Cell-cultured meat production is about to face another challenge in its effort to supply consumers with a sustainable way for them to get meat-like protein without eating meat, treating animals inhumanely and damaging the environment. Researchers at the University of California Davis released a report last month concluding that lab-grown meat’s environmental impact could likely be worse than traditionally raised beef. There is, however, a caveat. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed, and was only recently submitted to BioRxiv, an open access preprint repository for the biological sciences.
BY: Dennis McLaughlin, McLaughlin Writers LLC – Sources: UC Davis Cultivated Meat Consortium 2023, Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat: A Cradle-to-Gate Life Cycle Assessment, Derrick Risner, Yoonbin Kim, Cuong Nguyen, Justin B. Siegel, Edward S. Spang; Oxford Martin School of Social Sciences, University of Oxford, 2019; Matt McGrath, BBC, February 2019.

What’s Changing Minds?

For more than a decade, champions of cell-cultured meat have suggested that bypassing the greater biological processes of whole animal production can result in lower GHG emissions per unit of meat produced. Beef production, they claim, emits methane and nitrous oxide from their manures and digestive processes that contribute to global warming, water pollution and other environmental trespasses. “Around a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving up temperatures are estimated to have come from agriculture,” wrote BBC correspondent Matt McGrath in 2019, in a piece about research findings from the Social Sciences Division of the University of Oxford.

A key objective of this Oxford study was to look at the long-term implications of cultured meat versus meat from cattle. The Oxford scientists challenged the validity of a conventional premise that the various emissions from cattle could be converted to their carbon dioxide equivalent. But this didn’t provide the full story of how methane and nitrous oxide have different impacts on the climate.

Per ton of methane emitted, the research showed, indeed has a much larger warming impact than carbon dioxide. “However, it only remains in the atmosphere for about 12 years, whereas carbon dioxide persists and accumulates for millennia," said Professor Raymond Pierrehumbert, co-author of the Oxford study. "This means methane's impact on long-term warming is not cumulative and is impacted greatly if emissions increase or decrease over time." The scientists' climate model found that in some circumstance and over the very long term, the manufacture of lab meat can result in more warming. This is because the emissions from the lab are related to the production of energy which is almost entirely made up of carbon dioxide, which persists in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

Obtain Full Report

Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat: A Cradle-to-Gate Life Cycle Assessment, the yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study by researchers at the University of California Davis’ Department of Food Science and Technology is available on the bioRxivwebsite. The preprint service is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York.

Cell Cultured Meat: Not Yet Environmentally Friendly

It hasn’t been easy for the lab-grown meat industry. Digging Deeper has been following the possibilities, expectations and hopes that have excited developers of “cell-cultured” meat substitutes – and the realities that are emerging. (See the Ag Council’s Newsletter, December 2021, March 2022) “The industry’s early, heady days were flush with optimism,” reported The Counter (formerly The New Food Economy), an independent nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom investigating forces shaping how and what Americans eat. Food advocacy groups, vegetarians and environmentalists envisioned sophisticated bioreactors turning out alternative meat products with scalable efficiency that surely would save the planet. Animal rights activists were excited. Investors defined scalable as a chance to grab 10% of the $1.4 trillion global meat industry by 2029. That share, Barclays Bank said in 2019, would be worth $140 billion by 2029. Barclay analysts noted, “Plant-based protein continues to gain ground versus its animal-based counterpart, and we expect this trend to continue for the foreseeable future.”

What’s Happening Now

Despite astounding advances and accomplishments in bioscience, biochemistry and nutrition engineering that have created cultivated-meat in a laboratory, lab-meat proponents may have been unrealistic in estimating the overall complexity and expense of the effort. A study – Lab-Grown Meat Is Supposed To Be Inevitable; Science Tells A Different Story – released in September 2021 by The Counter warned that confidence in the prospects of cell-cultured meats could be overstated. Enthusiasm for its potential to become humanity’s mainstream, predominant source of protein is probably ill-conceived, the editors said.

The truth is this, said Joe Fassler, deputy editor of The Counter, “A sequence of as-yet-unforeseen breakthroughs will still be necessary. We’ll need to train cells to behave in ways that no cells have behaved before. We’ll need to engineer bioreactors that defy widely accepted principles of chemistry and physics. We’ll need to build an entirely new nutrient supply chain using sustainable agricultural practices, inventing forms of bulk amino acid production that are cheap, precise, and safe. Investors will need to care less about money. Germs will have to more or less behave. It will be work worthy of many Nobel prizes—certainly for science, possibly for peace.”

What Could Be

Conventional wisdom among conservationists is that meat cultured from animal cells is better for the environment. They claim it uses less land and water and releases fewer greenhouse gasses. But in the not-yet-reviewed paper (Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat: A Cradle-to-Gate Life Cycle Assessment), researchers at the University of California Davis say that lab-grown meat’s environmental impact could be “orders of magnitude higher” than cattle raised and processed conventionally. “If cell-based meat companies have to purify growth media to pharmaceutical levels, it will use more resources, which then increases global warming potential,” said lead author and doctoral graduate Derrick Risner, UC Davis Department of Food Science and Technology. “If this product continues to be produced using the “pharma” approach, it’s going to be worse for the environment and more expensive than conventional beef production.”

UC Davis researchers conducted a life-cycle assessment of the energy needed and the greenhouse gases emitted in all stages of lab-grown meat production. Then they compared it with conventional beef production. One of the current challenges with lab-grown meat is the use of highly refined or purified growth media – the ingredients needed to help animal cells multiply. These include complex mixtures of salts, carbohydrates, vitamins, amino acids, metabolic precursors, growth factors, hormones, and trace elements. Risner says this method is similar to the biotechnology used to make pharmaceuticals. And that poses a critical question for cultured meat production: Is it a pharmaceutical product or a food product? If lab-meat companies must purify growth media to pharmaceutical levels, explains Risner, it consumes more natural resources, which in turn increases global warming potential. “If this product continues to be produced using the pharma approach,” he states, “it’s going to be worse for the environment and more expensive than conventional beef production.”

UC Davis scientists define the global warming potential as the carbon dioxide equivalents emitted for each kilogram of meat produced. The study found that the global warming potential of lab-based meat using these purified pharma grade growth media ingredients is four to 25 times greater than the average for traditional beef.

One of the goals of the cell-cultured meat industry is to create lab-grown meat using food-grade ingredients rather than expensive, energy-intensive pharmaceutical ingredients and processes. Under such circumstances, researchers have found cultured meat could become more environmentally competitive. While these results show promise, the leap from pharma-to-food still represents a significant technical challenge for “system scale-up.”

“Our findings suggest that cultured meat is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef. It’s not a panacea,” said one of the study’s authors Edward Spang, associate professor in the UC Davis’ Department of Food Science and Technology. But it is possible that its environmental impact could be reduced in the future, say scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and educators currently researching cultivated meat. However, they maintain that it will require significant technical advances to simultaneously increase the performance of lab-grown meat and to decrease the cost of its production. Other goals, said Spang, are to establish and evaluate cell lines that could be used to grow meat and find ways to create more structure in cultured meat.

Going Forward

UC Davis’ Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat study reviewed current traditional best-practices beef production operations and found that they outperformed cultured meat systems whether they were developed via pharmaceutical product or food product standards. The authors suggested more investment in traditional cattle production to advance more climate-friendly beef operations would yield greater reductions in GHG emissions quicker than funding cultured meat.

The study was not designed to support positions of advocacy, activist, political or industry groups. It was designed and implemented by the UC Davis Cultivated Meat Consortium, a cross-disciplinary group of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and educators researching cultivated meat. Its goals include establishing and evaluating cell lines that could be used to grow meat and find ways to create more structure in cultured meat. The research was funded by the UC Davis Innovation Institute for Food and Health and the National Science Foundation Growing Convergence Research grant.

Derrick Risner says even if lab-based meat doesn’t result in a more climate friendly burger, there is still valuable science to be learned from the endeavor. “It may not lead to environmentally friendly commodity meat, but it could lead to less expensive pharmaceuticals,” he says. “My concern would just be scaling this [lab-grown meat] up too quickly and doing something harmful for the environment.”