100 things challenge - 55: Cultured meat

Some of you might have heard in the news that this week the very first hamburger made of cultured meat was presented to the world press in London. My professor is involved as an advisor in this development, so I've been hearing quite a lot about it.

Since the 1990's the possibility of making cultured meat has been discussed as a possible efficient and animal-friendly solution to the world food problem: the large amount of energy needed to produce meat and the limited resources we have. From around 2000 scientist have been able to grow stem cells from animals in vitro. Stem cells are a special type of cells found in most tissues which can divide to form more cells. Depending on how specialized they are, they can form only one or multiple types of cells. For the production of cultured meat, muscle stem cells are taken from a small piece of muscle. They are then promoted to divide and grow by certain proteins.

Cultured meat can be produced in small muscle fibers, for which only muscle stem cells are needed. Alternatively, real 'chunks' of muscle could be produced, but for this an artificial circulatory system is necessary and also other types of cells, such as fat cells.

The first cultured hamburger, which was presented at August 5, 2013 was made of 20.000 small strips of beef muscle. The funding for this specific project came from an anonymous donor, which was revealed at the presentation to be Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google. The head scientist of the project, the Dutch professor Mark Post said it would probably still be a decade before cultured meat can become available commercially. Challenges are among others to increase the efficiency and speed of the process, to make sure the cultured meat is completely safe and to improve the taste of the product to resemble real meat as close as possible.

If you want to know more, check culturedbeef.net

Personal note: Though as a scientist, I find this development quite fascinating, I don't think this is thé solution to the world food problem. If everyone in the Western world would eat less meat (3-4 times a week), this would reduce problems surrounding meat consumption for a large part. I'm in favour of encouraging people to take this route.