The liability waiver does not inspire confidence. I am not a natural thrill seeker, but in my limited experience, sitting down in an empty Melbourne cafe to eat a snack is not a typical activity that “may cause serious or grievous injuries, including bodily injury, and/or death”.
I am here to taste a product that is much hyped but not yet commercially available in Australia (and most other jurisdictions): meat that has been grown in a lab.
The meat in question is a soupçon of pork, which has been cultivated from the cells of a pig’s ear. The pig, I have been assured by Paul Bevan, the chief executive of cultivated meat startup Magic Valley, is still alive and well, continuing to live “its happy, healthy, normal life”.
Lab-grown meat – or cultivated meat, as it is known in the industry – is purported by its proponents to be better for animal welfare and the environment. It exited the realm of science fiction in 2013, when a research team at Maastricht University presented the first prototype, a lab-grown beef burger patty.
Since then, the cellular agriculture industry has yielded just a single commercially available product – cell-based chicken launched in Singapore in 2020 by the American firm Eat Just. A cultivated chicken product from Eat Just subsidiary Good Meat is now making its way through US regulatory approval.
Magic Valley is hoping to apply for regulatory approval in Australia by the end of the year, and to sell their cultivated meat products – lamb and pork, so far – by the end of 2024.
I am a meat eater and don’t consider myself particularly squeamish, but as I wait to taste Magic Valley’s pork I try to suppress a mental image of muscle fibres growing in a Petri dish, à la science experiments from university biology class.
The morsel of lab-grown meat is served in a silky wonton skin, doused with chilli oil, spring onion and black vinegar. The recipe has been cooked up by Wendy Chua, a Magic Valley scientist and their in-house gourmet.
The pork is, in a word, delicious. But then again, what generously seasoned dumpling isn’t?
The texture of the meat is perhaps slightly softer and more gelatinous than regular mince. Any differences in taste would have been easier to parse with a more sizeable portion, but I suspect the meagre serving is a deliberate logistical (and economic) choice.
Magic Valley is not yet operating at industrial scale, so all their meat is still cultivated in a lab, rather than in 20,000-litre bioreactors that they hope to eventually use. A facility with two bioreactors of such size would eventually be able to produce 300,000kg of meat annually, Bevan says. (It is unclear whether bioreactors this large are commonly used in the industry, but in 2022 Eat Just announced it was building 250,000-litre vats, set to be operational in 2024.)
How is it made?
The process of making the pork begins with reprogramming cells taken from a pig’s ear to create induced pluripotent stem cells. These stem cells, which are not yet specialised, have an essentially unlimited ability to generate other cell types. “From there, we’re able to direct the cells to become muscle, fat, connective tissue, bone – whatever we choose,” Bevan says.
Cells are brewed in nutrient media – a liquid of glucose and amino acids – that enables the cells to grow. Currently, muscle and fat are grown separately and combined at the end to form the final product. The process takes about three weeks, Bevan says.
Magic Valley describes its meat as slaughter-free, but other cellular agriculture companies use foetal bovine serum – a byproduct of the meatpacking industry which is harvested from the blood of cow foetuses – as a growth medium.
“In terms of input costs at the moment, for us it costs around $50 a kilo to produce,” Bevan says. His hope is that once production is scaled up, the costs may drop to $5 per kilogram.
While the current price tag is steep, it is far cheaper than it once was – the first lab-grown patty cost US$330,000 to create. But some critics are sceptical that cultivated meat can achieve cost parity with traditional agriculture.
“If your interest is maximising profitability in the early years, you should never start a cultivated meat company,” Eat Just’s chief executive, Josh Tetrick, told the Financial Times in June last year. The article highlighted that despite Eat Just’s 2020 commercial milestone in Singapore, “the lossmaking company’s products are not in shops”.
Though lab-grown meat has high energy requirements, analyses suggest the production process involves less carbon emissions and a smaller land-use footprint per kg of meat than traditional agriculture.
“From a greenhouse gas perspective, and from a water use and a land use perspective, we’re looking at between a 70% and 90% reduction compared to conventional meat,” Bevan says.
Nutritionally, “our cultivated pork products are identical,” Bevan says.
Independent studies are unclear on whether cultivated meat provides the same essential minerals, such as iron and vitamin B12, as regular meat. One 2020 review found that “vitamins are necessary in the [growth] media for optimal cell proliferation, but it is not clear whether the uptake from media results in levels of vitamins in cultured meat comparable to traditional meat”.
But unlike a pork cutlet, which is what it is, Bevan says with cultivated meat “we can remove things like saturated fat, add additional protein content, vitamins, minerals, etcetera”.
Critics of alternative proteins such as lab-grown meat have suggested the industry could jeopardise the livelihoods of food producers globally, “rather than supporting transformational changes in the way we eat”. Nonetheless, the demand for meat is rising worldwide, and cultured meat companies have proliferated accordingly.
In March, another Australian startup, Vow, unveiled a meatball engineered from the tissue of the long-extinct woolly mammoth, which nobody has yet tasted. In addition to traditional livestock animals, the company is making meat from the stem cells of at least 13 other animal species, such as alpaca and water buffalo.
As the technology advances, Bevan says the ultimate goal for Magic Valley is to create “structured” meat products such as steaks and chops. Last year, one Israeli firm used 3D printing techniques to create a 110g steak, but while the technology is impressive, the end product hardly resembles the real thing.
Replacing the chicken in a nugget or the pork filling in a wonton with cultivated meat is beginning to seem like a real possibility. But whether lab-grown chops won’t smack of the uncanny valley’s pastures is a question that’s yet to be answered.
