At London’s James Street, the restaurants are full of diners enjoying meats of all kinds.
But I’ve come here to learn more about lab-grown or cultured meat, and the role it could play
in combatting global warming.
I’m meeting the Good Food Institute’s Seren Kell.
Why are people making it in the first place?
Fundamentally it comes down to two big issues: public health and climate change.
14.8 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from an animal agriculture.
And then from the public health perspective, because of the way our animal industry has
developed over the previous decades, where because we have more and more mouths to seek
to feed, it is far more intensified.
The companies who are growing these animals systematically are prescribing antibiotics,
and now feeding all these antibiotics to animals really encourages antimicrobial resistance,
and it's just a public health crisis in the making.
But what is wrong with current farming that they can't fix?
We can't have all of our land taken up by the kind of sustainable organic farming that
people think we should be moving towards, there simply isn't enough land.
So just what’s involved in taking farming out of the fields and into the lab?
My first lab visit is in Old Street.
But at Hoxton Farms they’re not focused on actually creating artificial meat, rather
one of its key ingredients.
Hi, it's Emiko from the Financial Times.
This is our food lab where we use robotic equipment to work out the way to make the
juiciest fat cells that we can.
Here, they think fat, which they create by combining cell biology and mathematical modelling,
is magic.
So why animal fat?
It defines the way that meat looks and cooks and tastes, the sizzle and the smell, the
way it browns.
In meat alternatives there are plant oils and they're really unsustainable.
As well as caring about the climate and caring about animal ethics, I really care about food.
There's a world where we can safeguard the climate without endangering the recipes that
we've loved, or changing the way that people eat.
But now, I want to see where they’re actually making meat in a lab.
At startup Higher Steaks in Cambridge, they create meat by cultivating sample animal cells.
How do you get an animal cell to grow?
What do you feed it?
So, we feed it something called “the media”, which is a liquid full of sugars, amino acids,
vitamins and everything that you need to help it grow.
But also in the cells that we’re using it, then turning it into muscle, fat and all the
different tissues that you need to recreate meat.
Higher Steaks is concentrating its efforts on producing lab-grown pork, because it's
the most widely consumed meat in the world.
The company won’t reveal the cost of the process, but admits the key challenge is scaling
up output.
This is a one litre bioreactor, how easy is it to upscale this?
It’s going to be challenging, we have the whole issues of how do you grow cells in a
much larger vessel, not just to tens of litres, but thousands and maybe tens of thousands
of litres.
With this sort of scale, you can put them into centrifuge and just spin cells down and
go on.
But to do that at tens and tens of thousands of litre scales, it's not economic, it’s
very technically challenging.
Last year Higher Steaks produced the world’s first lab-grown bacon and pork belly.
These pieces they’ve prepared took about 3 weeks to create.
You’re still developing this product, so I can't taste it, but I'm just going to have
a sniff.
It smells like pork.
It's got a bit of a gingery soy smell, but it's definitely, it looks like pork and it
smells like pork.
So these are some of our pork belly prototypes.
So, those prototypes, we take the cells from where you’ve seen, so the muscle and the
fat, that we then mix with some plant-based proteins to create those delicious pork belly,
and soon you'll be able to taste them as well.
It’s frustrating that I can’t taste it now, but it’s legal to sell lab-grown meat
in Singapore, so I’ve set up a video call with my FT colleague Mercedes Ruehl, and chef
Kaimana Chee, from startup Eat Just.
I'm here today to try some cultured meat dishes with Kaimana.
And he's gonna walk us through what we have.
We have a cultured chicken salad with a little Mandarin vinaigrette.
Are you going to try it for us and tell us what it tastes like?
Tastes good.
It's easier to chew than the regular chicken, softer.
Oh, OK.
But it's a meaty texture is it?
Yeah.
I would eat it.
So it seems lab-grown meat can be edible and tasty.
Of course production is still on a tiny scale, but if it could replace some of our traditional
meat supplies, what impact could it have?
I’ve come to Oxford University to meet John Lynch, whose research focuses on the climate
effects of meat and dairy production.
So we've been hearing a lot about lab-grown meat, does it have any role in solving our
environmental climate issues?
We could simply eat less meat without replacing some of it with something.
But the question is, is that realistic to expect that level of dietary change?
And obviously, we have lentils for decades, millennia, but we still have been consuming
meat.
So is it that cultured meat, is that an easier shift for the average consumer to make?
But I don't think that there is a single “silver bullet” solution if you will.
My final stop is back at James Street in London.
At Homeslice, pizzas are the staple dish, but I’m keen to share a vegan plant-based
burger with meat-centric chef Neil Rankin.
So I think I'm gonna try it.
I’ll go too.
Here goes…
So the mouth feel is, is like meat.
It's like a burger.
If I were if I weren't told, I wouldn’t know.
Neil, I'm investigating lab-grown meat.
OK.
Is that something that you would cook with?
From a culinary level, I'm like, there’s food, we've got food.
We've got abundance of it, we're throwing out food every single day.
I want to use that to cook something nice.
I can do that, I don't need to use that yet.
But do I think it's important?
Yeah I do.
We need to be focusing on that because that could be the thing that saves a lot of communities
that can't grow food.
We're gonna have soil degradation problems in the future.
So, should they be doing it?
Yes.
Do we need it now?
Absolutely not.
So even though we can make meat in a lab, it’s going to be a long time before it will
have any real influence on our eating habits.
And even then, it will most likely just be one small piece of a broader strategy to reduce
meat’s environmental impact.