Guess what’s coming to dinner

The future of food is here, with lab-based meats being trialled and a cornucopia of plant-based products already stacked on shelves. But does it live up to the hype? Jacinta Bowler unpacks the what, why and how of meat 2.0.

There’s nothing better than a barbecue on a hot day. But actual meat is now not the only grill goods on offer: it seems like new types of meat-free sausages, schnitzels and salami appear on the supermarket shelves every other week.

But how are plant-based meats actually made? And when are we likely to see cultivated (better known as lab-grown) meat available on shelves? Plus, are either of these options a cut above the real thing?

Let’s tuck into the science of fake meats.

What is real meat?

To understand what fake meats are trying to imitate or replicate, first we have to understand good ol’ regular meat.

Let’s use beef as an example. A beef burger patty is a mix of fat and muscle tissue from a cow. A patty might be in the realm of 20% fat and 80% muscle tissue.

When it comes to beef patties you might think of a piece of perfectly marbled steak being ground up into mince. That’s how it happens if you grind your own meat, but at the commercial scale things are a little different. To get the right percentages of fat and muscle tissue in the burger, butchers will mix meats from a bunch of different cows, and they can even be from different countries.

“It’s the melting fat that gives a burger that real mouthfeel and flavour. The higher the fat percentage … the tastier – but also sloppier – the burger.”

Protein filaments in the muscles – which normally make the muscle contract and relax – are what makes meat chewy. When a patty is cooked, the muscle fibres shrivel and coagulate – this is why the patty shrinks down when it hits a barbecue. But it’s the melting fat that gives a burger that real mouthfeel and flavour. The higher the fat percentage (up to around 30%), the tastier – but also sloppier – the burger.

You might think the red juice you see coming out of a burger when it cooks is blood. Actually, it’s water expelling from the muscles, mixed with an oxygen-carrying protein called myoglobin.

Plant-based meat

As a vegetarian I’d be the first to say that plant-based meat has gotten significantly more pleasant in the last few years.

The key driver is not what ingredients are used, but the development of better techniques to make it more meat-like.

What goes into a burger patty has mostly stayed the same – the protein might come from soy, wheat, pea, fungi or fava. The fat normally comes from coconut oil or vegetable shortening, which are solid at room temperature and melt as they heat up. But how these ingredients are processed makes a big difference.

Originally, some plant-meats were made with a technique called “shear cell processing”. These products have a spongier texture, and they don’t need refrigeration.

Nowadays, it’s all about extrusion. Ingredients, water and oil are mixed together and pressurised through a teeny tiny hole called a die. In a technique called “high moisture extrusion”, the protein is also heated in the extruder machine itself and then quickly cooled down to create fibres that mimic the muscle in a real animal.

“I think the plant-based meat industry has had so much amazing innovation over the past decade,” says Dr Bianca Le, the founder and chair of Cellular Agriculture Australia.

“Plant-based meats today versus where they were five years ago – drastic difference, and that is because of this extrusion technique.”

It’s not just the texture that’s changed – in newer fake-meat burgers, you might also see a red tinge. A company called Impossible Burgers creates this colour using a genetically engineered plant-based version of heme, the iron-carrying molecule also in myoglobin. However, you might be more likely to have had Beyond Meat burgers, which just use beetroot extract for a similar effect.

But what about health? Comparing schnitzels to schnitzels, it’s not as different as you might think.

A study last year from the George Institute for Global Health looked at 132 plant-based meats and 658 regular meats, all available in Aussie supermarkets. This included a huge variety of products like burger patties, sausages, bacon, chicken and meat in pastry like sausage rolls.

Both the plant and animal products had around the same levels of processing and contained similar amounts of protein. But plant-based meat products had more fibre and a lot less saturated fat and sodium than the animal meat products.

There was one downside to the plant-based versions: only 12% were “fortified” with important nutrients like iron, vitamin B12 and zinc. Although they can also be found in certain plants, most people get these vitamins from animal products.

Unfortunately, many of the foods – both meat and plant based – were considered to be “ultra-­processed”, a category that includes pizza and doughnuts. So they’re definitely a sometimes food.

Lab-grown meat

What if you didn’t need to worry about pea protein and coconut oil? What if you could just have real beef, minus the cow?

That’s the promise of cultivated meat (also called lab-grown meat). But does it live up to the hype?

“Cell cultures have been around for decades. They’ve been scaled and used for commercial production of antibodies, medicines, drugs,” says Le. “Now it has been used for food for the first time.”

The not-so-secret ingredient in cultivated meat is stem cells. These are cells that can replicate and form all the other types of cells in the body. A lab-meat maker only has to take a sample of skin the size of a rice grain from a living animal – from a cow’s ear, for instance – to start the process.

The next step is to chemically reprogram the cells using molecules called Yamanaka factors that target particular areas of DNA, causing them to revert to stem cells. The cells get turned into a cell culture line – that’s a population of genetically identical cells descended from one cell – which replicates and can be turned into either muscle tissue or fat as the stem cells differentiate.

“You put [these cell cultures] into the bioreactor, which is a big stainless-steel tank – think of a brewery tank,” explains Le.

“You feed it cell-culture media and then the cells grow in that tank. After however many days or weeks … you’re going to get a massive expansion of cells. Then you just harvest it.”

You can think of the cell-culture media as food. It’s typically made up of plant-based amino acids, proteins and glucose, but in smaller quantities than what needs to be fed to a cow for an equivalent amount of meat.

Mix the fat and muscle tissue together like they do with real meat and presto – instant burger patties! However, at that point you only have a bunch of fat and muscle cells. This is fine for things like minced meat and burger patties, but for products like steaks or bacon, you’d have to create a scaffold to put the cells into to give it the right shape and texture.

Interestingly, Le thinks that cultivated meat makers might be able to use some of the plant-based extrusion techniques to get these kinds of textures, but it isn’t the only game in town – 3D printing and other techniques are also being researched.

The scaffolding part of the process is still in development, so even when cultivated meat becomes available in Australia, expect mince, not larger cuts of meat.

Unlike plant-based meat, cultivated meat isn’t more or less healthy than regular meat because the meat cells are the same – the only difference is how it’s grown. But how does it taste?

Le is a meat eater, and she reckons that cultivated meat tastes exactly like the real stuff.

If you’re a foodie, though, you might be thinking about how a meat’s flavour is a mixture of genetics, provenance and what it’s fed – how would this work with lab-grown meat?

“If you think about the food that animals eat, that’s basically what we’re adding into the media that the cells are growing in,” says Professor Andrew Laslett, head of research and development at an Australian cultivated meat startup called Magic Valley.

“There’s an opportunity there to influence the tastes by adding different plant-based materials to the media.”

Singapore has had a cultivated chicken nugget on the market for more than two years, so hopefully it won’t be too long until we can all try some and confirm.

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Human without the human

“Cellular agriculture” isn’t just making meat. Any kind of animal or plant product could be created in a vat.

Stem cells have been used in medical applications for years – think of cell therapy or drug testing. Anything that needs fresh human cells can use stem cells to create them. One example is creating beta islet cells (which make insulin) to treat diabetes.

Plants too have stem cells and can be used in similar ways, though they contain different nutrient amounts than a human stem cell.

Now, new cellular agriculture startups are expanding the possibilities, and ideas are getting wilder.

“People are producing real leather without the animal,” says Le. “Some people are producing palm oil and coffee and chocolate.”

Lab-grown coffee has more than a million cells, so it can be ground even finer than you’re used to.

“You can apply cellular agriculture to making real dairy milk without the cow,” says Le. “There’s even a company in Melbourne called Me&; they’re producing human breast milk without the human, for babies who are premature and their mothers aren’t lactating yet.”

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Is fake meat better for the planet?

One of the big selling points of both plant-based and cultivated meat producers is that these products take fewer resources to make.

This is particularly true for plant-based meat. A study by Johns Hopkins University researchers in the US found that protein for protein, the average greenhouse gas footprint for plant-based burgers was just 7% of beef, 37% of pork and 57% of chicken.

Cultivated meat is still in its early stages, so it’s hard to make an exact environmental comparison. But a study published last year in The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment looked at a hypothetical life cycle assessment of cultivated meat production in 2030. They found that cultivated meat could be almost three times more efficient at turning crops into meat than chicken is.

“Modelling that has been done shows that as long as you power the factories that are making the cultivated meat using an alternative energy source, it’s better for the environment than traditional agriculture,” says Laslett, who worked for CSIRO for more than 10 years before joining Magic Valley.

“Because it’s such a new industry that’s just starting off, there’s the possibility of designing it to be really quite circular and sustainable.”

Laslett suggests the industry could implement solar arrays, recycle media or use waste products to grow more crops to produce the ‘feed’.

So by 2030, the sky’s the limit on what you might grill. Companies are testing grouper, bison and even peacock, and the possibilities of plant-based are endless. One company in the US is even combining cultivated pig fat with plant-based meat to form bacon and other pig products.

The only sure thing is that the animals themselves are no longer required.