Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

The future of food was the subject of a four-session class at Alexandria Technical and Community College’s Senior College in January.

It was mostly about cellular agriculture, how it works and how it might fit into future food needs of the world.

You’re probably heard of Beyond Meat which is using plant materials to make a burger that tastes like meat. There are places you can buy that today.

Cellular agriculture is taking cells from animals, say a beef steer, multiply them in a bioreactor many millions of times and forming them into something that looks and tastes like meat.

It is being done is several countries. Chicken nuggets have been made, an Israeli firm has made steaks, egg whites have been made and more. In fact these items can actually be purchased in some restaurants in California or New York or Washington D.C.

But it is not a money making proposition for now.

The instructor was Irfan Tahir, who is finishing his PhD in mechanical engineering at the University of Vermont. I can see why he was seeking such a degree, much of the process of cellular agriculture is machines; fermentation tanks, bioreactors and more needed to grow a small batch of cells into the billions needed to create something.

The idea of taking cells and multiplying them through various processes is not new. It was interesting to learn that insulin used to come from the pancreases of pigs. Since 1978 it has come through cell multiplication.

Work has been going on, too, for over 30 years, in the area of trying to replicate skin tissue for medical reasons such as for burn victims.

The push into food products is relatively new and very expensive. Somewhere between 150 and 200 companies world-wide have raised $2.5 billion in venture capital to get started in this field.

The long term goal is to make food available in areas where food is difficult to grow, have an alternative food source available to feed people when droughts occur and possibly to have food creation become less hard on the environment.

For example, a big problem in some areas is overfishing of the world’s oceans. Fish are a major source of food for many in this world. Being able to create fish meat could take pressure off the ocean’s natural reproducing needs.

The problem with cellular agriculture at this point is scaling up production to a level that is feasible financially. Right now the bulk of cellular agriculture is done in a lab. A one-liter bioreactor costs about $50,000 and it takes multiple reactors to generate much of a volume. A liter is about a quart.

Tahir said it would take multiple fermenters and bioreactors each with 2,000 liter capacity each to generate enough cells to create meat. The process includes scaffolds on which new cells can attach, a process to get rid of the scaffolds, and a process to create a taste for the final product since, such as in the case of beef, much of the taste comes from hemoglobin in the blood of the animal.

And there is a difference in structured meat, such as a steak, and unstructured meat, such as a hamburger patty or hot dog. And here is a tidbit for your next trivia party, 38 percent of a cow is prepared and sold as unstructured meat.

When we talk scale we mean production that could compete cost-wise with say normal beef production and processing. Right now a beef burger patty would cost about $330,000. A single chicken nugget is about $10.

Tahir said big scale improvements are probably 15 to 20 years away. And even then there would not be enough volume to eliminate farms, which should be good news around here.