As meat and poultry prices continue to rise amid the new inflation, the cost to produce lab-grown meat is on the decline. Future Meat reports that it can make 1 pound of chicken for $7.70, down from $18.00 past year, and Shiok Meats hoping to launch its lab-grown shrimp at $37/kg next year, down from $7,400 in 2019.
While there are several viable companies producing what’s known as Cultivated Meat, one company is looking to be the foundation of the cultured meat industry. And by foundation, I mean literally – the foundation. The mission of Matrix Food Technology (Matrix F.T.), based in Dublin, Ohio, is developing and manufacturing nanofiber scaffolds to support the production of clean, healthy, tasty, and environmentally friendly cultivated products to ethically feed the world.
Scaffolds are nanostructures that support cells and induce them to organize into a larger mass of cells. When cells develop in a living animal (in vivo) they are influenced by their interactions with the extracellular matrix (ECM). The ECM is the 3-dimensional mesh of glycoproteins, collagen and enzymes responsible for transmitting mechanical and biochemical cues to the cell. Plant based scaffolds that are animal component free like those that are designed and manufactured by Matrix F.T. replicate the characteristics of the ECM.
This is more important than it might seem at first glance. Where would wine growing be without the horizontal trellising wires to attach the vines? Or the honeycomb structure now used to regrow bone in humans, not surprisingly also called scaffolding.
The team at Matrix F.T. realized that existing scaffolding solutions for cell proliferation, differentiation, and maturation were unsatisfactory and costly. So they developed a custom-engineered electrospun nanofiber matrix that mimics the natural extracellular matrix (see figure below).
That is also edible.
Ever since Robert Malthus published his essay on the Principle of Population, humanity has worried that our population would eventually outstrip our resources.
Written during George Washington’s Presidency when less than a billion people existed on Earth, Malthusianism postulates that population growth is exponential while the growth of the food supply and other resources is linear, making a future crisis inescapable.
At the same time, previous studies have shown some interesting results about our food and our climate. One bowl of rice can have six times the climate impact of another. More greenhouse gases are emitted to give you a bottle of beer than to give you the same amount of beer from a keg. One cup of coffee’s carbon footprint may be fifteen times bigger than one made from a different crop of beans.
According to the U.S. EPA, farming is responsible for a bout 10% of America’s greenhouse gas emissions. Almost half of that comes from animal agriculture. Two-thirds of the animal sector’s emissions are from animal farts and burps, and cows fart and burp the most, by far.
This isn’t just a problem in the U.S. More than two-thirds of global emissions from the livestock industry are due to cows—not just their gassiness, but their endless eating. Cows consume immense amounts of grain, which requires a lot of fertilizer, which emits nitrous oxide, another powerful greenhouse gas.
There are three paths forward that address this problem in different ways and both are necessary for us to solve this problem:
1) make fake meat that actually tastes and feels like real beef
2) change cow and sheep grazing to be “regenerative”, meaning mostly net zero carbon
3) make real meat without raising the animal itself
The third solution is now more than viable. Cultivated Meat circumvents the actual raising of land animals and fish to go right to making the meat directly – from stem cells grown in vats. In cultivated meat production, animal stem cells are combined with nutrients, salts, pH buffers, and growth factor and left to multiply in the containers.
This allows large scale cultivation of animal cells, in their entirety, in an economically and environmentally sustainable way. No pollutants with the same nutritional value as ordinary meat.
Cultivated meat requires only a percent of the water and emits a percent of the CO2 of ordinary meat. And if non-fossil fuel, like nuclear or hydro, is used to power this process, it becomes as green as we can get it.
Also, many people no longer like the idea of slaughtering living beings, regardless of them being bred over millennia specifically for this purpose.
Matrix F.T. is providing the foundation for this revolution. It could change the world.
