Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 303 | Shaping | 5

Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Week 303 | June 30 – July 6, 2023.

Here’s what we know about lab-grown meat and climate change

Cultivated meat is coming to the US. Whether it’ll clean up emissions from food is complicated.

By Casey Crownhart | MIT Sloan Management Review Magazine | July 3, 2023

Listen to the Extractive Summary of the Article

Soon, the menu in your favorite burger joint could include not only options made with meat, mushrooms, and black beans but also patties packed with lab-grown animal cells.  Not only did the US just approve the sale of cultivated meat for the first time, but the industry, made up of over 150 companies, is raising billions of dollars to bring products to restaurants and grocery stores. In theory, that should be a big win for the climate.

One of the major drivers for businesses focusing on cultivated (or lab-grown, or cultured) meat is its potential for cleaning up the climate impact of our current food system. Greenhouse-gas emissions from the animals we eat (mostly cows) account for nearly 15% of the global total, a fraction that’s expected to increase in the coming decades. But whether cultivated meat is better for the environment is still not entirely clear.

That’s because there are still many unknowns around how production will work at commercial scales. Many of the startups are just now planning the move from research labs to bigger facilities to start producing food that real, paying customers will finally get to eat.  Exactly how this shift happens will not only determine whether these new food options will be cheap enough to make it into people’s carts. It may also decide whether cultivated meat can ever deliver on its big climate promises.

At a cellular level, cultivated meat is made from basically the same ingredients as the meat we eat today. By taking a sample of tissue from a young animal or fertilized egg, isolating the cells, and growing them in a reactor, scientists can make animal-derived meat without the constraints of feeding and raising animals for slaughter.

Cultivated meat will still produce emissions, since energy is required to run the reactors that house the cells as they grow. In the US and most places around the world today, that will likely involve fossil fuels. Renewables could eventually be available widely and consistently enough to power facilities producing cultivated meat. However, even in this case, the reactors, pipes, and all other necessary equipment for production facilities often have associated emissions that are tough to eliminate entirely. In addition, animal cells need to be fed and cared for, and the supply chain involved in that also comes with emissions attached. 

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Soon, the menu in your favorite burger joint could include not only options made with meat, mushrooms, and black beans but also patties packed with lab-grown animal cells.
2. One of the major drivers for businesses focusing on cultivated (or lab-grown, or cultured) meat is its potential for cleaning up the climate impact of our current food system. But whether cultivated meat is better for the environment is still not entirely clear.
3. Where the total emissions from cultivated meat production will fall as high vs low depends largely on where the energy comes from to run the bioreactors for production: if it comes from the electrical grid, which will still rely partly on fossil fuels, the carbon impact will be much higher than it will be if renewables are used to power the facility. It also depends on what ingredients are in the media used to grow the cells.

Full Article

(Copyright)

Topics:  Food, Environment, Technology