“Frankenburger!” That expression reverberated through the German media landscape when during a live broadcast in London, since which eleven years have now passed, I had the opportunity to bite into the first laboratory-grown burger patty while the whole world was watching. London is the city in which no lesser than Winston Churchill in 1931 predicted that “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or the wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

The author

© Julietta Kunkel

As a trend researcher with multi-disciplinary access to questions of food and beverage culture, Hanni Rützler, founder of futurefoodstudio in Vienna, has made a name for herself far beyond German-speaking countries not only since her legendary, worldwide broadcast of tasting the first in-vitro burger in London in 2013. For more than 25 years, she has been acclaimed for looking at the big picture of change in food culture and her interest in new – including technological – developments combined with her ability to notice even inconspicuous changes and to correctly identify them as food trends beyond merely seasonal fads. As a nutritionist and health psychologist, Hanni Rützler approaches the subject of food culture not only in theoretical terms. She is an internationally sought-after speaker and author of the Food Report that has been annually published since 2014 by “Zukunftsinstitut” and “is regarded in the industry as a barometer of what makes consumers tick and what they want,” as “stern” magazine has put it.

Today, Churchill’s vision has become a reality: Around the world, numerous companies are working on scaling the production of meat that has been cultivated from animal cells in bioreactors. “Huber’s Butchery and Bistro” in Singapore was the first restaurant to include lab-grown chicken meat on its menu. Since last May, the nuggets produced by “Eat Just” can be bought at the store for the equivalent of 5 euros per 100 grams (3.5 ounces). Business is doing well, we hear. There’s certainly no more fear of Frankenstein meat in Singapore. In Europe, as well, many people, especially younger consumers, no longer view cultured meat as something out of a horror movie but increasingly look at it through the glasses of economic pragmatism or rational climate- and eco-conscious thinking.

Producing meat and fish in bioreactors may be the most spectacular technology that its protagonists expect to have the continuing capability to adequately feed the world in view of population growth and progressive climate change that increasingly affects farming. Keeping things in perspective, it’s not going to completely take the place of traditional meat production but it could mitigate the massive pressure on livestock production to satisfy the continually growing hunger for meat around the world. In Europe, where meat consumption is slowly but surely in decline, in-vitro could support a return to extensive animal husbandry that takes less of a toll on natural resources while delivering benefits like greater animal welfare, higher biodiversity, and better meat quality.

Agricultural and food science technologists around the world are working on many new or improved technologies that are going to radically change our food production in the coming decades. Not only in bioreactors but also on the fields – with AI-supported systems for precision irrigation and fertilization and targeted pest control. Not least, the so-called CRISPR Cas9 genetic scissors enable accelerated breeding of crop varieties with better adaptation capabilities to changed climatic conditions. This is another technology where the Frankenstein firestorm is out of place because with the CRISPR mutation the desired properties are merely achieved faster and in a more focused way than with classic breeding methods.

Artificial cultures for a new food culture

The most promising keyword, though, is precision fermentation, which is a biotechnological method of programming micro-organisms in a way enabling them to produce practically any complex organic molecule such as proteins, oils, or vitamins. In the future, the progressive findings in that field are going to lead to significantly enhanced results in terms of taste, i.e., results coming a lot closer to animal-based products. They’re going to complement and enhance the vegan meat, fish, and cheese substitutes that in the form of plant-based food are on the market today. The German startup “formo,” for instance, uses this technology for emulating milk proteins by means of yeast cells based on which nature-identical cheese can be produced. Food approval has not been issued yet but is likely to be issued soon. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has just rated “heme” (soy leghemoglobin) produced by “Impossible Foods” using precision fermentation as safe for consumption. Soy leghemoglobin is responsible for the “bloody” meat-like color of beef substitutes made by the American manufacturer.

Hence, besides cultured meat and fish as well as plant-, insect-, algae-, and fungi-based foods, microbes and the nutrients produced from them could become an important pillar in the process of producing protein-rich foods that will highly likely be less energy- and resource-intensive and emit less CO₂. In addition, precision fermentation can take place locally and irrespective of climatic conditions. Plus, it can help get scalable production of cultivated meat off the ground, for which it can produce low-cost culture media that are essential for cell growth. Besides animal ethics, key arguments supporting cultivated meat include the fact that in-vitro meat can be expected to perform better than traditionally produced meat in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and that, due to less land consumption, it frees up farmland that today is still largely being used for growing animal feed. A question yet to be answered is how the high energy consumption of the bioreactors can be minimized and whether and when the amount of renewable energy produced can sustainably cover the consistently growing overall demand for it.

Between “go” and “no go”

Today, resistance against cultured meat is primarily voiced by the stakeholders of traditional animal husbandry and by conservative and right-wing politicians who “in the name of local culture and for the protection of farming” are demanding a ban on the production and sale of cultivated meat or – like in Italy and Florida – have already put it into action. However, in doing so, they fail to recognize the potential of that technology to protect culture and agriculture by providing farmers with a new opportunity to depart from industrial mass production, which includes soil erosion and animal suffering or – in many countries of the global south – from the monoculture of top-selling crops such as cocoa, coffee, bananas, or avocados that are produced strictly for the international market without serving the purpose of food self-sufficiency of the farmers and the country.

However, advocates in either camp typically close their eyes and ears to productive synergies between low-tech and high-tech solutions. Instead of stone-walling on new technologies agricultural stakeholders would be well-advised to support their clientele in switching to a variety of high-grade products for human consumption, so promoting change in food culture toward a more-plant based, healthier diet – in other words, instead of growing animal feed for the manger producing more fruit and vegetables for the plate.

Like in other parts of the world, the goal of large-scale ecologization of traditional farming and concurrent restoration of biodiversity will hardly be achievable in Europe without innovative technologies and new approaches to thinking. A look at Germany demonstrates the dilemma: That’s where Greenpeace in its “Agrarwende 2050 (Agricultural Transition 2050)” roadmap projects that the German agricultural yield in the event of a full conversion to organic farming would decrease by an average of 40 percent. To compensate for that loss in yield, 27 percent more natural land would have to be converted to farmland. That would not only be diametrically opposed to the European Green Deal but also hardly be feasible.

The great potential of “cellular farming”

Consequently, going forward, cultured meat will be an option enabling continuing enjoyment of animal proteins at affordable prices and without a guilty conscience, with emphasis on “going forward,” because numerous technical and legal hurdles are yet to be overcome before meat can be produced in bioreactors in large quantities and at affordable prices.

“We’ve domesticated animals and plants, and now we’re in the process of taking subsequent steps – domesticating cells.”

Tilo Hühn, a professor at Zurich University of Applied Sciences

That, by the way, not only applies to animal cells. Plant cells can be domesticated as well. For instance, those of avocados or cocoa beans to make the products from them that we like best: guacamole dip and chocolate. That doesn’t require the entire fruit but just a slurry of cells. The requisite technology that has been developed at Zurich University of Applied Sciences is not yet ready for market. However, these two examples particularly illustrate the great potential of “cellular farming” to secure feeding the world in view of population growth and progressive climate change because the regions where the lion’s share of avocados and cocoa beans are being harvested today suffer most severely from climatic changes.

Tilo Hühn, a professor at Zurich University for Applied Sciences, has neatly put it in a nutshell by saying that we humans have “domesticated animals and plants and now we’re in the process of taking subsequent steps – domesticating cells.”