MEAT WILL GROW IN LABS, NOT FIELDS
When the revolution finally comes to a grocery store near you—in five to 10 years, if test-tube meat proponents are to be believed—it won't be a big juicy steak you'll be sinking your teeth into. The food of the future—meat raised in industrial labs instead of on a farm—will make its debut in the decidedly less epicurean form of chicken nuggets and sausages.
Researchers know how to "grow" meat now, says Jason Matheny, co-founder of New Harvest, a non-profit group in the U.S. that promotes research into in vitro meat. The problem is cost: Producing those chicken nuggets using current technology could cost $20,000-plus a kilo.
How to bring the price down to what a consumer would spend? Matheny says the solution lies in fixing the "soup"—a broth of nutrients that acts as a growth medium by stimulating starter cells (harvested from animals) to grow. Researchers are working on finding a replacement for the very pricey fetal bovine serum, the soup's prime ingredient. "If the recipe can be nailed down, then the five- to 10-year timeline is definitely within reach," Matheny says. That may be the toughest hurdle, but it's certainly not the only one. While scientists can grow meat in the lab in tiny batches, technology does not yet exist to do so on an industrial, mass-market level.
Nevertheless, even skeptics like Dr. Peter Purslow, professor of food science at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, are impressed by the "spectacular" progress made by researchers of in vitro meat. But he remains unconvinced by Matheny's optimistic time frame, likening his ambition to that of proponents of manned space flights to Mars: "They have the ambition and the vision and a pretty deep understanding of the technical feasibility of how to get there, but the reality is the timeline is still very long."
Purslow says the greatest challenge for researchers will be to replicate the meat-eating experience, which isn't just taste but also texture—"the juices and how meat breaks down in the mouth." Take the example of a great steak: It may have the same proteins as lesser cuts, "but the texture, the perceived eating experience, is completely different," he says.
That is precisely the reason why experts believe chicken nuggets and sausages will be the first in vitro meats in grocery stores: Because producing them requires processing as well as mixing in spices and additives, it will be easier to get the texture and taste right. And given that Canadians eat about $120 million worth of frozen chicken nuggets each year, that's not a bad market to tap. Consumers will have to wait a lot longer for their test-tube filet mignon.
FISH FARMS IN CONDOS
An abandoned inner-city warehouse is probably the least likely place you'd choose to set up a fish farm, but Dr. Yonathan Zohar insists it is possible. And not just any fish farm: a saltwater system that produces high-end fish like gilthead sea bream, a European delicacy that is becoming scarce in the wild and is priced accordingly, at $10 to $20 a kilo.
Zohar has spent almost 20 years developing such a system in his basement lab in Baltimore, where he works at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. He says he has built a better fish farm—one that's self-contained and recirculating (which means it does not need a natural water source nearby for top-ups or waste discharges), not to mention environmentally friendly and financially viable.
His final challenge, which may be the toughest, is to find a commercial partner that will use the technology and create a facility to mass-produce fish. The centre has drawn up a business model that envisions a $4-million (U.S.) investment for a warehouse and equipment that can produce about 180,000 kg of sea bream annually. Zohar says the system could be built "anywhere—in urban communities, rural communities, whether it's the Midwest, near an airport or in any inner city."
In Canada, fish farms are big business, with the aquaculture industry reporting record revenues of $753 million in 2005, the most recent Statistics Canada figures available. More than two-thirds of that production involves salmon. What Zohar is proposing—an enclosed saltwater system made for mass production—is "very rare," says Christopher Pearce, a research scientist in Nanaimo, B.C., who is also president of the Aquaculture Association of Canada.
