These are tragic events, and this summer in the northern hemisphere has seen an unusual number of severe fires. Many families have been affected and many on Hawaii have lost loved ones.
I hope that many of you managed to tune into our "Cultivated Conversations" webinar earlier in the week. We hear a lot about how lab grown meat presents the world with an opportunity to produce more with less, to feed more of the world's growing (and poor) population with meat without the need for more livestock.
The reality as always is more nuanced. At the moment, finding the scale to make this anything like price competitive with real meat is elusive. As with any start up that seeks to disrupt, there are myriad claims about the sustainability, nutritional value and comparability with real meat that simply cannot be verified until production at scale is taking place.
The growth media required is expensive. That alone presents a challenge to a price competitive product. Of course, the price is expected to fall, but that still leaves questions about the inputs, land and energy required to produce that media.
The biggest question of all about a large scale production facility is about energy. The source of that energy is pivotal in determining whether lab meat can have a lower GHG footprint. Using only renewable energy, it might be feasible, but there are a lot of embodied emissions in such a plant, and the depreciation on hardware will become a significant factor in cost.
To date, no lab meat facility with anything like the capacity of a traditional slaughter plant has been built. The technical challenges of keeping such a large facility sterile are huge, and the level of complexity increases rapidly with size. The counter argument is that these should be small and locally operated businesses within communities, supplying a "democratic" product to local people.
This is a laudable aim, but they still need to be operated to stringent hygienic standards, are energy intensive and require highly specialized inputs (media etc.) and therefore will require highly trained operatives.
While it is nice to paint them as democratic, clearly the companies that own patents on the technology are not going to be giving it away for nothing. Although there have been recent approvals in the US, the volume of product that has ever reached consumers is vanishingly small. The Singapore "chicken nuggets" from lab grown meat sell for $20 a piece and at that, they are losing money.
Undoubtedly, there will be breakthroughs and progress towards cheaper products at higher volume, but some of the technical challenges are well known, particularly with regard to upscaling, because the vaccine industry has been growing animal cells for decades and knows the hurdles involved.
So will it ever compete alongside real meat? Will it make a dent in food availability and protein supply? What will the nutritional value of these products be? Is it, again, a question of adding supplements until it can be made to appear as nutritious as real meat?
Listen to the recording if you missed the webinar. An email with the recording link will be sent early next week.
