The production of meat in the laboratory is undoubtedly unusual, and it is expected that it will face many challenges until one day it is allowed to trade freely in the markets, and at that time it will face other religious and marketing challenges.
The United Nations reports that the world's population will reach nearly 10 billion people by 2050, which adds a challenge to the challenges facing the planet in food security such as limited arable land, climate change, and inequitable food distribution.
The COVID-19 pandemic and various political turmoil added other challenges, such as erratic supply chains, the inability to produce in conflict areas, and decisions to ban exports from many countries.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) State of Food Security and Nutrition in 2020 indicates that more than 800 million people are at risk of starvation, an estimated 150 million increase over the previous year.
Thus, the search for new sources of food became necessary, mobilized government efforts, and attracted many large and emerging companies.
Lab-grown alternative foods
To overcome the food security crisis, scientists have sought since the middle of the last century to find alternative cultivation methods to traditional methods, as there are countries that suffer from challenges that prevent agricultural expansion, such as scarcity of agricultural land, scarcity of fresh water, unsuitable climate for cultivation throughout the year, or small The area of the country, which does not allow agricultural expansion.
Scientists’ efforts succeeded in finding solutions to grow plants in alternative environments, until they reached the climax by cultivating plants in the laboratory using tissue culture techniques that depend on taking a piece of the plant and growing it in a sterile nutritious environment isolated from external factors, until the cells grow to give a complete plant that is gradually transferred to pots Small or harvested directly from within the nutrient environment.
When trying to apply this to meat, scientists faced many challenges, foremost of which is the growth of cells in the form of a single thin layer, and the lack of differentiation of developing cells into organs, which led to the delay in the success of growing meat in the laboratory compared to plant cultivation by several decades, before it succeeded in the first years of current century.
And in 2013, the world had a date with the first burger made entirely of farmed meat, produced by Dr. Mark Post, a professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
Despite the success in this, it was only a theoretical effort, as it required 5 years of work to produce 2.25 kilograms of beef, in which the research team grew stem cells from a cow, and the production of the sandwich cost $ 325,000 paid in full by partner Sergey Brin. Founder of Google.
Unremitting efforts and huge investments
This was followed by the intensification of laboratory culture efforts, as governments and investors invested billions of dollars in research aimed at reducing the cost of culture and processing. These efforts focused on 3 main directions: culturing meat of all kinds in the laboratory , cultivating alternative foods of non-animal origin, and producing high-cost food ingredients such as Additives for taste and aroma in large quantities.
In a recent study published earlier this year, it looked at more than 170 start-up companies operating in at least one of the three fields mentioned in 25 countries, and found that the announced investments to finance laboratory culture exceeded $4.7 billion until 2021, noting that more than half of the companies The study dealt with did not announce the value of the investments obtained.
While another report issued by the Canadian Genomics Foundation (Ontario Genomics) indicated that the total investment in the field exceeds 12 billion dollars.
Singapore.. Historic approval
Singapore represents a model for a country that suffers from scarcity of land and scarcity of natural resources, and food production represents a real crisis for it, as it imports more than 80% of food, and therefore the Singaporean government has become one of the largest investors in the field of food farming in the world.
Cultured meat making image, lab grown meat concept
And in December 2020, Singapore surprised everyone by granting the first government approval in history to a food product containing 50% of farmed chicken meat.
The product is fried chicken pieces (nuggets) made of minced meat. The product expected to come to the local market soon will be a little more expensive than similar (natural) products, but it is still at a competitive price point that allows it to stay in the market.
Japan an unprecedented scientific breakthrough
Less than a year and a half after Singapore's historic step, Dr. Shoji Takeuchi, head of the Hybrid Biological Systems Laboratory at the University of Tokyo, Japan, came out with a scientific breakthrough that represents a quantum leap in the field, announcing the development of a new technology through which he and his team were able to grow stem cells Animals to obtain muscle fibers (cuttings of meat) in the laboratory.
In contrast to all previous technologies that produced blocks or strands of cells that were collected and processed to provide minced meat, the new technology succeeded in producing a piece of meat suitable for cooking directly without the need for an animal.
Statistics indicate that raising animals to obtain meat drains about 77% of agricultural land in the world, compared to only 23% for vegetable production, which shares 82% of the calories produced globally and 63% of the proteins.
In the case of expanding the adoption of such technology, it is possible to provide large areas of agricultural land used for animal production. This technology can also reduce the harmful impact on the environment due to traditional agricultural practices and harmful carbon emissions from farm waste.
The production of meat in the laboratory is undoubtedly unusual and it is expected that it will face many challenges until one day it is allowed to trade freely in the markets, and at that time it will face other religious and marketing challenges.
Therefore, laboratory-grown meat is not a panacea for the world's food security crisis, but it may be a catalyst for overcoming it.
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