"It will be functional,
natural, designed food," Vladimir Mironov says. "How do you want it
to taste? You want a little bit of fat, you want pork, you want lamb? We design
exactly what you want. We can design texture.” In a small
laboratory on an upper floor of the basic science building at the Medical
University of South Carolina Mironov has been working for a decade to grow
meat. He envisions football
field-sized buildings filled with large bioreactors which he calls carnaries[i]. And as I
write this text Mark Post, sponsored by Google co-funder Sergey Brin with US$
300,000, presents the first synthetic hamburger for the world’s media.
 |
| The Postburger, Photo: David Parry / PA Wire |
There are many issues
around these synthetic foods. With genetic engineering we certainly will see
more of it in the future. There are reasons to be cautious about the health
effect of eating the stuff. Some of them will probably show to be harmful, some
might be perfectly safe. We will realize this by the same crude process of
trial and error that humans have used all along...and sometimes, well "shit
happens".
Yeast biomass was used
as human food in Germany
already during the First World War. The development of large-scale processes
for the production of commercial protein began in earnest in the late 1960s,
against the backdrop of looming food crisis. Most of the initiatives failed due
to technical or economic reasons. The ICI Pruteen process for the production of
bacterial Single Cell Protein for animal feed was a milestone in the
development of the fermentation industry. This process utilized continuous
culture on an enormous scale. BBC presented the factory like this in 1986:
“Protein is a necessary part of the diet of both man and animals. Many countries don't have enough land or a suitable climate to grow sufficient ICI has developed a single cell protein process using Methanol as a substrate. The product which is called Pruteen contains about 70% protein and has been used effectively in the diets of animals as a replacement for traditional protein sources[ii].”
However, even if the production worked it was
never economically viable – it could simply not compete with soya and fish, and
the site was blasted with dynamite. On the site of the Pruteen factory there is
now a much smaller factory for a continuous fermentation process for the
production of Fusarium venenatum biomass, marketed as Quorn, a
vegetarian alternative to meat, with a price higher than meat.
Few people seem to
realize that also so called lab-food needs a feedstock. Energy can't be created
out of nothing, and even less can proteins etc. be that. All synthetic foods
grown are using biologically derived materials as feed stock. It's not like you
can take oil, nitrogen from the air, phosphorus from the soil crust and shake
it and you have high quality food. I am sure that there are technical
possibilities to do something like that, with massive investments (Mironov in South Carolina wants a
billion dollars to develop his process). But nature already does it. And there
are few signs that our labs can make it better. To grow corn for feedstock for
artificial food or for the production of chicken is in a way not a big
difference. Chicken production, as it looks like in many parts of the world, is
already landless production, a kind of (disgusting) feed converter factory. And it is obvious
that you can do a similar thing with fungi or bacteria. It is not obvious,
however, that the process will be much more efficient. Perhaps more appealing
for vegans; the only argument for synthetic meat that holds to date is that one
wouldn’t have to kill animals[iii].
In a last data check
for the book I look up if Mironov has been successful with his carnaries, and
see that the University locked his laboratory in 2011. The latest recording I
find of him on the internet is from September 2013, where he promised to
develop 3D printing of human organs in Russia[iv] -
another rabbit to be pulled out of hats.
(the text is a draft from my new book, tentatively called Global eating disorder - the true cost of cheap food)
[i] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/30/us-food-meat-laboratory-feature-idUSTRE70T1WZ20110130
[ii] http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday/dblock/GB-448000-522000/page/18
[iii] Personally i believe
there are enough natural plants to satisfy vegans, and I were a vegan I would
not like to eat a product that mimics what I don’t want to eat.
[iv] http://indrus.in/multimedia/video/2013/09/11/which_3d_organ_will_be_bioprinted_in_moscow_first_29299.html
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