An Anticipatory Social Assessment of Factory-Grown Meat

On August 5, 2013, a prototype sample of cultured, or in vitro, meat was tasted at a well-publicized event in London [1]. This hamburger was not grown in an animal, but rather from bovine stem cells in Dr. Mark Post?s laboratory at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The event may foreshadow a day when traditional livestock production has given way to large-scale growth of meat in factories, or carneries. Dr. Post has suggested that commercialization of cultured meat could be ten to twenty years away [1]. The implications are profound. By some accounts the technology could reduce the environmental impacts of meat production [2], promote human health by eliminating harmful contents such as saturated fats and pathogens [2], address global hunger issues [3], and alleviate the ethical concerns associated with industrial livestock operations [4]. However, technologies powerful enough to address such significant challenges often come with unforseen consequences and a host of costs and benefits that seldom accrue to the same actors. In extreme cases, they can even be destabilizing to social, institutional, economic, and cultural systems [5].

Cultured Meat

Meat consists primarily of skeletal muscle and fat cells in varying proportions. Emerging engineering techniques have enabled the growth of these cells in vitro, as opposed to the traditional in vivo process which requires the raising and slaughtering of a whole animal. A number of in vitro cultivation methods have been proposed, but perhaps the most promising [6] begins by extracting adult stem cells from a donor animal tissue sample (the animal remains otherwise unharmed). These stem cells are then submerged in a nutrient broth that enables the cells to grow, divide, and increase in mass.