Lab-grown meat, which can also be referred to as cultivated or cultured meat, is real meat that’s grown directly from animal cells. According to Eric Schuzle, the vice-president of product and regulation at UPSIDE Foods, these products are “real meat, made without the need to raise and slaughter animals.”

Cultivated meat may sound like a thing of the future, but it’s closer to reaching supermarket shelves than you might think. In fact, the first piece of lab-grown meat hit the world stage in 2013 when a team at the University of Maastricht presented the first hamburger produced by bovine stem cells. At the time, this original burger cost more than $300,000 to create. But researchers found that two years later, they were able to reduce the cost to $11.36. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the world population will surpass 9.1 billion by 2050, at which point agricultural systems will not be able to supply enough food to feed everyone. But could lab-grown meat help fill this void? Here’s what we know so far. According to researchers in the Journal of Integrative Agriculture, lab-grown meat is made by using the more-than-100-year-old technique of in vitro muscle tissue growth.

“The process of making cultivated meat is similar to brewing beer, in that this is an industrial cell culture process based upon well-hewn fermentation technology,” says Schuzle. “However, instead of growing yeast or bacteria, we grow animal cells. We start by taking a small amount of cells from high-quality livestock animals, like a cow or chicken, and then figure out which of those cells have the ability to multiply and form delicious meat food products. “From there, we put the cells in a clean-and-controlled environment and provide them with the essential nutrients they need to naturally replicate and mature. In essence, we can recreate the conditions that naturally exist inside an animal’s body so that the cells can continue growing. Once the meat is ready, we harvest it, process it like conventional meat products, and then package, cook or otherwise prepare it for consumption.”

Schuzle adds: “We’re excited about this as a new way to produce meat because our cells can continue growing many times over as compared to those in the animal. In effect, we can grow many animals from the cells of just one animal for many years to come.”

Source: https://www.livescience.com/

The convergence of two technologies is making it possible to free up millions of hectares of agricultural land devoted to livestock. A combination of culturing cells and 3D printing of all types of meat is likely to change land use and the diet of hundreds of millions of people around the world. It could provide reliable food sources even in the face of floods, drought and other environmental catastrophes.

I’m not a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) afficionado. But imagine if KFC were to produce its chicken nuggets from stem cells and 3D-printing plants. In 2020 the news wires lit up with stories of a Moscow, Russia, research laboratory under contract to the fried chicken restaurant chain to produce 3D-printed chicken nuggets.

For KFC the announcement could be seen as a public relations coup since the company is often the target of animal rights advocacy groups. KFC is truly a global enterprise, found in 145 countries at 24,000 individual locations. According to PETA, an organization focused on the ethical treatment of animals, 9 billion chickens raised on factory farms are slaughtered for their meat in the U.S. every year. A good percentage of that number go to fast-food chains like KFC.

That’s why KFC sees the growing of meat harvested from cell-cultures as a way out of the ethical dilemma. A future where the restauranteur can say “no chickens were killed here” would be a welcome mantra with other potential benefits to the global enivronment.

This is cellular agriculture. Its products are called cultured meat. The source of cultured meat is animal stem cells harvested from subject hosts that are not slaughtered. Once ideal chicken, pig, sheep, cattle, etc., candidates are identified, stem cells are harvested and then using electronic, chemical and biological culturing cultivated to create vast populations of cells of various tissue types from muscle to fat.

Turning stem cells from host animals into chicken pieces, beef steaks, pork and lamb chops, and other cuts of meat requires scaffoldings of bio-absorbable materials which form a framework for 3D printers to apply these cells as “ink” to create finished cuts. Getting the balance of fat to protein to give the 3D-printed meat the same look, texture, and taste is a challenge that the technology in time can meet. The company KFC has produced plant-based “chicken” nuggets and tried them on customers in the United States using Beyond Meats’ chicken products.

KFC Singapore has announced that it has debuted its first-ever meat-free alternative product called Zero Chicken Burger. It will be available for consumers at all KFC Singapore restaurants except the outlets at Singapore Polytechnic and Singapore Zoo.

Claiming to have a similar taste to that of chicken, the poultry-free Zero Chicken Burger showcases a mycoprotein meat-free patty made with Colonel Sanders’ original recipe of 11 herbs and spices. Mycoprotein is a protein derived from fungi popularised by Quorn for its meat-like texture. The burger preparation also includes lettuce and sliced cheese topped with mayonnaise and BBQ sauce making the sesame bun burger unsuitable for vegans.

Source: https://stem-cells.in-the.news/
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https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/

The price of producing a burger patty made from lab-grown meat is expected to drop to $10 by 2021, according to Dutch food technology company Mosa Meat and Spain-based Biotech Foods. Mosa Meats co-founder Mark Post created the first lab-grown beef burger (using a small amount of animal cells grown in a lab setting) in 2013 at a cost of €250,000 ($280,400)—funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin—but Mosa Meat and Biotech Foods say production costs have fallen dramatically since then. The average cost of producing a kilogram of lab-grown meat (also known as cultured meat) is now about €100 ($112) which is significantly lower than the $800 cited a year ago by Israeli biotech company Future Meat Technologies.

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“The burger was this expensive in 2013 because back then it was novel science and we were producing at a very small scale,” a Mosa Meat spokeswoman told media outlet Reuters. “Once production is scaled up, we project the cost of producing a hamburger will be around €9 ($10).” And they could ultimately become even cheaper than a conventional burger, the spokesperson said. A number of companies have invested in research and development of lab-grown meat in recent years. Biotech Foods hopes to reach production scale of its meat and have regulatory approval by 2021, when it expects to begin generating revenue. Earlier this year, animal agriculture feed supplier Cargill announced its investment in lab-grown meat company Aleph Foods to help the startup brings its slaughter-free steak to market.

Source: https://vegnews.com/