If current production methods are scaled up, the carbon footprint of cultured meat is likely to be between four and twenty-five times greater than that of beef. This is because the still experimental production of cultured meat still costs a lot of energy.
Cultured meat is made by growing animal stem cells around a culture medium in a nutrient-rich liquid. It is seen as a more animal-friendly and greener alternative to traditional meat. It requires less land, feed, water and antibiotics than livestock farming. Moreover, livestock farming is an important source of greenhouse gases, and cultured meat no longer requires livestock to be kept and slaughtered.
But food scientist Derrick Risner of the University of California at Davis, and his colleagues calculated that under current production methods, cultured meat production contributes four to twenty-five times more to climate change than ordinary beef. They defined this power as the CO2 equivalent emitted for every kilogram of meat produced, and published their results in a pre-publication on BioRxiv.
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Energy-intensive production chain
The researchers estimated the energy consumed by each step of current production methods. They discovered that the nutrient fluid with which the animal cells are cultured has a large ecological footprint. This fluid contains components such as sugars, growth factors, salts, amino acids and vitamins that each require energy to obtain.
For example, energy is needed to grow crops for sugars and to run laboratories that extract growth factors from cells. Each component must also be carefully purified using energy-intensive techniques such as ultrafiltration and chromatography before it can be mixed into the nutrient solution.
This “pharmaceutical-grade” level of purification is necessary to ensure, say, that bacteria or the toxins they produce don’t contaminate the nutrient fluid, Risner says. ‘Otherwise the animal cells won’t grow, because the bacteria will multiply much faster.’
Conflicting results
Sustainability advisor Pele Sinke from consultancy CE Delft and his colleagues published another analysis of the cultured meat production chain in January, which showed that its ecological footprint would be lower than that of beef.
Their analysis, funded in part by a Washington DC-based cultured meat advocacy group called the Good Food Institute, assumed a future scenario in which pharmaceutical-grade ingredients are replaced by less pure food grade components. “We assumed it would be possible to make this transition in the future,” says Sinke.
At the moment, all cultured meat is grown in a pharmaceutical grade nutrient solution. The Good Food Institute told New Scientist that “companies that produce cultured meat are moving towards a production chain suitable for use in food production, rather than one built for pharmaceuticals.”
Risner says he doubts this will be possible, as even trace amounts of contamination can destroy animal cell cultures. Still, it may be possible in the future to develop animal cells that are more resistant to contaminants, he says.
Using renewable energy to power cultured meat factories and their production chains could also help reduce their carbon footprint, says Sinke.