Attitude towards Cultured Meat: A Survey in India Santhosh Kacham1, Praneetha D. C.1, Bhaskar V.2, and Girish P. S.1 1 ICAR – National Research Centre on Meat, Chengicherla, Hyderabad 500092 Telangana State, India 2 ICMR – National Institute of Nutrition, Tarnaka, Hyderabad 500007 Telangana State, India * Corresponding author - E mail: santosh.biotech24@gmail.com
1.0 Abstract
4.0 Results
Meat is an important component of the food basket of India and it plays a critical role in ensuring the nutritional security of the ever-growing population. Concerns related to environmental costs, shrinking resources, and animal welfare issues continue to haunt the meat industry. Cultured meat, promises to produce meat without the need to rear the livestock and by utilizing fewer resources with minimum impact on the environment. In this work, an effort has been made to capture the perception of Indian consumers towards cultured meat by conducting a survey. Results of the survey revealed that about 60.52% of the respondents are willing to buy the cultured meat if made available. We found that 45.9% of the respondents who are willing to buy cultured meat were ready to pay a premium price range between 10-30%. Among the respondents, 54.0%, 59.1% and 66.5% felt that cultured meat is required in view of challenges like sustainability, nutritional security, and animal welfare.
• Total respondents (N) of the survey were 504, out of which, 63.1% were males and 36.9% were females (Fig 4). • Our sample predominantly consisted of young population, with 25.6% below 25 years and 58.73% between 25-45 years. • Most of the participants were educated with 30.8% being graduates and 38.5% being postgraduates. • Sample group consisted of 84.7% nonvegetarians and 15.3% of vegetarians
2.0 Introduction • Enhancing meat production to meet the growing demand is faced with several challenges: environmental cost, welfare issues, meat borne diseases and meat animals competing with human food (Fig 1). • In this background, producing meat by culturing cells in a suitable media rather than by rearing and slaughtering of meat animals is viewed globally as a potential alternative. • Cultured meat (CM), also termed in vitro, ‘lab-based’, or synthetic meat, refers to meat produced in a laboratory, outside of a living animal. • The cultured meat production involves the selection of cells, culture medium, scaffolds for culturing the cells and finally the scale up of the process in the bioreactors. • The time line of cultured meat is shown in Fig 2. • To understand the attitude of consumers towards cultured meat, surveys have been conducted in different countries such as New Zealand (Tucker 2014),United States of America (Wilks and Phillips 2017) and Italy (Mancini and Antonioli 2019). • But there was no exclusive survey study done in India. To fill this gap, we aim to know the Indians’ perspective regarding cultured meat Demerits of Conventional meat
1971
Merits of Cultured meat
• The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave approval for the use of commercial in vitro meat production 1995
1999 Require resources like water, land etc. whose availability is slowly reducing.
Require lesser resources (nutrients, land, water etc.)
Environment: Contribution to deforestation, global warming and pollution
Environmental friendly. Helps reduce emission of greenhouse gases
Animal welfare: Process of slaughtering which often compromises it.
Animal friendly as it does not require slaughtering of the animal. Only one time biopsy collection will serve the purpose.
Nutrient conversion: Inefficient.
Health: Food borne diseases due to presence of microbes in the meat.
Religious: Religious restrictions and social taboos.
Scarcity: Demand of meat is increasing day by day but the production is not in line with it.
• Russell Ross successfully cultivated the muscular fibers in vitro
2001
Nutrient conversion: Highly efficient.
• The first patent for in vitro meat was secured by Willem van Eelen • NASA has began the in vitro meat experiments by producing cultured turkey meat
• The common goldfish muscle tissue was cultured in Petri dishes and the meat was accepted as food by a test-panel. 2002 • New Harvest, which is the first non-profit to work for the development of cultured meat, was founded by Jason Matheny. 2004 • The other company named Modern Meadow was founded to aim at producing cultured leather and meat 2011 • The first in vitro hamburger was developed by Dutch researcher Mark Post's lab was also tastetested 2013 • Muufri, Clara Foods, Real Vegan Cheese, companies aimed at producing cultured dairy, eggs, cultured cheese respectively 2014
Health: Hygiene meat produced in sterile and aseptic conditions.
Religious: May help overcome religious concerns Scarcity: To meet raising demand, cultured meat can be one of the solutions. Possible to produce designer/ customized meat (adjusting the meat composition fats, protein etc.)
• The Good Food Institute, an organization dedicated to promoting alternatives to animal food products - including cellular agriculture - is founded and Memphis Meats announced the creation 2016 of the first in vitro meatball • Bay Area start-up Memphis Meats declares the development of the world’s first chicken strip grown from self-reproducing cells 2017 • Mark J Post coducted survey where he concluded that the awareness of cultured meat is the beat predictor of acceptance 2020 • Israeli meat bioprinting company Mea Tech announced that they are successful in transforming the stem cells to muscle cells and aiming to 3D print the cultured meat in an accurate shape and 2020 structure
Fig 1: Demerits of conventional meat and merits of Cultured meat
Fig 2: Cultured meat timeline
Fig 4: Socio-demographic of participants in CM survey (Total no= 504)
• Majority of our population are more inclined to try cultured meat (Fig 5), with 58.7% (probably or definitely) of them are willing to try CM • Willingness to eat regularly and CM as a replacement to the farmed meat was 35.7% and 38% respectively. • In our study, 60.8% of them are willing to buy CM • Gender and age didn't have any significance with respect to willingness to buy. • Level of education significantly affected the attitude of consumers towards cultured meat, where highly educated were more open to the idea of CM and were willing to buy. • When considering the income level, participants who have income below 5,00,000 INR were more willing to buy CM (Table 1).
WTB-yes Category
divisions Male
3.0 Methodology • A questionnaire for eliciting information on acceptability of cultured meat among consumers was prepared and the consumer responses were recorded. • In the questionnaire, initially brief information about cultured meat was provided to make consumers aware of the context and a pictorial representation of the cultured meat production was also shared with the participants of the survey (Fig 3). • The questionnaire initially asked about their name, age, gender, education level, income level, place of residence and job profile. • Questions covered different aspects like food habits (vegetarian or non-vegetarian), willingness to engage with CM, willingness to buy CM and amount the respondent is willing to pay to buy CM. • Further, questions related to necessity of CM like: security, sustainability and animal welfare were asked. • SPSS 23.0 version was used to perform statistical analysis. • During the course of analysis, Pearson Chi-square test was applied to determine the association between different categorical variables that include age, gender, education, income and consumer type of response for willing to buy cultured meat.
Acknowledgments Authors thank Department of Biotechnology, New Delhi, India for funding the research work
WTB-no
N
%
N
%
196
64.05%
110
35.95%
Total
Total Chisquare
p-value
0.84
.39 (NS)
0.44
0.93(NS)
7.1
P<0.05
9.2
P<0.05
74.9
P<0.001
306
Gender Female
109
59.89%
73
40.11%
182
<25
79
62.70%
47
37.30%
126
25-45
181
63.07%
106
36.93%
287
Age 45-60
39
59.09%
27
40.91%
66
>60
6
66.67%
3
33.33%
9
None
2
66.67%
1
33.33%
3
Primary School
2
66.67%
1
33.33%
3
High School
10
90.91%
1
9.09%
11
Intermediate
20
80.00%
5
20.00%
25
Graduation
90
60.40%
59
39.60%
149
Post-graduation
116
61.70%
72
38.30%
188
PhD
65
59.63%
44
40.37%
109
<5 Lakhs
184
68.40%
85
31.60%
269
5 to 10 Lakhs
75
55.56%
60
44.44%
135
10 to 20 Lakhs
35
56.45%
27
43.55%
62
>20 Lakhs
11
50.00%
11
50.00%
22
Veg
13
17.57%
61
82.43%
74
Not Highly educated
Highly educated
Income
Consumers Respondents
Non Veg
292
70.53%
122
29.47%
414
Overall
305
60.52
183
36.31
488
Table 1: Chi-square test of willing to buy (WTB) for group of respondents (Gender, age, education, income and consumer)
Fig 6: Respondents’* level of willing to pay (*Included those who said yes to the question willing to buy)
Fig 3: Cartoon illustration of CM production
Fig 5: Participants’ willingness to engage with the CM (* indicates those who said yes to willing try CM only included for analysis in later questions)
Fig 7: Responses for the perceived intrinsic and extrinsic attributes of cultured meat
• Among 60.5% people who are willing to buy CM ,45.9% of them are ready to pay premium price range between 10% to 30%; and 42.3% of them are willing to pay lesser price range between 10% to 30% (Fig 6) . • In our population, 46.6% of them agree with safety, which is the intrinsic attribute of the CM (Fig 7). In case of extrinsic attribute such as sustainability, security and animal welfare, more than half of the respondents were agreeing.
5.0 Conclusion • Majority of the participants reacted positively for the questions regarding willing to try, buy and pay CM. • Most of the participants were agreeing with the extrinsic characteristics like sustainability, security and animal welfare and near to half were agreeing with the intrinsic characteristic i.e. safety of the CM. • These respondents felt that CM might be good for animal welfare, security and sustainability, as with the conventional method, animals rearing consume the natural resources and painful to the animal while slaughtering
6.0 References • Rolland NCM, Markus CR, Post MJ (2020) The effect of information content on acceptance of cultured meat in a tasting context. PLoS ONE 15(4):e0231176. • Wilks M, Phillips CJ (2017) Attitudes to in vitro meat: A survey of potential consumers in the United States. PloS one 12(2):e0171904. • TIFAC,2018. https://tifac.org.in/images/pdf/pub/Cellular%20Agriculture.pdf • Tucker CA (2014) The significance of sensory appeal for reduced meat consumption. Appetite 81:168-179. • Mancini MC, Antonioli F (2019) Exploring consumers' attitude towards cultured meat in Italy. Meat Sci. 150:101‐110.