Pork From A Petrie Dish - Brave New Meat

The Globe and Mail's article today about Dutch scientists attempting to plate out meat, the way others plate out microbes, reminded me of this bizarre research which we covered sometime last year or the year before. I'd have to check our script archive to see the precise date this came up. We didn't do much on it - just a mention, and also that the edible mammalian tissue the scientists are growing doesn't have blood vessels.

I've plated out organisms in biology class. You grow the critters on a medium. There are different types of this substrate you can grow things on. Many of you will have heard of agar as a medium. It's a protein rich gelatin derived from seaweed (which isn't having the best time of it, lately). Not every critter can be grown on the same stuff. The medium you use in your petrie dish amounts to food for the growing organisms - usually single celled creatures, but you can grow fungus just as well.

And so I am wanting to know what the culture medium is, what elements go in to produce this so-called meat. What are they putting in to the growth medium?

Will the finished labmeat have the same B-12 content as normal meat? B-12 is a necessary nutrient found only in meat and to some degree in some yeasts. B-12 helps us make blood cells, which you need if you are going to keep breathing - not enough and you can get anemia. Of course the blood cells also carry other nutrients. If it has no blood cells then will it have any B-12 or iron at all? Iron is another thing that is found largely in meat. The heme form of iron is found in animal tissue - the non-heme form is found in vegetables and is harder to access. I know this from bitter personal experience as an anemic. I had tried to cut back on meat consumption but it didn't work - at least for me.

Being curious, I did some poking online and found a very interesting site, called VAT FOOD, which has various articles on growing meat in the lab, in a vat or via plate culture. This last linked article is from Popular Science. The site has articles from all manner of media outlets. It's pro-lab meat, there doesn't seem to be any questioning of what nutrients will be in the chewy in vitro veal etc. but worth a read.

In the scarily named journal Tissue Engineering" there is a paper entitled In Vitro Cultured Meat. It's all about the different ways in which the different kinds of skeletal muscle tissue can be grown. The easiest to culture are myofibres - these are the fibres muscles are composed of. Such a cultured meat product would resemble hamburger.

I'm not so sure this is what the doctor ordered for anyone with celiac disease, (which can cause anemia), or anyone with any other type of anemia.

Of course anything is possible. But how likely remains to be seen.

The work comes out of some of NASA's stuff on providing protein for space travelers. It's not really completely 'cruelty free' they use stem cells form the animals to engineer the meat. Read more about it here. The scientists working on culturing meat in vitroh ave said that nutritional profiles of meats could be improved by tweaking the nutrients that are added. But the stuff still has to come from somewhere - the added nutrients and the myofibre's cultural media. Some of them have formed their own non-profit company, called board members.

I wonder what farmers think of this plan for 'brave new meat' It doesn't look as if it will solve the dilemma of the remaining family farms. How sustainable is this lab meat? There will be nutrients needed. The lab meat does not come out of nothing.

Click here to see more on the problems with factory farming versus family farms and modern heavily profit-driven agricorp processing of meat and dairy production.