On my morning dog walk, my path takes me past a field where a small herd of cattle grazes. I usually pause there, partly because my dog is utterly fascinated by cows, and partly because it’s a pleasingly bucolic scene.
This is what I picture when I think of livestock farming: cows or sheep wandering around munching grass in a field. Then, like a lot of us who don’t work in farming or meat production, I probably don’t dwell as much as I should on what happens between the grazing part and the meat we see on supermarket shelves.
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But there is a burgeoning meat production industry that looks very different from this, which is set to offer us an innovative alternative using science: meat grown, not in an animal but cultured from a single cell, in a vessel inside an industrial production facility.
Personally, I’m curious to try it. And if there is a way I can indulge my appetite for meatballs and sausages without the need for an animal to be slaughtered, I’m keen to explore it.
But lab-grown, or cultured, meat companies are already making environmental claims that need to be borne out by the evidence.
The production of meat from livestock is estimated to be responsible for well over a tenth of our global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN, and that’s only set to increase as the global population, and its demand for protein rises.
UK Research and Innovation – the government body that directs the country’s scientific research funding – recently launched a National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre, announcing that cultured meat “could soon be a sustainable and nutritious part of our diets”.
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Because lab-grown meat doesn’t need herds of livestock and land for grazing, advocates say it’s an alternative with a much lighter environmental footprint. But not all grazing is equal.
A recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change revealed that, if properly managed, grazing can actually help sequester carbon from the air into the ground. But over-grazing, and the resulting loss of carbon from the soil due to soil erosion, is much more widespread.
One widely reported preliminary study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, yet to be peer-reviewed, involved what’s known as a life cycle analysis and concluded that the carbon footprint of lab-grown beef could in fact be much higher than beef farmed from an animal.
The study tried to unpick the emissions costs of running these facilities and heating the culture media that the cells grow in. The ingredients for this nutrient-rich media, which feeds the cells, have to be grown somewhere. And extra energy is needed to stir and heat the cultured animal cells as they grow because the cow or sheep are not doing that part of the job.
Dr John Lynch from Oxford University explained to me recently, when I was making a radio programme about cultivated meat, that it is too soon to compare the climate costs of the cultivated meat sector with traditional agriculture.
The industry is too young and there will be economies of scale as it develops. Cultured meat companies may also boost their environmental credentials by using renewable energy sources to power their production facilities.
However some of these companies are already declaring that their product is more sustainable. We will need some data to back up some of those assertions. And it does our environment no favours to claim that this will be an easy silver bullet.
There is good reason to believe that cultured meat production will have a lighter environmental footprint than rearing and slaughtering cows and sheep. But as Lynch pointed out to me, it won’t be intrinsically good for the planet, just better than conventional agricultural production.
And this is if people actually want to eat cultured meat. Brits are not always hungry for scientific innovation. Take the backlash and alarmist coverage about genetically modified foods, for example.
In a (very non-scientific) exercise of gathering some vox pop on the streets of Cardiff when we were making our radio programme, we heard a lot of suspicion. “It doesn’t sound natural” and “it’s not real meat”.
We also visited a cultured meat company in Oxford, where we observed how the product was made. On that day, a batch of Aberdeen Angus beef was being processed, all cultured from one specially selected, particularly “meaty” cell.
I wasn’t allowed to taste the result – it has not been approved for human consumption here yet. When it is, I’ll be keen to try it. But I won’t pretend I’ll be saving the planet.
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