Professor Johannes le Coutre said of lab-grown meat: “At some point, this will just be a way of producing food.”
Within the next decade, Australians could see lab-grown or “artificially grown” meat on supermarket shelves, a food and health expert said.
“Our goal is to have products dominating supermarket shelves within the next five to 10 years,” said Professor Johannes le Coutre of the University of New South Wales’ School of Chemical Engineering.
“Our goal is to reduce the cost to below the cost of conventional meat to make it acceptable to consumers, but it hasn’t happened yet.” Coote said.
Cultured meat, which is about 30 times more expensive than real meat, is made from cells sliced from living tissues of live animals. These cells are cultured in a vat into material that has the same nutritional characteristics, appearance, texture and flavor profile as authentic meat.
It allows scientists to control the nutrient content to a large extent, avoiding the antibiotics often used in commercial agriculture and making it more sustainable.
However, Alan Barclay from the Australian Dietitians Association said claims that it would be more nutritious “may be difficult to prove at this point.
It is not clear whether the nutrients in artificial meat will enter the circulation and have a positive effect once it enters the body.
“I don’t expect to see a lot of artificially farmed meat in supermarkets in the next five to 10 years.” Barclay told AAP.
The difficulty lies in convincing large numbers of Australians to switch to captive-raised meat.
That means lowering costs, making it taste like meat, and making it socially acceptable to consumers.
On December 22, 2020, Singapore, the first country to allow the sale of meat produced without slaughtering animals, showed a chicken nugget made from lab-grown chicken to the media.
Some people find vegan diets unattractive, and plant-based meat alternatives don’t always resemble real meat in texture and flavor.
“Don’t confuse the two,” Kurt says, “real meat cells are smaller and more nutrient dense than plant cells that contain a lot of water.”
“People should be eating vegetables and raw plant materials like soybeans, peas, beans – that’s very good. However, I still think we should consume meat products in moderation. With the future of cellular agriculture, we can do that in a sustainable way.”
Kurt says lab-grown meat products will likely appear in stores first, as ingredients in recipes such as soups or sauces.
The emergence of cellular agriculture comes against a backdrop of growing global demand for agri-food products. Sustainable raw material production could extend from meat to seafood and even the dairy industry, Kutt said.
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