"Smart Balanced" Meat: introducing the world's first low fat beef

 Killer Meat

All around the world, cigarette makers are required carry labels such as the one in the picture on the right. Although meat may kill more people than cigarettes, no such label is required on meat--yet the World Health Organization found that diseases related to the over-consumption of meat, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, cause one-third of all deaths world-wide.

Scientists at the National Cancer Institute report (click here for pdf) those who eat 5 ounces of meat a day are 30% more likely to contract cancer or heart disease than  those who eat 2/3 oz of meat per day.  That's a big risk to take!

Get Lean with Cultured Meat?
While not totally alleviating health risks of meat consumption, cultured meat may be able to provide leaner and more balanced meat.  There are three main nutritional benefits to cultured meat production concerning fat production.


Benefit #1- Low Fat Cultured Meat
First, cultured meat will allow producers to control the fat content of the meat because the product would initially be pure muscle tissue.  So fat will be added for taste in any amount desired.   In vitro cultured beef could have the fat content of chicken or salmon.  Naturally, not all consumers will choose ground beef  with low fat content, so this health benefit would be limited by consumer choices.  But, the trend in reducing beef consumption in favor of poultry consumption shows that many consumers would be interested in a healthier beef product.

Benefit #2- “Smart Balanced” Meat
Secondly, even cultured meat that has the same total fat content, has the nutritional benefit of   providing meat that  balances the types of good with bad unsaturated fats.    Due to unnatural corn fed diets (see King Corn) the majority of beef from livestock has 20 times more “bad” omega 6 fatty acids than do grain fed
cows or cows found in the wild. (For more on Omega acids and livestock, click here)   Unlike traditional methods, which provide imbalanced  fat content due to livestock feeding,  cultured meat production will allow production of meat with a  nutritiously advantageous balance of fats.   So-called “beneficial” fats, such as Omega-3 poly-unsaturated fatty acids, found naturally in fish oils and synthetically in Smart Balance, could be introduced while keeping saturated fats to the minimum.   This is a tremendous health benefit!

 Benefit #3-  Diet Meat?
Finally, one suggested method of cultured meat production allows for consumption of meat that is relatively high in fat, but is not fattening.   Dr. Mironov, one of the leaders in the field of cultured meat, believes that consumers will be most be interested in the health benefits of cultured meat.   He suggests that chitosan should be used in the production of cultured meat.   Chitosan  is edible and would remain in the final meat product.   Chitosan  could absorb fat, but would not be digested. (Read more here)

My Thoughts
Personally, while I think the first two benefits are huge, this last benefit is a bit suspect to me.  One commenter remarked that chitosan reminded him of another fat free fatty food, P & G's short lived Olestra potato chips. As anyone can recall that idea ended up being a explosive disaster--literally.  Consumers of Olestra frequently complained of abdominal pain and sever cases of Montezuma's revenge.  Further, consumers weren't losing weight because they just ate more fatty foods to make up for the calories "saved" through eating olestra chips.

I think the lesson we can learn from olestra is that we consumers have to take responsibility for what we eat.  If cultured meat becomes a reality, it is imperative that cultured meat replace traditional meat, not be used to supplement our already dangerous eating habits.

Meet Cultured Meat: how do they make that stuff?

 

The most plausible method for cultured meat production is called the ‘scaffolding technique.’

 Here's how it works:

#1-  STARTING WITH STARTER CELLS - “Starter” cells from domestic animals such as cows or chickens are harvested through a biopsy and placed in very small cultures. (See Figure 1) 

 #2- SCAFFOLDS- The starter cells need a place to grown on.  These are called scaffolds.  (See Figure 2)  The scaffolds are biodegradable and can be made out of edible material such as collagen beads.

 #3 - STARTER + SCAFFOLD- The starter cells are then placed on the scaffolds (see Figure 3).

#4-  MAKING THE CELLS GROW- The scaffolds containing the cells would then be placed in a special type of vat called a bioreactor.  This is pretty similar to how beer or Quorn (soy chik nuggets) is made.
Once placed inside the bioreactor, the starter cells would be a nutritious (but delicious) soup called a growth medium.  (See Figure 4).   The growth medium contains a special mix of  nutrients which would provide natural ‘environmental cues’ that would tell the cells to grow.  (And they do grow-- it's a good thing that cells are so obedient!)

#5- SKINNY MEAT - The result is actual animal meat, but in the form of ultra-thin sheets of muscle cells.   The thin sheets would be vacuumed packed (see Figure 5)  and sent to a meat processing  facility in order to make a ground meat product, such as a hamburger.

#6 - YOU EAT YOUR BURGER-  I think you already know about this step.  (See Figure 6).

Meet Cultured Meat: what's the difference between cloned meat and cultured meat?

 Growing meat with cultures in vitro is not the same thing as “cloning” meat.  Cloning meat typically involves the cloning of rDNA of prized cattle.  The cloned rDNA is then used to implant livestock such as a cow, pig or sheep when then give birth and are raised in the traditional fashion.  

While sometimes these concepts tend to grouped together, they are very different.  The FDA explicitly excluded cultured meat from its definition of cloning because  cultured meat only involves replication of cells in culture, not cloning of whole animals.  Ranchers are cloning their prized cattle so that they can increase their meat yields.Unfortunately, cloning of cattle involves all the downsides of traditionally raised livestock (environmental harm, risk of food borne disease, etc).  One fact that many may be surprised to know is that most people have eaten cloned meat, they just don't know it.  I guess I should be more precise--you probably haven't eaten cloned meat just the offspring of cloned meat.  It would be too expensive to eat actual cloned meat, because it costs at least 15 grand to clone just one cow.

Because cultured meat will be grown in safe, clinical conditions, cultured meat has the possibility of reducing the environmental and health risks posed by cloned meat.  While cultured meat has critics of its own, conflation of the concepts is dangerous as the benefits and costs of the two types of biotechnologies differ greatly.

Below is a diagram showing how cultured meat is made.  For more information, you can read my post about how cultured meat is made.  You can also visit how stuff works for an interesting discussion (including videos) that show cultured meat is made.

How Tasty is a Big Macracanthorhynchus?

All you broke Wall Street types, take note:  Buy Worm-Mart stock and fast!  Due to our insatiable desire for animal protein, veterinary parasitology professors William C. Campbell, George A. Conder and Alan A. Marchiondo, predict that the worm industry will be on the rise. Writing in Veterinary Parasitology, Aug. 2009, the profs predict that because beef is so expensive, hazardous to our health and bad for the environment- we may need to make our Big Macs out of worms.
















"Some day an enticing plate of vermicelli will not just look like ‘‘little worms’’–but actually be little worms. Even better-- it might be big worms. Macracanthorhynchus hirudinaceus would seem to be a good candidate: fat and juicy—the new Big Mac. Phrases such as ‘I’m going out and eat worms’ and ‘opening up a can of worms’ would take on a new meaning." Click here for full article via Science Direct).

The only problem they say, is that unless people start accepting cultured meat, we won't be able to produce enough worms to keep up with the demand!

Ah, I think that's just what the Frankenmeat naysayers need- a little bit of perspective.  If  the many prognosticators are right, a cultured hamburger sounds a lot tastier than a Big Macracanthorhynchus!


P.S. For those of you who still insist that cultured meat is gross, here's a recipe telling you how to fry up some tasty worms.  You better act fast, before this guy eats em' all himself!!!

Time Magazine Names 'Meat Farms' as One the 50 Best Inventions of 2009

So what if cultured meat wasn't invented in 2009? Time Magazine still listed in vitro cultured meat as one the 50 best inventions in its "Best Of" year-end issue. (Read it here.)

Time Magazine has broad definition of 'invention'-- the term also includes ' breakthrough ideas of the year' no matter what year an idea was technically invented. Breakthrough idea--  I can handle that.   It just goes to show what kind of traction the concept of guilt-free meat is getting. (Speaking of traction, I kind of liked the term, 'Meat Farming'-- I will add it to my list of possible names for cultured meat.)

Notably, Time allowed its readers to vote for the best invention.  As of this writing, 'Meat Farms' was ranked #29th-- just above 'Controller-Free Gaming.'  That's right, an invention that could single-handedly combat global warming, reduce epidemic influenzas and end animal suffering is just one notch above a solution to the Wii induced suffering known as [ahem] "Wiinjuries."  (Go ahead and click the link, laugh a Wii bit.  I'm not making this up.)

Do I sound bitter?  I'm not.  America, the brunt of Neil Postman's brutal critique Amusing Ourselves to Death, thinks cultured meat is a 'sexier' idea than Wiimoteless gaming.  That's a Winston Churchill-size victory in my book.

(Would) a Meat by Any Other Name Taste as Good?

Methinks, no. People might eat cultured meat, but they sure as heck won't eat Frankenmeat!

Romeo's ambivalence to nomenclature proves once and for all that NASA didn't fake the whole Shakespeare thing, because the writer of Romeo and Juliet obviously hasn't been exposed to the 5,000 marketing messages a day that we are forced to endure in this post-modern life.

Not counting Shakespeare, everybody knows that names matter (including  children).
But perhaps no one knows it better than Strategic Name, the brand naming company behind the Baconator. The Baconator is one of the company's proudest accomplishments. You gotta give 'em credit--despite its manifestly horrifying appearance--when the Baconator came out, people definitely noticed. Here's what Strategic Name says about the naming of the Baconator:

"America's freshest fast-food company wanted a provocative name for its signature cheeseburger--one that would appeal to younger males. The Baconator assumes the person of the epic Terminator character, and highlights the burger's essential ingredient, bacon, in a playful way. And just as the Terminator is a huge guy, The Baconator is a huge burger with plenty of beef and cheese in addition to the bacon."

Sheer genius. Wendy's sold 25 million Baconators in the first 8 weeks and it remains one of its top-selling products. If Strategic Name can sell a heart-attack on a plate (51 grams of fat, 60% more than the Bic Mac), surely we can find some way to sell a burger that is healthier, Greener, safer, and more ethical. Of course, there some uncertainty about whether being healthy, safe, ethical and environmentally-conscious is "attractive" to consumers.  But perhaps it is, with  green marketing's recent rise to prominence.

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, here. When Stegeman or some other company does decide to put cultured meat on the market, I'm sure they'll hire a fancy marketing company like Strategic Name to come up with a tasty brand name.  Take for example, Quorn, which is made in a somewhat-similar manner as cultured meat. The makers of Quorn didn't call its product "mycoprotein foodstuff made from processed vat grown fungus."  Quorn sounds a wee bit more pleasant, doesn't it?

So cultured meat right now is more of a general concept, a general type of food, than an individual branded product. But general food concepts are susceptible to branding, too. For example, detractors of the U.S.'s predominant method of livestock production label it "factory farming" while the meat lobby/FDA/EPA refer to the method as "intensive farming practices" or "Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations."

Likewise, "organic natural farms" and "grass-fed beef" sounds a lot better than "extensive farming," despite the fact that the latter name is indicative of the amount of land needed to produce its product. (U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization found that 70% of the Amazon had been deforestated to allow "grass-fed cattle" to graze. That's one reason why cultured meat is so necessary.)

So what about the topic of this blog? My first introduction to this food that I'm now referring to as as cultured meat was in a newspaper article that called it "Vat Meat." Talk about "Yuk factor!"

Proponents like Jason Matheny most often use the term 'cultured meat' in popular news sources, while scientists (including Jason Matheny) normally use the more technical, but cumbersome term, "in vitro cultured meat" in their scholarly articles. (Although, Jason Matheny has recently been calling it hydroponic meat-- but he's been using it more as a way to describe how clean the process can be, as opposed to naming it.)

So what's the most popular? A quick Google search reveals that the term "in vitro meat" dominates the competition in internet references:

1,070,000 - "in vitro meat"
34,000 - "cultured meat"
18,000 - "vat meat"
12,000- "lab grown meat"
10,000 - "laboratory meat"
9,000 - "in vitro cultured meat"
6,000- "schmeat"
2,500- "hydroponic meat"

(Note: I left out search terms that may refer to both cultured meat and another product. Notably, artificial meat, which may refer to meat replacements like Quorn, as well as engineered meat and Frankenmeat, which normally refer to genetically modified meat in general.)

I think we can all agree that a tasty name will make consumers more open to the future of meat.  So that naturally leads to the question(s) of the day. I was going to wait a few *days*--when this blog had *millions* of readers--but I just can't wait to ask:

What do you think the best name is?
Can you come up with a better name?

Can You Be Both "Green" and a Meat Eater?

Not unless you're eating cultured meat.

While driving a Hummer will cause you to get dirty looks pretty much anywhere, eating meat is only passé in Portland or San Francisco. But it seems that is starting to change.

 Scientists, professors, informed individuals, the news media are starting to all pay attention to the environmental impact of our food choices on the environment.

Carnegie Melon's Christopher Weber tells how giving up meat and dairy just one day a week would be the equivalent of driving 1,500 fewer miles a year.  Read his full report here, a brief blog on Earth Sky here or listen to his 90 sec Earth Sky interview here:

(But we've still got a lot of work to do, because it takes two vegans to make up for every one Hummer driver.) 


Here are some more recent studies:
A widely touted 2006 United Nations study found that livestock were responsible for 19% of greenhouse gas emissions. The study is highly regarded and, spanning over 300 pages, is extremely comprehensive. At the same time, it is filled with easy to read language, pictures and helpful charts. You may find a table of contents with individual pdfs on relevant sections here, or you may download the complete pdf here.


This month, a study by two World Bank scientists examined the UN's study's result and found that it didn't take into the affect of the deforestation that occurs due to meat production, and the CO2 expiration of the billions of livestock. Taking these and other factors into account, the study concluded that the number was 51%!

This year, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency found that reducing world intake of meat by about 40% would save $20 trillion on the costs of reducing GHG emissions!

A newly minted study by Hanna Tuomisto at the University of Oxford predicts that cultured meat will eat will likely reduce green house gas emissions by 80%, use 30-60% less energy (depending on the type of meat), 98% less land and between 90-98% less water.

The In Vitro Meat Consortium has a good summary on how how cultured meat can help mitigate much of the catastrophic harm that meat production has on the environment.
Read it here.

For more information on meat's impact on the environment read this interesting article.

Daily Kos covers Cultured Meat

Front page pro- cultured meat post on Daily Kos concerning cultured meat. The Kos post quoted an amazing article in H+ magazine entitled: 8 Ways that In Vitro Meat Will Change Our Lives. This is one of the better article I've read, so please read it, if you haven't yet.

The Kos blog highlighted what could probably be two of the biggest advantages of cultured meat: environmental benefits and health benefits.

I've read a number of online articles and the comments are invariably similar. Most people just found the idea gross. As Jason Matheny has often pointed out, if people knew where their sausage, ground beef, hot dog and chicken nuggets came from, they'd eagerly line up behind cultured meat: “What we’re talking about is hydroponic meat that would be the cleanest meat ever produced,” said Mr. Matheny. “That’s far preferable to how our meat is produced now: 10,000 animals crammed into a metal shed, pumped full of drugs and living in their own waste.”

A commentor named Otto summed up my concerns about most of the comments: "It's pretty funny to read people so quickly dismiss an idea like this. It's pretty much the direction we are going to be forced to go if we insist on continuing with diets that are so meat protein filled."

(Don't) Leave It to Cleaver

Well, that was the most humorous blog title I could come up with on the spot. This is a blog after all. I think the rules of blogging mandate that one not spend too much time

being clever revising, lest one sound inauthentic.

All of this is to say that writing about cultured meat need not be boring. Case in point: Due to spontaneous and uncontrollable laughter, I almost choked on the delicious "Chickie-nobs" I was eating when I read The Schtory Of Schmeat: Vladimir Mironov's Lab-Grown Chicken. Stephanie Pulford tells the back story of cultured meat in an entertaining fashion. I highly recommend checking it out for content and the cleverness.

What Can Geeks Do to Help Bring About A Culture of Cultured Meat?

If you'd like to help make cultured meat a reality, www.supportculturedmeat.org, is a resource for 'technology designers, companies, and animal rights and welfare activists to promote" cultured meat.

The site discusses the ways that technologies spread and ways that you can help. He relies heavily on the concept of the 'stickiness' of an idea. I haven't read the articles cited, but I have read Made to Stick. Made to Stick discusses ways to help people reminder the ideas that we tell them. If not the best, it's one of the best 'how to improve' books I've ever read. I devoured it in hours. If you haven't read the book, I highly suggest you watch this slide show or read it immediately.

Of Self-Loathing Omnivores and Meat Hungry Vegetarians

There are some people who just don't crave meat and wouldn't eat it-- even if there was a healthier and cruelty-free alternative to the current destructive methods of factory farming--and then there are the rest of us.

Patrick J. Kiger, a reluctant meat eater (and former vegetarian), provides a nice, quick and dirty overview of the history of in vitro cultured meat in his blog.

Welcome to my cultured meat blog

I intend this blog to be a resource page for those who are interested in learning more about in vitro cultured meat.

Rather than this being an actual blog, where I wax poetic about cultured meat, I will normally provide links other articles and blogs which discuss cultured meat.

Of course, as I am in favor of cultured meat production most of the links I provide will be to that effect. On the other hand, for proponents of cultured meat, it is best that we understand the objections of those who oppose cultured meat so that we best address their concerns.