FROM LAB TO TABLE
We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat a breast or a wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.
– Winston Churchill, Fifty Years Hence, 1931
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS AND BIG IDEAS
In 1940 amidst global turmoil, a sixteen-year-old Dutchman lied about his age to enlist. He was unfortunately captured and held as a prisoner-of-war throughout most of World War II. There was almost no food, and he found himself close to death when American soldiers finally liberated the camp (Specter, 2011). In the mid-1940s, as a newly-enrolled and pensive psychology student at the University of Amsterdam, the Dutchman was distracted by his own thoughts while sitting in a lecture on meat preservation. Memories of starvation filled his mind. Then, the idea seized him. “Why can’t we grow meat outside the body? Make it in a laboratory, as we make so many other things” (Specter, 2011).
Willem van Eelen studied his idea for the next four decades. The 1981 discovery of stem cells advanced his progress, and 7 days before Christmas in 1997 he filed a patent for the “Industrial production of meat using cell culture methods” (Eelen, 1997). The process: muscle stem cells are collected from an animal, grown in a nutrient base, and differentiated into amassable protein fibers (van Mensvoort, 2015). The product: lab-made meat without animal slaughter. Willem viewed lab-made meat as a solution for an exceedingly large world population and the countless animals that would be inhumanely slaughtered to feed them (Specter, 2011).
In fact, lab-made meat has become the sought-after solution for a host of other related issues with modern agriculture: dangerous antibiotic use, depletion of natural resources, and rampant greenhouse gas emissions (Post, 2015). These problems exacerbate antibiotic resistance, resource scarcity, and global warming, respectively. While the impending rise of lab-made meat will not solve the problem of world hunger, it will have significant social and environmental impacts by decreasing our reliance on traditional livestock, and thus the associated dilemmas with modern agriculture.
SCIENCE AND NOMENCLATURE
Fortunately, like van Eelen, many people believe in the benefits of lab-made meat. Thanks to van Eelen’s relentless advocacy and the advancement of stem cell research, a combination of entrepreneurs, environmentalists, animal-rights activists, biologists, and tissue engineers across the world are attempting to scale production and affordability. These contributors are necessary for incremental progress. To echo Walter Isaacson’s insights from The Innovators, “progress comes not only in great leaps, but also from hundreds of small steps” (Isaacson, 2015). Teams of people are sprouting up in laboratories, universities, and organizations, taking steps to explore lab-made meat from different angles, and solving different problems on the road to a final product. Each group may be driven by different motivations, but their lofty mission is the same.
The terms used to describe the final product are not the same, however. Although meat made in a laboratory is molecularly identical to meat from an animal, various names abound: lab-made meat, in vitro meat, victimless meat, clean meat, even frankenmeat (van Mensvoort, 2015). This paper has heretofore used the first option as a way to introduce the origins of the topic, but people creating the meat have struggled with the right name to adopt (Purdy, 2017b). Doctoral reports (Maastricht University, 2017) and institutes (Friedrich, 2017) concerned with nomenclature have found traction with “clean meat” as a way to indicate anticipated effects for the environment and public health (Purdy, 2017b). No name can be perfect, and one prominent individual finds fault in the term.
Mark Post, Chief Scientific Officer of Mosa Meat, says clean meat does not translate well into other languages, and suggests that the food product was run through detergent (Purdy, 2017b). Post created the world’s first cell-cultured burger in 2013 and is considered a leader in the race to industrialize production. He prefers the term cultured meat (Post, 2018), referring to its cell-cultured beginnings, and other companies have followed suit. I agree with Post’s perspective and consider the “clean meat” term to insinuate all traditional meat is unclean.[1] To maintain consistency, this paper will henceforth use the term “cultured meat” when describing animal meat products created through cellular agriculture.
Post and his Netherlands-based team at Mosa Meat is working on the problem of scale. Usually, cell cultures are grown in Petri dishes or flasks, but the surface area to volume ratio of these containers is not optimal for mass production. Mosa Meat is exploring the use of microcarriers, small spheres less than 100 µm in diameter, to be suspended in a bioreactor filled with nutrient medium (Post, 2018). “Cultured meat producers hope the process will look a lot like beer brewing” (Mandelbaum, 2017a). While the production of animal cell cultures requires far more advancements in biotechnology than beer, this analogy helps depict the process. Yet, the market for beer is well-established, and are consumers even interested in trying cultured meat?
Substituting hops for stem cells in a bioreactor is a relatable visualization for marketing purposes, but this does not guarantee consumer adoption. In my correspondence with Post,[2] he states “A number of surveys have been performed in various European countries and in the USA and they indicate. . . 20% to 50% of consumers are willing to try cultured meat. As an early adopter base that is more than enough. We are quite confident that when the product is of high quality and not too expensive the benefits will appeal to the consumer” (Post, 2018). Post is optimistic and carries business interests in cultured meat’s success. Other surveys report initial disgust followed by acknowledgement of broader societal benefits (Verbeke et al., 2015), and a large-scale examination of U.S. attitudes towards cultured meat found participants somewhat willing to try it (Wilks & Phillips, 2017). An adventurous group of people willing to try cultured meat is a good first step since global eating patterns show that we will need a more sustainable alternative.
PANACEA FOOD?
Data on global meat consumption indicates that demand for animal protein will rise. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations expects meat consumption to double by 2050, mostly in developing countries (Food And Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2016). Other research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides more conservative estimates of 13%-89% increases, with larger increases for lower income groups (Tilman, Balzer, Hill, & Befort, 2011). Notably, meat consumption is also dependent on economic background. According to the World Health Organization, “There is a strong positive relationship between the level of income and the consumption of animal protein” (World Health Organization, 2018). As developing nations advance economically, new populations start demanding animal meat, but the poorest populations are not guaranteed the same access.
Furthermore, making more food does not mean more people will be fed. We already produce enough food to feed the world (FAO, 2009; Holt-Giménez, Shattuck, Altieri, Herren, & Gliessman, 2012; OXFAM, 2016). Scarcity is not the predominant issue: poverty and inequality are (Holt-Giménez et al., 2012). Cultured meat advocates will often tout lab-grown food as a solution to hunger, but this conflation is not grounded. “Globally we’re producing enough food,” says Stanford Professor Emeritus Walter Falcon, former Deputy Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment (Falcon, 2018). I spoke with Professor Falcon on a Friday afternoon discussing the merits of cultured meat. He continues, “It’s not going to make the poor less poor” (Falcon, 2018). Cultured meat should not be viewed as a panacea food for populations at risk of starvation. The problem with simply increasing current food production practices is that doing so places further strain on our planet. Thus, it is important to keep in mind the problems cultured meat can potentially solve: offsetting those environmental and social harms that are tied to traditional livestock.
First, the environment stands to benefit from cultured meat. Livestock grazing uses more than a quarter of arable land, and feed production for those animals uses another third (Food And Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2012). Deforestation is prevalent in modern agriculture; however, most of the environmental impacts attributable to livestock arise not from “feeding large numbers of animals and dealing with waste but from producing their feed” (Smil, 2013). Livestock contributes 14.5% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions that can contribute to global warming (Gerber et al., 2013), and feed production contributes nearly half of the 14.5% (Rojas-Downing, Nejadhashemi, Harrigan, & Woznicki, 2017). In our agricultural system, the animal represents a vehicle for sustenance that is reliant upon other resource-intensive systems. Virtual water[3] consumed by global livestock production is estimated to be between 23 and 45 km3/year (Smil, 2013). For comparison, the 2010 total water use in the U.S was 49 km3 (Maupin et al., 2010). The previous statistics relate to environmental degradation that can be ameliorated; what we feed animals relates to the subsequent social harms.
Second, public health can benefit from cultured meat. Antibiotics used for humans are at risk of becoming ineffective due to widespread usage for livestock, where antibiotics are used to promote growth and prevent disease in healthy animals (World Health Organization, 2017). In November 2017, the World Health Organization issued a report recommending that farmers and the food industry stop using routine antibiotics, with justified fears of rising antibiotic resistance; “in some countries, approximately 80% of total consumption of medically important antibiotics is in the animal sector” (World Health Organization, 2017). In a joint partnership between The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Lancet, reporters found that thousands of tonnes of colistin were sent to India, South Korea, Russia, and Vietnam (Davies & Walsh, 2018). Colistin is often referred to as a “drug of last resort” or the “last hope antibiotic” to be used in only the most extreme circumstances. When a drug such as colistin is used for growing larger chickens[4] instead of life-saving medical situations, public health is jeopardized because our antibiotics can become ill-suited to fend off human illness.
From environmental and social perspectives, there are inefficient and unsafe practices in the current global livestock industry. Since cultured meat entrepreneurs also aim to be financially successful, cultured meat as a product is poised as a market entrant that can offset existing problems with a triple bottom line advantage: environmental, social, and economical.[5] Environmentally, cultured meat is estimated to use 45% less energy, 96% less greenhouse gas emissions, 96% less water, and 99% less land compared to conventionally produced meat (Tuomisto & Teixeira de Mattos, 2011). Socially, cultured meat production methods negate the need for antibiotics, helping mitigate the public health crisis we currently face (Sharma, Thind, & Kaur, 2015). Economically, cultured meat is projected to reach cost equivalence with livestock before 2030 (Amen, 2018; Post, 2018). When commercialized and available to the masses, cultured meat will have a beneficial effect on our environment and public health.
Naturally, there are skeptics to cultured meat’s projected benefits. Skeptics fall into three categories: those who disbelieve the environmental benefits, those who disbelieve the scalability of production, and those who disbelieve in consumer acceptance. Regarding the environment, Margaret Mellon from the Union of Concerned Scientists says cultured meat is a bad idea. Cultured meat evangelists seem to overplay the effects it would have on our environment, and Mellon criticizes the energy costs of bioreactors producing meat. “I mean, where does that energy come from? That’s a lot of fossil fuel” (NPR, 2008). However, Mellon disregards a baseline value of energy and resource use, in this case traditional livestock, to compare with cultured meat. Although the projections for environmental benefits are awaiting realization, skeptics of scalability hold a more pertinent argument against cultured meat.
Cultured meat production is not industrialized, and some people do not think it will ever reach a meaningful level. For example, Stanford professor Pat Brown, founder of Impossible Foods,[6] says cultured meat is not scalable. In a TechCrunch interview, Brown says “You buy into, at best, the same limitations that a cow has. And it’s economically completely un-scalable. If we could grow tissues that were a meaningful replica of animal tissues at an affordable price from stem cells, it would revolutionize medicine. Look around you. It’s not happening” (Mandelbaum, 2017b). Brown is correct that scientists cannot make affordably-priced replicas of animal tissue. However, cultured meat companies are making amassable protein fibers that can be clumped together, similar to ground meat. While replicating the structure of an entire muscle is the holy grail[7] of cultured meat entrepreneurs and biomedical researchers alike, meaningful progress towards scalability of amassable fibers is the current goal to offset traditional livestock. Furthermore, cultured meat is not limited to the cow. With traditional livestock, you would need to feed the cow; with cultured meat, you only need to feed the cells.
Figuring out how to feed the cells efficiently turns out to be a more pressing issue for cultured meat commercialization. A nutrient medium is used to encourage muscle cells to grow, and currently this medium is fetal bovine serum: the blood of unborn cows (Bercovici, 2017). This crutch of cultured meat production is a serious and hypocritical aspect, but researchers and entrepreneurs are not shy about this fact nor do they try to hide it. Fetal bovine serum is antithetical to the goals of cultured meat. Additionally, it is limited and costly. In this scenario, the ethical choice of removing fetal bovine serum is also the economical choice, which beckons the issue of money.
The cost of research and development efforts is expensive. Mark Post’s 2013 cell-cultured burger cost $300,000 to make.[8] This exorbitant fee was due to research and development costs, and the fact that it was created layer by cellular layer in countless petri dishes. The process was labor-intensive, but it was also a proof of concept. The hamburger event was broadcasted to the world, showing us that cultured meat was no longer science fiction.
Across industry and academia, other players in the race to make a product were inspired to double down on their own bioengineering efforts to make cultured meat more affordable.
Historically, costs come down dramatically as time progresses. In a New Yorker interview, Post talks about the ENIAC, the first general purpose computer. Originally the computer cost millions of dollars and occupied a whole room, but “Today, any cell phone or five-dollar watch has a more powerful computer” (Specter, 2011). Another optimism-inspiring example is gene sequencing. This process once took years and billions of dollars, but now it takes hours and thousands of dollars (Thompson, 2017). The first burger was a metaphorical ENIAC, or a sequencing of genes, that showed the world cultured meat was possible. Cultured meat has already seen its price per pound drop from millions to thousands (Mandelbaum, 2017b), and it is scaling at pace with the likes of other technologies.
Cultured meat and its metaphorical examples characterize the law of accelerating returns, a law championed by futurist Ray Kurzweil. “I can get the same computation, communication, genetic sequencing, and brain data as I could a year ago for half the price today” (Thompson, 2017). Regarding the first cell-cultured burger, Kurzweil says “It was expensive, it was a few hundred thousand dollars, but it was very good” (Thompson, 2017). He believes that by the 2020s, we will have the ability to produce cultured meat at scale. The limitation of cost is geometrically[9] mitigated by Kurzweil’s law. Importantly, cost reduction forces entities to introduce cultured meat to increasingly larger audiences, which could be beneficial in gaining the consumer acceptance mentioned previously. Instead of distributing cultured meat to all consumers, a steady acceleration to commercialization occurs.
None of this food product innovation matters without cultured meat’s cultural acceptance in human diets. Cultured meat often elicits a “yuck factor” (Amen, 2018). Eating food grown in a laboratory seems like science fiction, and this novelty rightly produces consternation in some individuals. However, carnivores often forget where and how their meat was produced and prepared.[10]
Cultured meat’s consumer acceptance is harder to predict than environmental benefit or cost, but the laboratory food does offer something that many traditional meat producers cannot: transparency. The ability to know where and how cultured meat is produced may entice consumers to try a healthy and sustainable option in lieu of traditional meat. Irrespective of marketing tactics, an alternative to traditional meat will be necessary, and minced cultured meats will be the first product to reach meaningful scalability and commercialization. This new food source can then reinforce the supply of meat to reduce the strain on current livestock. Cultured meat’s projected triple bottom line advantage will be crucial for advancement of the combined meat production system.
Indeed, cultured meat companies and their investors are seeking to make a change, not just a new food product. Cultured meat’s current status as a magnet for the flow of socially-conscious capital is a stark contrast to the late 1900s, when van Eelen was working to convince people of his idea-turned-obsession and gain funding to pursue research. “Funding at that time only came from private investors, and private investors only pay for something if they get money back” says Ira van Eelen, Willem’s only daughter (Purdy, 2017a). She grew up witnessing the development of her father’s passion to feed the world. She became a sounding board for his ideas. Ira naturally became personally invested in her father’s work, and in 2015, found herself advocating for cultured meat in Silicon Valley.
CULTURED MEAT, VALLEY CULTURE
Money inevitably follows such an enormous potential to alter the global food system. Investors have flooded startups like Memphis Meats and Mosa Meat with millions of dollars: untapped economic activity and social impact being main motivations. High-profile individuals are public about their thoughts on cultured meat’s role in the future of food, too. Richard Branson expresses his propensity for change in a recent blog post. Lauding cultured meat businesses as forces of good, Branson says “I believe that in 30 years or so we will no longer need to kill any animals and that all meat will either be clean or plant-based, taste the same and also be much healthier for everyone” (Branson, 2017). Branson contributed to a $17 million Series A round for Memphis Meats led by DFJ Venture Capital (Bercovici, 2017). Bill Gates was another funding round participant. In the past 5 years, he’s directed tens of millions of dollars into meat alternatives and cultured meat startups (Bercovici, 2017). Gates writes in a post for Gatesnotes, “I’m hopeful about the future of meat substitutes. I have invested in some companies working on this and am impressed with the results so far,” and “with a little moderation and more innovation, I do believe the world can meet its need for meat” (Gates, 2015). Moderation and innovation: Gates acknowledges that we must seek out alternatives to ensure health and sustainability. Through his investments and the investments of others, cultured meat is also captivating an unlikely business partner.
Contrary to common logic, two of the nation’s largest traditional meat producers, Cargill and Tyson Foods, are investing in cultured meat. For example, both companies have invested in Memphis Meats (Amen, 2018). Traditional meat operations supporting cultured meat companies looks as if enemies are becoming friends. Tyson Foods CEO Tom Hayes writes in a corporate blog post, “We want to continue building alliances and being inclusive,” and “taking a divisive approach in this is not going to be helpful for us as well as everyone else” (Hayes, 2018). The exact motivations behind Cargill and Tyson Foods are unclear, but their support indicates that traditional meat and cultured meat do not have to be mutually exclusive.
Teamwork amongst supposed competitors is beneficial for business and the global food system. Our industrial agriculture is strained, evidenced by antibiotic use, land diminution, and overt greenhouse gas emissions causing losses to biodiversity, threats to climate, and dangers to public health (Smil, 2013). In the same blog post, Hayes posits how we can sustainably feed a growing number of people with the protein they want. “We believe it will take a combination of innovative and traditional approaches,” he writes, “this isn’t an ‘either or’ scenario, it’s a ‘yes and’ scenario” (Hayes, 2018). In order to support growing populations that demand animal protein in their diets without causing more environmental harm, cultured meat will be necessary. Formative relationships between existing and developing meat production methods are unexpected, but welcome.
Serving meat has become a cultural and ritual staple for many communities around the world. For example, barbeque parties, pig roasts, and hot dogs at baseball games.[11] Eating animal protein is not morally wrong, but the health and sustainability issues surrounding traditional meat production needs to be addressed. In other words, improving traditional methods and displacing some meat consumption with a less environmentally demanding choice (Smil, 2013). Without doing so, widespread problems today will exacerbate and threaten the future food systems of tomorrow. Small scale farmers offering premium selections of meat may not be affected by cultured meat’s entry into our food system, but concentrated animal feeding operations and factory farms will be forced to adapt (Bercovici, 2017).
Relatedly, humans have relied on animals throughout history (Luna, 2017); with advances in cultured meat, now is the time to reduce our dependence. Small-scale farms that enforce sustainable, ethical animal practices should not be penalized, but these matters will likely be the responsibility of government and business leaders. “Human civilization was largely enabled by the domestication of livestock,” says Nicholas Genovese, co-founder of Memphis Meats, “if we can master producing meat without livestock, it’s really going to be the second domestication” (Bercovici, 2017).
Unfortunately, Willem van Eelen will not be able to witness the industrialization of cultured meat. He died on February 24, 2015 at the age of 91 (van Mensvoort, 2015). His life’s work has inspired businesses around the world—his legacy lives on in Ira. Soon after her father’s death, Ira received an unexpected call from Josh Tetrick, CEO and founder of San Francisco-based Hampton Creek. The company initially gained fame for its eggless mayonnaise product, but a string of controversies[12] gave Hampton Creek notoriety in the past year. on his call with Ira, Tetrick offered to make her a Hampton Creek advisor; Tetrick acquired two cultured meat patents from Los Angeles media mogul Jon Vein and the original cultured meat patent belonging to her father, Willem van Eelen (Eelen, 1997; Vein, 2000, 2004). Hampton Creek is now promising a cultured meat product by the end of 2018, sooner than any other companies’ aspirational timelines. The next section discusses the implications of existing intellectual property surrounding cultured meat and argues that this property will become inconsequential to the needed advances in biotechnology.
WHOSE PROPERTY IS IT ANYWAY?
Hampton Creek’s intellectual property grab raises questions about the claims it can enforce and protect. The sweeping claims in the three patents (Eelen, 1997; Vein, 2000, 2004) cover the production and the product itself, but it is the patents’ attempts to give the assignor exclusive rights to cultured meat that causes a problem. As Willem van Eelen’s daughter Ira explains, Willem’s intent was to write patents to cover the idea of lab-grown meat, not the techniques for creating it (Purdy, 2017a). The patents present broad descriptions of how to culture muscle cells in vivo, which were techniques already known in previous art; the presented materials amount to a summarization of the best-known techniques to engineer animal tissue in a laboratory, and by extension, cultured meat for human consumption. Patenting the idea of cultured meat would thus be analogous to patenting the idea of beer. No one party owns the patent to produce all beer, but individuals and companies can file for the right to produce specific chemical formulas or production methods (Chadeayne LLC, 2018; Joseph & Callanan, 2012).
While I cannot assess the validity of the three existing patents, biotechnology-related lawsuits provide insight. In Gentry Gallery, Inc. v. The Berkline Corp., the case included arguments about late claiming, which is trying to change the patent to cover things not originally conceived of; in regard to cultured meat, “biotechnology cases are about ‘gun-jumping’ – leaving the gate before the starter has fired the pistol” (Menell, Lemely, & Merges, 2017). If Hampton Creek decides to protect its property by accusing other companies of infringement, there will be difficulty in determining what claims are valid for protection because the original patents were created well before the first cell-cultured burger was created in 2013.
We can look to the pharmaceutical industry for another applicable example. In Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc. v. Eli Lilly & Co., since Ariad had not actually produced the molecules in the invention at issue, the court ruled that Ariad was “not in adequate possession of the necessary knowledge at the time that they filed their application” (Menell et al., 2017). Similar to the patenting of drugs, which do not have to show explicit clinical efficacy in humans at filing, the three cultured meat patents can be useful, non-obvious, and patentable subject matter, but they may lack novel or inventive steps separating them from the lab-originated processes that have been developing over the last century. Backing this assertion is Dawn Luining, cultured meat researcher and former colleague of Mark Post. Luining has a difficult time isolating exactly what intellectual property stands to be protected in the three patents. “They are just describing other people’s research, not really a process or anything new in this sense,” he says (Mohan, 2017). He goes on to say that if all these patent claims were upheld as valid, Hampton Creek “could sue almost half the world because every lab in the world uses these type of technologies to create a piece of tissue, in one way or another” (Mohan, 2017). In Gottschalk v. Benson, the court stated that discovery of new natural laws should be encouraged, but denying others access to certain “basic tools” could inhibit future innovation (Menell et al., 2017). This tension between patent claims and world-wide laboratory practices raises the question of patent enforceability, and what Hampton Creek thinks of its position in the business of cultured meat.
Tetrick believes his company’s intellectual property portfolio is valid. “we own the foundational [intellectual property] around the process, around cell line development” (Mohan, 2017). He also believes it can be enforced. “If you wanted to produce or sell a clean meat in Western Europe, Israel or Mexico before September 2024, we would work with you to license our technology” says Tetrick (Mohan, 2017). Given the previous examples and court cases regarding the enforceability of the three cultured meat patents, other businesses may have intellectual leeway, but the territory is unclear.
In summary, cultured meat companies should not be overly concerned about the three original patents. The patents expire in 2024, leaving a short window of time for Hampton Creek. Nonetheless, continued development of valid intellectual property will be necessary to protect business interests. For example, Mosa Meat could patent a novel microcarrier process, or Memphis Meats could patent an innovative nutrient medium free of fetal bovine serum. Thinking outside of business interests, all cultured meat companies should continue working towards environmental interests and the triple bottom line.
LOOKING FORWARD
The biotechnology for cultured meat is being studied and commercialized by bright minds hoping to benefit a global food system. While feeding the world is not in the purview of cultured meat alone, the problems that cultured meat can solve—antibiotic resistance, depletion of natural resources, and rampant greenhouse gas emissions—are critical for a healthy and sustainable future while providing meat to new populations. While the future existence of the three original patents will be short-lived, companies are developing new technologies to improve cost, scale and consumer acceptance in bringing cultured meat products to market.
Looking backward at history often provides light for a path forward. In 1931, Winston Churchill penned an essay title “Fifty Years Hence,” writing about the future he envisioned in half a century. His optimistic view of future foods is often cited by cultured meat researchers.[13] “The new foods will be practically indistinguishable from the natural product from the outset, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation” (Churchill, 1932). Though Churchill may not have considered the economic, social, and environmental impacts of his prediction, cultured meat is a product with a triple bottom line that can supplement our food industry for the better. The mass production of cultured meat has taken longer than Churchill predicted, but leaders in industry and academia have made great progress.
Willem van Eelen did not live to see the influx of interest and capital in support of the proclaimed “second domestication” of animals. He had his closest friend and advocate in Ira, but did not get to see her become an advisor to the company that now owns his patent. His legacy has not faded, and his penchant to bring cultured meat to the masses has certainly spread. In an effort to distribute cultured meat to the world, all those working on this new food should realize its preexisting limitations, but stride for its exponential advantages in reshaping the way we get food to our tables.
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Falcon, Walter. 2018. “Personal Interview.”
Post, Mark. 2018. “Email Correspondence.”
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Churchill, Winston. 1932. “Fifty Years Hence.” Popular Mechanics Magazine, March.
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Holt-Giménez, Eric, Annie Shattuck, Miguel Altieri, Hans Herren, and Steve Gliessman. 2012. “We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People … and Still Can’t End Hunger.” Journal of Sustainable Agriculture 36 (6): 595–98. doi:10.1080/10440046.2012.695331.
Luna, Alessandro. 2017. “The Unknown of Human Animal Chimera Research.” Intersect: The Stanford Journal of Science, Technology, and Society 10 (3). file:///Users/alessandroluna/Downloads/1057-Article Text-4391-1-10-20170710.pdf.
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Maastricht University. 2017. “Third International Conference on Cultured Meat.” In Consumer Acceptance of Cultured Meat: A Systematic Review of Peer-Reviewed Studies, and an Experimental Study on Nomenclature. Maastricht: Maastricht University.
Post, Mark. 2015. “World Economic Forum.” In The Meat Revolution. Davos. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/The_Meat_Revolution_Mark_Post.webm.
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Isaacson, Walter. 2015. The Innovators. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Menell, Peter, Mark Lemely, and Robert Merges. 2017. Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age 2017: Vol. I Perspectives, Trade Secrets and Patents. 2017thed. Clause 8 Publishing. https://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-New-Technological-2017/dp/1945555076/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1520108021&sr=1-1&dpID=41ZIQh3kX5L&preST=_SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch.
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———. 2016. “Meat & Meat Products.” Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department: Animal Production and Health. http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/themes/en/meat/home.html.
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Amen, Trevor. 2018. “Lab-Grown Cultured Meat – A Long Road to Market Acceptance.” http://www.cobank.com/Knowledge-Exchange/~/media/Files/Searchable PDF Files/Knowledge Exchange/2017/Labgrown Cultured Meat Report Nov 2017.pdf.
OXFAM. 2016. “There Is Enough Food to Feed the World.” OXFAM Canada. https://www.oxfam.ca/there-enough-food-feed-world.
World Health Organization. 2017. “Stop Using Antibiotics in Healthy Animals to Prevent the Spread of Antibiotic Resistance.” WHO.
———. 2018. “Availability and Changes in Consumption of Animal Products.” Global and Regional Food Consumption Patterns and Trends. http://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/3_foodconsumption/en/index4.html.
Patents:
Eelen, Willem Frederik Van. 1997. Industrial production of meat using cell culture methods. 11/124,372, issued 1997. https://patents.google.com/patent/US7270829.
Joseph, James, and Brandy Callanan. 2012. Beer brewing system and method. 61/668,240, issued 2012. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140017354A1/en?q=beer&q=recipe&oq=beer+recipe.
Vein, Jon. 2000. Method for producing tissue engineered meat for consumption. 60/249,993, issued 2000. https://patents.google.com/patent/EP1789063B1/en?q=inventor;&inventor=jon+vein&oq=inventor;+jon+vein.
———. 2004. Tissue engineered meat for consumption and a method for producing tissue engineered meat for consumption. 10/943489, issued 2004. https://patents.google.com/patent/EP1789063B1/en?q=inventor;&inventor=jon+vein&oq=inventor;+jon+vein.
Online News Articles:
Bercovici, Jeff. 2017. “Why This Cardiologist Is Betting That His Lab-Grown Meat Startup Can Solve the Global Food Crisis.” Inc. https://www.inc.com/magazine/201711/jeff-bercovici/memphis-meats-lab-grown-meat-startup.html.
Korosec, Kristen. 2017. “Hampton Creek’s Expiration Date Gets Closer As Board Quits En Masse.” Fortune. http://fortune.com/2017/07/17/hampton-creek-board-quits/.
Mandelbaum, Ryan. 2017a. “Behind the Hyp of ‘Lab-Grown’ Meat.” Gizmodo. https://gizmodo.com/behind-the-hype-of-lab-grown-meat-1797383294.
———. 2017b. “Synthetic Meat Spat Shows That Ethical Meat Doesn’t Mean Peaceful Meat.” Gizmodo. https://gizmodo.com/synthetic-meat-spat-shows-that-ethical-meat-doesnt-mean-1795467986.
Mensvoort, Koert van. 2015. “In Vitro Meat Godfather Dies at Age of 91.” Next Nature Network. https://www.nextnature.net/2015/03/in-vitro-meat-godfather-dies-at-age-of-91/.
Mohan, Geoffrey. 2017. “Can You Make Meat without an Animal? Hampton Creek Is Betting Its Future on It.” L.A. Times. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-clean-meat-hamptoncreek-20170915-story.html.
Purdy, Chase. 2017a. “The Idea for Lab-Grown Meat Was Born in a Prisoner-of-War Camp.” Quartz.
———. 2017b. “Would You Eat ‘clean Meat’?” Quartz. https://qz.com/1086825/theres-a-debate-among-the-makers-of-cell-cultured-meat-what-do-you-call-it/.
Specter, Michael. 2011. “Test-Tube Burgers.” The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/test-tube-burgers.
Thompson, Nicolas. 2017. “RAY KURZWEIL ON TURING TESTS, BRAIN EXTENDERS, AND AI ETHICS.” Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/ray-kurzweil-on-turing-tests-brain-extenders-and-ai-ethics/amp.
Podcast:
NPR. 2008. “Lab-Grown Meat a Reality, But Who Will Eat It?” USA: NPR. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90235492.
Webpages:
Friedrich, Bruce. 2017. “‘Clean Meat’: The ‘Clean Energy’ of Food.” The Good Food Institute. http://www.gfi.org/clean-meat-the-clean-energy-of-food.
Gates, Bill. 2015. “Is There Enough Meat for Everyone?” Gatesnotes.
Blog Posts:
Branson, Richard. 2017. “Investing in a Cleaner Way to Feed a Hungry World.” Virgin. https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/investing-cleaner-way-feed-hungry-world.
Chadeayne LLC. 2018. “Patenting Beer – Claiming Compositions, Apparatus, and Methods of Brewing.” Startup Patent Blog. http://inventingpatents.com/patenting-beer-claiming-compositions-apparatus-and-methods-of-brewing/.
Hayes, Tom. 2018. “Why We Are Investing in Alternative Proteins.” The Feed, Tyson Foods Blog. https://www.tysonfoods.com/who-we-are/the-feed/why-we-are-investing-alternative-proteins.
Footnotes
[1] Willem van Eelen’s daughter, Ira, also thinks that “clean meat” makes traditional meat sound inherently dirty (Purdy, 2017b). Bruce Friedrich, co-founder and executive director of the Good Food Institute, considers “clean meat” the best term, likening it to “clean energy.” The debate on nomenclature may have to be solved with consumer adoption of clever marketing tactics.
[2] Mark Post is based in the Netherlands and elected to correspond over email instead of a phone call. He and his team are busy working on the microcarriers to make cultured meat in bioreactors.
[3] Virtual water is the indirect water used to create goods in a production chain; the concept was introduced in the 1990s (Allan, 1992). Virtual water in livestock production includes all indirect water usage needed to grow feed. Direct water usage then refers to water consumed by animals.
[4] Venky’s is a major poultry producer that sells colistin to farmers in India as a chicken growth promoter. In India, the colistin feed can be purchased over-the-counter. Interestingly, lacing chicken feed with antibiotics is not against the law in India, which highlights the need for more stringent regulation. McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut and Dominos are supplied with colistin-fed poultry (Davies & Walsh, 2018).
[5] A triple bottom line considers social and environmental impact in addition to financial gain. This idea has become increasingly adopted in sustainable food circles, but it is also influencing the perceived responsibilities of companies in a variety of sectors. The Triple Bottom Line (Savitz & Weber, 2006) chronicles the changes companies are making to take on these responsibilities.
[6] Impossible Foods is famous for its plant-based burger that tastes like real meat. The company derives heme, part of hemoglobin in blood, from plants to mimic animal blood in its burger product. An Impossible Burger™ can be purchased at Stanford’s Axe and Palm restaurant for $13.25. Founder Pat Brown is skeptical of cultured meat scalability.
[7] Replicating an entire muscle is more difficult than growing a mass of muscle cells. Compare a New York strip to ground beef; one has a patterned 3-dimensional structure, and the other does not. Making a New York strip in a laboratory will require more research and development than ground beef, which scientists like Mark Post have already achieved.
[8] The cultured meat burger was televised around the world as a publicity event. Special guest chef Richard McGeown cooked the burger, and a panel of guests assessed the taste. Due to the burger’s lack of fat, panelists noted the lack of juiciness.
[9] A geometric relationship is one that grows or shrinks by a factor of a constant number. In the case of Kurzweil’s example, gene sequencing costs were halved each year.
[10] Mark Post likes to mention the production of hot dogs when addressing the “yuck factor” of cultured meat. If someone could see how a typical hot dog was made, it would be very off-putting (Post, 2015). Since hot dogs are culturally accepted, it is not “weird” to eat hot dogs with friends and family. Cultured meat as a new food source does not have the same acceptance, and thus faces a barrier to market.
[11] Acceptable condiments for a hot dog include mustard and bright green relish.
[12] Hampton Creek has faced severe scrutiny from the public. Firstly, it was accused of buying back its own products from stores in bulk; soon after, Target dropped their products from all stores; then, the entire board of directors left their positions (Korosec, 2017). Only Tetrick was left. Determined to keep going, he started amassing a new team, new business plans, and new intellectual property. Jon Vein and Ira van Eelen then enter the picture, and they both have board seats.
[13] Many articles on cultured meat incorporate this quote for its forward thinking and uncanny prediction of our future. Although Churchill’s prediction is off by a few decades now that cultured meat is a possibility by 2018, his imagination for the future still captures our attention, and has inspired the work of many researchers around the world.