Article Image

IPFS News Link • Food

Blood, brains and burgers: The future is lab-grown everything

• https://newatlas.com, By Rich Haridy

We may be centuries away from a single machine that can conjure up whatever we demand at a moment's notice, but we are not far off creating a variety of things we desire in laboratory conditions. We currently rear animals for meat and dairy, cut down forests for wood, harvest organs from the deceased and mine the earth for diamonds.

But what if all these things, and more, could be grown in a lab?

Meat

Over half of the planet's agricultural land is taken up by meat production. Lab-grown meat alternatives have been a focus of researchers for decades and over the last few years these innovative technologies have come closer and closer to supermarket shelves.

Creating something akin to ground beef mince was first cracked over a decade ago, but several issues slowed the development of the technology. Growing mince from cells in a lab may be one thing, but creating complex structures like steaks has proved challenging until quite recently.

In 2018 Israel company Aleph Farms presented the world's first lab-grown steak and then earlier this year it revealed that its novel 3D bioprinting technology could now create any type of steak. A thick-cut rib-eye steak produced entirely in a lab was shown as proof of the new technology.

The other big problem slowing down progress in the lab-grown meat industry has been cost-effective scaling. When the first lab-grown burger was revealed in 2011 it came with an eye-watering price tag of US$345,000.

By 2021 those costs had been substantially driven down. Chicken is looking likely to be first type of lab-grown meat to hit commercial shelves, with the world's first industrial-scale cultured meat facility recently opening in Israel. The company behind the factory says it can currently produce over 1,000 pounds of lab-grown chicken per day.

AzureStandard