Mmm mmm good? Lab-made food may be headed for your fridge
WASHINGTON — The cheeseburger, a staple of the summer cookout, could be getting a makeover — courtesy of a laboratory.
Nearly three years ago, Mark Post and a team of scientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands introduced a futuristic lab-grown burger that cost $325,000. San Francisco-based Memphis Meats has created its own “cultured meat” with a price tag of $18,000 a pound (compared with grocer Hy-Vee, which recently advertised 85 percent lean ground beef for $4.99 a pound.)
The goal by these and other groups working to change where meat — a key part of the human diet — and other animal-derived foods come from could eventually have a jolting effect on modern agriculture, if researchers can drastically rein in the cost, maintain flavor and persuade consumers to buy it.
“It will eventually have so many advantages that I can’t imagine that it will leave a market for livestock beef,” said Post, a meat-lover who enjoys the occasional filet mignon, medium rare. “If this is affordable and scalable, I would absolutely give up eating meat, livestock beef, no question.”
Post conceded his new-age burger introduced three years ago was far from perfect. Since then, he has worked to improve the beef by conditioning it to express its natural vibrant red color and cultivating fat tissue to boost the taste.
The meat, which is grown in a lab using stem cells taken from the muscle of a live cow, looks the same as the real thing under a microscope. It could be available to some consumers as early as 2020, he said, but anyone interested in trying one will need to be willing to pay up.
“It will be kind of an expensive product, (too much) for the supermarket but more for the high-end restaurant or specialty stores,” Post said of the early challenge he expects the new product to have. “Who’s going to buy a $10 hamburger in the supermarket? Probably not many.”
Increasingly, a growing number of companies and academic researchers such as Post are abandoning the traditional animal in favor of the lab, working to churn out everything from milk and eggs to meat and animal-based products such as leather.
The motivation has been brought on by growing consumer demand for food that is raised more sustainably — requiring less land and water, emitting fewer greenhouse gases, and in a way that is considered more humane for the animal.
While much of the work is still in early stages, researchers are confident that products close to or identical to their traditional counterparts could start popping up on store shelves within a few years.
“More than anything we want to provide an alternative to people who want to consume products that align with their values, their environmental conscience and, ultimately, products that are a good source of protein without all the baggage,” said Arturo Elizondo, chief executive of Clara Foods.
The company started work in 2015 on an animal-free egg white that takes water, yeast and sugar, and converts them using a fermentation process similar to the one used to make beer or wine. The startup estimates the market for egg whites in the United States is more than $3 billion.
With the egg industry battered by a 2010 salmonella outbreak that sickened thousands and the bird flu virus that destroyed millions of birds last year, Elizondo said the popular baking product is in need of a better alternative.
Still, he acknowledged there is a “show me” mentality among consumers for new products Clara and other companies are developing.
“People, more than anything, are demanding that companies be transparent and share the process,” Elizondo said. “There is a higher bar for companies to share where their food is coming from.”
Not everyone is convinced that livestock will be put out to pasture.
John Youngberg, executive vice president of the Montana Farm Bureau, acknowledged that lab-raised beef could have a future but downplayed its threat to the beef industry. He noted the different flavors found in beef depending on the local it was raised or how it is finished.
"Do I think it 's going to replace the beef industry? No, I don't think there is a chance that it will," Youngberg said. "It certainly could be viable for some things but I don't see it replacing cows on the prairie."
Lester Wilson, a professor of food science and human nutrition at Iowa State University, said he was doubtful that meats, cheeses, eggs and other products raised in a lab could gain an audience beyond a niche market.
“At the moment I see too many barriers for them to be readily accepted quickly,” he said.
The technology will likely need to overcome many of the same obstacles that plague new inventions, including reducing costs to make the product competitive with existing items, meeting regulatory hurdles, and persuading skeptical consumers to abandon traditional food sources for those that some view as better suited to the Jetsons or Star Trek.
“It is similar to any new product that comes out in that it has to be not only proven safe, but that it is a quality product,” said Wilson. “It’s going to require some (consumer) education, and we know in some cases that doesn’t even work.”
A 2015 study by researchers at Arizona State University and three other schools said that even though growing meat in the lab could logically be viewed as friendlier to animals, the environmental reality may be far more complicated.
While less feed and land would be needed, the researchers speculated growing cultured meat could require more heat and electricity, in part because of the need to produce the product in a sterile environment, resulting in greater greenhouse gas emissions than conventionally raised pork and poultry.
One exception is likely in beef, where methane produced by cows could give the lab an environmental advantage.
The beef industry downplayed any impact from cultured meat.
At New Harvest, a nonprofit that funds academic research on cellular agriculture, donations have soared from just $38,000 in 2013 to $600,000 a year ago; it is expecting to top $1 million in 2016, according to Isha Datar, its president and chief executive. The organization uses the money to fund publicly accessible research on growing animal products without the animal.
Datar said that while she’s pleased to see growing interest in products like cultured meat, she warned that much of the hype surrounding them is premature due to a dearth of scientists at universities working in the field and the traditionally slow pace of research common in biotechnology.
“I don’t think we need to tap our brakes, I just think we need to make sure our expectations are appropriate,” Datar said. “I’m approaching this as science instead of a promise. The reason why I’m doing this work is because I think these are questions worth asking and not because I think cultured meat is going to save all of us. That opportunity is there but we’ll never know it is real unless we start doing this research.”
Company executives and researchers working on new animal-free products are optimistic people will be willing to embrace a new way of thinking about food and how it is defined. Just because meat, for example, doesn’t come from an animal doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be considered meat, they said.
At Real Vegan Cheese in Oakland, Calif., 20 volunteers have been working since 2014 to replicate cow’s milk, without the cow.
Marc Juul, a self-described citizen scientist working on the project, said the team expects to finish work on replicating all four of the proteins needed to create milk by this summer. Those proteins will then be combined with vegan-approved fats and sugars that will eventually produce harder cheeses such as Gouda or cheddar for sale to consumers.
Real Vegan Cheese has already conjured a batch of mozzarella that Juul claims tasted just like the real thing. But even if future cheese creations have a slightly different flavor, the 33-year old is confident there will be a market for his creation. The cheeses could be available for sale within a year, and he's hopeful that one day people will be able to make the creations in their own kitchens.
"I'm confident we can get something that even if it tastes a bit different, maybe it will be a new type of cheese," said Juul. "I want to get a hard cheese where people who are eating it will think, ‘Yes, this is the real cheese and not some synthetic substitute.’"
Contact Christopher Doering at cdoering@gannett.com or reach him at Twitter: @cdoering