From Bloomberg Businessweek, February 7:
Lab-Grown Meat Has a Bigger Problem Than the Lab
Leading scientists agree that cultured meat products won’t give you cancer, but the industry doesn’t have the decades of data to prove it—so it’s trying to avoid the question instead.
If you avoid meat to cut down on animal cruelty, carbon emissions or both, your options are a lot better than they were a decade ago, which is to say they’re … fine. For people who can afford to pay a premium, veggie burgers and nuggets from the likes of Beyond Meat Inc. and Impossible Foods Inc. are a much tastier option than the average imitation-meat entrees of the past. What they aren’t, though, is meat—and many such products are so packed with salt and saturated fat that they probably shouldn’t be a staple of most diets. There is, however, another option on the way for those in search of better guilt-free protein: growing meat from cells in a lab, without raising any living animals for slaughter. Yes, really.
Thank the biotech revolution. Under the right conditions, animal cells can be grown in a petri dish, or even at scale in factories full of stainless-steel drums. For decades, companies such as Pfizer Inc. and Johnson & Johnson have cultured large volumes of cells to produce vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and other biotherapeutics. Now the idea is that we might as well eat these cells, too.
The Big Three startups in the field—Believer Meats, Eat Just and Upside Foods—have raised more than $1.2 billion in combined venture funding to bring products to grocery shelves. From the Bay Area to the Middle East, their research facilities and pilot plants are producing small amounts of chicken that, by most accounts, you’d be hard-pressed to tell didn’t come from a slaughterhouse. Late last year, Upside became the first to receive the US Food and Drug Administration’s informal blessing to bring its products to market. All three companies have announced their first partnerships with restaurants in anticipation of a fuller regulatory thumbs-up.
Some of the companies call their products cultured meat, or cultivated meat, or cell-cultured meat. All of them stress the M-word. “This is meat,” Upside Foods Inc. Chief Executive Officer Uma Valeti said at an industry conference a little more than a year ago. “Calling it anything else, I think, is going to be misleading.” On a cellular level, alternative protein advocates say, it’s no different. And that’s 99.9% true.The big honking asterisk is that normal meat cells don’t just keep dividing forever. To get the cell cultures to grow at rates big enough to power a business, several companies, including the Big Three, are quietly using what are called immortalized cells, something most people have never eaten intentionally. Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, precancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous.
Don’t worry: Prominent cancer researchers tell Bloomberg Businessweek that because the cells aren’t human, it’s essentially impossible for people who eat them to get cancer from them, or for the precancerous or cancerous cells to replicate inside people at all. You’d be better off worrying about the nitrates (linked with cancer) or fecal matter (a source of deadly infections) found in farm-raised meat. And cow tumors sometimes wind up in store-bought ground chuck, too. Of course, the facts might not matter much if ranchers or other players in the traditional meat industry felt threatened enough to declare a public-relations war. It’s all too easy to imagine misleading Fox News chyrons about chicken tumors and cancer burgers...
...MUCH MORE
Huh, sort of like the anti-muckraker version of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.
