Will Cultured Meat Fix Food Security Problems?

Do you know the meat produced in factory? The technology of culturing meat is being developed. Will this technology fix the problems of food security?

In this blog, I would like to discuss whether cultured meat will fix food security problem, especially in connection with social aspects.

Cultured Meat

"Cultured Meat" is a meat which is produced artificially in the factory (but currently in the laboratory and in vitro). The main technology is culture of muscle cells. The most significant differences with production of ordinary meat are resource efficiency and safety.

The production of ordinary meat requires many crops and water. To produce 1kg high quality animal protein, livestock are fed about 6kg of plant protein. Some parts of nutrition is used for the growth of organs with low commercial value such as bones and skins. Most of bones are discarded without using. On the contrary, culturing meat cell only uses a little water and nutrients. This is effective and direct use of resources.

With regard to safety, cultured meat has advantage over ordinary meat. Currently meat industry in UK operates their business under strict regulation by Food Standard Agency. Most of the purpose of the regulation is to prevent contamination during the process. If the meat produced in the clean factory, the meat must be safer than ordinary meat. So, this technology also called "clean meat".

Food security

Food security is important problem. The FAO defined that food security "exists 'when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life'. The habitat of eating too much meat is one of the obstacle to achieve food security.

As mentioned above, farming livestock requires many water and crops. If these resources are properly distributed to the people with demand directly instead of farming livestock, the situation must be improved.

Reducing meat consumption is effective way to improve food security. However, the meat consumption is not decreasing, on the contrary increasing and predicted to continue increasing. The main reasons are increasing of population and changing of life style to Western one in developing country.

Direction of Development and Culture

Imagine a steak. Steak meat has a three-dimensional structure. Culturing cell at three dimension is a important direction of development. However, a cell is basically cultured two-dimensionally on a petri dish. Three-dimensional culturing is more difficult, since in the case of three dimension, the cells inside cannot breathe or take in nutrients and cannot grow.

The other important technological problem is cost reduction for producing cultured meat. It might be too expensive to sell in the market.

For the first problem, if market prefer sliced meat to steak, the technological development becomes dramatically easy. Sliced meat is easy to imitated by stacking cell sheet. The problem is whether the market appreciate sliced meat or not. For example, Japanese food and Chinese food often use sliced meat. Rather depending fully on technological solution, let's find more acceptable and sustainable way of eating meat.

Finding Acceptable Way

How will a society accept cultured meat? Since eating food is one of the most important activity in human life, the technological fix must be done carefully. It will be a social experiment. The development must obey the ethical framework for experimental technology. Let's see the criteria and current situation of cultured meat. Four criteria are required as ethical development. Non-maleficence, Beneficence, Respect for autonomy and Justice. First, Non-maleficence is obligations relating to doing no harm. Cultured meat may not be harmful. No one will be suffered directly from this technology.

Secondly, Beneficence is obligations to do good. Cultured meat will be beneficial to society as we see above.

Thirdly, Respect for autonomy is obligations relating to protecting and guaranteeing the autonomy, including the autonomous choice. As to this point, more discussion is needed for cultured meat. Producer must give consumers choice. Consumers will be able to avoid eating cultured meat, if they don't want.

Lastly, Justice is obligations relating to issues of distributive justice, to special protection of vulnerable groups and procedural justice. This point also needs to be discussed before production of cultured meat; what types of meat is suitable to distributive justice and what is the procedure during culturing meat.

What Contributes to Decision?

Currently, cultured meat is developed with beef cell. Actually beef is resource-consuming and expensive meat. Once the technology developed, the effectiveness is larger than other types of meat. However, some people like Hindus cannot eat beef. They are excluded from this technological development, despite India being one of the countries predicted to increase consumption of meat in in the future.

The process of culture is also important. For some people, the process decides whether they can eat or not. Halal process is essential for Muslim, but it is still not evident that some way of cultured meat is permitted or all the cultured meats is prohibited from eating. It can only be decided by Islamic law scholar.

Eating habits are varied depended on societies. Technological development must be done along with the conversation with the society.

Who Lead the Development?

Much of development with this technology are made in private companies. This characteristic means, a government has difficulty in regulating the technology directly. Governments have role to develop the rule about cultured meat, especially from consumers protection's perspective according to the requirement of the society. We have already held GM nation as a similar experience. We can learn from the experience. Governments should establish criteria for strategic evaluation beforehand.

Conclusion

Increasing the proportion of cultured meat in the total meat consumption means reduction of pressure toward land using. Even if cultured meat will not be perfect alternative of ordinary meat, it contributes to the improvement of food security.
The land can be used for cultivating foods for local people or for protecting environment and bio-diversity instead of producing crops for livestock.

To be accepted by consumers, the technological development should be done with the conversation to the society.

I hope this technology develop in healthy way and spread and accepted all over the world.