TECHNICOLOR MEATSCAPES: WELCOME TO A POST-ANIMAL BIOECONOMY
Assistant at New Harvest
Meat is composed of, in descending order: water, protein, fat, soluble organic material (amino acids, vitamins, carbohydrates), and minerals (most notably phosphorus and potassium). The recipe for beef differs, of course, from that for pork, just as a marbled steak is not the same as a lean one. And yet, these basic ingredients remain the same.
The art of cooking is figuring out how to manipulate these ingredients; how to undulate flavor through layers of texture and into the juice that dribbles down your chin. The actual making of the beef, chicken, or pork happens inside the cow, chicken, or pig, of course, each of whose DNA holds the ultimate recipe. Cooks can season, fry, or marinate, but even the most brilliant will always be constrained by the raw material at hand.
But suppose it were possible to expand the cook’s jurisdiction to the making of the meat itself. So much of our energy is spent fumbling around as we crossbreed to figure out what combination of cut, aging, and feed will yield a perfectly marbled steak. What if, instead, we could play around—like a DJ on a soundboard—with the proteins and lipids and carbohydrates that dictate not just juiciness and tenderness but also the cells of the beef in question? Welcome to the post-animal bioeconomy.
Behold the carnery. It’s a (as yet hypothetical) place where meat is made commercially, like in a brewery, via fermentation. Although it doesn’t actually exist yet, the carnery is a thought experiment for a new paradigm of agriculture: cellular agriculture. Cellular agriculture is a way to harvest products like meat, milk, and eggs from cell cultures instead of actual livestock. It is an agriculture that deconstructs the burger to its most constitutive elements and then reconstructs it as a succulent patty, identical in every way except provenance. Winston Churchill actually predicted this revolutionized supply chain in December 1931, in an essay he wrote for Strand magazine. “Fifty years hence,” he said, “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” Churchill was prescient, if overly optimistic (it’s now thirty-four years past his prophesied “fifty years hence”). Not ones to be discouraged by a delayed timeline, however, a growing legion of biotechnology companies are pioneering an industry of animal-free animal products, in an effort to finally usher in just such a post-animal bioeconomy.
The process of culturing meat leverages existing technologies and techniques that are currently used in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. To begin, we take a small sample of cells from an animal. The sample then proliferates in a nutrient-rich medium, inside a bioreactor. Cells are capable of multiplying so many times in a culture that, in theory, a single cell could be used to produce enough meat to feed the global population for a year. After they’re done multiplying, the cells are attached to a sponge-like “scaffold” and soaked with nutrients. The resulting “cultured” meat is the same meat that would have resulted had those initial cells remained inside the animal—we simply used a bioreactor to take the place of an animal’s body.
The field of cellular agriculture reimagines the way we produce and consume animal products. If meat is just a collection of muscle, fat, and connective tissues, then why raise an entire complex organism only to harvest these bits and pieces; why not start with the basic unit of life, the cell, to make the meat more efficiently? In fact, why stop at re-creating the shape, taste, and nutritional profile of existing meats? Let’s create something new! To quote Julia Child, “Once you have mastered a technique, you hardly need to look at a recipe again and can take off on your own.”
There is precedent for this kind of paroxysm of possibility. With the advent of cellular agriculture, cultured meat joins the ranks of cheese, yogurt, bread, beer, and wine—venerable mainstays of the modern diet and some of the earliest applications of biotechnology. It was only after culturing milk, after all, that humans discovered kefir, yogurt, sour cream, and over 2,000 types of cheese. What might we discover as we culture meat? The gastronomic possibilities are practically limitless. But as the eighteenth-century epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once said, “The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.”
Cellular agriculture isn’t just about meat, however. Already, people are working on making eggs without chickens, milk without cows, rhino horns without rhinos, and shark fins without sharks. Cellular agriculture suggests a way to emancipate the animal from the commodity supply chain.
Most of the controversy surrounding meat right now is based on the assumption that meat comes from an animal. As we become increasingly aware of the vulnerabilities in livestock supply chains as well as the very real and devastating impact animal agriculture is having on our health and the health of the planet, we are also being forced to think about how we can move toward a truly sustainable paradigm of food production. Strategies to reform the current system can do only so much. With problems of this magnitude, we need to be looking for an entirely new system.
Almost any paradox can be solved by abandoning a crucial assumption. If we abandon the assumption that an animal must be meat’s bioreactor, our food can be disentangled from a bundle of uncomfortable truths and unsettling implications. Agriculture has always been a locus of innovation, and an early adopter of avant-garde technologies. Cellular agriculture is a natural evolution given the deeply ingrained culture of technological innovation. It sounds “revolutionary” and “disruptive,” and it is revolutionary and disruptive. But it’s also, frankly, just sensible.