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For people to eat meat, animals have to die. More and more people realize this in everyday life and at least give up the daily piece of meat. Especially since, in some cases, there are good alternatives that one or two meat lovers dare to try.
In 2019, for example, pea burgers from startup Beyond Meat caused quite a stir and have long been on restaurant and bar menus. There are also tasty alternatives on the sausage shelf.
They are often based on plant products such as soybeans, the production of which is sometimes associated with damage to the environment, because forests must be cut down or long transport routes are involved. Therefore, for years, companies have been working with a completely different approach: they produce meat in the laboratory. Singapore is now the first country in the world to approve such a product for the food market.
Mixed with vegetable protein
The country allows US start-up Eat Just to offer laboratory-grown chicken for sale in the form of chicken nuggets. However, it is not a pure meat product. Animal cells grown in the lab were mixed with plant proteins to cut costs. The exact relationship is unclear.
The approval took two years and was granted on November 26, 2020, Eat Just explained. Seven experts had tested and examined the production in more than 20 production cycles in 1200 liter bioreactors. The auditors included food toxicologists, bioinformatics, nutritionists, epidemiologists, food scientists and technologists, as well as experts in public health policy.
Singapore’s food authority confirmed the approval, noting that the country has introduced its own set of rules for “novel foods.” In recent years, the high-tech city-state has become the hub of numerous startups that focus on sustainable food production.
It is based on cells from live chickens.
Meat in the laboratory is always made using a similar process. Like Eat Just, it is based on cells from a live animal, taken in a biopsy, or on established cell lines from the laboratory. The cells come with a nutrient solution in a bioreactor that creates optimal conditions for growth. There, the cells multiply and can then be processed into meatballs or pepitas.
However, creating the structure of a clean, raw piece of meat remains a challenge. And it’s expensive to produce, in large part due to the expensive nutrients needed for cell growth. A laboratory hamburger presented in London in 2013, which had been raised from muscle cells from a live cow, cost around 250,000 euros. This is another reason Eat Just has added plant protein to their product.
The company said that the price of its product would be roughly the same as that of chicken in a fancy restaurant and that it should be reduced below that of conventional chicken in the coming years. No specific number is known. Whether consumers accept laboratory meat depends not only on price but also on taste.
Sell in restaurant, then in retail
There is already a restaurant that will offer the product, Eat Just explained. The menu should include nuggets like “farmed chicken”. “We’re going from one restaurant to five, to ten, and finally to retail,” said Eat-Just boss and co-founder Josh Tetrick. Then I waited for approval in other countries.
“We hope and hope that the US, China and the EU will address the issue,” said Bruce Friedrich, managing director of the Good Food Institute, a non-profit organization that addresses meat alternatives, “Technology Review” . “Nothing is more important to the climate than getting away from factory farming.”
The global consumption of meat is considered a determinant of climate change, mainly due to the enormous consumption of land for factory farms and the associated emissions, including methane.
According to the 2020 Food Report of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture (BMEL), for which a thousand people were interviewed from December 2019 to January, the proportion of those who consume meat or sausages every day in the country has fallen from 34 to 26 percent. cent since 2015.
The crown scandal at the Tönnies slaughterhouse in the middle of the year, which also focused on poor employee conditions, may have depressed values again. However, meat consumption continues to grow strongly around the world.
