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23 billion chickens. 1.5 billion cattle. 1 billion pigs. 1 billion sheep. These numbers seem all so insignificant at first, but what if I told you, these are the number of animals that are kept, only for food production. This is the harsh reality of these animals.
Despite us humans being so reliant on food, there are so many issues that come along with food, specifically meat. On average, 89% of the world’s population is made up of meat-eaters. We’re very dependent on meat, most of the world’s population loves it, but we aren’t even aware of the drawbacks of producing meat 😨.
Meat is one of the most inefficient ways of feeding humans. Creating and producing meat might just be one of the most inefficient processes ever. Our current methods of producing meat require a great amount of land, contribute to deforestation, overuses resources, and play a part in climate change.
Resource Wastage
26% of the total land area on Earth is occupied for meat production. One of the biggest issues of the last few years is the lack of global freshwater, well one of the biggest contributing factors to that is 27% of the global freshwater is used for meat production. Despite giving all of these resources in producing meat, we only get a very portion in return. Let’s take a look at cows, we only get 4% of the total protein and 3% of their total calories.
It doesn’t just stop here, it gets worse…😶
Creating a single kilogram of steak, the cow must be fed 25 kg of grain and it uses up to 15,000 liters of water. The resource wastage doesn’t stop here, the production of meat plays a key role in climate change as well. The meat industry is responsible for 18% of the total greenhouse gas emissions. This is simply inefficient given that only 24–34% of an average adult's diet is meat.
Cruelty of Animals 🐄
Not only does meat production waste a large number of resources, but there are also over 74 billion animals killed per year solely for meat. This number is equivalent to 2/3 of the number of people that have lived in the history of humanity.
To make this even worse, although we provide some animals with good food and shelter, most of these animals are raised in slaughter homes (abattoir). The quality of life is dreadful, these animals are often put in sheds without windows, force-fed food, forced to reproduce, and then they are eventually killed and processed into meat 😣.
Organically produced meat is a solution of course, but the word organic is a very elastic term. When it comes to organic farms, the animals aren’t given much comfort. But the major downside of organic meat is the number of resources that must be used. It uses more resources than regular meat production.
The process of producing meat needs to be changed, our current method of production isn’t sustainable at all. It’s already caused many impacts on our world and it’s just going to get worse.
Cellular Agriculture is the Future 💫
The problem will continue to grow, but Cellular Agriculture will change the future of food. In fact, Cellular Agriculture will be the future of food. It’s going to completely change how our food is produced.
But wait a minute, what is cellular agriculture? 🤔
Cellular agriculture leads to the same final product of meat, but instead of using livestock, cell cultures are used instead. Cellular agriculture can produce meats and also animal-based products. There are 2 production methods of cellular agriculture, cellular and acellular. Let’s take a dive into each one.
Cellular Products
Cellular products are made of living cells of cells that were once living, mainly meat. This process essentially is harvesting cells. It involves taking the cells that create the meat (muscle, fat, and connective tissues) from the animals through a regular biopsy.
These cells are grown in large quantities in a medium where they’re allowed to grow. The primary example of this is in tissue engineering, cells and tissues are put on a scaffold with serum. This allows these cells to grow. Once these cells have grown, they are put together to make meat. One of the biggest examples of this is cultured meat.
In Vitro Meat/Cultured Meat 🥩
In Vitro or Cultured meat is meat that is grown and made in a lab. It uses cellular processes in order to be made. Let’s break down the process 👇
Cultured meat follows the same process as cellular products. The first step is extracting stem cells from animals. Other cells, such as primary cells can be used, but the downside is that they can’t proliferate at the same rate and stem cells tend to live for longer periods. Once the cell is selected, it’s put on a petri dish and washed with something called a growth medium.
This may seem really confusing, but it’s not that complex, let’s break this down. 😅
A growth medium is a liquid that essentially helps organisms grow. It gives the organism support to grow. Following this, it’s then placed in a bioreactor which allows the cell to proliferate. The bioreactor exposes the cells to similar environments that would help it grow to a point where it almost resembles meat. This would produce something called unstructured meat.
Going from Unstructured to Structured Meat
When making food, getting the ingredients simply won’t be enough, you’ll actually have to make the food item through different cooking methods. Similarly, something must be done with these cells in order to turn them into structured meat. Scaffolds are used to organize these cells, specifically edible scaffolds. They are used to give foundation to these cells and they copy the basis of regular meat. This gives rise to lab-grown meat 🥩.
Acellular Production
The second branch of cellular agriculture is producing food via acellular processes. Cellular production is primarily used to produce meat and products similar to that, whereas acellular production would produce milks and egg white (proteins and fats).
So how does acellular production work? 🧐
Cells/microbes are used to produce acellular products, examples include yeast or bacteria. Unlike cellular production, they aren’t used to form the foundations/base of the product, but rather they are used as a manufacturing complex or factory to produce the proteins and fats. Acellular products don’t contain any living cells.
Producing Milk 🐄
Milk can be made via acellular processes, it uses yeast to help create it. It first starts with the cow. The milk the cow produces is made up of certain proteins, mainly casein and phospholipids. From the cow, there are some very specific genes that are responsible for the proteins/fat (casein + phospholipids). These genes are then inserted into yeast cells. This process is called recombinant gene technology. Eventually, the yeast cells are turned into factories that produce the same dairy proteins/fats that are made by a cow.
What does this mean for the future of food? 🔮
The current method of producing food is simply ineffective and inefficient. Not only are a lot of resources wasted, but animals are also forced to live in inhumane conditions. However, cellular agriculture has been a hot topic of discussion since the first-ever lab-grown burger in 2013!
However, cellular agriculture has only advanced since that point and cellular agriculture will be able to attend to the numerous problems in the food production industry. Primarily the health concerns, environment, and animal cruelty.
Public Health
Cellular food products are not only safer but also healthier for human health (in comparison with animal-based products). One of the biggest benefits is the minimized risk of contamination from the different types of pathogens. One of the biggest current impacts on food is Covid-19, the use of livestock plays a role in zoonotic spillover, and this results in the spread of diseases 😧.
All of this sounds extremely scary, but cultured foods are sterile and safe, antibiotics aren’t used in these environments at all. Antibiotics are heavily used in today’s world to prevent disease growth/spread, but this contributes to the antibiotic resistance within us humans. To make it worse, this use of antibiotics might result in 10 million deaths annually by the year 2050. Cellular agriculture is the key to preventing the potential damage that may be done to humans.
Animals
Animals are subject to poor living conditions and physical harm because of factory farming. These animals aren’t given the basic physiological needs, they are trapped within these factories and slaughterhouses until they are good enough to be slaughtered and converted into food for humans. The incorporation of cellular agriculture would significantly reduce the reliance on animals. We wouldn’t have to kill any animals to produce cellular foods. Let’s put this into perspective. A single cell would be used to create 10,000kg of cultured meat, in comparison, if we were to use our current methods, a grand total of 150 cows would have to be slaughtered.
Environment
The environment will benefit the most from this switch of traditional methods to cellular agriculture. It’s estimated that around 80–95% of greenhouse gas emissions and 82–96% of the water will be reduced from this switch. It doesn’t even end here, cellular agriculture would ensure that the amount of energy we used would be reduced by nearly 45% 🤯. In addition to all of this, we wouldn’t be using such a huge portion of the Earth’s land to keep livestock, this can be used to help our climate problems by replanting trees, biodiversity, etc. It would allow mother nature to slowly regenerate and this would play a key role in combatting climate change.
Our oceans would also benefit from this change. Growing cultured seafood would solve one of the biggest aquatic problems, overfishing 🎣. More than 90% of fish stocks and overfished to a point that is nearing unsustainable. Antibiotics and harmful chemicals are often used to capture marine life, but cellular agriculture would prevent the damage that is being done to our oceans. It would give our ocean the perfect opportunity to naturally regenerate.
Final Thoughts 🤔
Despite cellular agriculture posing many benefits, there are still some challenges that must be overcome before it is universally accepted as the future of food. If cellular agriculture is to become the future of food, it must be able to outdo the current system. It is gaining quite a bit of traction as multiple nations are going carbon neutral by 2050. This would ensure that everyone has a plant-based diet, this would allow cellular agriculture to prosper. With this, Cellular Agriculture is the future of food. 🥩
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