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Meat market in Singapore: Meat consumption is growing rapidly worldwide
Photo: Suhaimi Abdullah / Getty Images
In order for people to eat meat, animals have to die.
More and more people are becoming aware of this in everyday life and at least forego the daily piece of meat.
Not least because, in some cases, there have long been good alternatives that one or two meat fans dare to try.
In 2019, for example, the pea burger patties from the start-up Beyond Meat triggered a real hype and have long since been found on the menus of restaurants and bars.
There are also tasty alternatives on the sausage shelf.
They are often based on plant products, such as soy, the production of which is sometimes associated with damage to the environment because forests have to be cleared or long transport routes are involved.
For years, companies have therefore been working on a completely different approach: They produce meat in the laboratory.
Singapore is now the first country in the world to approve such a product for the food market.
Mixed with vegetable protein
The country allows the US start-up Eat Just to offer laboratory-grown chicken for sale in the form of chicken nuggets.
However, it is not a pure meat product.
The animal cells grown in the laboratory were mixed with vegetable proteins to reduce costs.
The exact relationship is not clear.
The approval took two years and was granted on November 26, 2020, explained Eat Just. Seven experts had tested and examined the production in more than 20 production runs in 1200 liter bioreactors.
Among the auditors were food toxicologists, bioinformaticians, nutritionists, epidemiologists, food scientists and technologists as well as experts in public health policy.
The food authority in Singapore confirmed the approval and pointed out that the country has introduced its own set of rules for "novel foods".
In recent years, the highly high-tech-oriented city-state has become a center for numerous start-ups that focus on the production of sustainable food.
It is based on cells from living chickens
Meat in the laboratory is always made using a similar process.
As with Eat Just, it is based on cells from a living animal, which can be taken in a biopsy, or established cell lines from the laboratory.
The cells come with a nutrient solution in a bioreactor that creates optimal conditions for growth.
There the cells multiply and can then be processed into meatballs or nuggets.
However, creating the structure of a clean, unprocessed piece of meat is still a challenge.
And it is expensive to produce, largely because of the costly nutrients required for cell growth.
A laboratory burger presented in London in 2013, which had been bred from muscle cells from a live cow, cost around 250,000 euros.
This is one of the reasons why Eat Just has added vegetable protein to its product.
The company said that the price of its product will be about the same as chicken in a luxury restaurant and that it will be lower than conventional chicken in the coming years.
A specific number is not known.
Whether consumers accept laboratory meat depends not only on the price but also on the taste.
Selling in restaurant, then in retail
There is already a restaurant that will offer the product, explained Eat Just. The menu should include the nuggets as "cultured chicken".
“We're going to go from one restaurant to five to ten and eventually retail,” said Eat-Just boss and co-founder Josh Tetricker.
He then hoped for approval in other countries.
"We hope and expect the US, China and the EU to take up the topic," said Bruce Friedrich, managing director of the Good Food Institute, a non-profit organization that deals with meat alternatives, "Technology Review".
"Nothing is more important for the climate than turning away from industrial animal husbandry."
Global meat consumption is seen as a driver of climate change - primarily because of the enormous land consumption for factory farming and the associated emissions, including methane.
According to the Food Report 2020 of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture (BMEL), for which a thousand people were interviewed from December 2019 to January, the proportion of those who consume meat or sausage every day in the country has fallen from 34 to 26 percent since 2015.
The corona scandal at the Tönnies slaughterhouse in the middle of the year, which also focused on the poor conditions for employees, may have depressed the values again.
However, meat consumption continues to grow strongly worldwide.
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With material from AFP
