In 2013, British chef Richard McGowan was asked to cook a dish the world had never tasted before,
a burger grown outside of a cow and in a laboratory.
It looks like any other product at this stage or any other beef burger that I had encountered.
But this burger cost $330,000 to make. A lot of people concerned about the scale of money,
but for me the money didn't really phase me. It was that responsibility and duty. My
biggest concern was the products actually melting or just dissipating in the pan.
The burger cooked relatively conventionally. The burger content was lower in fat. This was
a clean tasting simple burger and that was the achievement, that was the goal of the day.
Eight years later, more than 70 startups are now competing to bring what is known as
cell cultivated meat from beef to chicken and even kangaroo to markets around the world.
Advocates see these lab-grown alternatives as a way to reduce
industrial agricultural ills like the negative impact on the climate and animal welfare abuses.
Mosa Meat, a company developing cell cultivated burgers, invited TIME to take an exclusive look
at its facilities in the Dutch city of Maastricht. This is our first facility where we have a lab and
our first pilot plant production facility and what we're doing here is creating cultured meat.
We chose beef because beef has the biggest impact on climate change and that is really
our main drive. We replace meat with meat that's the same product, same nutritional profile, same
experience as traditional meats. We're essentially doing something that nobody has ever done before.
The technology was in was existing but never had anybody tried to produce this at scale
or or in a cost-effective manner. Technology to make this happen is essentially derived
from a medical technology and uses cell culture and tissue culture to
make now a consumer product instead of a tissue that we want to replace in the human body.
Ironically perhaps the process starts here on a cattle farm. All the company needs from these cows
is a small biopsy of tissue gently removed by a veterinarian. The vet applies a topical anesthetic
to the cow's flank and makes a small incision to remove a peppercorn size amount of muscle tissue.
Then he stitches up the wound and sends the cow on its way. Each tissue sample then goes
on to the Mosa Meat lab for cell proliferation. That piece of tissue has a lot of cells in it
which have the potential to become muscle and fat so what we're wanting to do is kind of trick
the cells into thinking they're in the cow, so we give them the right temperature and make it nice
and warm for them, so we have different teams who then assess those cells for various reasons so
for example, you would differentiate them into fat muscle. You would optimize the medium. What you're
looking at right now is just a sample to make sure that it's growing correctly. That it's happy.
Exactly, you can count how many cells there are and how much fat they produce and the fat is
depicted in the yellow and what we're interested in is basically making the largest wet droplets
possible, not these these tiny ones yeah because you want the most fat obviously in your burger.
So you clearly can see now a muscle fiber individually,
and this is a protein which is only present if the muscle is really maturing.
For Mosa Meat to impact the market in a meaningful way, the company will need
to overcome a few hurdles. In order to make their burgers affordable enough for the everyday person,
they need to scale up production. There is a lot of technology available to scale up
cell production, but it's mostly used for very specific cells
in the pharma industry, cells that are in a way engineered to be comfortable in those
large bioreactors. Our cells are not, so we have to kind of adapt the whole system. This will happen,
but it just takes time. Mosa Meat also must get approval from regulatory bodies to start
selling its patties. So far only two cell-based chicken companies have been approved for sale,
one in Singapore and another in Israel. Regulatory approval is more a matter of time because I'm
convinced that this product is safe, and it will be approved. It's just how much time do the the
agencies need to get to that point. And they'll need to convince consumers that meat grown
outside of an animal is something they actually want on their dinner plate, a choice that could
be heavily influenced by what these products are called. I can see that there's some value
in being able to call this meat. I also think it's eventually misleading not to call it meat because
if it's essentially the same, the same tissue then you shouldn't call it something else, but I also
think it's misleading to just call it meat, so that people think, oh yeah this is coming from that cow,
so you need to have a qualifier to make people understand that it's made in a different way.
The reason why we're doing this is truly to avert a couple of disastrous scenarios,
We don't have the choices that we think we have. It's not like we can continue on the way
we're doing this, just not possible, so either we accept this or we all become vegetarian.
And there are already some in the culinary world eager to get started.
I would love the privilege of actually being the first restaurant in the U.K.
to cook, to serve lab grown meat. In the next two to three years, maybe one in a hundred people
you know walking down the street has tried a stem cell produced burger or chicken product.