As livestock farming is increasingly known as a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions, cellular agriculture has emerged as a sustainable alternative to conventional meat production. This week, we spoke with Dr. Natalie Rubio, co-founder and CEO of Deco Labs, about how advances in cellular agriculture could make cultured meat more affordable and accessible.
Livestock farming is a major driver of global greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and water consumption, yet global demand for meat continues to rise. Cellular agriculture offers an alternative by cultivating meat from animal cells in a bioreactor. This could significantly reduce the climate and environmental impacts of meat production while delivering the same quality of meat consumers love.
Current food production systems, particularly for meat, can be among the most harmful human activities for the environment. They often require vast amounts of fresh water and land, are a major source of water pollution, and contribute to about one third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, the demand for meat continues to rise, with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations projecting the demand to reach 445 M metric tons by 2050, which is a 76 percent increase from 2005. Cultured, or cell-based, meat has the potential to remedy these issues. Meat cultured in a bioreactor can avoid harming animal welfare, producing methane, or spreading food-borne diseases, and promotes a more humane, sustainable, and safe way to consume meat without substantial change to consumption habits.
Cultured meat is created by taking cells from an animal and growing them in bioreactors. Through controlling temperature, exposure to nutrients, and other aspects, the cells can be tricked into believing that they are still inside of an animal. Under these carefully monitored conditions, the cells divide and proliferate, or grow exponentially, and mature into muscle and fat tissue through a process called differentiation.
Advocates for cultured beef project that it will use less land and water, and produce less greenhouse gas emission compared to farmed beef. Cultured meat additionally has the potential to benefit public health by reducing the spread of food-borne illness, infectious disease, and antimicrobial resistance. Farmed meat can carry countless pathogens, including zoonotic diseases, or diseases that can be passed from animal to human, such as influenza A. During the pandemic, meat-packing plants experienced multitudes of COVID-19 outbreaks. Cell-based meat production is conducted under more sterile conditions, so it has a lower chance of spreading such pathogens.
Despite the promising potential of cultured meat, it faces many challenges when it comes to commercialization. The primary concern of lab-grown meat is the cost. Media, or the food the cells use, is extremely expensive, and bioreactors, which were originally designed to cultivate small quantities of cells at a time, still need to be scaled. Cells are also finicky, so when conditions are unfavorable, they stop growing. With large vessels it is difficult to ensure that the conditions are always optimal for growth. Due to these high production costs, some estimates of the potential cost of cultured meat are approximately $37 per kilogram, which is 10 times more expensive than the cost of regular meat.
In addition, many studies have shown that attitudes towards lab-grown meat are mixed, with some customers having concerns about the ‘unnaturalness’ and about the safety of the product. One study showed that although 65 percent of respondents were willing to try cell-based meat, only approximately 33 percent were willing to eat it regularly or as a replacement for farmed meat. To gain consumer acceptance, the lab-grown alternative must be at a minimum equivalent, if not superior in quality to that of regular meat, which can be especially challenging for meats that require structure, like steak.
Natalie Rubio believes that despite the challenges cell-based meats face, there is tremendous potential and that areas in which current technology is lacking are simply opportunities for new technologies to develop.
Rubio co-founded Deco Labs to take on some of the challenges posed to cultured meat and develop solutions to them. Currently, Deco Labs are experimenting with genetic engineering to make the cells more productive and with creating cheaper media to feed the cells and lower the cost of production. Natalie Rubio believes that despite the current cost of cultured meat, cheaper inputs can lead cell-based meats to becoming cheaper than conventional meat.
Natalie Rubio was one of the first interns at New Harvest and later became a New Harvest Research Fellow. As a fellow, Rubio completed her Ph.D. at Kaplan Lab at Tufts University, being among the first in the world to complete a Ph.D. in cellular agriculture. Currently, Natalie Rubio is a co-founder and CEO of Deco Labs.
A transcript of this episode can be found at https://climatebreak.org/growing-meat-from-cells-with-dr-natalie-rubio/
Ethan: I’m Ethan Elkind, and you’re listening to Climate Break– climate solutions in a hurry. Today’s proposal? Growing meat from cells to slash emissions from animal agriculture. We spoke to Natalie Rubio, Founder and CEO of cellular agriculture research company Deco Labs.
Dr. Natalie Rubio: Animals aren't efficient at turning crops into food. With cells, we can be a lot more efficient. You need way less plants to feed cells. Cells double every 24 hours, so every day you have twice as much meat as you had the day before. It's exponential growth.
Ethan: Beyond resource inefficiency, raising livestock is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Rubio says growing meat from cells can drastically cut those emissions, especially when replacing beef.
Dr. Rubio: If we compare cultivated meat to beef, it's about 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, and, if 10% of the global demand for beef is transitioned to cultivated beef, that would mitigate 500 million metric tons of emissions each year, which is massive.
Ethan: Rubio says that cultivated meat can match the taste of conventional meat, but it currently costs much more to produce. However, she believes replacing expensive inputs with plant-based nutrients will eventually make it cheaper than animal-based meat.
Dr. Rubio: Cultivated meat is super expensive to produce right now, and that's because primarily culture media, this liquid broth of nutrients, like Gatorade for cells, is super expensive. But the potential for the technology is so strong that I don't see cultivated meat just meeting conventional meat on price and staying there. I think it's going to drop far below.
Ethan: To learn more about cellular agriculture, visit climatebreak.org.