It’s meat Jim,
but not as we know it! Why the meat-alternative food revolution is unstoppable and why British billionaire, Jim Mellon, is ‘in’! BY JULIET GELLATLEY, VIVA! FOUNDER & DIRECTOR
ultured meat recently made its historic debut in Singapore. Eat Just, a US start-up company, launched the lab-grown chicken at the chic 1880 restaurant. It is the first in the world to make cultured meat commercially available and its brand, GOOD Meat, was used in three dishes: bao bun with crispy sesame cultured chicken and spring onion; phyllo puff pastry with cultured chicken and black bean purée; and a crispy maple waffle with cultured chicken with spices and hot sauce. Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, told Viva!life: “This historic step, the first-ever commercial sale of cultured meat, moves us closer to a world where the majority of meat will not require tearing down a single forest, displacing a single animal’s habitat or using a single drop of antibiotics.” Most of the CEOs I’ve contacted in the cultured meat arena are similarly motivated by ethics. My interest in cultured meat is, of course, for the animals. Seventy-five billion farmed animals were killed last year across the globe and most were intensively farmed in pitiable conditions. Feeding these poor creatures is ravaging the world’s wildernesses as they are ripped up to make way for grazing and animal fodder. Animals from the sea fare no better, with almost all salmon factory farmed and trillions of other fish wrenched from the oceans, which are ecologically collapsing (see page 16). With meat consumption growing in China and India, cultured meat is an incredibly long lever to pull to quickly reduce the numbers of animals slaughtered worldwide; it may be the only way – and I mean by tens of billions – in our lifetime.
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With these thoughts in mind, I attended a webinar Protein Reimagined: Transforming the Global Food System, run by the Good Food Institute in Spring 2021. Within six years, the number of cultured meat companies has grown from two to over 60 worldwide and with investments of over $450 million, they have made huge strides in commercialising not only cultured meat but also fish, prawns and shrimp, foie gras, dairy products (including infant formula), pet food and leather. As the Founder of Vitro Labs, Ingvar Helgason, told me: “A single painless biopsy from one cow can make millions of handbags.” Curious to discover how cultured meat is made, I visited Mosa Meat in Maastrict. This was the company co-founded by Dutch scientist Mark Post who unveiled the first cultivated meat burger on live television in London in 2013. A tiny sample of cells is painlessly taken from an animal and are then fed a broth of nutrients, growth factors and water on which they multiply into trillions and are grown into meat or other products using a bioreactor. From start to finish, the process by Eat Just for chicken takes about 14 days. Other companies take up to two months. One of the stumbling blocks has always been the medium used to grow them – foetal bovine serum (FBS). It contains serum taken from the hearts of living calf foetuses – and yes, it is as horrifically cruel as it sounds. Mosa Meat, however, say they have developed a medium that does not contain any animal components and Didier Toubia, co-founder at Aleph Farms in Israel, wrote in an email to me: “Our growth medium does not include any component obtained from animals”. Other companies have now achieved this, too.
