Will consumers have a beef with test-tube meat?
ANNE MCILROY
SCIENCE REPORTER (Globe and Mail)
Scientists can grow frog and mouse meat in the lab, and are now working on pork, beef and chicken. Their goal is to develop an industrial version of the process in five years.
If they succeed, cultured or in vitro meat could be coming to a supermarket near you. Consumers could buy hamburger patties and chicken nuggets made from meat cultivated from muscle cells in a giant incubator rather than cut from a farm animal.
Home chefs could make meat in a countertop device the size of a coffee maker. Before bed, throw starter cells and a package of growth medium into the meat maker and wake up to harvest fresh sausage for breakfast.
You could feel good about eating a healthy breakfast; the meat would have the fat profile of salmon, not pork. One day, the truly adventurous may be able to grow ostrich, wild boar, or other game.
First, however, meat researchers in the United States and the Netherlands must find a way to replicate on an industrial scale a process that works in a petri dish. The price will have to be right. It is hard to imagine consumers paying more for an in vitro burger than they pay for a regular one.
They will also have to overcome the "ick" reaction. Many find the idea of cultured meat unappealing or downright disgusting. How would it taste?
"I don't find it hard to believe that in vitro meat can be produced that tastes like hamburger or chicken nuggets," said Jason Matheny, one of the founders of Vive Research, a U.S. form working on growing meat for the global market. Most of the flavour in burgers and nuggets now sold in grocery stores or restaurants comes from seasoning or filler, he said.
Researchers have succeeded in growing bits of meat, the type that could be used in burgers or spaghetti sauce.
Growing a test-tube steak or pork roast will be more challenging, said Henk Haagsman, professor of meat sciences at the University of Utrecht. He is part of a team of Dutch researchers who are leading the world in the meat-making field.
He and his colleagues grew mouse meat in their lab because the stem cells they could turn into muscle fibres were easily available. Now they are working on pork.
Australian researchers have grown muscle tissue from a frog, which they served with Calvados sauce at an exhibition in France in 2003. The frog steaks, they said, tasted like jelly on fabric.
In 2001, U.S. researchers, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, grew muscle tissue from a goldfish -- a kind of carp -- as part of an experiment on whether it is possible to grow fish for astronauts on long space journeys. Morris Benjaminson and his colleagues at Touro College in New York bathed pieces of goldfish muscle in fetal bovine serum -- which contains growth factors that spur muscle growth.
The fish muscle grew nearly 14 per cent over a few weeks. It smelled normal, the researchers reported. But they didn't taste it.
NASA, however, has decided against space burgers -- fish or beef -- for astronauts on long missions.
This has cut off an important funding source for U.S. researchers interested in cultured meat, said Vladimir Mironov, a tissue engineer at the Medical University of South Carolina.
He said mass production of cultivated meat will be difficult, and expensive, at the least in the short term. But smaller, countertop bioreactors, or incubators, could more easily mimic the meat-making experiments scientists have done in petri dishes.
"It would look like a coffee maker -- this is my dream," he said wistfully. "No one wants to fund it."
One group, which he would not name, did offer him money, but they wanted him to grow meat from human cells, so they could grow pieces of themselves to eat. <GOOD LORD NO!!!
"I don't want to participate in high-tech human cannibalism," he said he told them.
Theoretically, he said, it would be possible. Researchers have harvested human myoblasts, cells that can grow into muscle fibre.
Even without the stomach-turning notion of a human burger, cultured meat is not an appetizing idea for many people.
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