Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing- Cultured meat technology: An overview

With the introduction of the cultured meat concept, the past decade has seen the remarkable rise of a new scientific field based in the food technology domain, with the potential to change our current food systems.

Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing has published a book ‘Advances in cultured meat technology’ about this subject 

Below is an abstract from one of the chapters: Cultured meat technology: An overview.

Authors: Apeksha Bharatgiri Goswami, James Charlesworth, Joanna M. Biazik, Mark S. Rybchyn and Johannes le Coutre, University of New South Wales, Australia

Published by Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing

Introduction

Cultured meat is made from animal cells grown outside an animal. The principal approach behind producing this food is based upon the idea to use cell and tissue culture techniques, originally developed for the medical science field, to grow all components of edible meat in vitro. At a minimum, this comprises muscle cells, which grow and develop into enlarged cell assemblies. Ideally, this biomass
would feature as many aspects of animal-derived meat as possible.

Briefly, the technology entails obtaining a biopsy from a live animal and growing it to the desired volume in a suitable production environment with the help of specific media to feed the development. For the creation of three-dimensionality and texture, typically a bio-scaffold is incorporated at some point during the process. The resulting material is meat, and it will have to be labelled as such. Genetically, cultured meat is identical at the cellular level to conventional meat, and in the public debate, it is also referred to as lab-grown meat, clean meat, or in vitro meat.

CellAg

The scientific and commercial domain dedicated to this innovative technology refers to itself as ‘Cellular Agriculture’ (cellAg) to highlight the idea of introducing new domestication, i.e. the scaled production of cellular material that so far had only been obtained by higher animals or plants2. The term cellAg was coined in 2015 by the New Harvest non-profit organization for animal products made without animals. The technology holds the potential to improve global food security by addressing major ethical, environmental, commercial, and public concerns.

Objectives

A key objective behind any industrial effort in the context of food is to provide food security. The emerging global food security gap necessitates the production of additional 60–70% calories by 2050, assuming a population of about 10 billion people globally3. With the intent to alleviate the burden on current food systems and to improve nutritional quality and animal welfare, the field of cellAg offers a potential solution, albeit technologically challenging to accomplish.

The technology will provide significant advantages as compared to conventional animal-based meat if the product categories are chosen well. Based upon the enclosed nature of growing biomass in bioreactors, all ingoing and outgoing material streams can be controlled.

Challenges

Still, by far the largest challenge remains scaling of the technology at an affordable cost to provide nutritious, safe, and affordable material in large and impactful quantities. Current setups and approaches are nowhere near the output of the current animal-based livestock industry.

A wealth of conceptual papers, commercial reports, and anticipated consumer scenarios are being published, although we still do not know how CellAg will live up to expectations and how the related products will be perceived. The current situation is that products will be available and even are available in minute quantities to boutique restaurants and specialty niche outlets.

Cultured meat products are being envisaged at various levels of sophistication. At the simplest level, unstructured cellular material will be available that can be diluted with water to provide for a broth or soup stock.

With increasing complexity, more texture can be introduced and minced meat or ‘ground meat-like’ structures will be available, material which at this stage already should contain additional cells or tissues such as adipocytes to provide for the organoleptic property of fatty taste or texture as well as the nutritional benefits of these cell types.

Chicken nuggets or any artificially shaped meat products from other species belong in this group as well and might be available without additional cell types. The most ambitious product form will be analogous to a meat cut. To achieve meaningful meat cut analogues, it will take considerable time and significantly more technological development.

Mimic history

The field of food science is full of examples where one material is supposed to mimic another one, from tofu-based vegetarian meat in the tenth century Song dynasty to margarine, which is designed to mimic butter, and to specific molecules that are developed to mimic the taste of salt or sugar, such as aspartame, which imparts a sweet taste.

In the cultured meat domain, it will be interesting to see if mimicking animal-based materials will be the ultimate ambition or if the derived materials will succeed to attain a food category by themselves. Why mimic animal material if you want to abandon animal-based
materials?

To make cultured meat a success story, it is not just a matter of significant advances in one technology; success is dependent on making strides in an entire technology suite if the resulting products are not just meant to serve as a gimmick in a niche market.

Read the full chapter here