Why Lab-Grown Meat Is Bad

Proponents are touting lab-grown meat (i.e., cultured, cellular meat) as an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional meat production. However, several adverse outcomes are highlighting and increasing worries, despite the emphasis on environmental benefits and moral issues. This article discusses why lab-made meat may not be all it is purported to be, i.e. the “perfect” solution.

01. High Energy Consumption

Producing lab-grown meat is an energy-intensive process. The aim is to set up a lactate-producing plant and the obsolescence of traditional animal production in animals but this will require control environments, bioreactors and lots of energy input.

Key Issues:

• Carbon Footprint: A study from Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems showed that lab-grown meat production could have a greater carbon footprint than conventional farming if and only if renewable energy sources are utilized.
• Scalability Challenges: As production (i.e., and thus energy consumption) does increase on the one side, it also generates concerns about the impossibility of making the whole system sustainable.

Example: Meat production on site for lab-engineered meat still needs to be a power-positive activity for a medium-sized factory and may therefore not be environmentally sustainable even in carbon-based countries.

02. High Production Costs

Even with technological advances, lab tissue meat is still significantly more expensive to manufacture than regular meat. This cost effect has resulted in the problem of availability and the question of substitutability on a wider scale.

Contributing Factors:

• The need for specialized equipment and sterile environments.
• Highly manufactured substrates for cell culture, e.g., fetal bovine serum (FBS).

Although commercially etiolated lab-grown meat is a work in progress, in the short term, it is not sufficiently economical for the everyday consumer.

03. Uncertain Health Implications

Lab-grown meat is a novel food product in the market, and its long-term health and safety implications are still to be elucidated. While the goal is to provide the characteristic texture and taste of meat traditionally, questions remain regarding the safety of meat(2).

Potential Risks:

• Contamination: Bioreactors must be free of contamination and if contamination does occur that could lead to the killing of pathogens, then that should be borne with a consequence.
• Additives: As an effort to optimize not only taste and texture but also to function as a preserving factor, lab-engineered meat might include some kind of synthetic ingredient or chemical that could have adverse effects on the human body.

Pro Tip: When deciding to eat lab-grown meat, please always inquire about the transparency of manufacturing the food.

04. Ethical Dilemmas

Lab-based meat was first suggested as a substitute for traditional meat; however, it is unlikely to be free of ethical considerations.

Ethical Issues Include:

• Use of Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS): Some production processes continue to employ FBS, i.e., fetal bovine serum, obtained from in-utero dairy cows, and thus ethical aspects are presented.
• Job Displacement: Scaling up lab-grown meat to large-scale production conditions has the potential to cause disruptiveness in traditional farming communities and, consequently, jeopardize their livelihood.

05. Lack of Nutritional Superiority

Lab-made meat is not necessarily more nutritiously convenient than real meat, although it is often touted as such.

Concerns:

• Missing Nutrients: Normal meat has a physical arrangement of constituents that are difficult to replicate in vitro in the laboratory analog.
• Excessive Fat or Salt: Producers may include a surplus of fat or salt to meet target flavors.

Consumers seeking healthier meat alternatives may prefer plant-based proteins.

06. Limited Consumer Acceptance

There is also a level of skepticism among consumers regarding laboratory-derived meat and it’s regularly asserted that it is artificial.

Key Barriers to Acceptance:

• Psychological Discomfort: Such is the case when people repeatedly find themselves dissatisfied with the idea that one can produce meat in the lab, i.e., the “yuck” factor.
• Cultural Preferences: Nevertheless, due to the strong cultural identification with eating the original red meat, the consumption of lab-grown meat is not simple to get widespread acceptance.

07. Environmental Concerns Beyond Carbon

However, critics can mitigate counterarguments about the ecological footprint of lab-grown meat; in reality, the ecological footprint is not always positive.

Broader Environmental Issues: 

• Resource Use: The production process at large scales uses water and proprietary materials.
• Industrial Waste: Bioreactors and production lines produce waste material, and disposing of the waste-generating material may lead to the commercialization of waste disposal.

Example: As a single laboratory-scale meat processing plant can generate tens of thousands of pounds of waste per year, in comparison to its “eco-friendly” look, then certainly every chance exists that the same plant could contribute to a real-time reality-based problem too.

08. Regulatory and Safety Challenges

Lab-manufactured meat remains a frontier in the regulatory landscape.

Challenges Include:

• Lack of Standardized Guidelines: Because of the absence thereof (safety rules) of standardization in all countries, there is also the likelihood of inconsistency.
• Transparency Issues: Because of uncontrolled, uncontrolled sampling and surveillance, the hazards are an uncontrolled, uncontrolled discharge and the possibility of additive inclusion.

Regulatory prescripts have yet to be implemented on a global scale, so consumer safety will not be realized.

Summary

While lab-grown meat, as a potential answer to some of the greatest global challenges today, is not the answer itself, it does not solve the underlying issues facing us right now. Because of high energy consumption, high production cost and still unknown health effects, several serious problems are generated. Apart from ethical considerations, narrow market demands, and compromises to the environment, the promise of this technology lies in the fog of ambiguity.

As the discipline grows along with it, it is obvious that there is no alternative but to find an unacceptable compromise between the failings of traditional food production and the advantages involved with food production from plants and to find ways to work around such failings, e.g., through food from plants, and learn to regenerate food production to achieve a viable, sustainable and ethically acceptable food industry, depending on the status of the human and animal environment.