Synthetic meat still impacts the environment too much. But that’s not bad news

When the tragicomic government controversy over cultured meat broke out, I wrote on these pages that, apart from the bullshit supported by politicians, for the main benefits claimed by those who would like to bring this new product to market to be accepted as real, researchers must have the time to carry out the necessary checks, up to meta-analyses on large sets of data that can consolidate or disprove certain hypotheses. A certain benefit is that of saving animal lives. In addition, as I wrote, “it is hypothesized that the adoption of cultured meat, coupled with the gradual decrease in farmed animals, would bring benefits in terms of emissions, energy, water and soil consumed due to the livestock supply chain”; but “this is one of the points on which to conduct an accurate scientific analysis, or rather a meta-analysis, because it is not possible to blindly trust those who are developing the products”.

Now, a new study that has just been released, not yet peer-reviewed, comes to the fore, which deals in depth precisely with evaluate the environmental impact that could result from the large-scale adoption of cultured meat to replace traditional animal husbandry. Cultured meat is obtained from animal stem cells, grown on a suitable scaffold, in a nutrient broth. It has been widely argued that in this way a lower environmental impact is achieved than that of traditional meat, because soil, feed, drinking water and drugs such as antibiotics are not used, energy is not used for rearing and slaughtering and you don’t depend on livestock, emitter of greenhouse gases. However, Derrick Risner of the University of California, Davis and his colleagues have found that the global warming potential of cultured meat, defined as the carbon dioxide equivalents emitted per kilogram of meat produced, could be 4 to 25 times that of regular beef.

The researchers conducted a production cycle assessment of cultured meat by estimating the energy used at each stage with current production methods, a parameter that is roughly independent of the type of meat produced (ie the type of cells grown). The necessary nutritional broth was found to have a strong environmental impact, because all its components (sugars, growth factors, amino acids, vitamins and possibly lipids) involve high energy costs. In particular, not only is the production of these components in itself energy intensive, but above all the pharmaceutical grade purity required and used up to now is based on processes such as ultrafiltration and chromatography, to prevent bacteria or toxins of different types from contaminating the preparation and then the final product. The level of pharmaceutical purity, which is that of the processes approved by the FDA for the production of authorized products, is important to guarantee the growth of animal cells without competition from bacteria, not only for food safety reasons, but also and above all because these they are such efficient growth competitors that they kill the animal cells themselves, preventing the desired product from being obtained.

Now, in January a consulting firm funded in part by a cultured meat advocacy group called the Good Food Institute released an analysis that suggests cultured meat’s carbon and energy footprint is lower than that of beef; but, to obtain this result, it was assumed that instead of pharmaceutical grade purity, the production cycle would use the standards of the food industry, which are less stringent and therefore less energy-intensive and costly from an environmental point of view. In light of this detail, the two analyzes are congruent: the current production methods, approved by the American regulator, are actually more impactful from an environmental point of view than traditional animal husbandry.

Therefore, before realizing the promised potential in terms of lower environmental impact, the promoters of cultured meat must work, both in the laboratory and in production, at least on the following fronts. The first consists in demonstrating that, by passing to a level of purity of a food type instead of a pharmaceutical one, the production cycle can still have sufficient yields. The second step must be the demonstration to the regulator that, after the aforementioned step, the final product obtained is in any case safe from a food point of view and free from dangerous contaminants. Only downstream of the two previous steps will it be possible to obtain the significantly lower environmental impact boasted so far, particularly by integrating renewable energy sources in the production cycle. As anyone can see, good ideas, even when they are promising, must first walk on the legs of data, in order to also prove to be true and sustainable.