Meat grown out of a test tube may seem farfetched, but it's closer to being on your plate than you may expect. Meat researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands are now growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. The scientists hope to manufacture cultivated meat suitable for burgers and sauces within the next six years. The Dutch-government funded project began in April 2005 and is expected to be completed by 2009.
"Six years from now we might already have a product," says Dr. Henk Haagsman, Professor of Meat Sciences at the University of Utrecht, in a news release. "No loin, yet, but indeed a kind of minced meat the catering industry can use in pizza's or sauces.'"
Dr. Haagsman and a worldwide research team are presently searching for suitable stem cells and methods to grow large quantities of meat within a bioreactor. One method that is being tested is to grow sheets of meat on a membrane which curls up into thicker meat. The meat can then be ground up or rolled to a greater thickness.
"One can also simulate the blood flow by putting thin tubes in the tissue," says Dr. Carlijn Bouten, a tissue engineer at Eindhoven University. "Or you can pump the nutrients under pressure into the tissue."
The researchers claim that cultivated meat is animal friendly in that only the stem cells come from an animal. There would be none of the costs associated with conventional meat production including animal feeding, production and processing. To keep their costs down, cultivated meat producers would use nutrients from plant or fungal sources.
However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has banned cloned animal food until their safety has been tested. Furthermore, the existing technology can only produce ground meat, not a pork loin or steak.
REFERENCES:
1. Heselmans M. The Dutch cultivate minced meat in a petri dish. New Harvest, September 10, 2005:
http://www.new-harvest.org/article09102005.htm
Posted by Elaine Gavalas on October 2, 2006 09:54 AM
