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Melissa Harris-Perry: According to the USDA, the average American consumes around 250 pounds of meat every year, and producing the meat for our meals has a meaningful effect on our planet.
Meat production uses almost a third of the world's agricultural water supply and is a significant contributor to global CO2 and methane emissions. Now food scientists have been experimenting with new ways to create more sustainable alternatives to meat and the FDA's recent approval of lab-grown meat marks a new step in that effort. The product is made by California startup Upside Foods and Upside's meat is grown in a lab using cells from real animals. For more on this, I spoke with Matt Reynolds
Matt Reynolds: I'm a senior writer at Wired Magazine.
Melissa Harris-Perry: How is it that it is meat?
Matt Reynolds: There is an animal involved but only right at the beginning. What's called cultivated meat, sometimes lab-grown meat starts with a tiny sample of animal cells and then it moves through a series of steel tanks like bioreactors where it's fed all these nutrients that cells need to grow like sugars and salts and things like that. If you do that for enough times and the cells grow for long enough, you're going to harvest that and then you've got meat, but you only had this really, really small part of the animal to begin with. Technically you've got an animal in there but almost all of it is made without using animal products. It's not vegan or vegetarian, but it's still meat.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Is the thing that becomes the meat, was it alive at any point? Should we think of that as constituting life? I'm trying to think in part about the ethical questions that are raised, not only the environmental ones but the ethical ones.
Matt Reynolds: The cells were alive when they were growing in these tanks but they were never attached to a part of an animal that could feel or that could think or could experience pain. Yes, it's alive, but what you've done is this pretty cool scientific trip of detaching the meat of an animal. All the bits that humans are actually interested in from all those other bits of the animals, the brain and the eyes and the poo and the body heat. You take all those parts out and just say, "Let's just give the meat." Theoretically, at least it's better ethically and it's better for the environment.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Right. Let's walk through some of those advantages when you talk about the body heat, the poo with all of that, we talked a bit about the ethical, but talk to me about the environment. What are some of the environmental and sustainable advantages to growing meat in this way?
Matt Reynolds: Yes, if you think when you feed an animal, say I've got a cow and I want to make a beef burger out eventually, well what you have to do is you have to spend two and a half years or 18 months feeding that cow loads and loads of hay and animals are great but they're not very efficient. They turn lots of that hay or grass or whatever into bits of the animal that we are just totally not interested in. That's one of the reasons why meat tends to have a higher carbon footprint and a higher environmental impact than plant-based forms of meat or just plants.
Now for cows, that's especially problematic because they also create loads of methane when they're growing and they're burping and they're farting. The idea is, is you can get rid of all those inefficiencies and get rid of the cow body in particular. Then actually a lot of these problems environmentally when it comes to carbon emissions, but also things like runoff and fertilizer, you can remove all of those because you're not going through this inefficient process of putting food through an animal body.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay. For the producer, what access though does it take? On the one hand, I get it, it's a little inefficient to, "Look I have chickens, they spill a lot of their food on the ground." There's lots of inefficiencies in the process of growing or nurturing an animal, but what are some of the challenges for a meat producer to access something like lab-grown meat?
Matt Reynolds: The big challenge today is that it's really, really expensive to produce meat in this way. Chicken you buy at the store, it costs about $3 a pound or something like that. It's really cheap. If you're producing this in the lab or through these steel bioreactors, it's many, many times more expensive. That's really because the industry isn't set up to produce meat this way. Those minerals and elements I talked about, you need to feed these cells and feed this stock. They're really expensive because no one is producing these at scale.
That's where the big problem is. There's one company that's got this green light from the FDA. They have a facility that might be able to produce 50,000 pounds of chicken meat at the moment, that is such a tiny, tiny part of chicken production the whole of the US and you don't really start to get some of those economic benefits and to reduce the cost until you get it at this really big scale. That's really the main challenge facing industry. Then you have this other problem which is will anyone want to eat it?
Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes. You've tasted it. What does it taste like?
Matt Reynolds: This is so disappointing, but it tastes like chicken, which is what everyone says but maybe that's good. Although I have to say I'm vegetarian so I haven't eaten chicken for 10 years so I'm probably a terrible person to judge this. It was delicious. It was cooked I think in a little olive oil source and what's interesting is you can lower the cost of these meat products by blending them with soy and plant-based meat that we already have in a fairly cheap. Some of these things I tried actually had a relatively small proportion of animal cells or have cultivated meat cells but they still tasted pretty good and that's one way the industry hopes they might be able to get some of these costs down at least initially.
Melissa Harris-Perry: If and when this lab-cultivated meat becomes commercially viable, do you think it's going to be available everywhere?
Matt Reynolds: I think we should be really realistic and temper our expectations that this will be a very long time before it's available in stores for people to buy. You're likely to experience it, if you experience it at all, in high-end restaurants, in this quite controlled environment because it's a new weird product and companies want people to experience it in the best possible way.
Also, I think we shouldn't think this will be replacing all of our meals in 10 or even 15 years. I think realistically this will be a pretty niche product. It'll be exciting for some people. It'll still be expensive and it will fulfill maybe people that really don't want to eat any meat but they want to treat themselves once a month, maybe they'll buy something like this. Because you've got to think we have other meat alternatives like plant-based protein or even changing your diet and this is going to fit in around those other diet approaches and these other solutions. I don't think it's going to be a market winner that takes all of this share that plant-based had before or meat had before.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Matt Reynolds is senior climate and food writer for Wired Magazine. Matt, thanks for taking a L for the rest of us for eating the cultivated meat and for joining us here on the Takeaway.
Matt Reynolds: Thanks, Melissa. It's been fun.
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