Cultural innovation

We are approaching the 50th anniversary of the movie Soylent Green, which is a bit of a cultural touchstone even for those who have never seen it. With Hollywood heavyweights Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson playing key roles, it was a somewhat crude depiction of a society blighted by pollution, climate change, housing shortages, dying oceans, sexual oppression, and corporate control of the food system. You know, crazy sci-fi stuff.

Oddly enough, this dystopia is set in the year 2022. I don’t want to give too much away (in case you decide to subject yourself to the viewing experience sometime), but a key element of the plot concerns the need for a source of protein to feed the masses. It’s a futuristic take on a theme that also appeared in the story of Sweeney Todd, which arose from the squalor of Victorian London (spawning several theatrical and cinematic retellings, including a Stephen Sondheim musical in 1979, and a 2007 adaptation by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter). The common thread is our existential obsession with meat.

Under normal circumstances, meat is not murder – but neither is it equivalent to killing plants. The slaughter and consumption of animals bears a certain moral gravity that we have accommodated in various ways through the course of human history, by means of religious edicts, taboos, and industrial efficiencies. More recently, our dietary anxieties have been further complicated by considerations related to land use, energy and water requirements, and carbon emissions.

Not surprisingly, a technological fix is at hand. We have entered the age of “cultured” meat – which comprises cells grown in an incubator or “bioreactor,” under highly controlled conditions. To appeal to borderline vegetarians, it is sometimes called “no-kill” meat (which is potentially confusing, since this term is also used to refer to animal shelters that do not practise euthanasia).

The process involves stem cells which are extracted from living animals, then propagated in a laboratory, by supplying the necessary nutrients. A type of 3D printer may be used to apply this new tissue to an edible scaffold, to provide the desired shape. Alternatively, researchers at McMaster University (in Hamilton, Ont.) have developed a technique for growing palate-pleasing proportions of fat and muscle cells in layers, which can then be stacked up like a ream of paper, forming a lab-meat slab of the desired thickness.

Developments in this field have paralleled medical breakthroughs in the culturing of human organs, such as ears and bladders, as an alternative to using donated body parts for transplants. I guess you could call that a valid niche market. For food purposes, there remains the problem of scalability – but vast resources are being directed toward finding a solution.

The first lab-grown hamburger was produced 10 years ago by Mark Post, a professor of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He quickly became the academic poster child for cultured meat – and since then, he has become involved in getting this product to market, as chief scientific officer of a company called Mosa Meat.

In 2020, Singapore became the first country to grant regulatory approval for a lab-grown meat product, and a U.S. start-up called Eat Just actually sold some of its cultured chicken nuggets there – but mostly for show, and at a significant financial loss. A team at the University of Lisbon, in Portugal, is working on cultured seabass fillets – boneless, of course. And in Israel, two separate companies – Aleph Farms and MeaTech 3D Ltd. – have hyped their respective lab-grown steak products.

A key concept is to produce only the premium cuts – although “cuts” is not the right word, since there is no butchering involved. In fact, the product is not something that exists in nature. It’s a bit like cloning a two-by-four, without the messy tree foliage and bark. Theoretically, there is no waste (though without all the nasty bits of a critter, one wonders what will be used to make wieners).

The Good Food Institute, an international non-profit established in 2016 to promote plant-based and cultivated meat, is a big booster for this fledgling industry. “To make these innovations accessible and to achieve the huge environmental, public health, and food security benefits of cultivated meat as quickly as possible, we need governments to invest billions in research and commercialization,” said Seren Kell, the group’s science and technology manager, in a recent interview with the Guardian.

Quite a few tech entrepreneurs are jumping in – backed by venture capitalists, and also by the public purse. The Canadian Food Innovation Network, supported by the Government of Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund, is directing money to cultured meat R&D through its AcCELLerate program.

There’s a long way to go, but if aspiring manufacturers overcome hurdles related to texture, taste, appearance, and economics, it’s possible that the sector will win over some consumers – presumably people who are uncomfortable with animal slaughter and concerned about their environmental footprint, or fast-food patrons who simply eat whatever is put in front of them. This would be a rather sad commentary on public perceptions of agriculture. (And the ag industry itself is partly to blame, because it has allowed livestock production to become largely segregated from crop farming, in practice and in the public imagination.)

If we are asking ourselves whether we can get over the “ick factor” associated with lab meat, I think we are asking the wrong question. Instead, we should be asking who will benefit, and who will gain control of our food system. The sector has tried to brand itself as “cellular agriculture,” but this too is a misnomer, since the process does not involve land. In fact, lab meat is a means of replacing farms and farmers.

The idea that this could improve food security is preposterous, because the decentralized structure of the agricultural economy – its connection to the land – provides our best hedge against an uncertain future. This is the fundamental resilience of our food system, imperfect as it may be.

Imagine a catastrophic scenario – war comes to mind, for some reason, but it could be a pandemic, or a weather event that shuts down power grids, transport routes, and manufacturing facilities. In such circumstances, let us hope that we have protein production capacity on farms in numerous different communities, widely distributed across the landscape – and reliant mostly on energy derived through photosynthesis. If that capacity were instead housed in a few laboratories, the food system would be insanely fragile.

Lab meat is part of the same trend that has brought us plant-based meat substitutes – which are kind of silly, but relatively harmless, because if the production system crashes, we can just eat the ingredients, since they are actual foodstuffs. Those legumes and nuts and seeds and oils can be cooked up over a campfire to make delicious vegetarian meals. Stem cells in a test tube, on the other hand, are not a source of sustenance – even in a pinch.

There’s also the question of who gets to participate in food production. As a do-it-yourselfer, can you afford to establish an in vitro beef grow-op in your basement? In addition to the necessary infrastructure, you would need a supply of the biological feedstock. (“Honey, can you pick up some fetal bovine serum on your way home?”) There is a distinct possibility that the proprietary technology would end up residing with just a few large companies. Given the precedents in agri-business consolidation, this is not the stuff of speculative fiction.

As for the issue of food safety, we know that unwelcome pathogens can grow in a lab environment. When contamination occurs in a highly centralized production system, the effects are multiplied exponentially and spread widely.

Rest assured, commercial lab meat is nowhere near feasibility – but that has never stopped people from trying to turn a buck on the stock market. It is unfortunate that the sustainability-oriented sales pitch may attract some of our best and brightest. There is an opportunity cost.

Much can be achieved through human ingenuity. Maybe we are expected to take pride in the fact that Canadian technology (supplied by a company called L3Harris Wescam) has been employed in the targeting system for Turkish-made military drones now being used by Ukrainian forces in their defense against a Russian invasion. Instead we should weep, and we should repent our failure, over the past few decades, to deploy our best minds toward preventing this man-made disaster.

What can we do now? Farming is an act of peace. Plant sunflowers, at least (if you can find seeds). But also, we must practise democracy with more rigour and civility, at all levels. This too is a form of resiliency, but one we can grow in our culture. We’re going to need it. DL