Fake meat not so palatable

I'm reminded via another blog that lab grown meat has been in the news lately, with an upbeat (more of a beat up, actually, as you will see) article in the SMH with an absurdly misleading headline "how synthetic sausages could be on our plates in six months time."

Err, no.

The report notes the work in the Netherlands that is hoping to make enough lab grown cells to make a hamburger in 6 months time.

People who want to know more about their work should read this interview from the Science Show earlier this year:

Joel Werner: So how long will it take you to produce the mince for a hamburger? I mean, you're talking about small muscle strips, but the hamburger patties I like to eat anyway are relatively large.

Mark Post: Right, so that requires making about 3,000 of these small pieces, and of course that takes time, so we estimate that it will take a year to make that first hamburger, and it will also cost 300,000 euros.....

Joel Werner: So what are the stumbling blocks to reaching that future?

Mark Post: Well, there are a couple of scientific issues, technological issues. One is to get the protein content higher than it is right now, it's now about 70%, and it needs to go up to 90%, 95%. Then there is of course eventually the scaling up of the whole process and quality control, because you don't want these cells to go into a cancer mode or anything like that, so you need to quality control it. And finally we need people to accept the concept....

Mark Post: For many of them it would. We actually spoke to the chairperson of the Vegetarian Society here in the Netherlands and she said, 'I wouldn't eat it because it still requires animal cells, but I'm sure that more than 50% of my constituents will start eating meat.' We still need donor animals to get the adult stem cells. We need a supply of donor animals, but we figure that a factor of 1 million less than we are using right now, and we may be able to improve that even more.

So, let's get this straight: at the moment, they have small pieces of pale, not high in protein, strips of cells that don't taste like meat. (Towards the end of the interview, they mentioned that someone did taste a bit.)

Also, as you still need the stem cells to grow it, vegetarians are still capable of objecting to it.

The other point to note is that, according to another Science Show interview on the topic, you are not likely to have any lab grown meat that resembles a steak any time soon:

....they never tell you when you're a kid that meat is muscle, and if you take a piece of muscle it is not just beef cells. You've got mostly the striated muscle cells, as they're called, which make up the bulk of the meat, probably 85% of it. They are called striated because if you look at the muscle cells under the microscope, each cell grows like a long fibre, like a ladder if you like or like a railway track, because across it are these very, very fine lines, like the sleepers or the rungs of a ladder. And those are the little lines that slide into each other and cause the muscle to contract. Those are the striated muscle fibres...

Robyn Williams: Are you saying that they are so complicated that you can't actually culture them?

Brian J Ford: No, you could culture those as much as you want, but all you are going to get is a culture of striated muscle and that's not meat, that is most of meat but it doesn't look like meat, it wouldn't have the texture of meat, it would be soft and slimy and mushy and slippery because those striated muscle fibre cells are held together in layers of what are called fibrocytes, fibre producing cells. And the fibrocytes produce thin...I don't know, like a cross between a piece of polythene and a piece of tissue paper. You see that kind of tissue when you take a piece of meat and lay it down on the kitchen slab, it's the surface coating of each part of the meat.

Frankly, it sounds like the future of lab grown meat is only going to be in something resembling mince, and even then it sounds like a hell of a lot of work is to be done to make it taste like beef.

It does sound to me like a ridiculously pie in the sky scheme, when you can just kill a cow instead.

One other interesting thing which I had never heard of before from that interview with Ford is this:

...it was in 1976 in a book called Microbe Power that I said how in a few square miles of countryside one could actually produce enough microbial protein to feed the entire world. That is true, and it has almost become true because...I don't know whether quorn is particularly popular in Aussie?

Robyn Williams: It is not necessarily so.

Brian J Ford: It's a vegetable protein which is very popular in England and now very popular in the United States as well, and it's produced by taking a fungus, which was originally discovered growing on barley in a field in the midlands of England about 30 or 40 years ago, and you grow this fungus so that it produces a sort of a rubbery, chalky mass which you then texturalised to be like meat, you add flavours to it to make it taste like meat, you mince it up or chop it into little cubes so that it looks quite like meat, and it is used as a substitute for meat.

This is grown in factories, and it seems to me to be very paradoxical, this. Quorn is particularly popular amongst natural food addicts, people who are vegetarians and others love quorn.

And here I'd never heard of it before. But Googling around, and it looks like Quorn based products are indeed available in Australia.

So we apparently already have a vegetarian based "fake meat" that is apparently better tasting than soy based products, and it could easily supply the world's protein needs? If anything, Quorn sounds like a much better solution to the "feed the world" issues that lab grown meat are fancifully suggested as answering.

I'm going to go looking for Quorn when next near a health food supermarket.