Want to finish off with a cheesecake after the Independence Day BBQ?
- Today, of course, it is still impossible if you keep kosher, but thanks to the accelerated development of the civilized meat industry, you will probably soon be able to eat grilled meat with a glaze of butter and sip a completely dairy dessert - thanks in part to Israeli development that is about to change the meat industry Civilized and turn it into an industry that will reach the plate of each and every one of us and also influence the kosher laws we know today.
Cultured meat, unlike regular meat, is meat produced in a laboratory using cell culture.
For decades, entrepreneurs have been dreaming of producing meat in the laboratory, but it is only in the last decade that technological advances have been achieved that have made the dream a reality.
"By and large, a biopsy is taken from an animal, for example, a sheep, a cow, a chicken or a fish," explains Dr. Tami Miron, Chief Technology Officer of Fresh Start, an Israeli food technology incubator supported by the Ministry of Economy and the Innovation Authority. .
But the high production costs and low production rate make cultured meat something that can still not be bought at the supermarket, and certainly not to throw on the barbecue casually: "One of the big barriers of the cultured meat industry is the cost issue. In 2013 Mark Post. It took him two years to produce a patty that contained about 100 grams of meat, and it cost about $ 325,000. "Because the global demand for meat is only increasing, and the number of consumers in the world is growing, everyone understands that more efficient and faster production processes need to be found."
Israel is already a world power in the field of cultured meat, with companies such as Future Meat Technologies, which raised almost $ 350 million for research and development, and Super Meat, which was the first to present cultured chicken, but it seems that the holy grail everyone is looking for In the hands of a small and not yet known company, "Profios", which offers a solution that reduces the production costs of cultured meat by at least 40 percent.
The researchers, says Dr. Meron, who along with her colleagues at Fresh Start nurtures the small company, generally studied a biochemical pathway associated with myocardial cell renewal, but their development was discovered under a microscope just like a minimal steak - and the rest is history.
Mouse steak?
Not so disgusting
The fact that the steak they saw was a steak from mouse cells did not really bother the researchers, and they decided to investigate the issue in depth - then discovered a biochemical pathway that is a kind of shortcut in cell differentiation: instead of 7 to 10 days for cell sorting, the path achieves the same result in 72 hours.
Through an accelerated process of differentiation into muscle cells they get muscle fibers with a texture closer to the source.
This Israeli shortcut will lower the costs of producing cultured meat and make it cheaper and more accessible - which will turn the halakhic questions regarding cultured meat into practical and everyday questions.
Is cultured meat meat at all?
Is it allowed to mix it with milk and its products?
Are laboratory-grown seafood suitable for edible kosher embryos?
And what about a steak that makes a suitable pork, is it allowed to be eaten or is it a pork for everything?
- A group of rabbis from the national religious sector, including Rabbi Moshe Beagle, Rabbi Zeev Whitman and Rabbi Oren Duvdevani, all renowned experts on modern kosher, dealt with some of these questions and recently published a halakhic document that meat produced in a laboratory suitable for embryos is fur, based on a roadmap on the subject. Published by Rabbi Yuval Sherlow, Head of Ethics at the Tzohar organization.
Attached to the document were explanatory notes by Rabbi Avraham Satyu.
If until today, the production process of cultured meat was based solely on cells taken from adult animals, a source that remains controversial for training and its meat, the new technologies make it possible to produce suitable meat from embryos and even from pre-embryos.
According to the rabbis, since the tiny cell cluster from which the cultured meat culture begins is in a developmental stage similar to that of the pre-embryo born with each fertilized egg, in any case the same primary cell cluster is not defined as an "animal" and is therefore not meaty.
Therefore, even the meat produced from the same primary cell cluster is not meaty.
BBQ on Independence Day (archive), Photo: Oren Ben Hakon
According to this approach, cultured meat that produces suitable meat taken from an adult cow or sheep may be meaty, but exactly the same meat that produces suitable meat taken from a cow or sheep embryo is completely fur, and therefore, "products based on these cells and grown on a plant substrate" are kosher Fur 'Even if it is the same cells, in their composition and properties, for fat or muscle cells that grow in nature. And there is no 'appearance' in that. "
In short, prepare yourself for a complete change in kosher law.
A meat sink and a milk sink?
Unnecessary.
Of course, provided that all the meat you consume will meet the basic conditions of the source of the cells and the form of their growth.
So if you really want to eat a strictly kosher cheeseburger on Independence Day, all you have to do is make sure the juicy patty that arrives at the BBQ is from an embryonic source. Since there are jurists who disagree with the facilitative approach and believe that all cultured meat is meaty, while others believe that although such meat is not meaty, it is still not advisable to eat it with milk for apparent reasons, you will probably need to check who you are ordering for your BBQ.
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