Cultivated Meat

Work in Progress

Cultivated Meat is also known by the terms in-vitro, cultured, and lab meat, or cellular agriculture as an academic field. It is a subset of a broader category called alternative proteins, which also includes plant and fungi based animal product substitutes.

According to its promoters, cultivated meat has the potential to reduce environmental cost and protect the welfare of animals. In his book "Clean Meat," Paul Shapiro makes the case for how cellular agriculture can completely revolutionize the food production process and remove animals from the equation. It is claimed that cultured meat, if made commercially viable, would be far more resource efficient, requiring up to 45% less energy, 96% less water, and 99% less land than conventional beef (Tuomisto & Mattos, 2011). Some vegans, however, do not support this technology.

Opposition is rooted primarily in two camps: the health-based vegans, and the deontological vegans. There are also practical concerns about the production process as well as concerns over whether the potential benefits might be exaggerated. While consequentialist ethical vegans broadly agree that if in-vitro grown meat can compete with meat of slaughtered animals then developing it is the moral thing to do, there are still a number of unknowns. This article will attempt to address these topics, and highlight areas that are less clear.

Health based opposition

Some vegans, including vegans for ethical reasons, place human and societal health in high regard. Beyond animal ethics, it CAN be an ethical reason to be vegan in order to oppose the animal agriculture industry which causes harm to human beings (similar to how one might oppose the smoking industry).

Cultivated meat, despite being much cleaner (minus most pathogens) than conventionally produced meat, could still have the same nutritional downsides which exist in current meat, such as red meat being carcinogenic.

Not all vegans are willing to take a quicker win for veganism at the cost of a less complete transition for human beings to healthier plant based diets.

It might be possible to tweak the fatty acid profiles of clean meat (more lauric and oleic acids, for example), and even the amino acid profiles (more lysine, less methionine), and remove the heme iron, but that may involve genetic engineering -- a technology which much of the public is afraid of and may use as a reason to oppose clean meat -- and would very likely also change the taste (the Impossible Burger achieves a meaty taste using heme iron from legume roots). For these reasons, it may be more effective from some perspectives to continue development of mock meats based on plant proteins and plant fats, promote a social change in taste, and utilize moral disgust of animal based meat to end reliance on what is viewed to be an inherently unhealthy food product.

Deontological opposition

Deontological vegans frequently oppose cultivated meats because it is of animal origin, so it does not fall under most accepted definitions of vegan. Others claim that humans are "exploiting" the animals' biology or DNA, and point out that the original sample was taken without permission.

Definition of Vegan

The Definition of Vegan is subject to some debate, but the consequential ethical aspects are fairly strong within it. Still, many people take a hard-line position of saying cultivated meat isn't vegan, and point to the dietary terms in the second half of the vegan society definition, disregarding the spirit of the law in favor of the letter:

"In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."

Because the cells are technically animal cells, cultivated meat would be animal derived (much in the way oysters are, by this strict definition, technically not vegan -- see weaknesses in the Definition of Vegan.

However, just because something isn't vegan, that doesn't mean it's wrong. It also doesn't mean vegans need to eat it in order to be generally supportive of the technology's development by encouraging others and contributing donations to the research.

Exploitation

The definition of exploitation itself is vague, ranging from the narrow interpretation of harmful use, to the broad use in any sense regardless of harm.

From a consequentialist ethical perspective, it is clear that not all use is harmful, but harmful consequences are not a concern for deontologists: they are concerned with means that violate certain rules, and exploitation is a common one.
For example, "that we never treat others as a means to an end, but rather as ends"

When considering use, period, we are ultimately still using the animals by taking something from them, even harmlessly, and that isn't alleviated if that use is ongoing (even from an immortal cell line).

Some more "moderate" deontologists may be willing to discount use by previous generations and permit an immortal cell line on the basis that we didn't do it (much as we can use infrastructure created by slaves, since slavery has been ended).

However, in rare cases there may be a legitimate risk of ongoing harmful exploitation by keeping animals to extract cells from. If it's only something like one harmless sample taken from 15 cows per year there wouldn't be a strong case against it, but it's not clear that it would be harmless or that they would live in good welfare standards. See cell lines below.
However, even if done harmlessly, many deontologists still oppose this because it is considered use, even if the consequences would be to prevent profound harm to billions.
There may be one way to avoid this issue, but it comes at a major cost from the mainstream: Using human cell lines or proteins (for transgenic production in yeast) so that full consent can be given. However, this may be considered cannibalism and put off the very people we need to adopt cultivated meat to save animals from suffering.

Development

Some vegans express concern about the efficacy of cultivated meat because the animal cells must be extracted (via biopsy) from the animal. Some may also express strong opposition to the use of fetal bovine serum (see growth medium below). While consequentialist vegans realize that these small harms could be justified by the steady decline of animal agriculture (given agreement that this is the consequence), deontological vegans do not agree. To them, ANY harm, no matter how small, can never be justified by its ends.

Practical Skepticism

Growth Medium

A common criticism of cultivated meat is that some companies use fetal bovine serum to develop the animal cells. Fetal bovine serum is not vegan, because it comes from slaughtered pregnant cows. It is only taken for the sake of research and development, and to analyze and identify which kind of molecules are necessary for meat to grow. All cultivated meat companies seek to completely eliminate its need, and some companies claim to have done so already. In-vitro meat made from FBS might not be any more ethical than meat from slaughtered animals, and relying on it economically makes no sense because it's an expensive product with unreliable supply.

Several start-ups are attempting to find more ethical alternatives to fetal bovine serum. This study investigated the feasibility of using platelet lysates (PL) as a substitute for FBS (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22130485). Obtained from outdated human donor platelet concentrates, PL successfully grew human and animal cell lines. However, there are serious pathogenic concerns over introducing human products into the food system.

Researchers have been able to effectively culture animals cells with a serum-free medium from maitake mushrooms. Some cells show an even higher rate of growth with maitake mushroom extract than with with FBS (Bhat & Fayaz, 2011). This could be an ethical alternative to fetal bovine serum for culturing animal cells.

There are other synthetic alternatives, though they may not be as feasible. If researchers cannot produce effective alternatives, it may be difficult to ethically defend cultivated meat. Criticism from both vegans and non vegans alike is pushing cellular agriculture companies to do away with FBS.

References: Bhat, Z. F., & Fayaz, H. (2011). Prospectus of cultured meat—advancing meat alternatives. Journal of Food Science and Technology, 125-140. doi: 10.1007/s13197-010-0198-7

Cell Lines

There's also the concern of animal cell lines. Alongside a vegan growth medium, immortal cell lines are generally something cultivated meat companies are aiming for, so they don't have to continuously do biopsies from live animals.

However, not all companies are actually aiming for immortal cell lines: Mosa Meats says they still need donor animals, with one sample of a cow being able to make 20,000 tons of beef (http://mosameat.eu/faq.html). It's much less harm with only a fraction of the number of animals used, so it's a huge improvement over current meat production, but it's still continuous use of animals and not quite the standards vegans may hope for. Now let's do some math. Netherland's population in about 17,200,000 people (https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/visualisaties/population-counter), and beef consumption per capita in Netherland in the last few years has been around 15.5 kilos (https://www.statista.com/statistics/618821/per-capita-consumption-of-beef-in-the-netherlands/). That means annual beef consumption for the entire population of Netherland (we're using this country for this example because it's where Mosa Meats is based) is about 266,000,000 kilos. Assuming by "ton" Mosa Meats means non-metric ton, converted to metric it would mean 18,143,695 kilos. Let's divide: 266,000,000 / 18,143,695 ≈ 14.65 which would mean taking cells from 15 live cows per year could be able to supply the demand of beef in Netherland. Assuming the biopsy is harmless and not too invasive, this perpetual need of using cows might be a nitpick for a consequentialist vegan rather than a big deal. But that's assuming they actually have happy lives and good welfare standards. That sounds much more plausible than in a regular farm, but there's still the possibility of bad treatment due to people supposed to take care of them potentially trying to cut financial corners. The best bet for animal welfare in this case may be to make mandatory for in-vitro beef companies to source their cells from non-profit sanctuaries rather than by the companies themselves or other for-profits, because animals being seen as commercial products is an easy start for a slippery slope towards abuse. There's also the problem of keeping breeding individuals from races with inherent welfare concerns, similar to dogs with respiratory problems related to their anatomy or chickens whose body grows so fast ther legs can barely support it, assuming the meat cells that grow the best in-vitro come from an animal of such a race.

However, most in-vitro meat companies (Modern Meadows immediately comes to mind) are looking for ways to remove animals entirely from the process, so in the very least there will likely be consumer choice in the matter, and that may be optimal to convince the most people to switch (with the more "natural" inclined to choose the multiplied biopsied muscle which more recently derived from "real cows/chickens/etc").

There's also the issue of working around European Laws. They've already got some pretty strict GMO laws. Plus, taking a biopsy from a live animal is considered an animal experiment in the European Union. This would pose some serious drawbacks to Mosa Meat, and any other company trying to find animal cells to culture in a lab. Perhaps scientists could work around this by taking samples from recently slaughtered animals? Though this could benefit slaughter houses.

There's also the issue of companies that don't want to remove animals entirely wanting to accommodate religious beliefs of Muslims and Jews, for whom in vitro meat may only be permissible if the animals are ritualistically slaughtered in accordance with their religions to obtain the cells, a biopsy might not be acceptable.

Lab-grown beef would be considered kosher, according to Rabbi Joshua Strulowitz of the West Side Institutional Synagogue in New York, but only if it was made using tissue from a ritually slaughtered kosher animal. Post used a biopsy from a live cow, as living stem cells are needed for the process.

"The animal would need to be slaughtered according to Jewish law before harvesting the cells because meat from a live animal is not kosher," says Strulowitz.[1]

99% less land claim

This claim is likely looking only at animal grazing footprint, and ignoring the land it takes to produce the growth medium.

Animals can not create proteins from nothing, and while it may be possible to produce them from chemical stock as synthetic fertilizers are, the raw ingredients will have to be created using land and resources.

Even with perfect conversion from plant sources like soybeans, land savings would only range from 10 - 20x, meaning 5%-10% of the land in the best case. We would need to not only create a very efficient growth medium, but also find a more efficient way to produce it than any common human foods.

Plant Based Meat

Some vegans respond to the idea of clean meat by saying that it's unnecessary and useless, because we can simply replace the taste for meat by making people enjoy plant-based food. But no matter how much more important vegans think their animalist cause is compared to the taste pleasure of animal products, expecting non-vegans to necessarily have enough willpower to give more importance to vegan ethics than to their taste preferences is not realistic. Because no one likes the idea of radically changing their diet or to abandon food they love, it's important to consider the option of finding alternative ways to make animal products, without harming sentient animals, in order to lower the bar of entry for non-vegans to adopt a more ethical lifestyle.

Some vegans might instead want to put focus on plant-derived alternatives to meat, but it's not likely that plant-based alternatives will convince billions of meat eaters around the globe to give up meat. Plant-based meat substitutes can compete with animal meat (https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2018/01/12/An-estimated-70-of-Beyond-Burger-fans-are-meat-eaters-not-vegans-vegetarians-says-Beyond-Meat) but do not taste exactly the same and are unlikely to take over animal agriculture.

As Paul Shapiro points out in his book, it wasn't people's concern of horses that ended their use for transportation, it was the invention of the car. The discovery of kerosene, not animal welfarist sentiment, stopped the killing of whales for their oil. By analogy he argues that lab-grown meat can do the same for the chickens, pigs, and cows of today.

Taste and texture

Cultivated meat needs to have the right balance of different kinds of cells in order to imitate the taste of conventional meat. This means we can't solely rely on muscle cells for example, otherwise it will not feel fatty enough and thus not convincing. But with the right balance, getting the right taste is not a problem, as a large part of the taste of meat comes from the amino acid composition.

The main mouthfeel problem, though, might be of texture. Cells of in-vitro meat don't grow in the same environment as those inside the body of a live animal, which means the cellular structure of cultivated meat could be different from that of meat from slaughtered animals. This doesn't cause a problem for things like beef burgers or meatballs or chicken nuggets, because those are processed meat. However, it might be harder to imitate the texture of whole meat products, like chicken breast.

Despite the potentially limited applications of cultivated meat when it comes to substituting an animal product to a more ethical alternative (assuming it works well for processed meat products but struggles to imitate the texture of whole meat), it would still be an interesting option that might convince meat eaters who may not be convinced to try plant-based options. If one were to replace at least part of their animal-derived meat consumption with cultivated meat, this would mean the animal agriculture industry would have a lower market share, thus leading to lowered animal suffering overall.

Risk of non-viability

There also may be concerns about the technology's maturity and the feasibility of the concept. Some people may think that putting faith in cultivated meat is merely blind faith in technology, and might be as unrealistic as something like replacing all fossil fuels with solar panels.

Unfortunately, there are still quite a few challenges in making cultivated meat commercially viable, seeing how it's still a new technology after all. The biggest obstacle is the cost. The very first cultured hamburger costed over $300,000, although progress has been made in that regard since that burger was made in 2013, there's still more research to do to lower the cost to the point it becomes reasonably affordable. In order to foster cell growth in a petri dish, you've got to have the right growth factors, which we just don't produce on a mass scale yet. Scientists are working hard to make this technology more affordable.

The theory of how to culture meat cells is for the most part already known, and it seems as though the biggest obstacles involve massively increasing the scale at which we produce in-vitro meat, all the while making it cheaper than the meat we already have. But to put things into perspective, the sequencing of the human genome originally took several years and billions of dollars of investment, and now the sequencing of an individual's genome can be done for less than 1,000 dollars and only a few days. In the same respect, hopefully the technology of producing in vitro meat will be able to improve and scale up the same way DNA sequencing did.

Other in-vitro animal products

Other animal products like dairy (based on specific proteins like casein), leather and gelatin (both based on collagen proteins) are also being developed as vegan friendly products through engineered yeast and other cellular agriculture.

California-based company Bolt Threads is growing in-vitro spider silk, starting with yeast cells that have been engineered to omit proteins naturally found in spider silk. Bolt Threads has produced knit ties containing the material (https://boltthreads.com/technology/). Other companies, like Spiber and AMsilk have begun producing lab-grown spider silk.

Because these products have the advantage of being technologically mature, they will probably enter the market long before cultivated meat does.

There seems to be less ick factor and less potential for rejection among vegetarian consumers (providing an instant market). Omnivores also seem to be curious.

Other in-vitro products, like lab made leather, could serve as an "entry product" that eases consumers up to the idea of eating and wearing animal products produced outside of animals. If consumers are open to wearing lab-grown leather, the idea of eating lab-grown meat might not seem as foreign or bizarre.

The commercial success of cultivated meat may be dependent on the reception of other in-vitro products, like lab grown leather.

Reception

A number of polls have been done on the subject of clean meat/in-vitro meat in recent years by VRG, PETA, and other groups.

[I'm having trouble finding the raw results]

The VRG commissioned a Harris Poll in 2011 that asked people what types of food they would eat. It included a question about buying “a meat alternative grown from animal cell DNA obtained 10 years ago, which does not currently involve the raising of animals”.

Just 11 percent of those polled said they’d buy it and just 2 percent of vegans said they would. Four percent of people identifying as either vegans or vegetarians said they’d buy such a product.[2]

PETA seems to have done a poll, but it's not clear where the results are posted if at all[3]