Birth of a buzzword: "Clean Meat" and "Cellular Ag"

Clean Meat's Path to Commercialization

How far away is the mass production of meat without conventional farming, and what will it take to get there?

gfi.org

The organization behind the linked article is the Good Food Institute, a non-profit dedicated to "Creating a healthy, humane, and sustainable food supply", primarily by promoting alternatives to field-grown animal meat. They have coined the term "clean meat" to describe the ideal of real meat made without animals: cells derived from a cow, a chicken, or some other animal, artificially cultured in an industrial-scale facility, and delivered at costs competitive with the meat we buy now at a butcher's. That production process, from end to end, is "cellular agriculture" -- growing food from cells, in a factory.

The concept of clean meat is defined at the new domain CleanMeat.com. The term aims to draw a parallel to the idea of "clean energy". Just as solar or wind power produce the same electricity as coal- or oil-fired generators, but without the byproducts and environmental damage, so could "cellular ag" produce the same nutrition as animal farming, but without the killing and environmental damage.

It's a nice vision, but the ideal is not close to reality. The linked article correctly describes the barriers between the current lab experiments and the dreamed-of future production. There are many, many hurdles to be leaped before you can buy a "clean" hamburger or chicken nugget at a competitive price. Two that are spelled out in the article are:

  • The whole process of growing animal cells at industrial scale in a tank has to be worked out. There is a lot of basic engineering to be done, as well as basic biology, before we can build a plant that produces meat cells in ton-lots.

  • A key challenge within that is working out the nutrient medium that circulates through the tank to sustain the cells. Current lab experiments use a serum derived from unborn calves, which is clearly unsustainable, not to mention unethical. But finding a fully artificial nutrient medium that is ethically-sourced and economical will not be simple.

The article is worth a read. Then you'll be up to speed on two new buzzwords that you will likely hear often in the future: "clean meat" and "cellular ag".