A startup company says it is growing authentic beef, pork and chicken from animal cells.
In a video posted on YouTube, Memphis Meats said it recently created the first meatball that did not require the killing of an animal. The company said it used real meat cells to grow the food.
In a news release, the San Francisco-based company said it will officially debut tomorrow. It also plans to create hot dogs, sausages and burgers and aims to sell its products within five years.
“We plan to do to the meat industry what the car did to the horse and buggy,” the company’s chief executive officer, Uma Valeti, said in a statement. “Cultured meat will completely replace the status quo and make raising animals to eat them simply unthinkable.”
Cultured meat, or that which is grown outside of an animal, is not an all-new concept.
In 2013, a professor from Maastricht University in the Netherlands announced he had grown a cultured hamburger. The university held an international symposium on cultured meat last October, billed as a meeting of the minds for all of the scientists working toward growing meat.
Cultured meat advocates say it’s a viable method to combat food shortages and climate change.
Valenti said in the video that the Memphis Meats method uses about 90 percent less greenhouse gasses than traditional agriculture would produce. It also takes just 3 calories to produce just 1 calorie of beef, compared to traditional agriculture’s need for 23, according to the news release.
Memphis Meats did not explain the exact process it uses to grow its own meat, though Maastricht University has some resources that explain how cultured beef is made.
According to the university, scientists take some muscle cells from a cow, the major component of the beef humans eat, and nurture them so they multiply into strands. It takes about 20,000 strands to create one burger, but a single sample could yield 20,000 tons of the cultured meat.
The university says cultured beef isn’t genetically modified. It’s just grown outside the animal, which isn’t killed.
Still, some people could be apprehensive to eating food that is produced in that manner.
Cultured beef also isn’t cheap.
Maastricht University reported the first cultured hamburger cost about $365,000 to produce, though that was partly because the science was still in its infancy.
However, it argues that cultured beef may be cheaper than traditional beef in the long-run.
It cited a 2011 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization that says livestock demand will increase in the next 40 years, and it will be “increasingly challenging” to match that demand. The report cautions that could drive up prices and threaten the poor’s ability to afford food.
Maastricht University says that cultured beef is safe to eat, and Memphis Meats adds its products will be free of antibiotics and other contaminants that may be found in traditional meat.
