Lab-Grown Meat: Its Time Will Come

Cultured chicken from Good Meat in Alameda (Chron)

Plant-based "meat" has been acknowledged, even by people who won't touch it, to produce substantial environmental benefits in the form of much less greenhouse-gas emissions and water and land use.

Lab-grown meat, on the other hand, currently has little environmental advantage over animal meat. [bold added]

The cultured meat industry...is probably 25 times more energy intensive than traditional beef in its current form, a new UC Davis study has found. And even when production becomes more widespread, the authors have doubts about its potential climate benefits...

Cultured meat, also called cultivated or lab-grown meat, is produced in bioreactors with real animal cells but does not require animal slaughter. The main reason it’s energy intensive is that the nutrients and other ingredients required to feed the cells need to be highly purified, a process that is closer to pharmaceutical-grade rather than food-grade production, though companies are working on changing that, said [UC-Davis Professor Edward] Spang.

Lowering the quality from pharmaceutical- to food-grade will lessen the energy cost, but to be perfectly frank, your humble blogger expects the lab-grown product to be safer than real meat if he's going to go through the trouble of eating it.

This research may have stymied lab-grown meat for now.

But the technology will likely have second life as humans live off-Earth and crave something closer to meat than plant product soaked in meat-simulating chemicals. Fission, or even fusion, energy should be plentiful, and it will be prohibitively expensive to transport and breed animals off world for consumption.

They're having a sale at Spaceway. Let's hop over and pick up a half-dozen tubes of chicken.