Lab-grown food could help solve world hunger

It’s been a pretty good summer, hasn’t it? I don’t just mean the heatwave. We even had a few tornadoes for entertainment. The hay was saved weeks ahead of normal and there’s probably a second harvest in it. Not to mention the grain crops, Ireland’s livestock and tillage coming good as only they can.

In parallel, the barbecues have been burning harder than for years. The checkouts of supermarkets are chocka with people loading up on meat and charcoal. Our inner Ozzie comes out to play...
But what about that meat they’re loading up with? After the year that’s just passed, are we being careful? Are we checking what, exactly, we’re burning? Are we insisting on meat reared on good Irish pasture?
I doubt it. I went to one barbecue hosted by people I thought were pretty good about food and found they were slapping pre-pack burgers on the burner, the kind of pressed plastic anonymous flesh that could be anything – and quite possibly was, including horse. They didn’t look like burgers you’d make yourself, or you’d buy from a craft butcher, that’s for sure.
They didn’t even look as good as the first lab-grown burger that was cooked in Riverside Studios in Hammersmith in London the other week. No doubt you’ve seen the pictures...
Apparently it wasn’t bad at all, though it didn’t quite taste like the real thing. Then again, neither did the barbie-blackened yokes I was presented with.
The lab-grown version was made from thousands of strands of protein grown from cattle stem cells. The man who led this project is Professor Mark Prost from the University of Maastricht. He reckons it could be the future of food production and part of the solution to the increasing global demand for food.
This isn’t an idle quest. The demand for meat is so enormous that 30% of the world’s usable surface is devoted to pasture animals. Livestock produce 5% of the CO2 emissions and 40% of methane emissions...
Lab-generated meat is still some distance from a counter near you. That first burger cost over €300,000 to make. The manufacturing technology is a long way from being ready to supply the market that has yet to be built. But don’t think it can’t or won’t happen.
In its own weird way, it fits into the same grid as molecular gastronomy and foraging. If you were offered a bowl of ants, would you eat them? Yes, of course, some of you would. But many wouldn’t. Yet ants are on the menu in Noma in Copenhagen, one of the world’s top restaurants.
So, a bowl of ants or a lab-grown burger? Your choice, pal!
In fairness, apart from unidentifiable barbecued sacrifices, Irish people have eaten batterburgers in Cork and curryburgers in Dublin. Coulda been anything in there! Same goes for a fair few sausages.
I once saw a guy in a carvery in Mullingar order lasagne and taking all the veg with it, cabbage, cauliflower and carrots. He wasn’t done. He also asked for potatoes four ways, mashed, boiled, roasted and chips. He had a big block jaw that was made for chewing and he chomped his way across that plate. Had there been horsemeat in the lasagne he wouldn’t have noticed.
The prospect that someone that gross might be offended by the notion of a lab-grown burger is too ridiculous for words. But he probably would.
While you chew on that, remember this: in another generation, that is, by the middle of the century, the world’s population will rise to between 9 and 10 billion. The demand for food in general will soar and the market in meat will double.
The pressures on the world’s ecosystem will be enormous. Indeed, they already are. Check where your blueberries come from. One week it’s Argentina, the next it’s Kenya. We also produce them here but not in sufficient quantity to satisfy our own indigenous demand. And not as cheap either, which is another major global issue.
Of course, the world’s population has been betrayed by a number of awesomely fertile countries, the most obvious of which is Zimbabwe, a land so rich in natural gifts it could plausibly feed all of Africa. And almost half the world’s food is thrown away. You could take a billion people out of food poverty if we were simply more efficient and conservationist with what we produce.
But even if Zimbabwe was at full production and even if the world’s waste was cut by two-thirds, there would still be gaps. Maybe lab-grown and mass manufactured food has a role to play in addressing these gaps.
Still a bit Star Trek though, isn’t it? It’s meat Jim, but not as we know it. But if a manned mission heads for Mars and wants burgers, I suspect they’ll be lab-grown. As for the rest of us, make hay while the sun shines, and fire up that barbie!