Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: population of 9.7 billion by the year 2050. 2 Along with a larger population comes greater carbon emissions, as well as a greater demand for land, food, and clean drinking water.Unfortunately, current methods of meat cultivation, an increasingly relied upon source of food globally, 3 require massive amounts of both land and water.Currently, 77% of habitable land on the planet is used for maintaining livestock.2 Fortunately, an innovation in the fields of food sciences and biotechnology have presented the world with a possible resolution to this daunting future that faces the human population.As of November 16, 2022 the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use and sale of the first lab-grown, or cultured, chicken cells within food products for human consumption within the United States.4 Though this is the only currently approved product of its type, many companies are working towards similar goals, with this approval only being the first in a wave of similar products to come.5 This date is a monumental landmark in the advancement in the field of sustainable food products.Furthermore, the use of cultured meat products could offer solutions to massively reduce the carbon footprint and overall resource consumption of the meat industry as a whole.6 These promising advances could be pivotal to the continued growth and maintenance of the human population, but ultimately it is the commercial viability that will drive the widespread adoption of this novel production method.With dozens 6 of companies pursuing similar advancements, and a forecasted compound annual growth rate of 15% from 2022-2030, 8 this technology has the potential to disrupt the meat industry, and provide an ethical and sustainable source of meat worldwide. Manufacturing processDue to the infancy of the cultured meat industry, various techniques for producing meat within a laboratory environment, from start to finish, are being investigated by various companies.Generally speaking, the goal for the production process of cultured meat is to provide a minimal number of select animal cells to a cell culturing pipeline in which they can replicate to occupy high volume or high density.2 These cultures are then harvested and given shape using various scaffolding techniques.2,8 To achieve this, the production process is divided into four distinct steps which are subject to a high degree of variation as the technology evolves: animal tissue selection, cell-type and growth media selection and isolation, cultivation, and tissue engineering.2,9 Animal tissue selection is a relatively straightforward variable in the production process, as it is the variable that dictates the type of meat that will be produced.Traditionally produced meat products
Authors: Jacob Krol, Bill Tawil
Institution: California State University, Channel Islands
Language: English
Subfield: Ecology
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4320037171