Cell-based Food: The Future Of Sustainable meat eating?
By Ivanna Bagul
‘Go Vegan or Go home’? Not necessarily. One’s ethical considerations may tell them that consuming meat is not all that bad but it may also lead them to question the ways in which their meat is reared, produced and distributed. It has been said that the meat industry causes several problems including increased greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation caused by the need to make space for farmland and high consumption of resources like water and grains. So how does one not give up their love for meat while still being environmentally conscious? Well, a possible answer might be in the emerging innovation of cell produced food.
What is it?
Against the backdrop of a growing climate crisis and the need to fulfill the food demands of several billion people there emerged a promising technology in the form of cell based meat also referred to as cultured meat. The basic idea is to grow meat from the muscle stem cells of an animal — it could be chicken, fish or beef- without actually sacrificing it and using not only lesser resources but also having less of a negative environmental impact. Oftentimes larger animals like pigs, sheep and cows are stunned with a bolt gun in the head to make them unconscious before killing them.
The aim is not to grow a whole new animal but simply put, the cells would form a meat product that is ready to be consumed, there is no head or tail or other live organs involved in it, it is the same logic used when culturing yeast to make beer. Having meat like beef being grown from cells would contribute to reduced land use and it would also lead to lesser greenhouse gas emissions. Cultivating meat in a clean facility would further eliminate the health risks associated with contamination by pathogens and with the antibiotics that are used on the animals. Even culturing fish cuts down on the environmental impact of commercial fishing and eliminates the dangers of consuming microplastics, mercury and other pollutants that one might find in wild or farmed fish.
Is India ready for it?
Contrary to popular belief that India is a land of vegetarians in reality studies have shown that the Indian diet is actually meat-heavy. Within this context, the startup Clearmeat has already come up with their own cell based chicken mince given the popularity of the meat. The company is working towards bringing about price parity with real chicken; accomplishing this would be a major milestone as it would cater to a large mass of people. Currently the company is targeting to level their prices to that of processed chicken that sells for about 1000 rupees a kg. They have managed to bring the price of their minced meat to 800–850INR and have hopes of bringing the cost down even further. Their only challenge currently is the anti-GMO attitude of many in India and with concerns that people might mistake their meat for GMOs.
In a report produced by The Good Food Institute in 2018, it was revealed that 50% of Indian consumers were extremely or very likely to purchase cultured meat, while 61% were extremely or very likely to try it. The motivations cited behind these promising acceptance rates include the desire to reduce environmental impact and the need to do away with slaughterhouses that indulge in several unethical practices that include torturing and force breeding the animals. Added to this, the ongoing pandemic that inserted a sense of paranoia among people to consume food which would not only boost immunity but was also sourced in a safe and healthy manner had also heightened the buzz around cell-based food and other sustainable proteins. However, there were also studies which suggested that Indians are more neophobic with respect to food and have a lesser meat attachment in comparison to those in China and the US. Thus, through an informal interview I aimed to capture the responses of a small group of young adults in order to understand whether they were aware of the environmental impacts of meat eating and if they were open to the idea of “clean meat”. Most replies to the idea of cell-based meat were that of apprehension, expressing that they would rather just give up eating meat instead; while some others had an overall blasé attitude towards how their eating habits would impact the environment- “we’re all going to die anyway”. There was only a miniscule minority who were really willing to try it stating that as long as it tasted “delish” they would be up for it.
While we wait for this technology to come to total fruition we could always take small steps like choosing to eat less meat or by choosing the right kinds of meat- ones that do not necessarily contribute as much to greenhouse gas emissions. In the end however, this too could be a contentious ethical issue of why one life should matter more than the other? And as I brought up the topic of ethical meat eating with my friends and peers, the words of one of them perfectly captured this dilemma:
“ I don’t think about the ethical consequences of a lot of things we do, it’s a never ending spiral and I wouldn’t know where to stop; every living thing is potential food for another species, So I don’t know what makes one type of consumption acceptable and another not so much, I wouldn’t know where to draw the line…..”
