14/01/2023
At present days, science has advanced so much that people are producing artificial meat in the lab. Artificial meat or lab-grown meat or also known as cultured meat is meat produced by culturing animal cells in vitro using tissue engineering techniques. Artificial meat is a miracle of modern science. Scientists can harvest a small sample of cells from a living animal and cultivate the sample to grow outside of the animal’s body and shape this sample into a fully formed piece of meat. Fish fillets, hamburgers, and bacon all are indistinguishable and have the same taste consumers know and love.
Brief History of Artificial meat:
The idea first came in 1950 during second world war. A Dutch researcher named Willem Van Elen who was a prisoner at that time suffered greatly from starvation which made him passionate about food production and food security. Later on, many research and experiments had done in-vitro for the purpose of producing cultured meat. The first public trial was done in London on 5th August 2013 using the first cultured beef burger patty which was created by Mark Post at Maastricht University. It was tested on live television. After that many startups were launched around the world to industrially develop the concept of cultured meat.
What is the purpose behind artificial meat?
To meet the need of meat consumption, 70 billion land animals, and possibly trillions of marine animals, are killed each year. A vast majority of these animals are raised in factory farms, where they are brutally abused in severely overcrowded and putrid conditions for their entire lives. To stop this inhuman act towards animals and to reduce environment pollution from livestock waste, it is surely a great advancement of science.
It has got a great attention because it involves stem cells. See the process of making artificial meat: https://www.awesomebiochem.com/2023/01/05/what-is-cultured-meat/
Issues:
There is an ethical issue regarding the using of fetal bovine serum (FBS) as the culture medium. Because FBS is made from the blood of unborn calves of pregnant cows after they are killed. However, companies are trying to find alternatives of FBS.
A question may arise that if the cells are taken from dead animals how will we general people know?
Advantages and Disadvantages of artificial meat:
https://www.awesomebiochem.com/2023/01/05/what-is-cultured-meat/
What is cultured meat - Cultured meat or lab-grown meat or also known as artificial meat is meat produced by culturing animal cells in vitro using tissue...
