Meat without murder, or “animal” flesh grown in a lab for human consumption, has been touted as an ethical gourmand’s dream for nearly a century, but is it a fantasy too good to be true?

Not according to Modern Meadow, a Brooklyn biotech startup that is promising to bring so-called in vitro meat to a dinner table near you, although it is not without its critics.

According to its website, Modern Meadow is developing “animal products with no animal slaughter”, which they also refer to as “cultured” meat and leather. Modern Meadow’s co-founder, Andras Forgacs, has made many promises for his product. “By the end of the year, I think we’ll be able to produce a two centimeter by two centimeter sample of leather that’s made without killing an animal,” he told Fast Company in 2012. And “growing cultured meat … harms no animals in the process”, he told a Reddit’s Ask Me Anything in 2013.



Forgacs has managed to garner not only an immense amount of interest, but financing as well: to date, his company has raised more than $13m from high-profile backers, such as Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs, Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures and even the US Department of Agriculture.



Despite the excitement, Modern Meadow’s methods remain murky. While Forgacs and his investors have in the past stated that the company would be 3D printing its in vitro meat, Modern Meadow is using “donor” animal cells grown in a “cell culture” to produce sheets of tissue that can be layered into meat. Though Forgacs has been eager to discuss this process in general terms, earlier interviews with him have noted his reluctance to explain its specifics, and multiple requests for comment from the Guardian to the company have gone unanswered.



“One thing to remember about Modern Meadow is that their product launch and the way they are marketing themselves is not through peer review, it’s not through scientific scrutiny. It’s basically that they showcase their work in places like TED and other platforms that don’t require vigorous fact finding or peer review. It’s really hard to know – and they’re not revealing, obviously – the techniques,” said Oron Catts, an artist/researcher at the University of Western Australia.

Despite Modern Meadow’s secrecy, Catts believes he has a good idea of its techniques, especially since he was part of the first team to grow and eat in vitro meat back in 2003. Although Catts wishes Modern Meadow well – “I would love to be proven wrong,” he said repeatedly during our conversation – he’s skeptical of the ethics and economics behind the operation.

While some of this has to do with legacy (he points out that Forgacs’s previous company, Organovo, had been founded to 3D print transplant organs but has settled on producing tissue for scientific testing) and much of Catts’s mistrust rests on one of the ingredients in Forgacs’s cell cultures: fetal bovine serum.

Fetal bovine serum is harvested from unborn cows. During the slaughter of the pregnant mother, blood is drawn from the fetus, commonly by puncturing the heart. The blood is put through a centrifuge to separate the blood cells from the serum, which is then filtered further. The final product is low in antibodies and high in growth factors – a perfect food, if you will, for the muscle tissue being cultivated for in vitro meat. Fetal bovine serum is the most widely used animal supplement for cell cultures, and Forgacs has admitted to Modern Meadow’s use of it (albeit behind headlines like, “Modern Meadow Makes Leather and Meat Without Killing Animals”).



The ethical issues behind a slaughter-free product being produced with fetal bovine serum should be apparent, but there are also economic hurdles. “It’s very much in the realm of an excessively technological luxury product,” said Catts of in vitro meat. According to his research and experimentation, it takes around 100 milliliters of serum to produce 1kg (2.2lbs) of in vitro meat; with a 500-milliliter bottle of serum selling for at least $300 on today’s market, a pound of in vitro meat would cost more than $75 in terms of serum alone.



Forgacs has mentioned that Modern Meadow is attempting to phase out the use of fetal bovine serum, but Catts is not optimistic about the alternatives. He pointed out that researchers have been looking for a replacement for the last 60 years – and not for purely moral or commercial reasons, but for scientific ones: since each batch of serum is unique, its inclusion in cell cultures introduces variables that could skew results. And yet fetal bovine serum remains the standard. Blood from adult cows could be a replacement if you were able to deactivate its antibodies (otherwise they could attack the tissue cells being grown) or horse serum might work, but both still necessitate animal slaughter. Mark Post, a professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, is currently experimenting with growing in vitro meat in non-animal-derived serums, but he admits that he doesn’t even know what’s in them. (They are apparently the trade secrets of their third-party developers.)



Not everyone is as skeptical as Catts, though. “The naysayers are always picking at things when progress requires big-picture thinking and the knowledge that progress in small areas will inevitably come about,” says Ingrid Newkirk, president and co-founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta). Although the animal rights organization has a reputation for being radical, their perspective on Modern Meadow’s use of fetal bovine serum is surprisingly generous.

“I frankly don’t care what method they’re using as long as they make progress, and they still seem to be doing that,” says Newkirk of Modern Meadow’s efforts. This enthusiasm is girded with the belief that the use of fetal bovine serum will soon be phased out by plant, fungal or synthetic counterparts, all of which have demonstrated success in lab tests. In the meantime, Newkirk points out, in vitro meat production remains less cruel than slaughterhouses.



“We’re fully behind these efforts, and we have faith in their worth,” says Newkirk of all in vitro meat, “as they will allow people who won’t change their eating habits – no matter what they hear about cruelty to animals, hardening of the arteries, filth in processing, water pollution or spewing of methane – to continue to eat real flesh.”



And that is the linchpin to the entire debate around fetal bovine serum: the general population’s refusal to accept the consequences of traditional meat production.



“The current models of meat and leather production are problematic, but there are simple ways to solve it, and that’s to just stop using them,” said Catts. “One of the decisions I made for myself after doing this research, after eating [in vitro] meat, is that I’ve basically stopped eating meat. That’s such an easy way of solving it,” he said. “But it’s not a good business model.”

