Run the titles!
Hello and welcome to just have a think. Now I've always enjoyed a good burger,
and I'm one of millions of people around the world who've moved to a plant-based diet,
so this thing is an entirely plant-based burger. And very tasty it is too. But let's be realistic.
Moving to a vegetarian or vegan diet is something that many more millions of people around the world
will simply never consider doing. In fact, as the developing world catches up with our Western
lifestyle, it's a statistic that's actually going in the opposite direction. I'm not
going to get into a debate about animal versus plant-based foods here though. For one thing,
there's a massive variation in perception and opinion on the subject depending on whereabouts
you are in the world. In the UK and Europe about 10% of the population follows a vegetarian or
vegan diet. It's a similar number in Canada, and actually slightly higher in Australia at 11.2%,
with 50% of the population now saying they're actively eating less meat. By contrast, the number
of vegetarians in the United States is only around about 5%. And there's also a big variation in how
livestock is raised and processed depending on the country of origin and the size of operation,
from independent smallholders through to behemoth mega factories. So it's a complicated and emotive
subject involving not only the welfare of animals but also the livelihoods of millions and millions
of very hard-working farmers and landowners around the world. But regardless of which side of the
argument you come down, on a couple of things are certain. Number one, we currently use about 50% of
all habitable land on earth for agriculture and about 77% of that is for livestock. Number two,
the developing world is growing fast, as this animation shows. As people reach a higher level
of income, they aspire to eating more meat in their diet. And why wouldn't they? So as these
developing nations continue to grow in number and in prosperity so more and more land will be
required, with a tendency to encroach on dwindling forestry land, stripping away more and more of
an important carbon dioxide sink, and removing protective shade that allows nutrients to thrive
in the soil below the tree canopies of the world. As this chart shows, if the world average moved
from where it is today just up to the level of my fellow Brits, then we'd need almost 95% of all
inhabitable land just to feed ourselves. And with the best will in the world, that just ain't gonna
work. So for some years now scientists have been looking for what they regard as the holy grail of
food production and what some other people might think of as a portent of a nightmare dystopian
future of Frankenstein monsters. I'm talking about lab-grown meat. "Doesn't even look real. It's not
life as we know or understand it". Also known as cultured meat or clean meat. The first ever
lab grown meat was produced at the Maastricht University laboratory in the Netherlands back
in 2013. It cost about 250,000 Euros to produce a burger when they first started out, but since then
several start-up companies have sprung up around the world in what's now become a race for market
domination. And that's had the inevitable effect of driving the price down significantly to more
like $600 to $1000 for a quarter pounder today. Still way off the mark of course, but I think you
can see the direction of travel pretty clearly here. So, how is it done then? Well, they take
a tiny sample of muscle tissue from the animal, about the size of a grain of rice, and then back
in the lab the scientists grow stem cells from that tissue. Held inside a nutrient-rich liquid,
the stem cells do what comes naturally to them, which is multiplying up and growing into muscle
fibres. According to one producer, Mosa Meat, they can produce 80,000 quarter pounders from
one muscle sample. And of course the folks working inside this new frontier of food technology are
quick to tell us that there are many benefits to pursuing this goal. So, what are these benefits,
and are they worth it? Well, for one thing the scientists tell us that lab-grown meats won't
contain any of the pathogens that you can find in meat from slaughtered animals, like E.coli,
Salmonella and Campylobacter. Why? Because meat grown in a lab never comes into contact
with the intestinal pathogens or fecal matter from the animal carcass in the way that meat in
big factory size processing plants can. And then there's energy and resources savings. According
to 'Environmental Science and Technology', depending on the animal type, lab-grown meat
involves approximately 7% to 45% lower energy use, 78% to 96% lower greenhouse gas emissions,
99% lower land use, and 82% to 96% lower water use than conventional meat production. But it's not
all plain sailing for these new food pioneers. At this stage there's two or three major hurdles that
still stand in the way of mainstream production and acceptance by the public. The first of these
has to do with the way the muscle fibres are grown in culture. Up until now the nutrient liquid that
the scientists have used to grow these fibres in has been something called fetal bovine serum,
which is a protein rich liquid full of all the right stuff for nurturing life, but which has to
be extracted directly from the fetuses of unborn calves. And let's face it, you ain't selling that
to anyone are you? So, unsurprisingly then, all of the half-dozen start-up companies that are working
on cultured meats are frantically researching alternative serums that they can use to grow the
stem cells into the muscle fibres that they need. One of the most prominent of these new companies
is a US start-up called 'Just'. Already well-known in The States for their vegan Mayo's and other
dairy alternatives, Just are acutely aware of the ethical problems surrounding fetal bovine serum.
Their research team, headed by Parendi Birdie, is looking for alternatives using similar proteins
found naturally in plants... "so we're working on a lot of different experiments to find ways
to eliminate that serum, so to do that we're harnessing the technology from our discovery
platform to find different proteins that come from plants that can replace the proteins that
are in the FBS, in that serum, that comes from animals. And I think here at Just we are very
well positioned to do that because we have years of experience... analyzing and understanding
proteins from plants, because at the end of the day animals eat plants. Cows for example,
eat grass. So the proteins are similar enough. We just need to figure out the best ones that
ourselves are happiest within and and grow naturally". Hot on the heels of Just are a
company called Mosa Meat, who I mentioned earlier. In fact it was their chief scientific officer,
Mark Post, who originally unveiled the very first lab-grown burger back in 2013. They're backed by
money from Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, and they're aiming to get a product to market
within three to four years. But the one issue that neither of these companies has cracked yet,
and the second of the three big challenges for the industry, is something that they call structure.
You see the cells that are currently grown, while technically meat in their chemical construction,
come out as a random jumble of cells that can only really be used as a burger patty or the inside of
a chicken nugget. No-one's been able to get these cells to a line up into a structure that looks
like a chicken portion or an actual steak - until now. Out in Israel, a company called a life farms
say they've nailed not only the nutrient protein issue but also crucially the challenge of creating
a state like product they've been working on a kind of three-dimensional lattice work to
provide a structure around which the cells can grow and organize themselves into the more state
like article that you see here even though these samples are so far only about the size of a credit
card and cost about $50 a piece that's still a massive reduction from the 2013 prices that I
mentioned earlier Alef Farms reckon they're about two years away from full commercial production of
proper, economically affordable, steaks. And then there's 'Finless Fish'. As far as I can tell,
the only start-up concentrating on growing fish products from harvested stem cells. As their
website points out, fish is one of the healthiest proteins on the planet. It's high in Omega-3,
Omega-6, DHA and a host of other nutrients to help us thrive. And it goes on. We now eat twice as
much fish as we did fifty years ago - a value set to nearly double again by 2030. And increasingly
our fish supply has become unhealthy as climate change and pollution fill our fish with unwanted
additives with rising levels of ocean pollution. And fish farming contaminants like plastic,
mercury, growth hormones, antibiotics, herbicides and fungicides end up lurking in our favourite
fish and sea foods. And when we eat them, those nasty substances end up in us. Finless Fish is
starting by producing bluefin tuna - a fish that has recently been threatened by predatory fishing
practices. They use exactly the same basic five steps as the meat producers and their aim is to
produce real fish fillet steaks in the fullness of time, although as you can see in their promo
video they're still only at the fish cake stage so far. Nevertheless though, a very encouraging
set of breakthroughs. But the third big bogeyman for these companies will be regulation. In the
United States, the food and drugs administration and the US Department of Agriculture have agreed
to share regulatory oversight of lab-grown meat for the US market. Meat production is
a 200 billion dollar industry in the US so it's no surprise that a fierce debate is bubbling up
between conventional meat producers and these new start-up enterprises. There's even argument about
whether a foodstuff can be called meat if it's not the product of a dead animal. Ultimately though,
if the product is right - which in this case means if it looks right and tastes right and
is at the right price - then people will buy it. And if that happens on a global level,
especially in countries like China, then we'll be saving a massive amount of forestry land that
would otherwise be stripped and cut back for livestock grazing and the growing of cereal
crops to feed that livestock. And that has to be a good thing for all of us. That's it for this week.
No doubt there'll be some very strong opinions on this one, so please feel free to leave your
thoughts in the comment section below. Try and keep them civilized if you can! If you found
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