It is an unpleasant fact that the world cannot sustain its current water use.  Most of our water is used for agriculture and of that water over half is used to raise animal feed.  Producing food from animals results in a great deal of pollution of our planet.

So it looks as if we must eventually turn to plants and insects instead of animal products as our food source.  However, lab-produced meat is on the rise.  Plant based meat is too processed to be considered healthy and it is more expensive than animal meat.

Veganism is not yet popular with many people although percentages are increasing.  So we don’t know the planet’s future food source, except that it very likely won’t be what we are eating now.

The following article is not recent but neither is it dated.

Read the original article with photos here in the Guardian.

Comments by OSFR historian Jim Tatum.
jim.tatum@oursantaferiver.org
– A river is like a life: once taken,
it cannot be brought back © Jim Tatum

It sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. In Singapore, the US company Eat Just gained approval to sell its nuggets of lab-grown chicken to consumers in December 2020. Under the brand name “Good Meat”, Eat Just rolled out its first products at an exclusive social club. Diners sample a bao with sesame chicken and pickled cucumber and a maple waffle served with chicken nuggets.

In April, Eat Just partnered with another restaurant to begin introducing its chicken to a wider public via a delivery service. As well as the Asian chicken salad, the Cantonese restaurant is also selling their novel meat in the form of chicken dumpling and chicken fried rice. Demand has already been high – just a few minutes after appearing online, the eight servings for the day were sold out.

Cultured meat has made strides in the last few years, but production remains small. Although the science of tissue culture has been around for more than half a century, growing sufficient flesh to make an edible product at a competitive price has been the major challenge. Good Meat’s meals are priced at 23 Singapore dollars (about US$17) – certainly not a cheap portion.

The company is actively working to scale up supply and bring down costs, but it’s clear that challenges remain. Consumer production requires using larger quantities of expensive growth media and bioreactors adapted from the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. These look like the giant steel vats you might see on a brewery tour. The cells grown in these tanks are mixed with other food products to obtain a desirable taste and consistency. This high level of processing is certainly not likely to appeal to everyone.

“Tank to table” eating would sidestep some of these problems, in addition to its ethical advantages. But as the industry begins to scale up, there are other questions that need careful consideration. What resources are laboratory-made meats consuming? What is being “fed” to the bioreactors and where is this feed coming from? What sort of energy consumption is involved in keeping the reactors buzzing?

The broader economic and political effects of a substantial transition to lab-grown meat would be significant. Here the world might learn from what is already happening in Singapore. The small city-state is rapidly embracing in-vitro meat as a solution to problems of land scarcity and food security. Traditional forms of agriculture cannot meet the nation’s ambitious “30 by 30” policy goal (providing 30% of the population’s nutritional needs by 2030).

All this represents a significant opportunity. But it also raises concerns about how the industry is likely to develop. When genetically modified foods (GMFs) were introduced in the 1980s and 1990s, they caused a significant economic shift within the food industry. Through the ownership of the intellectual property in seeds, large companies such as Monsanto, Bayer, Dow, Dupont and Syngenta came to exert significantly more economic power over agriculture. Opponents of GMFs worried not only about the safety of these crops, but also about monopolistic control over the world’s food supplies. The entrepreneurial enthusiasm for lab-grown meat raises similar concerns. If Eat Just or other lab-based meat companies end up providing a significant proportion of our protein, their technologies will become increasingly critical to the world’s food supplies. This means more control over what we eat and what we pay for it.

In the long run, perhaps the ethical and environmental benefits will outweigh these social costs of lab meat. But now is also the right time to make sure that the industry develops in ways that don’t result in monopoly ownership of the food supply or the flattening of food culture. The investments that the Singapore government is making should result not only in more private ownership but in a “commons” of new food technologies, where some resources are publicly owned and communities have a role in governing and managing them. These investments should also be used to ensure as much diversity as possible in lab-grown products.

We need a lab meat that serves public as well as private interests. These are the stakes of becoming a cytovore.

• Hallam Stevens is an associate professor of history in the school of humanities at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Yvonne Ruperti is a lecturing instructor in baking and pastry arts at the Culinary Institute of America’s Singapore campus