A new San Francisco-based startup, Memphis Meats, is planning on growing beef and pork in laboratory bioreactors, aiming to be the first company to bring lab-grown meat into the mainstream market, according to Gizmodo. Furthermore, the company says that its animal-free products will be available to high-end customers in the next three to four years and lab-grown pork will be available within five years.
As of now, lab-grown meat is expensive - the first stem cell burger cost $330,000 to create, but each year production costs are falling, and it's not completely unlikely that this form of meat will eventually be a novel alternative to the resource requirements of growing a cow, which include water, food, energy, time and space.
Of course, there are still many barriers to overcome. Memphis Meats is growing its animal tissue in bioreactors that require stem cells and nutrients. However, without a capillary system to provide the tissues with oxygen, they must be housed and grown in very thin layers. Furthermore, the growth medium for lab-grown meat requires fetal bovine serum, which is extracted from the blood of unborn calves and is currently very expensive.
Memphis Meats and its scientists aren't the only ones eyeing lab-grown meat - Mark Post, a scientist from Maastricht University, created a meat burger from the cells of a living cow, according to Ecorazzi.
"Technically, any species with stem cells in muscles can be used to recreate meat," he said. "We've worked on pork, others are working on fish and chicken but we've been focused on beef because cows have a bigger environmental impact."
Memphis Meats says that in the future, harvesting meat from animals will become unthinkable and that its technology is the way of the future, according to the Daily Mail.
"This is absolutely the future of meat," said Uma Valeti, the CEO of the company. "We plan to do to the meat industry what the car did to the horse and buggy. Cultured meat will completely replace the status quo and make raising animals to eat them simply unthinkable."
