This might be the future of meat.
- Welcome to the future.
It's delicious.
One hundred percent raised in a lab.
- Cell-cultured meat is a way of making meat that's more efficient.
Making our food more efficiently will be key to feeding
the world's growing population.
In the next 50 years, we'll need to raise more food
than we produced in the last 10,000 years, combined
even as climate change makes agriculture less predictable.
- You know a lot of non-profits have tried to persuade
people to change the way they eat,
but by and large Americans like to eat meat.
Cell-cultured meat isn't a veggie burger
or the bleeding plant based proteins like the impossible burger
It's actual meat.
And startups in the US, UK, Israel, Netherlands,
Japan and China are racing to get this technology
to market and on people's dinner tables.
They promise a kind of utopia where we can eat
as much meat as we want without straining
the environment or hurting an animal.
- Eventually we see a world where the majority of meat
made doesn't require killing a single animal
doesn't require all that land, doesn't require all that water
and ends up having a barbecue that just tastes good
as I remember when I was growing up.
But will cell-culture meat live up to that promise?
I'm Phoebe Bradford. This is Quartz.
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On August 5th 2013, Dutch scientist Mark Post
presented the first cell-cultured hamburger to the world.
The product wasn't perfect.
It didn't look or taste like a normal hamburger
and it cost $330,000 to make.
But it was a promising start.
Dr. Post's Burger told the world that sustainable,
scalable, slaughter-free, antibiotic-free meat
might be possible.
That could be game changing for the planet.
The world demands more meat every year
and large scale animal production so-called factory farms
have raced to meet that demand
but not without environmental consequences.
Livestock are responsible for 14.5% of the
world's greenhouse gas emissions.
26% of the planet's ice free land is used for livestock grazing.
33% of crop lands are used for livestock feed production.
And in the US, 70% of all medically important
antibiotics are sold for use in animals.
And even with these large-scale farm operations,
demand for meat is set to outpace production.
— You try everything?
I tried the chicken nugget. It was delicious.
Josh Tetrick and his team at JUST are in the race
to develop cell-cultured meat.
They're working on making Wagyu beef
and they've already cultivated and harvested edible chicken.
To make their chicken nuggets
Josh's team only needs a handful of cells.
- I mean this would be probably even a small scale
enough cells to make some nuggets.
Vitor Santo is the associate director of cellular agriculture at JUST.
This flask of pink fluid are cells he's cultivating into meat
we can consume.
- And from one sample that you take,
how much meat can you potentially create?
- So theoretically from one single isolation, one biopsy,
we can get enough cells to make our full line of chicken products.
- To make a JUST nugget, technicians collect stem cells
from those isolations and put them in a nutrient dense liquid medium.
Think of it as the feed and it goes into bio reactor.
There, cell mass grows and proliferates.
The resulting product - a combination of muscle and fat tissue
is identical to conventional meat on a molecular level.
- This is great in terms of texture.
Because it shows that these cells are not only producing
the proteins that will give the flavor of muscle
but also the texture.
And what do you say to those who are still maybe hesitant?
- What it literally is, is getting cells from animals,
then compare it to what currently exists.
What currently exists - I'm not talking about
old MacDonald had a farm in southern Alabama.
I'm talking about large industrial production of animal protein.
Look at those two side by side and then ask yourself
what are the other options?
The problem is that it's still very hard to compare
those two side by side.
Companies have made little scientific data available
for independent review. Which makes critics wonder
if cultured meat can make it out of the lab and onto our plates.
- There's not a production facility that exists yet
where we can measure.
This is how much water this uses.
This is how much electricity it takes.
This is how energy intensive this is.
Chase Purdy is writing a book on cell cultured meat.
And until we have that information,
we won't know exactly how environmentally friendly
this new process is.
This is cause for concern for people like Danielle Beck,
director of government affairs at the
National Cattlemen's Beef Association
which lobbies for the interests of the beef industry
and small family farms.
- Until you know I think lifecycle assessments can be
conducted on a commercial scale
until these products have been put forward for
folks like the American Science Association
to get a hold of, you know, until we can work better together.
Yeah, there's a lot a lot of questions left unanswered.
In March, the USDA and FDA reached an agreement
on how they would share the responsibility of
overseeing cell-based meat products
from early growth stage to packaged product.
The National Cattlemen's Beef Association supported
the regulations and Josh says they're also a win
for the cell-cultured meat industry.
- In order for the biggest customers in the world
and consumers to feel comfortable with this,
there needs to be a regulatory framework.
We believe it's safe. We know it to be safe.
But the goal is not to feed ourselves.
The goal is to feed millions of people.
This is only the first step in the battle to get cultured meat to market.
The agreement between the USDA and FDA hasn't
announced how these products will be labeled
- The conventional meat industry is very reticent
to let these sell poultry meat companies call their products "meat".
What's in a name? That's like the million dollar question
for a lot of people that are in this world.
Why it matters is that this is like how people will perceive this product.
In states like Missouri legislation has passed
banning cell-cultured meat from even being called meat.
It's inspired other states to follow suit.
So the labeling is important, because at the level of DNA,
this is meat.
But the reality is, it's going to be a major hurdle
if we have to invent new language to talk about
something that's familiar to people as meat.
- Do you think that the biggest barrier to entering
the marketplace right now for cell-cultured meat
is regulation or the technology?
- Regulation. Absolutely.
The technology is ready.
The science is there. The science has been there for a while.
It's really all about governments around the
world figuring out how to regulate these products.
It could be that cell-cultured meat will debut
abroad where technology has advanced,
public consensus is encouraging
and regulations are more favorable - like China.
But when governments do finally allow cell-cultured meat
to enter the marketplace, Chase thinks grocery stores
everywhere will stock it.
- I don't think that sort of this conventional meat
that you can get today so easily will ever truly fully go away.
I think that if cell-cultured meat can be about
the same price as the meat we buy today,
I think if it looks the same,
And I think if it tastes the same,
it will be just as common to see it in a grocery store
as conventional meat.