In a way, the trail for bio-fabricated animal fabrics is already at least somewhat blazed for Modern Meadow. Unlike with clean meat, some people are already beginning to buy lab-grown animal-based garments, many of which utilize comparable technologies to those employed by some of the companies discussed in this book. For example, California-based Bolt Threads is growing in vitro spider silk (what their webs are made of), starting with yeast cells that have been engineered to spit out the proteins naturally found in the extremely durable arachnid product. Unlike the more common silk from worms-who’ve been domesticated and bred for silk production over the course of many centuries-spider silk is far stronger, some types being even sturdier than Kevlar, all the while being as soft as, well, silk. The problem with trying to produce it commercially is that spiders don’t do so well when we try to farm them, typically eating one another in the crowded conditions needed for insect farming to work. Cannibalism just doesn’t lend itself to profitability. (A team in Madagascar did succeed in producing a farmed spider silk garment in 2009, but only after four years offering a lot of spiders.)
With $90 million in venture capital raised, in 2017 Bolt Threads announced its first commercial product-a necktie that retails for $314, and were only made available to fifty lucky individuals who won a lottery to buy them. The company also inked a deal with Patagonia for its arachnid-free spider silk garments. A Japanese competitor named Spiber (as in "spider fiber") is doing the same thing and in 2015 partnered with North Face to produce the so-called Moon Parka, a durable winter coat containing their lab-grown silk that is, at the time of this writing, available for sale in Japan and retails for $1,000. And shoemaker Adidas is already starting to use lab-produced spider silk, called Biosteel, manufactured by a German competitor of Spiber named AMSilk. The company boasts that “a spiderweb made of pencil-thick spider silk fibers can catch a fully loaded Jumbo Jet Boeing 747, with a weight of 380 tons.” […]
Second, as GFI’s Bruce Friedrich points out in a blog on the topic, clean meat at scale won’t happen In a laboratory-all processed food started in a food lab, even Corn Flakes and peanut butter, for example. But no one asks, "Would you eat lab-produced Corn Flakes?” Rather than being produced in a lab, clean meat would be produced in a factory (or call It a brewery if you prefer), where the majority of food sold In supermarkets Is produced. Food companies, of course, have R-and-D teams laboring away in labs, but once they get their recipe down, the actual food production moves to a factory. Similarly, clean meat factories will be a far cry from a laboratory; they’ll have massive tanks in which the meat will be cultured on a huge scale. [...]
Not everyone will convert, needless to say, but enough will likely do so to make a difference, and, presumably, a profit. As well, even if only twenty percent of meat-eaters were willing to switch, that would still make clean meat a multibillion-dollar industry. […]
Hansen is right that predictions have been made for years about cultured meat coming to fruition, and yet the meat industry largely hasn’t felt that threatened. But things do seem to be changing in the wake of high-profile product unveilings by the likes of Post and Valeti, and certainly the investment from Cargill. Gone are the days of clean meat being purely a theoretical daydream of environmentalists who want a more sustainable way to produce meat. With commercialization looking increasingly likely, we won’t need to rely on pollsters to tell us how consumers may react when clean meat is available to them. People like Hansen and Nestle may not want to eat meat if it didn’t come from a slaughtered animal, but how many others will share their repugnance at such a thought?
Kristopher Gasteratos, founder of the Cellular Agriculture Society (created in 2016), is more optimistic. He believes animal agriculture is so inefficient that humanity will be forced to abandon it, at least for the bulk of our protein production, or we’ll pay the price. His analysis of the situation doesn’t pull any punches: “Factory farming of animals will end one way or the other. The real question is this: if we don’t find an alternative to factory farming soon, will we as a civilization end with it?”
Gasteratos is convinced that the public will come to accept clean meat because there’s such an existential necessity for it. But his view is also informed by a study he conducted over the course of 2016 with the assistance of both New Harvest and the Good Food Institute. In the study, Gasteratos led a team of researchers who asked thousands of survey respondents their views on the topic. Based at Florida Atlantic University, the project ultimately surveyed more than thirty-two hundred undergraduate students and about fifteen hundred adults both in the United States and Australia (the two nations with the highest rates of meat consumption on a per capita basis). Unlike the aforementioned surveys, which largely asked if people would eat "meat grown in a lab:’ Gasteratos took a deeper dive, wording his key question in a way that provided respondents with more context: “Scientists are working towards producing meat by using animal cells instead of living animals. This new method of harvesting meat is called “cultured meat” and will likely be available to the public within the next decade. It is important to note that cultured meat is real animal meat, so it should not be confused with current meat substitutes which are made from plants. If cultured meat is proven safe by long-term research, tastes the same as current/conventional meat and is priced affordably, would you eat cultured meat?”
Upon simply being asked this question, without any discussion of clean meat’s benefits, 61 percent of the university students claimed they’d either “probably” or “definitely” eat it. After being told some of the benefits, either ethical, health, or ecological, that number spiked to 77 percent. Among the fifteen hundred adults, the numbers were similar: 62 percent were willing to eat it without knowing its benefits, while 72 percent were willing once they knew of those benefits.
Other interesting findings from Gasteratos’s work include some pretty fascinating results about just who is most interested in eating this meat. “People still seem to be generally unaware of this topic, but what really shocked me was our finding about how higher self reported meat consumption correlated with higher cultured meat acceptance. Basically, the people who say they eat the most conventional meat tend to be the most receptive toward a cultured alternative, while people who say they eat little meat, and especially vegetarians and vegans, are the least interested.
In other words, clean meat probably isn’t for the people shopping at the farmers’ market or their local co-op, It holds far less appeal with the natural-foods crowd than the crowd going to KFC. But that's okay. In fact, it may even be for the best considering that the number of people who eat conventional meat is far, far larger than those who frequent their local farmers’ markets.
Comments left by respondents offered some good qualitative insights into the general perception. "I don’t care where the meat came from so long as it’s safe and tastes right;’ explained one respondent, echoing a widely held sentiment among participants. Others expressed some qualms about meat-eating but thought cultured meat could be the answer to their concerns: "I heard meat is really bad for global warming;’ one respondent wrote. "this would sort of absolve me of that guilt.”
- Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, Paul Shapiro
