Cellular meat, more 'meaty' than plant meat

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Replacing chicken coops, barns, grasslands with bioreactors, where food comes not from farms but from laboratories. It sounds unbelievable, but it has become a reality because of the development of technology.

Cell cultured meat is an edible material that uses cell culture engineering and tissue engineering technologies to culture animal muscle tissue in vitro. Different from the "meat" simulated by vegetable protein food processing technology, cell cultured meat uses cells as the smallest production unit, and uses the cross-innovation technology of life and food science to directly cultivate animal cells into a piece of "animal meat".

The generation of cell meat is generally by first extracting cell tissue from animals, isolating stem cells, and then using bioreactors to expand and culture to achieve large-scale proliferation. Then use differentiation molds, bioreactors or 3D printing methods to produce muscle tissue on a large scale, and finally use food processing technology to make cultured meat products. In layman's terms, you can eat pork without raising pigs.

Data shows that the global cellular meat field has received a total of more than 360 million US dollars in 2020, and it will grow rapidly in 2021. The investment in the first six months has exceeded 360 million US dollars. Additionally, the cell-cultured meat market is expected to reach $25 billion by 2030, according to McKinsey.

Compared with meat produced by traditional animal husbandry, artificial meat can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% in the same production process. Due to the elimination of space and diet for raising poultry, the production of the same weight of cellular meat can reduce land and fresh water by 99% and 96% respectively. For example, in general broiler breeding, it takes 40 days at the earliest to be released, while the production cycle of cellular meat is shortened by 20 times, that is, the same amount of chicken can be obtained in only two days.

In 2013, Maastricht University in the Netherlands made the first artificial meat burger using cell technology, and the cost was as high as $330,000; last year, the price of artificial meat burgers listed in Singapore dropped to $23 each, which has To a level acceptable to the public; at the end of 2021, Israeli cellular meat company Future Meat said it reduced the cost to about $1.7 per piece of chicken, or about $7.7 per pound. In 2022, China's first cell-cultured "pork belly" was also born.

Compared with the familiar plant meat, cell meat tastes more "meaty" and is closer to real animal meat. However, compared with raw meat, the flavor of cell-cultured meat is still lacking in taste, and fat differentiation can be further optimized; in terms of taste, cell-cultured meat can already match the taste of traditional meat and can be adjusted Cell ratio to further adjust the taste.

With the increasing market acceptance of cellular meat, cellular meat may cause a revolution in the food field in the future.