My mouth was not exactly watering as I took my first bite of “meat” in nearly three decades. But I did it with a clean conscience. In fact, not a single animal died or suffered for my palate or plate. And I hold to the notion that my 30-year run of vegan living continues uninterrupted.
The meat I ate came from a laboratory, not a farm field, feedlot or slaughterhouse. It was a cultured steak chip, tastefully dressed with a light barbecue sauce. Welcome to the brave new world of cell-culture meat, compliments of a business straight out of Brooklyn.
I confess I ate this meat chip with some reluctance, owing to my longstanding decision to confine my consumption to the plant kingdom. My tempter was Andras Forgacs, a tissue engineering scientist and CEO of Modern Meadow, a startup that produces biofabricated meat and leather.
It works like this: Cells are sourced from a cow or other animal via simple biopsy, then isolated and multiplied in a cell culture through the gradual infusion of plant material. Over time, cell division occurs, replicating the creation of tissue that naturally develops in a living being. Eventually, you end up with enough to make a piece of meat.
(If you think that process sounds strange, you’ve never visited a slaughterhouse.)
Forgacs’ creations are one innovator’s attempt to cleanse animal cruelty and environmental harm from the production and consumption of a protein-rich food. Thankfully, there are many more working with him — and competing against him — to do the same.
It’s about time. Take a gander at what the world looks like right now. Every year, farmers raise and slaughter some 77 billion animals for food. That’s 10 animals per person. With a billion or two more of us on the planet by 2050, and with rising incomes allowing a greater appetite for meat, that number could expand. Perhaps even to 200 billion, if China and other populous nations start eating as much meat as Americans do. And on our small, fragile planet — with 70% of its surface covered by water and lots of the remaining landmass covered by rock and ice — we just cannot go there and expect to preserve our water, soil, forests and grains.
In the nick of time, food technologists are working out a way to give us the taste and texture of animal products with dramatically fewer moral and ecological problems.
Another innovator in the field is Ethan Brown, founder of Beyond Meat, whose mission is to engineer the perfect plant-based burger. Brown eschews meat-in-the-lab strategies, and instead uses soy protein, pea protein isolates and other ingredients to create his products, which include such unlikely offerings as “chicken” strips. They are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
At Stanford University, scientist Pat Brown (no relation) is developing plant-based substitutes that look, smell and taste just like meat. The key to Brown’s engineering process is “heme” (essentially plant blood), a protein found in plant roots. Brown’s Impossible Foods, which Google attempted to purchase in 2014 for more than $200 million, will shortly release its “Impossible Burger,” which has garnered rave reviews.
At yet another startup, Silicon Valley’s Hampton Creek, scientists blend different types of plants and their proteins to mimic the taste and feel of the common egg for use in foods like cookies and mayonnaise.
What’s happening here is simpler than it sounds. Meat is composed of amino acids, carbohydrates, lipids, minerals and water — all of which are found in plants. These new processes simply take the meat synthesis process outside of a cow or chicken and into the research laboratory and then into mass production. It’s hardly more radical than society’s half-century-long experiment in mass confining billions of animals on hellish factory farms.
As innovative new companies are rethinking the way they treat animals from the ground up, organizations like the Humane Society of the United States are working with existing companies like McDonald’s and Walmart to reconsider old practices. Increasingly, executives sensitive to their public image are listening — and doing the right thing for animals. To make a humane omelet, you’ve got to break some eggs.
Given time, we might even be able to fulfill a promise made by none other than Winston Churchill. In 1931, Churchill predicted that we would one day “escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”
He was right. Lab-grown meat can reduce land use by 99.7%, drain 84% fewer gallons of water and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 98.8%.
All it takes is a little vision. And maybe a touch of barbecue sauce.
Pacelle is president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers Are Transforming the Lives of Animals.”
