Fake meat: real pressure on government

August 2022

Make no mistake, your government will be under a lot of pressure to jump on the fake real 'cultured' meat bandwagon [1]. Westminster won't risk being seen as an old-fashioned, backward-looking government, scared to grasp the lab-meat nettle while other governments race ahead.

Fake real meat is being presented as inevitable by companies planning to market it. GOOD Meat, for example, is confidently predicting that its product "will replace conventional meat at some point in our lifetimes" as "consumers increasingly recognise the environmental impact of their diet choices and search for healthier and more sustainable products". 

But, check out WHO BENEFITS FROM ALTERNATIVE PROTEINS? - July 2022

At the moment, the cultured-meat space is attracting funds from super-rich celebrities, such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson, conventional meat giants, such as Tyson and Cargill, food processing magnate, Nestlé, and a stack of venture capitalists. However, these cash injections are tiny compared with what's actually needed to take the product forward: they could stop very suddenly if there's a hint of bad press, consumer rejection, or it just seems to be taking too long.

The founder and CEO of the Good Food Institute, which represents the alternative protein industry, said "if we leave (the development of cultured meat) to the tender mercies of the market, there will be vanishingly few products to choose from and it'll take a very long time". He argued that the need for significant public investment is urgent and necessary.

The underlying problem is the huge capital cost of building, setting up, running and maintaining enough bioreactors to make a dent in our protein needs. Even to supplant 10 percent of the world's meat supply with the fake real stuff would take 4,000 factories each with 600 bioreactors running simultaneously and would come with a heart-stopping price tag of $1.8 trillion.

Let's face it, private investors aren't going to foot a bill like this once they realise it's never going to result in a cost-competitive product. That leaves governments and philanthropic supporters to supply the funds.

Undaunted, the PR drive to get fake real meat out there is already well underway.

In December 2020, Israel's then-Prime Minister became the first head of state to publicly taste vat-grown non-animal 'steak' which he declared "delicious and guilt-free". The manufacturers vowed to make their cultured meat products publicly available by 2022. Singapore was chosen for the launch of the first fake real meat product because it is a global hub with strong intellectual property rights and a 'straightforward' (read minimal?) regulatory process. In selected restaurants there you can order fake real chicken nuggets or steamed fake real chicken dumplings. This is, of course, a PR stunt: the chicken-like ingredient is coming from a tiny 1,200 litre bioreactor, and the manufacturers are taking a loss on their products.

Leading the field of techno-optimistic governments is Qatar where state-backed organisations have been persuaded to fund the building of a large-scale cultivated meat factory in Doha. This will be strategically near Doha's airport and port to give access, not only to Middle Eastern markets, but to the world. Next in line for such a development is Abu Dhabi.

Note that by 'large-scale' is meant able to produce 10 million pounds of 'meat' a year. To put this in perspective, that's only about two-thirds of the output of just one of the 4,000 factories needed to supply just 10 percent of human protein needs.

In San Francisco, there are plans for a small production facility to sustain a tourism of cultured meat where intrigued customers will pay for a fake real meat experience which markets elsewhere can't support.

Fake real fish suffers all the same prohibitive costs and scaling-up problems as the fake real four-legged versions. However, cultivated fish might make it into the sushi market. As the (rather cynical) CEO of San Francisco-based start-up, Wildtype, suggested "People are used to paying a lot of money for (very little) fish in sushi products" and "might already be in an exploratory sort of state of mind for trying something new".

If governments leap into this uncertain future, fake real meat will be funded using taxes and if it doesn't work out, society will be the loser.

OUR COMMENT

Keep an eye open for any UK government silliness wanting to plough your taxes into the ultimate processed bio-fermenter 'meat'.

Take the opportunity to suggest that your money might be better spent supporting farmers to shift to diversified agroecological production systems in which animals, fed on what they eat naturally, are integrated to provide fertile soil for the crops.

Background

[1] FAKE REAL MEAT - July 2022


SOURCES:

• Joe Fassler, Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable, www.thecounter.org, 22.09.22

• Aleph Farms Completes $105 Million Series B Funding Round, Aleph Farms, 7.07.21

• Lab-grown meat is vapourware, expert analysis shows, GM Watch 26.09.21

• Tom Philpott, The Bloody Secret Behind Lab-Grown Meat, Mother Jones, March-April 2022 Issue

• Tom Philpott, Is Lab Meat About to Hit Your Dinner Plate? Mother Jones, 2.08.21

• Club-goers take first bites of lab-made chicken, Nature Biotechnology 39 March 2021

• GOOD Meat, a Division of Eat Just Inc., Secures $170 Million to Scale Meat Without Slaughter as Demand Grows, Business Wire, 18.05.21
  

  Photo Wikimedia Commons