Well, yes, they may be working on it. But I'd say that wikipedia article is a lot more interesting as entertainment than as realistic evaluation. But I'll get back to that.
The thing is, "in vitro meat" is basically tissue culture. If you've ever been in a lab that does tissue culture, and ever been around a farm that raises livestock, you might get an idea of the very different level of difficulty in the respective processes. Tissue culture labs aren't quite like semiconductor manufacturing clean rooms, but they do require equipment like laminar flow hoods and sophisticated HEPA filters to deal with contamination issues. And culture media are tricky and expensive. Feedlot cattle mostly walk around in their own excrement and they eat mostly unprocessed bulk grain.
A few amusing bits from Wikipedia that hint at the difficulties:
Depending on the motives of the researchers, the growth medium has additional requirements.Commercial: The growth medium should be inexpensive to produce. A plant-based medium may be less expensive than fetal bovine serum.
Duh. But fetal bovine serum is the type of thing that goes into tissue culture media. Or maybe someone will figure out an efficient and economical way to manufacture fetal bovine serum, except I'm thinking not.
If in vitro meat turns out to be different in appearance, taste, smell, texture, or other factors, it may not be commercially competitive with conventionally produced meat. The lack of fat and bone may also be a disadvantage, for these parts make appreciable culinary contributions. However, the lack of bones and/or fat may make many traditional meats like Buffalo wings more palatable to small children.
Small children usually don't like spicy food, but that's not important right now, to engage in a slight Airplane!-ism. Given the recent consumer rebellion over "pink slime", I don't think boneless Buffalo wings for small children are going to be enough to overcome the marketing hurdles for this, which will in turn look pretty small compared to the economic hurdles.
The production of in vitro meat is currently very expensive—about US$1 million for a piece of beef weighing 250 grams (0.55 lb) [2]—
Um. Looks like that fetal bovine serum is sort of pricey Maybe they could find some snobby French cow cells that prefer Château Lafite Rothschild 2005 as an economical alternative.
and it would take considerable investment to switch to large scale production. However, the In Vitro Meat Consortium has estimated that with improvements to current technology there could be considerable reductions in the cost of in vitro meat. They estimate that it could be produced for 3500€/tonne (US$5037/tonne), [7] which is about twice the cost of unsubsidized conventional European chicken production. [6] [7]
I'm guessing there's more that a few overly optimistic assumptions buried in that estimate, and probably a "then a miracle occurs" or two. Levity aside, though, I'm not that knowledgeable about biotech, and It might be technically feasible, but as a viable large-scale commercial possibility in the foreseeable future, I'd say, in vitro meat, shmeat., to use one of the wikipedia article's alternate names. |
