Israeli non-profit Modern Agriculture Foundation (MAF) is developing lab-grown chicken meat that doesn’t require the rearing and slaughtering of birds.  Since 2014, they’ve been researching mass production of cultured chicken meat from a single bird cell.  If they succeed, we could soon be asking, Which came first, the chicken…or the chicken?

Chicken is the world’s second favorite meat product after pork, with an estimated 23 million chickens killed daily just to feed Americans. The United Nations estimates that by 2050 world population will exceed 9.6 billion. That’s two billion more mouths to feed, and increasingly, they’ll be meat-eaters. How is the food industry gearing up for demand?

In 2013, Green Prophet reported on the first lab-grown beef, an experiment undertaken by Maastricht University which culminated in a hamburger patty that cost roughly $325,000 to create. We questioned the viability of “victimless meat“: will consumer commitment to food with a lower carbon footprint overcome the “ick” factor of meat born in a petri dish?  Considerable investment will be needed to scale up to commercial manufacture, so for now production of synthetic meat (or shmeat, or tubesteak) is now limited to research labs.

Did you know that ranching and livestock rearing now take up 30% of earth’s surface? Meat production causes negative environmental impacts ranging from soil erosion to deforestation with significant losses in biodiversity.

A report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization found that current levels of meat production contributes up to 22 percent of the 36 billion tons of “CO2-equivalent” greenhouse gases (GHG) generated globally every year. Scientific American put that into perspective, calculating that producing half a pound of hamburger releases as much GHG into the atmosphere as driving a 3,000-pound car nearly 10 miles. The industry is also a voracious consumer of water (4,325 liters of water is required to produce 1 kg of chicken meat, according to the British Institute of Mechanical Engineers ).

“Earth cannot take it. It’s not a prediction or speculation. It’s truth. There’s not enough land on the planet to raise the animals. We are raising 70 billion land animals at the moment. We won’t have space for another 70 billion,” MAF cofounder and biologist Shir Friedman told Mirror Online.

Cultivated meat sidesteps animal cruelty and flock-shared disease such as Avian and Swine flu.

Chickens bred for meat are typically raised in highly efficient (and controversially cruel) intensive factory farms which accelerate the birds’ growth to market weight in six to seven weeks, a rate three times faster than in the mid-1900’s.

Use of growth hormones in poultry is illegal in the US and many other countries, but the animals are fed high calorie feeds to quicken weight gain, which cause all manner of medical problems to the birds including immobility. Proponents of cultivated meat will point out that the fried thigh you are about to tuck into may have been pressed to a feces-packed floor for the few months of its owner’s life, featherless and covered with sores.

Cultured meat is made from stem cells harvested from live animals. The cells are fed with a nutrient cocktail that enables them to grow into muscle tissue, which must be mechanically stimulated in order to develop properly. It is 100% meat, and involves no genetic engineering.

Tissue specialist Amit Gefen (pictured below) from Tel Aviv University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering is heading up the MAF study which aims to have devise a lab-cultured chicken meat recipe by January 2016, identifying all associated technologies, resources, and costs.  The goal is to one day produce in factories on a commercial scale, which would require between seven and 45 percent less energy, 90% less fresh water and 99% less land, and would result in 80 to 90% less GHG emissions than the traditional chicken meat industry.

“If 2.5 billion people join us in eating only cultured meat by 2050, we get all those resources back. It’s truly a magic solution,” says Friedman.

Hebrew University Prof. Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, says that if the process becomes economically feasible, “the ecological and ethical considerations would make cultured meat irresistible. Cultured meat is one of the most important revolutions in the history of food and in the history of humankind itself.”

MAF is an all-volunteer nonprofit organization founded in March last year. The project is privately funded.

Lead image of a chicken from Shutterstock, all others from MAF Facebook page.

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“By the time meat gets to the consumer, it’s been processed far beyond its original form,” animal rights activist Koby Barak told The Times of Israel. “If we’re already processing it to that extent, why not go all the way and develop a cultured meat industry that will produce meat that will be healthier for people, and for the environment?”

To encourage development, Barak created the non-profit Modern Agricultural Foundation.  He’s teamed up with Tel Aviv University and Amit Gefen, an expert in tissue engineering, to study the feasibility of producing of lab-grown chicken breast.  Unlike privately held companies working in the field of muscle tissue growth, Gefen’s team will make their research findings available to the public. The results will assist manufacturers and investors in determining how best to commercially produce cultured meat and identify challenges to scalable production.

The science underpinning the culture of synthetic protein developed out of stem cell research, which sought to develop new methods of regenerative medicine to treat human injury and disease.  In 2002, as part of a program to find new sources of protein to feed astronauts, NASA-funded scientists successfully grew goldfish muscle cells in a laboratory setting. Soon after, at an art exhibition in Nantes, France, tissue engineers at Harvard University exhibited a specimen of new muscle grown from frog cells.

In 2011, Mark Post, a vascular physiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, was working on an EU-funded project to create synthetic meat, when he received a (then-anonymous) donation exceeding $330,000 from Google cofounder Sergey Brin to accelerate the project. In 2013, Post unveiled the world’s most expensive hamburger, engineered from a small sample of cow muscle stem cells.

Post fed the cells a a growth mix of sugar, amino acid, and cow fetus blood, enabling them to multiply and create muscle tissue. He added beet juice and saffron to improve the coloring of the new fibers, and breadcrumbs and egg powder to create a mincemeat texture.

Meat without murder? 

“Twenty years from now if you enter a supermarket you will have a choice between two identical-looking products. One will have a label that says it has been produced with a lower environmental footprint, the other will have a smoking-type label that says animals have suffered or been killed to produce this meat,” Post told reporters at the time.

In February 2012, Hungarian-born US scientist Gabor Forgacs did his own public tasting of a small strip of lab-grown meat at a TED conference. He dismissed Post’s burger as a “ridiculously expensive experiment.”

Forgacs started his own synthetic meat company, Modern Meadow, financed by his own billionaire investor, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, and the US Department of Agriculture. He concedes that his own meat product is unlikely to be cost-effective at the start, but suggests it may prove in the long-term to be the only meat we can afford to eat. “The rules of the game of meat production are not the same as they were 100 years ago – it’s not sustainable,” he says. “We are destroying this planet with intensive meat production.”

As scientists work to perfect production techniques, environmentalists and animal rights groups debate whether lab-grown meat is a Utopian ideal or a distraction from ongoing campaigns to cut our meat consumption by moving towards a grain and vegetable-based diet.

Synthetic meat offers the tantalizing prospect of – one day in the future – reducing the environmental impacts of meat production and eliminating the animal suffering embedded in industrial agriculture.  The same can be said about vegetarianism, today.

Image of lab-cultivated meat from Shutterstock

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