From a Petri Dish to the Dinner Table: Will Laboratories Become the Newest Meat Suppliers?

Welcome to the future of food: where meat is grown in labs, not on farms, and where animal noises are replaced with the sound of lab machinery! Lab grown meat is the promise of delicious burgers and steaks without the need for sacrificing animals. Imagine firing up the barbeque and enjoying a family meal without the guilt that is often associated with traditional meat industries. But is this promise too good to be true?

Lab-grown or cultured meat is meat produced in bioreactors or labs from cells that are originally taken from an animal.¹ Bioreactors are systems that provide a suitable environment for products that are isolated from living organisms (in this case meat from cells) to focus on growing.² The process entails taking a biopsy (a sample of cells) from the muscle of the animal (e.g., pigs, cows, or chickens).³ The cells are then put in a dish or flask where it is continually given a fresh liquid or special juice (known as a media). The media contains all the beneficial nutrients they need to grow. Using this media, cells are encouraged to grow into muscle and ultimately into your favorite cut of meat.⁴ With this method consumers are still getting the promise of “real” meat, unlike other meat alternatives, but without the conventional ways of obtaining it.

There has been a lot of buzz regarding lab-grown meat amongst the science, food, environment, and energy industries. This innovative approach can solve a lot of issues associated with the conventional meat industry, aside from sparing animal lives.⁵ Some are claiming that lab-grown meat will reduce the environmental burden of our meat industries today.

Currently, the production of conventional meat requires vast amounts of land and water use to sustain these animals.⁶ With lab-grown meat, cells taken from one animal can be used repeatedly to grow the meat, so there is no longer a need to raise and breed animals for food, in turn reducing land use and water consumption.⁷ Since lab-grown meat is being produced in a much more controlled environment relative to conventional meat, there may also be a decrease in diseases spreading to humans since the introduction of microbes are rare in the clean and sterile environment of a lab.^8,9

The push to lab-grown meat, can also lead to positive impacts on limiting antibiotic resistance, which is currently a huge threat to human and animal health.^10,11 Currently the meat industry requires the use of many different antibiotics to ensure that animals remain healthy and so that the spread of diseases to humans is limited. That being said, some specialists suggest that antibiotics will not be as widely needed with lab grown meat processes. There is still debate on whether this will be reality as the lack of antibiotic use in lab-grown meat creates some concern about potential contamination.¹²

While this all seems like a win-win, no-brainer solution, it has its caveats. First and foremost, the popular opinion that lab-grown meat is more environmentally friendly than the current meat industry, isn’t entirely true. While lab-grown meat doesn’t require as much land use for animals, it does require building bioreactors; especially when looking to scale up these initiatives. To sustain and operate the bioreactors that produce the lab-grown meat, a substantial amount of energy is needed.^13,14 So, from an environmental perspective, where lab-grown meat saves in land use it expends in energy consumption.

Food specialists are also concerned that we do not entirely know what macro and micronutrients make up lab-grown meat.¹⁵ Consumers might be missing out on lots of essential vitamins and nutrients that are usually provided in conventional meat.¹⁶ While there is a continuing effort to include necessary vitamins and nutrients in cultured meat, currently there are hurdles to include nutrients including B12 and necessary fats.¹⁷ This can ultimately have negative effects on human health and wellbeing.

Finally, the biggest drawback holding back the lab-grown meat industry from scaling up is the cost.¹⁸ Producing lab-grown meat is extremely expensive compared to the current conventional meat industry due to the need for bioreactors and the special media (juice) needed to grow cells into edible meat in a dish.¹⁹

While the idea of lab-grown meat has become a buzzword and has received some polarizing feedback, it is unlikely that this new alternative meat industry will completely replace current conventional meat production. Although some companies are already underway on producing lab grown meats, there are still many technical and economical hurdles to overcome before this becomes the new normal. Lab grown meats will not be populating the meat isles in our grocery stores for now.

1. Post, M. J., and J. -F. Hocquette. 2017. “Chapter 16 - New Sources of Animal Proteins: Cultured Meat.” In New Aspects of Meat Quality, edited by Peter P. Purslow, 425–41. Woodhead Publishing Series in Food Science, Technology and Nutrition. Woodhead Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-100593-4.00017-5.

2. Delavar, Mojtaba Aghajani, and Junye Wang. 2022. “Chapter 7 - Bioreactor Concepts, Types, and Modeling.” In Advanced Methods and Mathematical Modeling of Biofilms, edited by Mojtaba Aghajani Delavar and Junye Wang, 195–245. Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-85690-4.00004-X.

3. Chriki, Sghaier, Marie-Pierre Ellies-Oury, and Jean-François Hocquette. 2022. “Is ‘Cultured Meat’ a Viable Alternative to Slaughtering Animals and a Good Comprise between Animal Welfare and Human Expectations?” Animal Frontiers 12 (1): 35–42. https://doi.org/10.1093/af/vfac002.

4. Chriki, “Cultured Meat”.

5. Jones, Nicola. 2023. “Lab-Grown Meat: The Science of Turning Cells into Steaks and Nuggets.” Nature 619 (7968): 22–24. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02095-6.

6. Jones, “Lab-Grown Meat”.

7. Jones, “Lab-Grown Meat”.

8. Jones, “Lab-Grown Meat”.

9. Hadi, Joshua, and Gale Brightwell. 2021. “Safety of Alternative Proteins: Technological, Environmental and Regulatory Aspects of Cultured Meat, Plant-Based Meat, Insect Protein and Single-Cell Protein.” Foods 10 (6): 1226. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods10061226.

10. Jones, “Lab-Grown Meat”.

11. Hadi, “Alternative Proteins”.

12. Hadi, “Alternative Proteins”.

13. Jones, “Lab-Grown Meat”.

14. Hadi, “Alternative Proteins”.

15. Chriki, “Cultured Meat”.

16. Chriki, “Cultured Meat”.

17. Fraeye, Ilse, Marie Kratka, Herman Vandenburgh, and Lieven Thorrez. 2020. “Sensorial and Nutritional Aspects of Cultured Meat in Comparison to Traditional Meat: Much to Be Inferred.” Frontiers in Nutrition 7 (March):35. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2020.00035.

18. Jones, “Lab-Grown Meat”.

19. Jones, “Lab-Grown Meat”.