After thousands of years of humans raising animals for food, the prospect of building a business around meat created in a laboratory instead of on farms or feedlots looks to be a huge technical challenge. Success for food tech entrepreneur Josh Tetrick depends on scientists who are familiar with the latest advances in bioengineering and on religious scholars who study the laws of religion.
Eat Just Inc., a San Francisco startup backed by billionaires, is developing meat that is grown in bioreactors rather than raised on farms. Unlike plant-based products, cultured meat is grown from animal cells. Tetrick says it is meat from a genetic and a nutrition perspective. The slaughter component is not a step in the process.
The lack of bloodshed creates questions for religious Muslims and Jews who only eat meat from animals that have been slaughtered according to long-established rules. If meat is grown in a lab and doesn't come from a dead animal, can it be considered kosher or not? Is it meat? Billions of people around the world subscribe to faiths or traditions that have strict guidelines about meat preparation.
Tetrick is betting that today's technology can find favor with ancient traditions, which will lead to a new way to satisfy the world's appetite for protein. In December, Eat Just received permission to introduce cultured chicken breast in Singapore, after it began selling lab-grown chicken nuggets in 2020. In August, the company announced plans to build a facility in Qatar, which it is now targeting Muslim consumers. Eat Just has consulted with religious experts, but hasn't gotten a seal of approval for its new type of meat. It is an important question and it is even more important because of what we are going to be doing in Qatar. We don't have that stamp yet.
McKinsey says that the industry could be worth $25 billion by the year 2030. Future Meat Technologies, an Israeli startup, received a $347 million investment from the investment arm of the Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. Bill Gates and Richard Branson are both investors in Upside Foods.
The Sultan Mosque is in Singapore.
If Islamic authorities decide that it is not permissible to eat cultured meat, it will be off-limits to followers of Islam. The Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, said in a statement in September that cells taken from live animals and grown in bioreactors are not allowed to be eaten.
Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, has a fatwa that could encourage other countries to do the same. In Pakistan, the second-largest Muslim country, scholars led by Islamic law expert Muhammad Taqi Usmani ruled that cultured meat can only be eaten if the original cells come from animals slaughtered according to the Sharia-compliant process. Cell lines from live animals are used by many startup.
Orthodox Jews have yet to reach an agreement on whether meat from animals other than those killed in a ritual slaughter can be kosher. Jewish authorities are concerned about the use of fetal bovine serum, taken from the blood of pregnant cows, to feed the animal cells in the bioreactors. A rabbi with London's United Synagogue who studied Jewish law and science at Israel's Bar-Ilan University says that a prohibition against consuming blood could render meat unkosher. Trying to find precedent is the greatest challenge for this technology.
There is no consensus on whether meat grown in a lab should be considered meat, or whether it should be considered a neutral category that is neither meat nor milk. Avrom Pollak, president of Star-K Kosher Certification Inc., a Baltimore-based organization that works with clients such as Walmart Inc., says that what the companies call it doesn't matter. Some people are going to say that it isn't really meat.
Many companies are moving away from using the system. On December 8th, Israel's Aleph farms announced a partnership with a German company to develop non animal alternatives to feed the cells in bioreactors.
Future Meat Technologies uses cell lines that were ritually killed cattle, chickens, and lambs to address concerns about slaughter-free meat. Future Meat wants to have its chicken in restaurants by early 2023, but needs regulatory approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Several groups of rabbis have visited. Nahmias says that winning Islamic certification won't be difficult. He says it will be both kosher and halal.
Muslim experts are taking it slow in Singapore, where the government has been the world's fastest in approving the commercialization of cultured meat. The Islamic Religious Council of Singapore said in an email that novel foods are new areas in Islamic jurisprudence and need appropriate religious research, analysis and interpretations. It is a new development that the IRCS is studying.
Crickets, Beetles, Mealworms, and Maggots for Burgers are fake meat.
