The Marketing of Lab Grown Meat
Between 1961 and 2007, the worldwide consumption of meat has doubled. Each step of regular meat production is causing extreme damage to the environment. In 2010, beef production was responsible for 3 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions. The worldwide meat obsession is very hard to reverse and it is impossible to convince people to give up on something they have been consuming their entire lives, the most sustainable way would be to find an alternative to help the environment and prevent animal slaughter. While its production and demand increase every day, Vegan protestors, investors and big businesses are trying to come up with a way to reduce this rapidly increasing scale of worldwide meat consumption by introducing plant-based/lab-grown meat. The goal of plant-based meat producers is to lower our carnivorous meat cravings with something that has a lesser impact on our environment. The search for this solution has created an industry worth $130 milion dollars and research shows that lab-grown meat generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions than regular meat. Economists say, the lab-grown meat industry has a chance of overlapping the regular meat industry and possibly becoming the new future of meat.
How is lab grown meat made? Is it healthy? And what are the flaws of this industry?
In 2013, a professor at Mastrich university grew the first cell-based burger which was tasted and tested during a press conference and since then, private investors have supported the growth of lab-grown meat in the industry. To make lab grown meat you need 3 important ingredients animal stem cells, a protein based feed and a bioreactor. Stem cells are taken out of animals through biopsy when they are under anesthesia, the right temprature conditions are given to it and the cells multiply artificially inside the bioreactor and is then mixed with additives and preservatives before it is sold. Not all plant-based meat companies use stem cells, as they are still trying to figure out what works best. According to volunteers that have taken part in research projects, it tastes pretty much like regular animal-meat.
Scientific lab’s in which meat is grown are the perfect environment for contaminants and it is quite hard to grow meat artificially inside a bioreactor, Thus a lot of space is used to grow just a small chunk of meat which makes it a slower production process than regular animal-based meat. Lab grown-meat is a very challenging product to pull off and there would have to be some kind of fully automated system for it to efficiently meet with the demand if it becomes our future.
