One Dutch scientist says "cultured meat" could spell the end of traditional cattle farming within decades.
Maastricht University Professor Mark Post, who served up the world’s first laboratory-grown beef burger got everyone talking at the Northern Territory Cattlemen's Association’s annual conference in Darwin, ABC News reports.
"I do think in 20, 30 years from now we will have a viable industry producing alternative beef and there will be a growing market for it and eventually a really large market," Post said.
Professor Post said traditional meat sources would not be able to satisfy the world's growing demand for protein, and that cattle, in particular were "very inefficient animals in converting vegetable proteins into animal proteins".
"We lose a lot of food by giving it to animals" as part of the production process, he said.
By contrast, it takes just three months to create a lab burger using thousands of muscle fibres grown from stem cells taken from cow muscle.
The process is not cheap, but the costs are falling.
When Professor Post gave the world its first taste of his laboratory grown beef a year-and-a-half ago, he estimated the cost of producing a "cultured" burger was more than a $250,000.
Using economies of scale, he believes beef could now be produced for $80 a kilogram.
So how is meat ‘cultured’?
There are several crucial steps in the development of ‘cultured meat’:
The first step is to extract muscle stem cells from animals, usually cows, pigs or chickens. This project uses stem cells obtained from little pieces of fresh cow muscle for instance obtained through biopsy.
The cells must then multiply, which requires a growth medium. This project uses/experiments with commercially available media, supplemented with calf serum. In the next stage, researchers at the University of Amsterdam work with synthetic mediums or simple and efficient nutrient sources such as algae extracts.
The isolated stem cells must then develop into muscle cells. Because the stem cells are designated muscle precursor cells this process largely happens automatically.
As with natural muscle cells, the cultivated muscle cells ‘bulk up’ into solid muscle fibres/bundles. To do so, they are affixed to a soluble polymeric sugar scaffold and trained by building tension between two anchor points in the bioreactor. This also largerly occurs spontaneously.
As soon as the muscle cells grow in size, it is important that the tissue is continuously supplied with nutrients. For the small, newly formed muscle strands, regularly changing the culture medium suffices. Creating larger slices of meat, however, requires the creation of soluble polymer (sugar chain) duct systems through which a medium can flow, similar to the way blood flows through our veins.
To make the tissue edible, taste and texture must be just right. This should be achieved by recreating the natural consistency of meat (in terms of protein composition, fat tissue, etc.). If this does not produce the desired result, accepted food technology methods are used to improve the taste and texture of the meat.
At the end of this process, the final result is edible muscle tissue that can be ground to create minced meat and, ultimately, a hamburger.