Tag Archives: lab-grown meat

No-kill is brilliant branding. The lives saved may be our future generations

Rants, , , , ,

For nearly a decade I’ve been crowing about our plodding progress toward lab-grown meat. The biggest barriers are from two realms: Scalability and consumer psychology. This piece in The Guardian describes how Eat Just seems to have addressed both. I couldn’t be more thrilled, and for reasons I’ll get into below, you should too.

Now being test-marketed in Singapore, their lab-grown chicken nuggets (made with other plant-based ingredients) have found a way to scale production of meat from chicken stem cells.

They’ve also addressed the “yuck factor” that can hinder consumer trial by emphasizing the humane nature of their product. “No-kill” is brilliant marketing.

Saving Our Planet While Sating Our Desire for Meat

What you might not realize is the life that is saved may be our climate, and possibly our very species. As I described in detail in my 2011 post, raising livestock not only harms our environment to the extreme (greenhouse gases, deforestation, fresh water depletion) but our very gut biome (the majority of antibiotics are used on livestock and not humans). And don’t forget the horrific working conditions that seems to be intractable within the factory meat industry.

For these reasons, I’m optimistic that we are finally making progress in addressing our evolutionary hunger for meat with products that do not introduce death throughout the farm-to-table equation.

Is lab-grown meat still meat?

Musings, , ,

I first wrote here about lab-grown meat a decade ago. With so many ethical and environmental benefits of the process, I’m saddened that there has not been more discussion about it in the years since. But that is beginning to change, first with this story of lab-grown “McNuggets,” and especially this piece on the semantics of meat. If the origin of your burger is a cluster of stem cells instead of a living animal, is that still meat?

In that New York Times article, Andy Lamey writes that the timing of this semantic question is far from coincidence. “Lawmakers know that plant-based meat substitutes have become big business: In 2019, plant-based meat sales totaled $939 million, an 18 percent increase over the year before, while sales for all plant-based foods reached $5 billion. The real reason for the meat industry’s interest in grocery labels is that it is threatened by this surge in popularity.”

When those interested in maintaining the status quo start firing up the lobbying machines, you know they are perceiving a real threat. The story of lab-grown meat is starting to get more than just academic. In that press release on lab-grown “McNuggets,” put out by KFC, they remind us of what’s at stake:

Biomeat has exactly the same microelements as the original product, while excluding various additives that are used in traditional farming and animal husbandry, creating a cleaner final product. Cell-based meat products are also more ethical – the production process does not cause any harm to animals. …

According to a study by the American Environmental Science & Technology Journal, the technology of growing meat from cells has minimal negative impact on the environment, allowing energy consumption to be cut by more than half, greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced 25 fold and 100 times less land to be used than traditional farm-based meat production.

The coming few years will be interesting to watch.

Photo via Creative Commons by my_amii

Just beyond the Overton window: lab-grown meat

Musings, , , , ,

A version of this post originally appeared in my workplace blog, behind a firewall.

Last week the lunch crowd at Accenture’s Digital Hub cafe in Chicago was buzzing with speculation. Actually, it was buzzing about speculation. An engrossing exercise in a Lunch and Learn presentation called Then & Now: The Evolution of Trends, presented by Fjord, had us reviewing some antique predictions of the future.

I and the rest of the audience was given a reprinted magazine article that our great, great grandmothers might have read and we were asked to summarize its themes. The piece was full of predictions about the last century, written just at the turn of it, in 1900, by The Ladies’ Home Journal.

We found some predictions spot on. Others not so much …

The free university education prediction is of course just depressing. But delivery of products via pneumatic tubes? That’s not far off. Just imagine bolting wings on those tubes, and jet engines on those wings.

Fjord’s predictions — well, actually, more like themes packaged up as trends — were quite good, albeit more conservative. That’s to be expected, since they weren’t boldly looking at a 100-year horizon. Or even one 10 years out. That’s what the excellent Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce, Vala Afshar, did in this recent tweet:

Roughly a decade ago I made a prediction. It’s not in the above list, which frankly surprised and saddened me. You see, it will be a game-changer for our planet.

Once the challenge of this innovation’s scalability is tackled, the only major hurdle will be mass acceptance.

Today at least, most people find it kind of icky.

Test Tube T-bones

If you’d like to tuck into the details of lab-grown meat, I urge you to do so. I wrote the post nine years ago, but the facts in it are still correct … and if anything more relevant today than in 2011.

Lab-grown meat can and will someday feed the planet, while simultaneously helping to heal it.

Fun aside: Many before me have made this prediction, but just this year I learned that none other than Winston Churchill predicted lab-grown meat, in the 1930s!

A changed perspective

I’m sharing all of this because, well, as I write this the polar ice caps are melting and Australia is on fire. I find that disgusting.

And although I’m an eager omnivore — I enjoy a real hamburger when I can’t get my hands on an Impossible one — the conditions of the domesticated animals that we slaughter, and the conditions of the underclass forced to do the killing, are also disgusting.

So while scalability is being solved, let’s all think about the tendency toward disgust … the ick factor. I urge you to talk to your friends and family about whether they would eat a hamburger or McNugget made in-vitro. Yes, they’ll say yuck initially. But that’s how societies change — by exposure. It’s called shifting the Overton window.

And if you don’t believe attitudes change, consider that 120 years after that Ladies’ Home Journal prediction, we’ve got legitimate presidential candidates talking about that previously unthinkable free college idea.

Yuck indeed.