Nov 12, 20213 min read

Lab grown meat; Food for Thought for NZ Dairy and Animal Farmers

Updated: Nov 13, 2021

Just in the time I’ve been alive the world population of humans has increased by over 2 billion and is set to keep increasing. Current estimates have us reaching 10 billion people by 2057. All these people will need to eat.

An RNZ article states “New Zealand produces enough food to feed 40 million people, exporting much of it, including $16 billion of dairy, $3.7b of beef and $3.9b of sheep meat a year.” This is quite impressive for our small country of 5 million people.

Unfortunately, the current means of producing protein is unsustainable, inefficient and contributes significantly to climate change. Livestock is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite this, consumer demand is showing little signs of changing.

In my latest YouTube video I explore ‘Clean Meat’ which is cellularly identical meat but grown outside of an animal's body; requiring a fraction of the resource input. Clean meat promises to be the solution to many of the problems posed by popular diets and current meat and dairy production.

There is one key point to expand on here and that is the non-animal derived cell culture media. It has been the most difficult part to wrap my head around. In its beginning Cultivated meat (CM) was grown in fetal bovine serum (FBS) which is taken from a cow fetus; the process involves killing the pregnant mother and baby. Now, many sources state that CM doesn’t require animal suffering or slaughter but I haven’t been able to find the landmark study or report explaining how scientists were able to move away from FBS.

To figure this out I contacted 3DBT, GFI and GOOD Meat and asked them “is there a culture media that is in no way derived from animals?”

3DBT CEO Che Connon’s reply:

“The answer is yes, although the use of ours or anyone else's has not been used all the way through to a commercially available product yet.”

GFI’s reply:

“Serum-free media already exist, but more research and development needs to be done to optimize media specifically formulated for cultivated meat cell lines in order to scale up production and to reduce costs. As of 2019, UPSIDE Foods and other cultivated meat companies have proven that they can run production without FBS. Many large-scale cell culture operations for biomedical and clinical applications have already moved away from serum entirely. Hundreds of animal-free media formulations. Furthermore, every cultivated meat company has stated that their commercial production won’t involve FBS.”

GOOD Meat’s reply:

“Singapore has granted us approval for a chicken cell line that is produced with a very low level of bovine serum; however, this is effectively removed through the harvesting and washing procedure. In parallel, we have also developed an animal-free nutrient recipe to feed our cells and have successfully created chicken that does not require animal-derived ingredients in the culture media. We are in the midst of working to bring that to commercialization pending regulatory review.”

So it seems it is possible to cultivate meat using a media in no way derived from animals but this hasn’t yet been brought to market. When done using immortalised initial cells I think it’s fair to say that the animals have been removed from the process.

I’m giving too much credit to Good Meat by showing their website highlighting “without taking a life” because to produce their current chicken nuggets they still rely on FBS. They get away with this claim because FBS is considered a by-product of beef production and so the life was not taken for the CM.

In conclusion, CM seems likely to dramatically improve the way we feed our species whilst reducing the strain we cause on the planet and prevent the slaughter of billions of animals every year. Rarely does a solution come along that is this ideal.