Agri Kultuur June / Junie 2018 | Page 15

said he could not tell the difference between
a wrap containing real chicken and one with
the Beyond Meat chicken strips. Chef Alton
Brown, tasting the product for Wired magazine,
estimates the strips could replace chicken in
“at least 30% of the existing chicken recipes
floating around out there, and that’s a few
hundred thousand (depending on who you
ask).”
Cellular Agriculture
One way to get around the challenges of
using plant proteins and fats to recreate the
taste and texture of meat is to use real meat
cells instead. Much like tissue engineering
grows new organs in the lab, this approach
grows muscle cells in culture. A team led by
Mark J. Post of Maastricht University, in the
Netherlands, was the first to unveil a lab-
grown hamburger produced from thin strips
of cultured beef.
To create the strips, the researchers first
isolate muscle cells from a piece of cow
tissue. As the cells grow in culture, they form
tubes 0.3 mm long, which the researchers
then wrap around a cylinder of gel. The tubes
grow into each other and naturally contract.
Because of their circular arrangement, this
contraction generates tension in the tubes,
which encourages protein production and
natural muscle tissue development into small
fibre bundles. After 3 weeks, the researchers
harvest a ring of tissue and slice it open to get
a 25-mm-long strip.
The process is not yet anywhere near as
efficient as growing cow cells in a cow. The
lab’s 85-g burger, unveiled in August 2013,
used about 10,000 strips of muscle, and at
the time, reportedly cost more than $300,000
to produce, grown on nutrient-rich medium
containing glucose. And while tasters said the
burger had an “intense taste close to meat”
and a “familiar mouthfeel”, some noted that
the muscle-only patty was a little lean. Post
said the team is working on culturing fat cells
to combine with the lab-grown muscle tissue.
They also hope to tailor the culture conditions
to get the composition of muscle proteins
actin, myosin, and myoglobin that produces a
natural taste—and with an efficiency to allow
large-scale production.
Though cult uring tissue requires energy to
sterilize equipment and stir fermentation
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tanks, a 2011 life-cycle analysis suggests
that, with even a little scale-up, the process
could be better than a cow. Growing 1,000 kg
of meat with nutrients from cyanobacteria
would use much less energy, water, and land,
and the process would generate dramatically
less greenhouse gas than traditional beef
production, according to the analysis. Applying
standard biotechnology and engineering
techniques to the process should bring the
costs down, says Isha Datar, executive director
of New Harvest, a New York based non-profit
that awards grants to researchers working on
“cellular agriculture”.
Meat is not the only target for this technology.
Datar says the group is trying to kick-start an
industry for animal products made without
animals. New Harvest recently collaborated
with a start-up company called Clara Foods
that is producing egg white proteins in yeast;
the proteins can be fried just like a regular
egg, added to cake batter, or whipped into
a meringue. Within six months of starting at
a San Francisco biotech accelerator, a cell
biologist and his business partner developed
the product and raised $1.75 million in seed
funding.
It remains to be seen whether these new
products will sate our carnivorous desires.
Investors seem willing to take a gamble,
though, and Impossible Foods’s Brown
is optimistic, noting that technology has
eliminated animals from our daily lives
before. About two hundred years ago, horses
were the fastest transportation, one even
winning a race against the first mechanized
transportation, the steam locomotive. While
horses have not gotten much faster since then,
Brown says, the performance of mechanized
transportation improves every year. He thinks
Impossible Foods is in a similar position with
respect to food. “We’re getting better every
day, and we’re going to continue to get better”,
he says, “... in ways the cows can’t.”
Sources:
Melissae Fellet: A Fresh Take on Fake Meat:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/
PMC4827462/ Copyright © 2015 American
Chemical Society. Open access article
published under an ACS AuthorChoice License,
which permits copying and redistribution
of the article or any adaptations for non-
commercial purposes.
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