|
‘Our grandchildren are going to ask us about why we ate meat from slaughtered animals back in 2022’.
The quote is from Josh Tetrick, the chief executive of the company Eat Just, who will soon build the world’s biggest cultured meat factory in the US for its division called GOOD meat (read below Singularity Hub’s article).
Culture meat, as the article describes, is “grown from animal cells and is biologically the same as meat that comes from an animal. The process starts with harvesting muscle cells from an animal, then feeding those cells a mixture of nutrients and naturally-occurring growth factors so that they multiply, differentiate, then grow to form muscle tissue”.
In 2013, I had the chance, as a reporter for Le Temps, to attend the first presentation and testing of the first ever beefsteak, in London. At the time, the cost of one piece of meat was CHF300,000. It is now of only a few dozen Swiss francs, in a development that went much quicker than expected. Now, there are about 170 companies around the world working on cultured meat, but “Good Meat is the only company to have gained regulatory approval to sell its product to the public. It began serving cultivated chicken in Singapore in December 2020”, as The Guardian recalls.
But, as Le Monde explains, two reports now bring clouds in the blue sky of cultivated meat: the first one describes the threat that this new market will be dominated and controlled by the few companies producing such “fake” meat, which will be able to establish a “protein politics” by promoting massively these new dietary regimes. And the second study shows that, indeed, it is exactly the current giants of the agro-business which already control a large part of the cultivated meat industry… Besides, while it was first thought that this cultured meat would reduce the ressources normally needed to get normal meat by feeding real animals, the carbon footprint of the technology is now put into question, the big plants where animal stem cells are cultivated consuming a lot of energy.
And add to this simple prospect that cultivated meat is far from being widely accepted by the population, and I wonder if our grandchildren will still not be appreciating a good T-bone steak.
Olivier Dessibourg, GESDA
|
