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Is lab-grown meat the next frontier in ethical eating?

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Is lab-grown meat the next frontier in ethical eating?

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Is lab-grown meat the wave of the future? Find it out for yourself at the link below. It is about how all foods are made of cells, so they are making meat out of cells.

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Hello, people! This is our weekly newsletter on all things environmental, where we highlight trends and solutions that are moving us to a more sustainable world. (Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.) This week:

Is lab-grown meat the next frontier in ethical eating?

Green energy investment in the last decade: A success story

Canada's colleges and universities are among the greenest in the world

Is lab-grown meat the next frontier in ethical eating?

The meatless burger is surely one of the biggest food trends of 2019. The rising popularity of options like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods burgers come as scientists implore consumers to switch to a more plant-based diet to help tackle climate change.

But there's another option lurking on the horizon: lab-grown meat. Or, as scientists prefer to call it, "cultured" or "clean" meat. It has the potential to be better for both the environment and your health.

Amy Rowat, associate professor of integrative biology and physiology at University of California, Los Angeles, is one of six scientists who received a grant earlier this year from the Good Food Institute in Washington, D.C., to further develop cultured meat.

Born and raised in Guelph, Ont., Rowat spent years studying cells and has years of academic experience in the science of food.

"All the food that we eat is made of cells," Rowat said, so developing cultured meat was a natural fit. In the simplest terms, stem cells are taken from an animal's muscle and put in a nutrient-rich broth, of sorts, to encourage them to multiply and grow into muscle fibres. So, it is real meat, but with one key difference: Animals don't have to be raised or killed to produce it.

Rowat and her grad student, Stephanie Kawecki, determined that to produce one billion quarter-pounder burgers (113 grams each), it takes 1.2 million cows living for three years on 8,600 square kilometres of land (and then slaughtering them). The same number of cultured burgers would require the muscle stem cells of just one living cow, and they'd take only about a month and a half to grow.

Right now, those cultured burgers would be pricey. The first lab-grown burger was produced in a Netherlands lab in 2013 at a cost of about $425,000 Cdn, although Israeli company Future Meat Technologies said last year it could bring the cost down into the range of $3.00 to $6.00 Cdn a pound (453 g) by 2020. Rowat believes cultured meat will eventually be on par cost-wise with organic beef.

Some believe it could be available in two to five years. But the pivotal question is: Will people eat it?

Lab-grown meat "is a foreign concept," said Kara Nielsen, who analyzes food trends at CCD Innovation in Emeryville, Calif. But she sees a definite advantage. It will have the familiar taste and texture of farmed meat, and it's a good alternative for people concerned with animal rights. "It certainly wins on you-didn't-kill-a-cow-to-eat-this-burger," she said.

Another plausible selling point: it could be healthier than farmed beef. "Imagine modifying genetically the cellular components so that they produce healthier molecules in your cultured meat," said Rowat. For example, to make a lower-fat meat, or one with more healthy fat.

On the environmental front, if people move away from farmed beef, there would be less need to clear cut land to raise cattle, and less methane from those gassy cows.

A recent Oxford University study, however, highlights a potential hurdle. It found that the amount of heat and electricity required to produce cultured meat could be worse, environmentally, than some cattle farming if energy systems remain dependent on fossil fuels.

The researchers suggested that to be more environmentally responsible, companies producing cultured meat would have to do something to mitigate carbon emissions. That could be crucial to cultured meat's success.

Nielsen said the potential positives may be what push people past any feelings of strangeness about eating lab-grown meat.

"It could be that we'll leapfrog to an acceptance ... like, 'You know what? I still want to eat my beef. And my beef just comes from a separate place.'"

- Stephanie Hogan

Reader feedback

Our story on tree-planting efforts last week spurred a number of people to write in with comments and suggestions.

Laurence Thompson said, "As a Scout leader for many years, we (Beavers, Cubs, Scouts, Venturers) voluntarily planted thousands of trees as part of a 'reforestation' program. Clear-cutting was rife, and it was our contribution, with suitable seedling donations, to try to repair some of the damage caused by this practice. This was 40 years ago and was not an endeavour based on money and donations!!!! Times have changed and so has the imperative, given the global warming and climate crisis, but the message is still the same."

Shirley Barnea chimed in to say, "another great way to take part in tree-planting (without having to pay or do it yourself) is to switch your search engine to https://www.ecosia.org/. They use their profits to plant trees in deforested areas around the world and empower people in poverty by hiring them to plant them. It is available as an extension for many browsers and as an app for phones."

Old issues of What on Earth? are right here.

The Big Picture: Green energy investment in the last decade

Given the scale of the problem of climate change, and the challenges posed by some of the solutions, progress may seem slow. But a study by Bloomberg New Energy Finance suggests that between 2010 and the end of this year, $2.6 trillion US will have been invested in new renewable energy worldwide. As you can see, the biggest beneficiaries have been solar and wind energy projects, but biomass and biofuels have also received significant funding (although when it comes to pollution, bioenergy has both pros and significant cons).

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

Canada's colleges and universities among the greenest in the world

As students head back to college and university campuses across Canada this month, they might be proud to know they're studying at some of the greenest schools in the world. That's according to the 2019 Sustainable Campus Index put out recently by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), an international organization.

Nova Scotia Community College and Thompson Rivers University topped the sustainability rankings for associate colleges and masters institutions, respectively, while Université Laval and the University of Calgary made the Top 10 for doctoral institutions.

Some Canadian campus green initiatives highlighted by AASHE include:

The Joyce Centre at Mohawk College in Hamilton, which opened in 2018. At 96,000 square feet, it's Canada's largest net-zero energy institutional building. Its features include solar panels, a solar-thermal array, geothermal wells, stormwater harvesting and a green roof.

Programs at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C., that allow students and staff to sign out conventional bicycles and e-bikes (see photo above) and allow employees to buy an e-bike using payroll deductions. The e-bike programs are designed to encourage cycling in the hilly city.

Because universities teach about sustainability, they have a responsibility to make their operations sustainable, said Rochelle Owen, who runs Dalhousie University's Office of Sustainability and sits on the steering committee for the Canadian Alliance of College and University sustainability professionals. "We should model that through walking the talk."

The size and unique teaching and research mandates of post-secondary institutions allow them to test and implement green solutions that may be beyond the reach of most businesses, she said. "We will step out ahead of the pack there, because we're trying to be innovative."

That can include big projects like district energy systems that heat buildings centrally with one heating system and reclaim waste heat. Or demonstrations like a building with solar panels at Dalhousie that just installed a battery to show how solar plus storage can solve a problem - that the sun doesn't always shine when people need power.

Monika Urbanski of AASHE, the author of the Sustainable Campus Index, said other organizations can take ideas from what's happening on campuses.

"Higher education is so unique in that we are in the business of educating future leaders of our world," she said. "Students can see how a sustainable organization should function, and then they can take that message to their future employers."

- Emily Chung

Stay in touch!

Are there issues you'd like us to cover? Questions you want answered? Do you just want to share a kind word? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at whatonearth@cbc.ca.

Sign up hereto get What on Earth? in your inbox every Thursday.

Editor: Andre Mayer | Logo design: Sködt McNalty

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Is lab-grown meat the next frontier in ethical eating? | CBC News

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Hello, people! This is our weekly newsletter on all things environmental, where we highlight trends and solutions that are moving us to a more sustainable world. (Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.) This week: Is lab-grown meat the next frontier in ethical eating?

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Do you wonder how much a lab-grown meat costs?
In think it is interesting because I saw shocked on how much it costs.

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In 2013, producing the first lab-grown burger cost $325,000. By 2015, though the cost had dropped to around $11, Mark Post, the Dutch researcher who created the burger, thought that it might take another two or three decades before it was commercially viable. But the first so-called "clean meat," produced from animal cells without an actual animal, may be in restaurants by the end of 2018.

The Israel-based startup Future Meat Technologies aims to begin selling its first products later this year. The startup's costs are still very high-around $363 a pound-but it believes that it can cut the cost of cellular agriculture to about $2.30 to $4.50 a pound by 2020. (Post's $11 burger came in at $37 a pound; as of April, the average wholesale value of beef in the U.S. was $3.28 a pound, though no directly comparable production cost is available.) Today, the startup announced a $2.2 million seed round of investment, co-led by Tyson Ventures, the venture capital arm of the meat giant Tyson Foods.

"Right now, growing cells as meat instead of animals is a very expensive process," says Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientist of Future Meat Technologies. The startup's new process is designed to reduce that cost in a few ways. The biggest expense in cellular agriculture is the medium-made of sugars, salts, and amino acids-used for growing cells, which typically has to be replaced as the cells grow. The startup uses a process that cleans and recycles the medium, similar to the way that an animal's liver and kidneys clean and recirculate blood.

The process also avoids using serums, which are made from animal blood, and which have been used by other companies working in the field, and are both expensive and unappealing to consumers who want to avoid animal products entirely. In addition, rather than using the same type of huge bioreactors that are used in the pharmaceutical industry-and are also very expensive-the company plans to use small units that can be distributed to existing farms.

"If we start small and stay small, we can essentially dramatically reduce the cost, and the capital burden drops by an order of magnitude or more," Nahmias says. "With these two plays-a more efficient bioreactor and a distributed manufacturing model-we can essentially drop the cost down to about $5 a kilogram [$2.27 a pound]. This is where it starts getting interesting, because the distributed model also allows you to use the current economics."

Farmers, he suggests, could begin to shift from animal agriculture to cellular agriculture. "These distributive models allow us to grow organically and essentially replace chicken coops with these bioreactors," he says. "This, I think, is a reasonable way of actually taking over and replacing this industry sustainably."

The company plans to supply farmers with a small collection of cells or a piece of tissue roughly the size of an coffee capsule, along with the nutrients to feed the cells and the equipment for growing them (the platform can use cells from any animal). Ten to 18 days later, after the tissue has grown, it will be sent to processing plants where it can be turned into "clean meat" for consumers. Turning protein into something with the shape, texture, and mouthfeel of meat has become relatively easy, he says, as companies like Beyond Meat and others have shown with soy and other plant-based proteins.

To address flavor, Future Meat Technologies creates lab-grown fat cells along with muscle cells (it first grows connective tissue cells, which can be induced to turn into either fat or muscle cells). "Most companies today are growing muscle cells . . . they're producing this mass of protein, but one of the things that's missing is fat," says Nahmias. "Fat is what we really crave. Fat is what gives meat its distinct aroma and flavor." The end result tastes like meat from an animal, with the same nutrition-although because the process is controlled, it's possible to tweak the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fat to make it healthier.

If a move away from animals seems unlikely, Nahmias argues that it's necessary as the world adapts to a growing demand for meat at the same time as traditional meat production strains the environment. A quarter of the world's land, apart from Antarctica, is used for pasture; most deforestation in the Amazon basin happened because of cattle ranching. Livestock is responsible for an estimated 14.5% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Producing a single pound of beef can take around 1,800 gallons of water. As the world population swells to 10 billion by 2050, we'll need to produce 70% more food calories-and between 2006 and 2050, demand for animal-based protein is expected to grow 80%.

"Cultured meat is a transformative concept in general," Nahmias says. "We're running out of land, we're running out of water resources, and if you want to continue feeding a growing population not only in the West but also in China and India, where people are moving toward Western-style diets in increasing numbers, then we need to fundamentally change the way we produce meat."

In 2017, China made a $300 million trade deal with Israel to collaborate on clean-tech projects, including both clean energy and clean meat. "There is a strong interest in China to move into sustainable agriculture in multiple ways," he says. "This trade deal is definitely part of it and we can definitely take advantage of it if we get to market fast enough." Chinese VC firm Bits x Bites, the country's first food tech accelerator, is one of Future Meat Technologies' investors.

Tyson, which is one of the world's largest food companies and is known for chicken, sausage, hot dogs, and other meats, doesn't expect traditional meat production to go away. But the company, which also invested in the lab-grown meat company Memphis Meats, sees an opportunity for new kinds of protein. "It will be a part of the story, over time, in our estimation," says Justin Whitmore, executive vice president of corporate strategy and chief sustainability officer of Tyson Foods. "The biggest question is how much time, when you're talking about lab-grown meat."

One key to widespread adoption, of course, is cost. The Good Food Institute, an organization that focuses on alternatives to animal products, has done research into the financial viability of the clean meat sector as a whole. "I was tasked with figuring out if this clean meat thing is worthy of our time or should we put all of our focus into plant-based meat," says Liz Specht, the nonprofit's senior scientist. "I actually came in into that exercise quite skeptical because I've done animal cell culture for biomedical R&D, and I knew what the high costs were associated with that. Through doing this analysis I actually did end up quite optimistic."

Other startups in the space, she says, are also finding ways to drive down the cost of production, though because the products are not yet in production, companies' specific cost projections are still highly speculative. At least one other company- Just, formerly known as Hampton Creek-also plans to launch its first clean meat product by the end of 2018. The company is aiming for a price within 30% of the conventional product (other companies are also working on recycling the medium and eliminating the use of serum).

Nahmias believes that clean meat will eventually be cheaper than traditional meat from animals. Along with other advantages, such as avoiding the risk of contaminants like salmonella, and eliminating the need for antibiotics, which are heavily used in animal agriculture today, he thinks that clean meat could someday largely replace the traditional version.

"That's not to say that there are not going to be specialty restaurants producing meat traditionally-more expensive restaurants-but I think the burgers that we're going to put on the grill, and the chicken nuggets that we're going to eat at McDonald's, and the barbecued chicken that we're going to eat in Chipotle is mainly going to be cultured meat decades from now," he says.

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Lab-Grown Meat Is Getting Cheap Enough For Anyone To Buy

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In 2013, producing the first lab-grown burger cost $325,000. By 2015, though the cost had dropped to around $11, Mark Post, the Dutch researcher who created the burger, thought that it might take another two or three decades before it was commercially viable.

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Are you feeling helpless about climate change? You aren't alone! See some solutions at the link below!

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Hello, people! This is our weekly newsletter on all things environmental, where we highlight trends and solutions that are moving us to a more sustainable world. (Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.) This week:

A better, more positive way to talk about climate change

The world population is growing - but not for long

The Arctic is on the front lines of climate change

'We can go on the offence': A more positive way to look at climate action

According to a recent survey of 14,000 respondents in 14 countries The disempowered, however, think it's too late to stop the damage and feel, well, paralyzed. But Per Espen Stoknes, a psychologist who has also served as a member of Norway's parliament, has ideas about how to change that. , people basically fall into four groupings when it comes to tackling climate change: "optimists," "supporters," "disempowered" and "skeptical." The optimists and supporters generally feel they can have an impact and are doing their part to mitigate rising emissions and temperatures. What is it about climate change that makes people feel helpless?
Stoknes is the author of a 2015 book called What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming, which focuses on the barriers that keep people from making change - and offers ideas to overcome them. Stoknes shared some of his insights with Stephanie Hogan via email.

The barrier of distance makes planetary-scale climate disruptions feel very far away. It is ... remote in terms of space, time, impacts and responsibility, except for the relatively few people who are directly hit by wildfire, floods or droughts at any time.
Does the way we talk about climate change make a difference?
The scale ... and the invisibility of CO2 all contribute to the feeling of helplessness and the lack of self-efficacy to contribute real change with an impact. It makes many voters give climate disruption a low priority relative to immigration, unemployment, health issues, et cetera.

Language is hugely important.

When communicating about climate, we should never accept the [negative] frames (doom, uncertainty, cost, sacrifice). There is no need to negate them, or repeat them or argue them in order to counter them.
What kind of action can help an individual feel more empowered?
Rather, we can go on the offence with our own framing: that more commercial and political action is needed right away to ensure safety for society, secure our health, be prepared for what comes and realize the amazing opportunities for jobs and better lives that the shifts in clean energy will bring.

Doing something together with others is the basic remedy. Many think of psychology as individualistic and assume that a psychology of climate solutions would be about what each of us as individuals can do separately, that we only get better one by one.
How do you take that action further?
It is clear, however, that individual solutions are not sufficient to solving climate alone. But they do build stronger bottom-up support for policies and solutions that can. Our personal impact on others is much more valuable in giving momentum to the change of society than the number of [kilograms] of CO2 each action generates. It works like rings in water: If I see someone else that I respect taking action, then I want to as well. Enthusiasm is contagious. That is why engaging together with other people is so crucial.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Organize, organize, organize. The key is to make climate disruption into a social issue by taking action together with others. Start a local chapter of Climate Citizens Lobby or 350.org and make it visible to let your neighbours, friends and colleagues see that you are taking action with solar panels on the roof, electric mobility and/or a more plant-based diet. The largest cuts in climate emissions - from solutions in agriculture to buildings to mobility - can be addressed when thousands of people start taking action together. The Drawdown.org project gives a wonderful and inspiring overview of all the solutions.

In case you missed our climate change coverage

This week, we launched our climate change series, In Our Backyard. If you didn't see these stories on CBCNews.ca or on social media, here's a roundup of some of our coverage:

Old issues of What on Earth? are here.

The Big Picture: World population projections

One of the complicating factors in humanity's attempts to save the environment - by reducing carbon emissions and consumer waste, for example - is the fact that we are adding more people to the planet every year. But new figures released by the United Nations suggest that rather than grow continually, the number of humans on Earth will peak just short of 11 billion toward the end of this century.

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

It's 'getting pretty dangerous to live here': Climate change in the Arctic
This is one of four personal stories featured in the CBC News interactive In Our Backyard, which looks at how climate change is affecting Canadians across the country.

When Sandy Adam and his wife, Sarah, moved into their home in an area of Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T., known as "the Point" 25 years ago, the lot had a huge yard. It contained a large shed where Sandy stored his boats and sleds. Next door was a curling rink and, a little farther down, a warehouse.

Since then, most of the yard has been eaten away by the Beaufort Sea. Sarah Adam estimated it has been moving an arm's length closer every year, and could soon claim the house itself.

"It's only about six feet from our house now," Sandy Adam said. The 64-year-old said it's "getting pretty dangerous to live here anymore."

As for the curling rink and the warehouse - where they once stood, it's just water and ice.

Tuktoyaktuk - or Tuk, as it's known locally - lies on a peninsula dotted with lakes. The sea has always gnawed at its coastline. But climate change, which has warmed Canada's Arctic by 2.3 C since 1948 - nearly three times the global average - has given the ocean more strength to erode the shore. Sea ice that used to restrain the ocean waves in winter no longer freezes like it used to, leaving the waves to wreak more havoc.

During storms, they smash into the rocks right beside the Adams' house. To make matters worse, the sea level is rising. Meanwhile, the permafrost that once strengthened and stabilized the land is thawing and also weakening the coast.

The Adams share their small prefab house on Beaufort Drive with one of their sons, his common-law wife and their six children, along with two of Sarah's brothers. Sandy not only laments his shrinking yard but also worries about the safety of his grandchildren, who like to scamper along the beach, below the boulders that were brought in to stabilize the collapsing shore.

"They're playing on the rocks and ... huge boulders might fall on them," he said.

Sarah Adam said the erosion began to speed up in 2011. "Since then, it's been eroding two, three feet and more, some years," the 60-year-old said.

She's been pleading and negotiating with local officials for the last two or three years to move their house. "There's not going to be any time left soon enough," she said. "We'll be in the water."

Sandy would prefer to find a way to stabilize the homes on his street so they don't have to be moved. He has lived on this side of Tuk all his life and loves the view.

"What I'm going to miss the most is the ocean," he said. "Every morning I check to see if anything is going by my house, like whales or seals travelling. I can see boats coming in from out hunting and it's amazing."
- Emily Chung and Mia Sheldon, with additional reporting by Susan Ormiston
Some other homes on Beaufort Drive have been relocated farther inland. But no one has confirmed when the Adams' home will be rescued from its seemingly inevitable drift into the ocean.

The local authorities "come and check [the house]," said Sarah. "They come and take pictures of the interior, how many times?"

Addressing the local government, she said it's time for action. "Do it. Help us move."

Stay in touch!

Are there issues you'd like us to cover? Questions you want answered? Do you just want to share a kind word? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at whatonearth@cbc.ca.

Sign up hereto get What on Earth? in your inbox every Thursday.

Editor: Andre Mayer | Logo design: Sködt McNalty

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Feeling helpless about climate change? There's lots you can do | CBC News

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Hello, people! This is our weekly newsletter on all things environmental, where we highlight trends and solutions that are moving us to a more sustainable world. (Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.)

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People are feeling quite helpless about climate change because CO2 is invisible. It's pretty hard to fight something you can't see. But there are ways to not feel helpless!

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How to Not Feel Helpless About Climate Change

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How to Not Feel Helpless About Climate Change

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Feeling helpless about climate change? Well, you're not alone! Thinking in a more positive way can help.

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This is interesting because no one really has told you HOW to counteract climate change, but lo and behold, here it is!

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Citizens' Climate Lobby | Solutions to Climate Change

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Our supporters cover the political spectrum and work in 500+ local chapters. Together, we're building support for a national bipartisan solution to climate change.

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Organize, organize, organize! Working in groups can help you help the climate! Some support in your actions is always welcomed!

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Lab-Grown Meat! And all our hunters groan, but you vegetarians, rejoice! Vegans too! This crazy solution could be the wave of the future. Try it for yourself! Scientists say this is very healthy.