III. Test Tube Hamburgers

If eating insects is an ancient answer to the modern protein problem, lab-grown meat — made from the stem cells of live animals — is a solution from the future.

You can’t buy an in vitro burger at your local grocery store just yet. Mark Post, the Dutch researcher, who unveiled his product to the press for the first time in August 2013, estimates they will be commercially available within a decade.

The process sounds mind-boggling, but it is conceptually simple. First, you need a vial of stem cells from an animal. “The most innocuous way is just sticking a needle into the cow’s butt and taking a small piece of muscle out of it. That has a couple of hundred stem cells, from which you can grow thousands of kilos of meat,” Post said. Post is well practiced at explaining his product to in vitro meat novices, but he seems almost mystified at questions on the process’ details, because to him, it is so straightforward. You just harvest, feed, grow, cook and eat your test tube hamburger — easy.

That first burger presented in August cost 250,000 euro (about $342,000), Post said, factoring in all the research and development. With the current technology, price of materials and no automation of the process, a scaled product is currently projected to cost about $65 per kilogram (about 2.2 pounds).

Food technician Peter Verstrate (seated) works in a cultivated meat lab with Dr. Mark Post at Maastricht University in The Netherlands. (Credit: CulturedBeef.net)

Other issues include the fat content and color. Both need to be changed in the current prototype. “You can tweak [the tissue] a little bit, so with the feed that you give to these cells, you can make fat with more polyunsaturated fatty acids, omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, so it is healthy,” Post said. One burger currently costs hundreds of dollars to produce. Post and his team are working on a sustainable production and scaling system.

Post’s background is in medical tissue engineering. He worked on blood vessels and cardiovascular tissues grown from human stem cells for surgical use, a cutting-edge technology. When Post was asked to join the cultivated meat project, spearheaded by Willem van Eelen, a Dutch entrepreneur, he said he became interested in its environmental benefit. A survey of the general Dutch population found similar sentiments, he said. Sixty-three percent of survey respondents said they were in favor of the development generally, and 75 percent were “positive or leaning toward positive” on trying it themselves if it were available in the grocery store. But a new poll from the Pew Research Center and Smithsonian magazine found that only 20 percent of Americans feel the same way.

Stateside, the technology is not as advanced. PETA offered a million-dollar prize to any scientist who can create real meat without killing an animal (the contest has expired). Nicholas Genovese, Ph.D., a PETA-funded scientist at the University of Missouri, is converting stem cells into striated muscle cells, but is not producing meat. A company split between Moffett Field, California, and Columbia, Missouri, Modern Meadow, is working to create “supply side” 3D printed proteins from real meat, as well as 3D printed leather.

Modern Meadow’s meat particles are grown and prepared like Post’s. Then the tissue is printed into a familiar, edible form. It’s all very preliminary technology.

Right now, meat production is on hold, and the leather is in prototype phase, the company said. It costs about $10,000 per yard, Modern Meadow founder Andras Forgacs said at a panel event coordinated by VLab, the Bay Area chapter of the MIT Enterprise Forum at Stanford, in February. (Forgacs’ father, Gabor, is the company’s chief scientific officer and tech lead. Like Post, he also previously worked on tissue engineering for medical applications through his company, Organovo.) Neither Forgacs would grant an interview for this article.

Modern Meadow is putting meat on the back burner in favor of printed leather’s more immediate commercial value. But it has unveiled “shelf-stable and food safe ‘steak chips,’” for private tastings and tests, Forgacs said at the Stanford event. “To my knowledge, [the testers] are still alive and well,” he joked. “It’s crunchy. [A] really good tasting snack food product that is actually healthy and doesn’t require killing animals.”

Winston Churchill famously dreamt up in vitro meat in his essay “Fifty Years Hence,” writing, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. Synthetic food will, of course, also be used in the future.” In his view, the pleasures of eating need not be banished, “that gloomy Utopia of tabloid meals need never be invaded.”

Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University and consumer advocate, with no relation to the Nestle food company, thinks lab-grown meat is exactly that — a gloomy Utopia. She likened the technology to the ’70s science fiction flick Soylent Green, which depicts a world suffering from pollution, depleted natural resources and climate change. The movie is named for the disgusting processed food rations the citizens of this futurescape eat to stay alive.

A Soylent shake, created by software engineer Rob Rhinehart as a way to "free your body" from the need to cook and eat nutritionally balanced food. (Image courtesy of Soylent)

(Interestingly, another start-up, Soylent, is harnessing the film’s name to promote its product positively. Soylent is an all-in-one nutrition shake meant to “free your body” from the biological need to eat solid food, according to the company’s website. Started by a then San Francisco-based computer programmer, Rob Rhinehart, after he felt eating nutritionally was too cumbersome, Soylent comes as a powder containing every essential nutrient the body needs. You just mix the powder with water and an included tube of “oil blend” (a mix of canola and fish oil) to create a creamy, beige shake that tastes like a run-of-the-mill, unflavored protein powder drink. It’s not terrible, but living on the stuff seems unfathomable.)

“These things will never replace real food,” Nestle said in an email on in vitro meats. “They just don’t taste as good.” She added that while she believes less meat would be better for the environment, the rising demand for it in the developing world is an issue.

Post disagreed. “It’s different in people’s minds from a cow that is grazing,” he said. “[But] in the end we produce something that is exactly the same, just through a different route.” This question — what is real, what is processed, what defines the two — is one that constantly crops up during any discussion of food technology. All the innovators in this story call their products “real food,” thanks to their recognizable, GMO- and chemical-free ingredient lists. Whether consumers will feel the same remains to be seen.

Forgacs, for one, likened this visceral negative reaction to the technology to the way consumers once reacted to soy, seitan, tempeh and tofu — plant-based proteins that were once considered fringe in the United States, but are now commonplace. The bug people — Miller and the Brentanos — compared their product to sushi. “[We] saw it take about 25 years for sushi to go from sort of an obscure thing you could only get in San Francisco and Los Angeles to something that’s everywhere,” Andrew Brentano said. “So I think, similarly, insects will probably creep in from the coasts.”

Nestle’s reaction to this: “I hope not in my lifetime.”

Hampton Creek and Beyond Meat are creating foods with more recognizable, familiar ingredients than insects and in vitro meat. Although the companies produce processed foods, they are still “real food” — just in new forms, according to their founders.