Cell-Based Meat Production

Cell-Based Meat Production

1. What is cell-based meat?

   • Cell-based meat (also known as in vitro meat, lab-grown mean, clean meat, or synthetic meat) is edible muscle tissue created by culturing stem cells in a controlled culture and physiological enviroment in a laboratory utilizing tissue engineering and computational simulation technologies (Mengistie, 2020)
   • Cell-based/Lab-grown meat is an edible animal cell culture (Thompson, Cell based meat 9.4, slide 5)
   • CBM, also referred to as in vitro meat, lab-grown meat or cultured meat, is meat produced by cultivating cells as opposed to farming animals (Rubio et al., 2020)

2. Importance

   • Gives us another option for food production to try to match the growing population and reduce food insecurity
     • Growing at a rate of 1.05% per year, the global population of 7.8 billion today is expected to surpass 9 billion by 2050 (Chriki et al., 2021)
   • Fulfill the wants of consumers with a concern on the welfare of animals in conventional meat production
   • Reduce the need to grow our meat animal populations
   • Hopes to create a more sustainable protein source

3. Current Challenges

   • Economics
     • Cell-based meat is currently very expensive to produce
     • Still a lot of research and testing to do which requires abundant funds
     • Billions of dollars of infastructure must be built to put into mass production
     • Acquiring investors to invest in the development of production and research
   • Negative Public Perception
     • Consumers worry about the safety of consuming cell-based meat
     • Consumers are concerned with the higher prices than conventional meat products
     • Consumers worry about the flavor, texture and color not matching convential meats
   • Regulations
     • Have to work with both FDA and the USDA to get the cell-based meat out into the public
     • Decisions on how cell-based meat should be labeled for public consumption

4. Sustainability

   • Hopes
     • Changing from conventional meat production to cell-based meat will reduce greenhouse gas emissions
     • Will require less land usage than conventional meats require for production
     • Will reduce the amount of food insecurity the world is currently experiencing
   • The researchers discovered that lab-grown meat had a lower environmental impact than conventional beef and perhaps pork, but a larger impact than chicken and plant protein production, owing to high energy demands, except land use and terrestrial soil and freshwater ecotoxicity (Smetana et al., 2015)
   • The energy needed to run the giant factories will create a ton of CO2 and CO2 last longer in the atmosphere than other greenhouse gases

5. Unknowns

   • How much infrastructure will be required to be able to replace conventional meat production
   • Will the costs of production ever be reduced enough to compete with the prices of other protein options
   • Will the greenhouse gas emissions actually be less than that of conventional meat production
   • How will an increase in cell-based meat consumption affect the prices that farmers and ranchers will recieve

6. What needs to be done to make this happen?

   • Educate the public on the production and nutrients of cell-based meat
   • More research on how to make the production of cell-based meat more sustainable and quicker
   • Get the attention of more investors
   • Figure out a way to get farmers and ranchers involved and not just shut them completely out