CULTIVATED MEAT
Cultivated meat usually referred to as cultured meat is genuine animal meat that will replicate the sensory and nutritional profile of conventionally produced meat because it’s comprised of equivalent cell types and arranged within the same three-dimensional structure as tissue. It isn’t imitation or synthetic meat; it’s actual meat that's grown from cells outside of an animal.
How is cultivated meat made?
All cultivated meat and seafood companies follow an equivalent general approach, almost like the way cultivation work with plants. a method to grow vegetables is by starting out with a little cutting of a parent plant. That cutting is placed in a nutrient-rich environment that permits it to grow.
Similarly, the cultivated meat process starts with a little sample of tissue and places it during a nutrient-rich environment that permits it to grow. Of course, the small print of how this process takes place is complex and can differ from company to company.
Benefits of cultivated meat
Cultivated meat is considered more eco-friendly as compared to regular meat. It eliminates the necessity for livestock, which could reduce the utilization of energy by the maximum amount of 45%, reduce the utilization of land by 99%, and produce up to 96% fewer greenhouse gases.
It will even be animal-friendly as no animals are going to be harmed or treated unethically. Moreover, it'll significantly reduce the quantity of water usage, because the standard production of just half a kilo of meat requires around 9000 liters of water, as compared to 94 liters required for classy meat. In reference to health, it's time to be ready to determine any benefits from lab-grown meat, and only time will tell if it possesses many health benefits.
The science behind cultivated meat
Most of the cultivated meat products have been tried and tested. However, only a few have made it past the bench-scale production. Scaling up the process required a lot of optimization and bioengineering.
Bioreactors are employed for such large-scale production. Cell therapies, recombinant protein production, or production of other biologics make use of such bioreactors and are already used in full fledge.
However, as animal cells lack cell walls, they are more susceptible to shear stress than microbial cells. Moreover, apart from the anchorage dependence and adaptation properties of animal cells, they are sensitive to paracrine factors and other metabolites. Hence, several optimizations are yet to be made before large-scale production of Cultivated meat can be made possible.
​
Today, startups from many countries are racing to optimize this technology. Cultivated meat produced at present is far too costly to survive in the mainstream market. Advancements are being made daily to bring this meat to our regular supermarkets, which will have just the right texture, flavor, and cost as people are used to. Ultimately, sustainable, scalable, slaughter-free, and antibiotic-free meat can be the game-changer for our planet.