Cultured meat made for the masses

A team of scientists led by university of Maryland doctoral student Jason Matheny, propose how companies could mass produce cultured meat using scientific techniques to create a product that ishealthier than the real thing.

Food companies could then target the growing market for healthier, lower-fat foods and also meet the growing demand for meat in developing markets. Cultured meat would also appeal to consumersconcerned about food safety, the environment and animal welfare, and those who want to tailor food to their individual tastes, Matheny stated.

He even suggests that meat makers may one day sit next to bread makers on the kitchen counter.

"There would be a lot of benefits from cultured meat,"​ Matheny stated. "For one thing, you could control the nutrients. For example, most meats are high in the fatty acidOmega 6, which can cause high cholesterol and other health problems. With in vitro meat, you could replace that with Omega 3, which is a healthy fat."​

In a paper published by Tissue Engineering​ the scientists say two new techniques used in tissue engineering could one day lead toaffordable production of in vitro​ - lab grown - meat for human consumption.

Using one method scientists could grow cells from the muscle tissue of cattle, pigs, poultry or fish in large flat sheets on thin membranes. The sheets of cells would be grown and stretched, thenremoved from the membranes and stacked to increase thickness until the mass resembles meat.

Using the second method scientists could grow muscle cells on small three-dimensional beads that stretch with changes in temperature. The resulting tissue could be used to make processed meat suchas chicken nuggets or hamburgers, Matheny stated.

Both methods would produce an edible product that tastes like cuts of beef, poultry, pork, lamb or fish. To ramp up production on large scale, cells from several different kinds of tissue,including muscle and fat, would be needed to give the meat the texture to appeal to human tastes.

"The challenge is getting the texture right,"​ Matheny stated. "We have to figure out how to exercise the muscle cells. For the right texture, you have to stretch thetissue, like a live animal would."​

Matheny now plans to put the concept into action. He and other scientists have started New Harvest​, a nonprofit company devoted to advancingthe technology. The group plans to develop a system for mechanically stretching cultured chicken, a mushroom-based serum-free culture medium and a two-liter rotating bioreactor for the production ofcultured meat.

"The benefits could be enormous,"​ Matheny stated. "The demand for meat is increasing world wide -- China 's meat demand is doubling every ten years. Poultry consumption inIndia has doubled in the last five years."​

One of the scientists in the group, Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat science at Utrecht University, recently received a grant from the Dutch government to produce cultured meat. The money is being given as part of a national programme to reduce the environmental impact of food production.

Experiments for NASA space missions have shown that small amounts of edible fish tissue can be created in a lab, but the process has not been attempted on a large scale as proposed by Matheny.

"To tissue engineers this subject is of interest as cultured meat production is an application of tissue-engineering principles whose technical challenges may be less formidable than thosefacing many clinical applications,"​ they stated.