Technological, Regulatory, and Ethical Aspects of In Vitro Meat: A Future Slaughter‐Free Harvest

Abstract

Defined as meat cultured in a laboratory within a bioreactor under controlled artificial conditions, in vitro meat is a relatively recent area that has opened a whole universe of possibilities and opportunities for the meat sector. With improved chemical and microbial safety and varied options, in vitro meat has been proposed as a green, healthy, environmentally friendly, and nutritionally better product that is free from animal suffering and death. Cell culture and tissue culture are the most probable technologies for the development of this futuristic muscle product. However, there are many challenges in the production of a suitable product at an industrial scale under a sustainable production system and a great body of research is required to fill the gaps in our knowledge. Many materials used in the product development are novel and untested within the food industry and demand urgent regulatory and safety assessment systems capable of managing any risks associated with the development of cultured meat. The future of this product will depend on the actions of governments and regulatory agencies. This article highlights emerging biotechnological options for the development of cultured meat and suggests ways to integrate these emerging technologies into meat research. It considers the problems and possibilities of developing cultured meat, opportunities, ethical issues as well as emerging safety and regulatory issues in this area.

Analysis of Scientific and Press Articles Related to Cultured Meat for a Better Understanding of Its Perception

“…Both in WoS (in Topic, as of December 31, 2019) and Factiva (as of December 31, 2019) databases, we searched for articles containing the following words: "artificial meat" OR "meat in vitro" OR "in vitro meat" OR "cultured meat" OR "synthetic meat" OR "lab-grown meat" OR "lab meat" OR "cell-based meat" OR "clean meat" OR "fake meat" OR "slaughter-free meat" OR "cell-cultured meat" OR "craft meat" OR "cultivated meat" OR "victimless meat" OR "animal-free meat" OR "cruelty-free meat" OR "shmeat" OR "Frankenmeat" OR "test Cultured meat (97) a Edelman et al, 2005;Bhat and Fayaz, 2011;Forgacs et al, 2012;Post, 2012;Hopkins, 2015;Bryant and Barnett, 2018;Hamdan et al, 2018;Bodiou et al, 2020;Chriki and Hocquette, 2020;Weinrich et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020 in vitro meat (85) Datar and Betti, 2010;Laestadius, 2015;Sharma et al, 2015;Hocquette, 2016;Wilks and Phillips, 2017;Lee, 2018;Bhat et al, 2019;Bryant and Barnett, 2019;Woll, 2019;Li et al, 2020 Clean meat (25) Lagally and Specht, 2017;Windhorst, 2018Windhorst, , 2019 Artificial meat (21) Bonny et al, 2015Bonny et al, , 2017Hocquette, 2015;Hocquette et al, 2015;Orzechowski, 2015;Sodhi, 2017 Synthetic meat (19) Kadim et al, 2015;Marcu et al, 2015;Jones, 2017;Siegrist and Sütterlin, 2017;Lynch and Pierrehumbert, 2019;Warner, 2019 Cell-based meat (10)/cell-cultured meat (1)/cellular meat (1) <...>…”

Sensorial and Nutritional Aspects of Cultured Meat in Comparison to Traditional Meat: Much to Be Inferred

“…The challenges to creating an appealing texture in producing cultured meat mimicking fresh meat are by far greater than challenges involved in the preparation of ground or finely minced meat products. It is acknowledged that the production of a full-sized cultured product similar to steak or pork chops is challenging and may not be feasible within the near future (4,5,17,18). Due to the absence of blood, providing nutrients and oxygen, and diffusion limitations, only a few cell layers can be produced using currently available culture techniques (19).…”

“…Hence, the gelling and emulsifying characteristics of meat proteins are of paramount importance in the production of finely minced meat products. It has been suggested that the biochemical composition of cultured meat is expected to be very close to that of regular meat, since both contain muscle fibers (5). However, muscle fibers formed through the currently available in vitro methodologies contain only small amounts of predominantly embryonic or neonatal isoforms of actin and myosin (13).…”

“…The only other, modest, sensorial test on cultured cells reported in scientific literature, dates back to the early years of cultured meat experimentation and included smelling and observation, but no tasting (3). In addition, several review papers briefly discussed the potential sensorial characteristics of cultured meat (or derived products) (4,5), but most of the information provided was based on indirect assumptions and on knowledge of the current in vitro production capabilities. To our knowledge, a scientific and technological comparison between cultured meat and traditional meat has not been published thus far.…”

Future foods: Is it possible to design a healthier and more sustainable food supply?

“…A number of biotechnology approaches are also being developed to create alternative food sources to animal products, which are often referred to as cellular agriculture (Mattick 2018;Waschulin & Specht 2018). 'Clean meat' is grown from animal cells in a bioreactor, without the need to kill any animals, which obviously has ethical advantages (Bhat et al 2019). Moreover, LCA studies have shown that growing meat under these conditions has much less impact on the environment, leading to less greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, water use and land use than conventional meat (Mattick et al 2015;Alexander et al 2017).…”