Cultivated Meat: The Future of Agriculture on a Decaying Planet By Kate Brewster
“We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” - Winston Churchill, 1931 In the battle against climate change, the impacts of energy, fossil fuels, and transportation seem to dominate the mainstream conversation about mitigation efforts while the devastating effects of agriculture on the environment are often overlooked. This may explain why an inventive, science fiction-esque solution to the overconsumption of meat has managed to fly under the radar until very recently. In 1931, Winston Churchill predicted a future in which meat products could be grown independently in a lab. Now, just short of a century later, China’s new FiveYear Agricultural Plan, which includes cultivated meats and other ‘future foods’ such as plant-based eggs as part of its blueprint for food security, is accelerating the market for cultivated meat. This vision of cultivated meat is tauntingly close, and not a second too soon. For the sake of our environment and food security, global agriculture is in desperate need of sustainable change. So how can cultivated meat, a relatively new and untested concept, actually provide a possible solution to food insecurity, agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, and global poverty? The development of agriculture has essentially defined human civilization beginning roughly 10,000 years ago when the world population was around 5 million. From 1940 to 1980, the world population almost doubled, and to account for the burgeoning population, Norman Borlaug famously revolutionized the agricultural industry by engineering crops to improve crop yields, according to Kevin Drum. Since then, the world population has skyrocketed further, from roughly 2 billion to almost 8 billion. We have outsourced our agriculture, converted more land to farmland, and expanded small-scale operations to industrial farms. Still, our agricultural system has not evolved effectively to sustain the growing population. The possibility of eliminating the need for animals to grow meat may seem hard to fathom, but it is becoming glaringly obvious that we need to find alterna-
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tives to feed the world while stewarding our resources for future generations. Currently, raising livestock for food accounts for up to 14.5% of global emissions, according to Aryn Baker. Baker also reports that the one billion cows and other livestock used in global agriculture are responsible for releasing an amount of methane equivalent to some 3.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. If we want to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius, the maximum temperature at which Earth can sustain life as we know it, restructuring our agriculture systems might be a good place to start. Cultivated meat has the potential to feed growing populations using a fraction of the resources required by traditional agriculture, and the resulting product is cellularly identical to conventional meat. The procedure involves acquiring stem cells from animals in a minimally invasive process. Doctors remove a tiny sample of muscle from the cow using a scalpel and anesthetic and grow those stem cells in a bioreactor at high volumes. The cells are then fed an oxygen rich cell medium containing nutrients and proteins to support their growth as they differentiate into the cell types that make up meat. The resulting conglomeration of skeletal muscle, connective tissues, and fat are harvested and packaged into sellable products, according to Elliot Swartz and Claire Bomkamp. Following the news of China’s plan, there may now be enough interest to raise funds for a largescale project. Investors have already poured billions into plant-based meat, and this technology is even more likely to appeal to meat consumers, for the simple reason that it tastes a whole lot better. If China creates a market for cultivated meat and attracts investors willing to back it, the increased funding will cause market prices to fall, allowing for the possibility of lab grown meat at affordable pricing on shelves at local grocery stores, according to Aryn Baker. As reported by the World Resources Institute (WRI),
