No animals were killed to make the £50 meatball in front of me, created from stem cells at a lab in Oxford. ‘Cellular meat’ may one day feed the world. But will we want to eat it?
Mark Schomberg looks tense as he rolls the single brown meatball carefully around a frying pan with a pair of tongs. He has cooked for the rich and famous at five-star hotels and private members’ clubs, but this is no ordinary meatball. This is a £50 (NZ$95) laboratory-grown pork meatball — no animals have been killed to make it. And if Schomberg, development chef for the Oxford-based Ivy Farm Technologies, looks nervous, I am doubly so because I’m the guinea pig who’s about to eat it. This is the first time anyone other than staff and half a dozen investors have been allowed to try Ivy Farm’s lab-grown meat.
I’ve had to sign a disclaimer to acknowledge it is in the research phase — the company has not yet applied to the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA), or any overseas government regulator, for its meat to be sold commercially, so I’m doing this on trust. “It sizzles, it browns, as you can see, it cooks identically,” says Schomberg, 39, proudly serving the meatball onto a plate with a tiny swirl of spaghetti, a dab of tomato sauce and four miniature basil leaves. “It tastes like pork because it is pork,” he tells me. “This is you tasting the future.”
The future looks appetising, even if it may not sound it: this meatball was created by taking fat and muscle cells from an anaesthetised live pig and feeding the cells nutrients and oxygen in a series of bioreactors — large steel vats — over two or three weeks, until they grow into a meaty pulp. This pulp is then moulded into the miniature hors d’oeuvre before me. They can make sausages too.
“That’s an expensive meatball,” grins Rich Dillon, 47, Ivy Farm’s chief executive, holding an iPhone to record my reaction. “That would be the cost of a three-course meal at a restaurant. I hope you enjoy every single succulent bite.”
Ivy Farm Technologies was founded only three years ago by Dr Russ Tucker, 37, and Dr Cathy Ye, 45, who met at Oxford University where Tucker studied for a PhD in biomedical engineering and Ye is an associated professor in the subject. It has already raised £24 million of investment.
Tucker comes from a long line of butchers and farmers in Worcestershire. Growing up, he thought all animals enjoyed the same freedom as those on his grandfather’s sprawling farm. However, while working as a consultant to supermarkets, he learnt more about industrial farming processes and the volume of meat imports to the UK. He quit his job and contacted Ye to see if they could solve the conundrum of how to satisfy the country’s demand for meat using less land. “We cannot rely on people putting down their steak knives. We are running out of planet,” he said in a TED talk in January last year.
Ivy Farm aims to have its “sustainable, guilt-free meat” in restaurants and supermarkets within a few years. “Eighty billion animals are slaughtered every year for food,” Dillon says. “In the future, when this industry becomes successful, we won’t need to do that.”
The company has ambitions to produce 12,000 tonnes of cell-based pork a year by 2025-26 — the equivalent of 300 million sausages. “You would have to kill 170,000 pigs to produce that much meat,” Dillon says. “In the future, potentially one pig could feed the world. We could be food secure with no need to farm animals on the scale and size that we do.” Scientists are exploring this: to feed the world from just a few animals they must find the perfect starter cells for a cell line that can proliferate on a mass scale.
According to the United Nations, global demand for meat is expected to increase by 73 per cent between 2010 and 2050 — owing to both population growth and rising consumption in parts of the world including China. The United Nations has said we cannot sustain a planet eating “an animal protein-rich diet in 2050″, pointing out that it takes 1500 litres of water to produce a kilogram of cereal but 15,000 to produce one kilogram of meat. Livestock consumes a third of global cereal production, while grazing is a key driver of deforestation — not to mention the greenhouse gases emitted by cow burps and flatulence.
Food stats you may not know:
— Ivy Farm (@ivyfarm_tech) October 16, 2022
🌎 2.3bn people in the world experience food insecurity
🍽️ 1.3bn tonnes of food is wasted every year
🚜 Agriculture is the 2nd biggest contributor to climate change#CultivatedMeat can fix our broken food system.
#WorldFoodDay pic.twitter.com/qonSZYr9XE
Lab-grown meat could be part of the solution: the industry is in its infancy but there are already 300 cellular agriculture companies worldwide working on everything from cell-based duck and beef to salmon and lobster. Nutritionally, Ivy Farm says its lab-grown pork is the same as butchered pork, if not better. “Our protein levels are equivalent,” says Emma Lewis, the company’s vice-president of product. “The amino acid profile of our meat is similar and in terms of iron, our initial analysis shows it is a little bit higher. We have the ability to enable a better ratio of saturated to unsaturated fats, so we could have a higher ratio of omega-3 fatty acids, for example, in our products.”
The consultancy McKinsey predicts the industry could be worth £25 billion by 2030 and “not just match but surpass the taste and texture of conventional meat”.
So let’s put it to the taste test. As I take a bite, the company’s chief executive, two vice-presidents, chef Schomberg and two communications officers watch me in silence. I feel like the Man from Del Monte, the fruit inspector from the 1980s adverts. Fortunately, I detect a familiarly rich flavour, indistinguishable from the real thing. “It … tastes like pork. It’s really good,” I say, to the visible relief of the team.
The consistency, however, is slightly less authentic — smoother and softer than conventional meat. Texture, I am told, is one of the hardest challenges for Ivy Farm, partly because the scientists take and grow only muscle and fat cells and leave behind gristle and cartilage. “It is tough to replicate,” Dillon admits. “We’re working on our processes to give the mince more texture. To get to a steak or a whole cut, that’s a long way away, my best guess would be 2035. The marbling of the fat within the fibres requires vascularisation.”
Vascularisation is the process of growing blood vessels to improve oxygen and nutrient supply, and they’re not there yet. At Ivy Farm’s pilot plant, scientists in white lab coats use tweezers to extract pieces of muscle and fat from pig flesh and place them into test tubes. They then use powerful microscopes to select and isolate the best cells — the ones most likely to reproduce at a rapid rate. These cells are “fed” a tailored (and expensive) liquid of oxygen plant-derived components including glucose, amino acids, fats and vitamins, which will help them to grow in size and multiply. “Our cells don’t have a stomach and they are not living in grass fields. So we give [the meat] its nutrients in a broken down form,” Dillon says.
They bubble away in this brew for days until the cells are visible to the naked eye, the flecks suspended in the mixture. As they grow they are transferred to larger bioreactors until the particles are big enough to be poured into “Betty” — the site’s largest 600-litre tank, which is capable of producing 2.8 tonnes of meat a year.
It takes around two to three weeks to grow the 12 trillion cells required to produce a single kilogram of meat.
The pulp goes through a centrifuge where the pinkish liquid is removed, leaving behind pure muscle or fat, depending on which substance is being produced at the time. The fat and muscle are later combined to make meat approximating the consistency of mince. “At this point it’s basically mincemeat, but without all the bits you don’t want. We just grow the best bits,” Dillon says.
Ivy Farm — a bucolic play on the initials IV, short for in vitro — is reluctant to show me what the meat looks like in its raw form, after it has emerged from the centrifuge prior to cooking. What happens in the bioreactor stays in the bioreactor, at least when the media are visiting.
“Cell-based meat emerges as a sludge, it’s a slurry kind of thing,” says Anthony Chow, co-founder of Agronomics, a London-listed venture capital firm that has invested in 24 international cellular agriculture companies (Ivy Farm is not one of them). “Your readers probably don’t want to hear that, but it is a liquid with lots of cells in it. You rinse the cells and you’ve just got a kind of paste that you can put into sausages, meatballs, whatever you want.”
Chow points out that scenes from an abattoir would be a far worse sight. “People are willing to put slaughterhouses out of their minds when they eat meat, why not sterile bioreactors?”
The biggest challenge these companies face — the lab-grown elephant in the room — is cost. Sceptics say that producing cellular meat on a mass scale at an affordable price poses a huge, perhaps impossible, challenge, but Dillon insists it is a case of “when and not if” lab-grown meat arrives on supermarket shelves. Ivy Farm believes it can get its meatballs down from £50 to 50p once it is able to produce on a much bigger scale at a larger facility. Prices have already fallen dramatically from 2013 when the first lab-grown burger, unveiled in London by the Dutch physiologist Professor Mark Post, cost £215,000 to make.
Eat Just, a San Francisco-based company that launched the first lab-grown chicken in 2020, managed to reduce the cost of a single chicken nugget from US$1000 to US$50 (about NZ$1571 to NZ$78). It now sells its nuggets for a loss-making US$3 at food stalls in Singapore — the only country to have approved the commercial sale of cellular meat — to encourage people to try them. “We’re currently making a modest amount of meat and it’s not yet profitable,” a spokesman says.
Ivy Farm says the liquid the cells are grown in makes up the majority of its production costs, and that this expense will inevitably fall when more companies start to produce it specifically for cultured meat and not — as they are now — for medical uses such as human vaccine production.
Then there’s the question of government approval. Ivy Farm intends to open its first large manufacturing facility and launch its products overseas, most likely in the US, where regulation on meat production has been less stringent than in the UK. Britain used to adhere to strict EU regulation on cultivated meat and other so-called “novel foods”, and no EU country has yet approved the commercial sale of lab-grown meat. In November the US Food and Drug Administration declared that lab-grown chicken produced by Upside Foods, a start-up based in Berkeley, California, was safe for human consumption.
Elsewhere, the Dutch government has just announced a £50 million investment in cellular agriculture, while the Singapore government has already invested millions in the industry as part of its ambition to produce 30 per cent of the country’s nutritional needs locally by 2030.
Conversations between UK regulators and lab-grown meat producers are said to have been delayed as a result of Brexit. The FSA says it has yet to receive any applications for lab-grown meat but insists it recognises “the potential of alternative proteins”. Chow, the Agronomics investor, predicts it will be sold in UK restaurants as a premium product by 2024 and in mainstream supermarkets in 10 years.
The PR challenge
First, the public must be convinced. A recent survey by the FSA found only 34 per cent of British consumers would be willing to try lab-grown meat. A third thought it would be safe, compared with three-quarters for plant-based proteins.
Marketeers in the industry know there is a perception problem and balk at the phrase “lab-grown”. They point out that much of our food (including plant-based meat substitutes) is engineered in factories and laboratories already. Instead they prefer a baffling array of terms including “cultivated”, “cellular”, “cultured” and even “clean” meat.
One of the benefits of producing meat from cells in a sterile, disease-free environment is that every process from cell isolation to cultivation is tracked, they say. This means that, compared with farmed livestock, there is little risk of food poisoning from bacteria or parasites such as listeria, salmonella, campylobacter, Toxoplasma gondii and E.coli.
“What do we really know about where our meat comes from?” Dillon says. “What antibiotics it took, whether it was sick? Remember the horsemeat scandal? With this meat, we know exactly which animal we took the cells from. It is in its purest form. It is basically the healthiest mincemeat.”
The pork meatball I ate was developed using muscle tissue from a live pig raised on a farm and used for research by a UK veterinary institution. Ivy Farm has not confirmed where its cell samples will come from when production is scaled up, but says it has previously used animals that have died naturally on local farms, as well as anaesthetised living animals. In the future it hopes to source cells from premium Aberdeen Angus cows and Iberian pigs.
From an animal rights perspective, however, the industry had a controversial start: in the early days of developing cellular meat most companies relied on foetal bovine serum, extracted from the hearts of calf embryos, as a key ingredient to grow the meat cells. Harvesting the nutrient-rich blood of foetuses from dead pregnant cows that had been slaughtered in the dairy or meat industries would clearly have been contrary to the aims of “clean” meat, and was expensive, so an alternative had to be found before it was launched to the public. Most cultured meat companies now use a plant-based liquid to grow their cells.
Nonetheless, these companies are unlikely to convert the most ardent vegetarian or vegan because they still source cells from animals and, in some cases, could source them from by-products of the meat industry. Instead they are aiming to win over so-called “reluctant reducers”, Dillon says. “We have designed our products for people who want to reduce their meat consumption a bit even though they love it, because they feel as though it’s the right thing to do.”
Despite not being able to sell its meat in the UK, Ivy Farm says it will remain a key location for research and development. It was, after all, only down the road at Oxford University where its founders, Tucker and Ye, studied for their PhDs. Half of the 60 workers at Ivy Farm’s new multimillion-pound pilot plant hold PhDs, in subjects such as engineering and biotechnology. Some are experts in stem cell research and regenerative medicine in fields ranging from Alzheimer’s disease to infertility.
My tour of the facility coincides with a big day for the company. Its first bovine specimen has arrived — a dairy cow from a veterinary institution — from which Ivy Farm intends to grow cellular beef mince.
“There is a lot of potential in that room,” says Filipa Soares, vice-president of research and technology, pointing out five people examining a 100g piece of meat with tweezers. “It is a very exciting moment for us.”
As we leave the laboratory, Schomberg is working in his research kitchen on a new prototype of lab-grown pepperoni for pizza. “It’s still got a way to go, but Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he says.
Written by: Louise Eccles
© The Times of London