From fake halal meat to lab-grown meat

 

Malaysia is being gobbled up by a meaty scandal. Many are rightfully livid, demanding justice be meted out to the unethical miscreants who have been feeding Malaysians fake halal meat that may have been mixed with diseased kangaroo and horse meat.

The authorities need to ensure that corruption is uprooted from the food industry and that quality and hygiene are prioritised above all else.

However, we have to realise that most meat we get today – whether halal or non-halal – is anathema to our health, especially when consumed in excess. This is because they come from factory farms which look less like a food production facility and more like a Hitlerian concentration camp on steroids.

The animals, whose meat we consume, are often pumped with synthetic hormones, antibiotics, and heavy metals to promote rapid growth and combat infections,
among other things. Needless to say, these chemicals have dastardly effects on our delicate bodies when we consume them, contributing to a host of ailments,
including cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

In addition, meat production is one of the biggest causes of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. A University of Oxford study even went so far as to say that the single biggest thing a person can do to reduce their impact on the environment is to stop their consumption of meat and dairy.

But of course, billions around the world consider meat an essential part of their diet. They love its taste and swear by its nutritional value. And despite optimistic reports that suggest that veganism and plant-based diets are on the rise, meat consumption is expected to increase globally by over 75% by 2050, according to a 2015 report by Chatham House.

This is cause for alarm.

Industrial meat production rapes the planet of its finite resources and causes the needless suffering of billions of sentient beings – a price too steep to pay for temporary mouth pleasure.

But a company has taken a major step towards making this a concern of the past. Just last month, Silicon Valley-based Eat Just made history by becoming the first company ever to serve lab-grown meat to the public. And it happened just across our southern border, in Singapore, which became the first nation in the world to grant regulatory approval for the sale of lab-grown meat.

Branded as Good Meat Cultured Chicken, Eat Just’s “chicken bites” are made in a bioreactor and not by slaughtering chicken. This is done by taking cells of live chicken via biopsies, feeding them plant-based nutrients, and growing them in a growth medium that includes foetal bovine serum.

But knowing that their choice of growth medium might be a cause for concern to some, they largely remove it prior to consumption and plan on using a plant-based serum for the next production line.

One report quoted an unnamed young patron who tasted Eat Just’s lab-grown meat as saying: “I’m speechless, it will save a lot of animals’ lives and it will be a lot more sustainable. It feels good to have chicken without feeling guilty.”

The United Kingdom’s Astronomer Royal, astrophysicist Martin Rees, went so far as to call it one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2020.

Indeed it is. It claims to preserve what many meat-eaters love about meat – its texture, taste, and nutritional density. And it removes all that is wrong with meat – the frequent contamination, the harmful hormones, and chemicals it’s injected with, its abhorrent effects on the environment, and the downright criminal way animals are treated in industrial factory farms.

Additionally, when it was first made in 2013, a lab-grown meat burger patty cost an eye-watering US$330,000. Today, it’s closer to US$11 – a 30,000-time reduction in a mere seven years. When it comes to carbon footprint, lab-grown meat requires 100 times less land and 5.5 times less water to produce than traditional meat. With time and economies of scale, both its cost and carbon footprint will invariably reduce.

But Eat Just isn’t the only kid on the block. Many other companies are vying to feed consumers their own lab-grown meat in the fast-intensifying space, including Mosa Meat, Memphis Meats, Aleph Farms, and Finless Foods. Many of them have been granted formidable war chests to turn their visions into reality by high-profile backers such as Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Sergey Brin.

However, amidst all this optimism, it’s important to remember that even though lab-grown meat is undoubtedly healthier than traditional meat, it is still meat and hence can be harmful to human health if consumed in excess.

These lab-grown meat companies join an increasingly crowded field of plant-based meat companies – chief among them being Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods – that in recent years have been wooing and wowing customers and investors alike with their uncannily meat-like products.

This healthy competition and diversity of solutions is heartening to see and is indicative of the need for an alternative to the rightly much-maligned and increasingly infeasible conventional practice of mass incarceration and merciless slaughter of animals for meat.

As Bill Gates says: “There’s no way to produce enough meat for 9 billion people. Yet we can’t ask everyone to become vegetarians. That’s why we need more options for producing meat without depleting our resources.”

I envision a not-so-distant future where lab-grown meat and plant-based meat are cheaper than traditional meat and take up more supermarket shelf space than their conventional, unhealthy, and unethically derived counterparts.

Let’s just hope Malaysia learns its lesson from its halal meat debacle and decides to elicit and allow the sale of clean, ethical, lab-grown meat. It won’t only be helping accelerate the adoption of a much-needed, pathbreaking technology but will also be projecting itself as an innovation-friendly, progressive country.

It’s about time it did.

The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@gmail.com. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.