December 8, 2006
BrainTrust Query: Is the world ready for “cultured meat”?
By Bill Bittner, President, BWH Consulting
Several weeks ago, we asked whether consumers were ready for meat products coming from cloned animals. But what if there were no animals involved at all? Does that make the science more palatable?
Most people seem to have come to terms with bioengineered produce without much protest. For those who have strong concerns, organic produce offers a way to opt out. There is talk of cloned meat and experiments are beginning in that area. But now it seems there is a foreseeable future when meat could be efficiently produced without animals, and in sufficient quantities to make a real impact on the meat industry.
In the recent Economist Technology Quarterly, they discussed the development of “cultured meat.” NOVA also did a discussion on their scienceNOW segment. Cultured meat promises to provide smells and tastes exactly like the real thing without needing to kill an animal to create it. It may even be healthier than the real thing, free of disease and developed in a sterile environment free of E. coli, salmonella, etc.
Discussion Questions: Do you think consumers are ready for “cultured meat”? What happens to the huge infrastructure built for raising and distributing
livestock?
The Economist article quotes a member of PETA who says, “No one who considers what’s in a meat hot dog could genuinely express any revulsion at eating
a clean cloned meat product.”
When asked the poll question, “Would you eat cultured meat?,” 4000+ respondents on PBS’ NOVA web site voted “no,” but by a slim margin – 52 percent to 47
percent. (Granted, Nova draws a science-loving crowd.)
The whole idea seems so surreal to me at this point, I don’t have a personal opinion. I know I don’t shop the organic section to avoid bioengineered produce,
so maybe with time I will be able to also accept meat from the Petri dish.
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Cultured meat… Since I live up the road from the Hormel SPAM museum the term seems like an attempt to be politically correct. Just travel to an outdoor market in Thailand, China, Malaysia and experience the smells, textures and flavors of what people consume around the world and cultured meat will simply become as sought after as a filet Mignon. Can a successful Broadway musical be far behind? SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM…SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM…SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM….
Hmmm, maybe I can stop off for a Culture-Burger at the Sonic drive-in, in my flying car that I was promised as a kid 30 years ago.
Both are unlikely to happen.
By the way, vegetarian is a very old Native American word for bad hunter.
The early adopters will try it right away. Depending upon the early adopter response and what gets printed in the media and whether any other group becomes vocal with any issues, it could be quite successful.
Cultured meat could be very good. All of the attributes would be built in with no variance. Every pound would be wonderful and there would be no butchering cost included in the price. Hey, what about the price? Right now I can go to Outback and get a decent steak for less than I pay for a crap shoot steak in my local “big chain” supermarket. Additionally, if I am not satisfied with the Outback steak I can send it back. My local grocer won’t allow that. Maybe our grocers should talk to an ex Outback employee and try and figure out where they are getting their meat and try selling it in the grocery store.
Most of America under the age of forty and living within the confines of “Greater Anywhere,” USA already thinks hamburger grows in a cryovac package. Why not do it for real?
Ironically enough, maybe something like this would cause folks to get reacquainted with “the real meat,” much the same way they have reacted to bio-engineered produce. I still see a lot more prepackaged, cut produce going out of the department than organic stuff with dirt clinging to the roots. But at least people know the difference.
Here’s one for the obscure fact finders out there: What percentage of the population has actually “processed” a piece of meat, fish or poultry beyond cutting up the serving on their plate? (Carving the Thanksgiving turkey doesn’t count!)
OK, maybe I’m being dense, but I don’t get it. If it doesn’t come from animals how is it produced? Is it something that has the same chemical make up as meat that comes out of a lab? Is it another product disguised as meat? I think I need more information to decide whether this would work or not. I’m not really into organics, but I don’t think that we as a society need to ingest more chemicals than we already do.
There are two ways in which this could work – lots of information or no information. Some people will eat anything if they think there’s a good reason, specifically if it’s allegedly healthful or functional. Some people will only eat what they believe to be unprocessed and natural or whole, whether it is organic or not. There are also lots of people who do not ask questions and therefore know little about what they are eating (whether they would care if they knew is another matter). I have absolute confidence in the advertising industry – if they want to sell this stuff, they will find a way and a market.
As an ingredient in meatballs, burgers and so on, perhaps. It will take a long time to market this, though. I would expect it to be a major hit in the third world, assuming it’s less expensive than raising and feeding cattle. With the price of corn and other feeds through the stratosphere, and unlikely to decline significantly, that very well could be the case.
I can not wait to try cultured meat. Why not, if it is healthier and we can be free from worry about animal meat related diseases? No one thinks about how much food resources the meat animals consume and how much waste they generate. It is not an efficient way to feed people. It is not good for our environment either. I think cultured meat is the future!
This is an old reliable sci fi premise: A living hunk of filet mignon floats, hooked up to various tubes and wires, in a tank of nutritive fluid in the space station galley. The robo-cook saws off a chunk every so often to feed the hungry space cadets. Almost sounds appetizing… .
But the techniques described here yield nearly undifferentiated muscle cells. They may offer good quality dietary protein, but none of the texture and mouth feel we associate with meat. So let’s set aside speculative fiction and confront cultured meat for what it is: at best a food ingredient or supplement that may be hidden within prepared foods and sauces or pressed into patties, like fish sticks or those “mystery meat” cutlets they used to serve in the junior high cafeteria.
Thirty years ago, food researchers were creating similar products using processing machines that recovered bits of digestible protein from meat and fish carcasses. I had a food science professor who delighted in using his students as taste-testers for the stuff. It tasted a lot better when you didn’t think about how it was made….
Assuming the science and economics work together to deliver a tasty, priced right, super-hygenic “cultured” meat, why not? To me, it could be marketed as a premium meat line given its origins. As another panelist points out, many consumers already consume tofu as a high protein meat substitute. I’m guessing “cultured” meat is still far away from grocery shelves as yet, and even when its available it will take a substantial time to get off the ground since it’s such a radical concept and marketing it would involve substantial consumer education. Overall I feel it has potential but not on a broadscale basis – more as a smaller premium segment of the meat business. And a big unknown would be the reaction of the American Cattleman’s Association and the meat packing industry who I suspect, would see this development as a threat. Of course, if Tyson buys or licenses the technology, then we’d see some serious momentum.
We have people within the confines of New York City eating everything from Armadillos to rat — so why not cloned meat products?
I doubt if anything would come of it for a decade or two. It’s not so much a matter of culture as it is economics. Can you imagine the ramped up lobbying by the beef industry?
Tofu is a major food in Asia, and has a reasonable share of the organic market in the USA. If cultured meat gets a toehold market share similar to tofu, it will do fine. Tofu is sold “plain,” and it’s also used to create various prepared foods, from cheesecake to noodles. Cultured meats needn’t replace 100% of traditional meats.
There seem to be a lot of misconceptions about what cultured meat is or would be, so let me clear some up.
Cultured meat is (muscle) cells from a meat animal, such as a cow, on an artificial framework instead of a skeleton of a living animal. The technique is well practiced in small quantities to do things like making new skin for burn victims.
Past efforts to grow meat like this for food products have failed on account of taste and texture; assumed to largely be due to the difference between muscle tissue that’s never been used versus having a rigorous lifetime workout. New techniques address this by having the artificial framework stretch and work the meat like a real muscle (possibly including electro/chemical stimulation to cause contraction).
While at first such meat might seem too expensive for the mass market, costs would come down dramatically over time. In the mean time, the ability to precisely control the amount of workout the meat received would result in relatively extreme and consistent control over things like fat content, cell strength, shape, texture, and presumably taste. This would probably appeal strongly to certain connoisseurs, especially those with moral issues over animal killing but who still like their meat.
Over time, it’s possible that the cost of growing cultured cells could be reduced to substantially below that of growing, killing, and slaughtering animals – especially when one considers the various waste, environmental, and appeasing pro-animal movements. The net result could be that we end up with cultured meat being the rule and real animal meat being the rare delicacy.
Too many socio-political and technology scaling factors come into play to accurately forecast mass acceptance, but I see some level of market arising soon with the mass market following at some time – assuming no major quality incidents (culture beef can still get sick if given the right opportunity).
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Cultured meat… Since I live up the road from the Hormel SPAM museum the term seems like an attempt to be politically correct. Just travel to an outdoor market in Thailand, China, Malaysia and experience the smells, textures and flavors of what people consume around the world and cultured meat will simply become as sought after as a filet Mignon. Can a successful Broadway musical be far behind? SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM…SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM…SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM….
Hmmm, maybe I can stop off for a Culture-Burger at the Sonic drive-in, in my flying car that I was promised as a kid 30 years ago.
Both are unlikely to happen.
By the way, vegetarian is a very old Native American word for bad hunter.
The early adopters will try it right away. Depending upon the early adopter response and what gets printed in the media and whether any other group becomes vocal with any issues, it could be quite successful.
Cultured meat could be very good. All of the attributes would be built in with no variance. Every pound would be wonderful and there would be no butchering cost included in the price. Hey, what about the price? Right now I can go to Outback and get a decent steak for less than I pay for a crap shoot steak in my local “big chain” supermarket. Additionally, if I am not satisfied with the Outback steak I can send it back. My local grocer won’t allow that. Maybe our grocers should talk to an ex Outback employee and try and figure out where they are getting their meat and try selling it in the grocery store.
Most of America under the age of forty and living within the confines of “Greater Anywhere,” USA already thinks hamburger grows in a cryovac package. Why not do it for real?
Ironically enough, maybe something like this would cause folks to get reacquainted with “the real meat,” much the same way they have reacted to bio-engineered produce. I still see a lot more prepackaged, cut produce going out of the department than organic stuff with dirt clinging to the roots. But at least people know the difference.
Here’s one for the obscure fact finders out there: What percentage of the population has actually “processed” a piece of meat, fish or poultry beyond cutting up the serving on their plate? (Carving the Thanksgiving turkey doesn’t count!)
OK, maybe I’m being dense, but I don’t get it. If it doesn’t come from animals how is it produced? Is it something that has the same chemical make up as meat that comes out of a lab? Is it another product disguised as meat? I think I need more information to decide whether this would work or not. I’m not really into organics, but I don’t think that we as a society need to ingest more chemicals than we already do.
There are two ways in which this could work – lots of information or no information. Some people will eat anything if they think there’s a good reason, specifically if it’s allegedly healthful or functional. Some people will only eat what they believe to be unprocessed and natural or whole, whether it is organic or not. There are also lots of people who do not ask questions and therefore know little about what they are eating (whether they would care if they knew is another matter). I have absolute confidence in the advertising industry – if they want to sell this stuff, they will find a way and a market.
As an ingredient in meatballs, burgers and so on, perhaps. It will take a long time to market this, though. I would expect it to be a major hit in the third world, assuming it’s less expensive than raising and feeding cattle. With the price of corn and other feeds through the stratosphere, and unlikely to decline significantly, that very well could be the case.
I can not wait to try cultured meat. Why not, if it is healthier and we can be free from worry about animal meat related diseases? No one thinks about how much food resources the meat animals consume and how much waste they generate. It is not an efficient way to feed people. It is not good for our environment either. I think cultured meat is the future!
This is an old reliable sci fi premise: A living hunk of filet mignon floats, hooked up to various tubes and wires, in a tank of nutritive fluid in the space station galley. The robo-cook saws off a chunk every so often to feed the hungry space cadets. Almost sounds appetizing… .
But the techniques described here yield nearly undifferentiated muscle cells. They may offer good quality dietary protein, but none of the texture and mouth feel we associate with meat. So let’s set aside speculative fiction and confront cultured meat for what it is: at best a food ingredient or supplement that may be hidden within prepared foods and sauces or pressed into patties, like fish sticks or those “mystery meat” cutlets they used to serve in the junior high cafeteria.
Thirty years ago, food researchers were creating similar products using processing machines that recovered bits of digestible protein from meat and fish carcasses. I had a food science professor who delighted in using his students as taste-testers for the stuff. It tasted a lot better when you didn’t think about how it was made….
Assuming the science and economics work together to deliver a tasty, priced right, super-hygenic “cultured” meat, why not? To me, it could be marketed as a premium meat line given its origins. As another panelist points out, many consumers already consume tofu as a high protein meat substitute. I’m guessing “cultured” meat is still far away from grocery shelves as yet, and even when its available it will take a substantial time to get off the ground since it’s such a radical concept and marketing it would involve substantial consumer education. Overall I feel it has potential but not on a broadscale basis – more as a smaller premium segment of the meat business. And a big unknown would be the reaction of the American Cattleman’s Association and the meat packing industry who I suspect, would see this development as a threat. Of course, if Tyson buys or licenses the technology, then we’d see some serious momentum.
We have people within the confines of New York City eating everything from Armadillos to rat — so why not cloned meat products?
I doubt if anything would come of it for a decade or two. It’s not so much a matter of culture as it is economics. Can you imagine the ramped up lobbying by the beef industry?
Tofu is a major food in Asia, and has a reasonable share of the organic market in the USA. If cultured meat gets a toehold market share similar to tofu, it will do fine. Tofu is sold “plain,” and it’s also used to create various prepared foods, from cheesecake to noodles. Cultured meats needn’t replace 100% of traditional meats.
There seem to be a lot of misconceptions about what cultured meat is or would be, so let me clear some up.
Cultured meat is (muscle) cells from a meat animal, such as a cow, on an artificial framework instead of a skeleton of a living animal. The technique is well practiced in small quantities to do things like making new skin for burn victims.
Past efforts to grow meat like this for food products have failed on account of taste and texture; assumed to largely be due to the difference between muscle tissue that’s never been used versus having a rigorous lifetime workout. New techniques address this by having the artificial framework stretch and work the meat like a real muscle (possibly including electro/chemical stimulation to cause contraction).
While at first such meat might seem too expensive for the mass market, costs would come down dramatically over time. In the mean time, the ability to precisely control the amount of workout the meat received would result in relatively extreme and consistent control over things like fat content, cell strength, shape, texture, and presumably taste. This would probably appeal strongly to certain connoisseurs, especially those with moral issues over animal killing but who still like their meat.
Over time, it’s possible that the cost of growing cultured cells could be reduced to substantially below that of growing, killing, and slaughtering animals – especially when one considers the various waste, environmental, and appeasing pro-animal movements. The net result could be that we end up with cultured meat being the rule and real animal meat being the rare delicacy.
Too many socio-political and technology scaling factors come into play to accurately forecast mass acceptance, but I see some level of market arising soon with the mass market following at some time – assuming no major quality incidents (culture beef can still get sick if given the right opportunity).