Review 567 – Techno-Food Part 2

Welcome to the second part of our two-part Techno-Food Reviews, in which we’re flagging up a double onslaught by the biotech lobby on regulatory safeguards and the public purse. The aim? To fast-track the introduction of techno foods while channelling large amounts of public money into scaling up their production.

In Part 1 (REVIEW 566) we focused mainly on synbio food. Techno-food boosters prefer the term “precision fermentation”, even though synthetic biology is anything but precise. As we saw, that raises some very serious food safety and nutritional issues, especially if it is to become, as its promoters project, the major source of the world’s food supply. We also examined some of the massive technical, political and environmental problems involved in trying to scale up this technology into a mass food production system.

In Part 2, we’re going to be looking more at some of the other forms techno food is taking, most notably LAB-GROWN MEAT and GROWING MEAT IN PLANTS. But we’ll also be focusing on the attack on regulatory safeguards, including highly concerning developments in the UK, where the Food Standards Agency has launched its own deregulation campaign to try to fast-track the introduction of lab-grown meat and synbio food (see TRASHING REGULATORY SAFEGUARDS). This makes all too plain that the biotech lobby’s aggressive deregulation campaign goes far beyond gene-edited plants.

TRASHING REGULATORY SAFEGUARDS

UK: Food Standards Agency wants to fast-track and green light techno food

The UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) is seeking to fast-track approval for lab-grown (“cultivated”) meat and synbio (“precision fermented”) food by slashing UK regulations surrounding novel food and feed products, as well as food additives. This will also involve less oversight for GMO foods. As part of this regulatory streamlining, the FSA is proposing to fast-track novel food approvals by relying on other countries’ regulators.

In the case of synbio food, this could see the FSA depending in particular on the judgements of regulators in the US, which has already approved several such products for sale and consumption. Israel and Singapore, as well as the US, have been the first to approve lab-grown meat products. The FSA’s director, Rebecca Sudworth, justifies such dependence as avoiding pointlessly duplicating the work of “another trusted regulator”.

It seems certain the US will be high on the FSA’s list of “trusted” regulators, and that is bound to set alarm bells ringing not just in the UK, but in any other countries tempted to follow this model. Recent testing revealed that a synbio milk that was accepted by US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as safe contained a large number of unexpected substances that could potentially be allergenic or toxic.

And Dr Michael Hansen of Consumer Reports points out that lab-grown meats are products so novel that their impacts on the microbiome and epigenetics are completely unknown. He calls the lack of robust regulation for such products a dereliction of the FDA’s duty to protect the public.

RAIDING THE PUBLIC PURSE

Bumper year for public funding of lab-grown meat and synbio food development

According to the Good Food Institute (GFI), “UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) – the country’s biggest public funding body – has comfortably invested more in alternative proteins in 2023 than throughout the entire previous decade (2012-2022).” The GFI said “a game-changing leap forward for the development of cultivated meat [lab-grown meat] and precision fermentation [synbio food] in the UK” came with UKRI’s investing £12 million in establishing the Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub (CARMA), which, among other things, will focus on working how to produce cultivated meat at scale (see LAB-GROWN MEAT and ALSO ON THE MENU: LAB-GROWN BREAST MILK, WOOLLY MAMMOTH MEATBALL, KIND OF QUAIL, AND PET FOOD below for why that’s never going to happen; and see PART 1 for more on public funding of techno foods in Europe and the campaign to massively increase the amounts involved).

GROWING MEAT IN PLANTS

As we saw when looking at synbio foods in Part 1 (REVIEW 566), using energy- and resource-hungry bioreactors at any scale can be extremely challenging. One of the big challenges is avoiding contamination – a problem that also bedevils LAB-GROWN MEAT, where, as we shall see, companies have had to abandon plans to use large bioreactors because they have proved a contamination nightmare.

One of the clearest indications of just how problematic bioreactor production is proving is the extraordinary lengths that some biotechnologists are going in their efforts to avoid using these biotech vats at all. This includes trying to use genetically engineered flies and cows as “bioreactors” for producing recombinant proteins, including for lab-grown meat companies, as well as growing animal proteins in plants.

Plant-pig hybrids will make ultra-processed “meats” tastier

Moolec, a company spun out from Bioceres – the GM seed firm behind the HB4 GMO wheat being grown in Argentina – has inserted pig genes into soybeans so that porcine proteins can be grown in field-based plants.

With consumer concerns around “plant-based meat” (also known as meat substitute, fake meat, mimic meat, mock meat) made from vegetarian or vegan ingredients leading to a significant decline in sales, amid the struggle to remain competitive against conventional meat, Moolec claims adding their “Piggy Sooy” (patent pending) to plant-based offerings can improve the “meaty” flavour at a competitive price.

But, according to WIRED, Moolec’s CEO and co-founder, Gastón Paladini, “says he’s more interested in the trillion-dollar global meat market. It’s an uncomfortable truth that many meat products contain a surprisingly small fraction of real meat. In the UK, for example, sausages only need to contain 42 percent pork to qualify for the label ‘pork sausages.’ The rest is flavorings and filler – which often includes protein from soybean. Mixing in a meatier soybean could improve these products while keeping their costs down, says Paladini.”

So if you were hoping that more consumption of plant-based meat substitutes would mean less soybean monocultures (for animal feed), forget it. Now they’re growing GMO soy with pig genes not just to make fake meat but to supplement the meat in real pork sausages – in both cases encouraging the consumption of ultra-processed foods.

Growing animal cells in hybrid beef rice

Korean scientists are managing to grow animal muscle and fat cells inside rice grains. Cow muscle and fat stem cells were seeded into rice and left to culture in the petri dish for 9 to 11 days. The resulting hybrid beef rice is reported to have 8% more protein and 7% more fat than regular rice. News of this multi-million dollar endeavour prompted Arnold Schwarzenegger to comment that the protein content was so small that the hype outweighed any actual benefits. Arnie said it was reminiscent of supplements that “promise the world” but “don't do anything”.

LAB-GROWN MEAT

(aka biotech meat, in-vitro meat, cellular meat, cell-meat, cultured or cultivated meat)

The Dutch scientist Mark Post unveiled the first ($330,000!) lab-grown burger on live television in 2013 and today more than 150 companies are trying to produce lab-grown products at an affordable price, with the support of not just Silicon Valley tycoons like Bill Gates, Kimbal Musk, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel, but conventional meat giants like Tyson and Cargill, and Swiss processed-food giant Nestlé.

The process starts with removing stem cells from a live animal. These are then grown in bioreactors, where they are fed on a cell culture medium supplemented with recombinant proteins and growth factors. Originally the main growth factor for all lab-grown meat production was fetal bovine serum harvested from fetuses taken from pregnant cows during slaughter. Alternatives, both animal and synthetic, have been emerging, though not without controversy.

A few lab-grown meat, poultry, and seafood products produced in this way (see below, and ALSO ON THE MENU: LAB-GROWN BREAST MILK, WOOLLY MAMMOTH MEATBALL, KIND OF QUAIL, AND PET FOOD) are now finally poised to enter the marketplace. But there are massive problems, not least the sky-high production costs, with some companies even being accused of faking their progress in a style reminiscent of the failed blood testing company Theranos, another Silicon Valley biotech darling that turned out to be a fraud. To Michele Simon, the vegan public health attorney, food industry expert, and food policy advocate, “The entire sector is essentially one massive PR campaign disguised as food tech pretending to save the world… the house of cards will inevitably fall.”

Lab-grown meat is one of the worst technology failures of 2023

Lab-grown (or “cultivated”) meat was one of the worst technology failures of 2023, according to MIT Technology Review’s annual list of the worst in tech. Exhibit A: billion dollar start-up Upside Foods, which is using lots of labour, plastic, and energy to make hardly any meat. (More on Upside Foods, which has Bill Gates among its investors, in items below.)

Lab-grown meat: The revolution that died on its way to dinner

Between 2016 and 2022, investors poured almost $3 billion into cultivated meat and seafood companies, reports Joe Fassler in the New York Times. Yet despite nearly a decade of work and a great many messianic pronouncements, it is increasingly clear that a broader lab-grown meat revolution was never a real prospect, and definitely not within the few years we have left to avert climate catastrophe.

Interviews with almost 60 industry investors and insiders, including many who have been employed by, or been part of the leadership teams of, these companies, reveal a litany of squandered resources, broken promises and unproven science. Founders, hemmed in by their own unrealistic proclamations, cut corners, such as using ingredients derived from slaughtered animals. Investors, swept up in the excitement of the moment, wrote cheque after cheque despite significant technological obstacles. Sky-high costs refused to enter the realm of the plausible as launch targets came and went. All the while, nobody could achieve anything close to meaningful scale.

And yet companies rushed to build expensive facilities and pushed scientists to exceed what was possible, creating the illusion of a thrilling race to market. Now, as venture capital dries up across industries and this sector’s disappointing progress becomes more visible, the reckoning will be difficult for many to survive. Investors will be eager to find out what went wrong. For the rest of us, a more pressing question is why anyone ever thought it could go right. Why did so many people buy into the dream that cultivated meat would save us? (In case of access problems, an archived version of this article is here).

How lab-grown chicken became yet another expensive Silicon Valley mess

Upside Foods (formerly Memphis Meats) is the lab-grown meat industry’s biggest player. It has raised more than $600 million in investment and in June 2023, Upside was cleared to sell lab-grown meat in the US. Upside has long attracted attention by implying that it is ready to produce whole cuts of chicken at large volumes, a breakthrough that, if true, would put it far ahead of the competition.

But Bloomberg reports that in reality, Upside’s gleaming row of patented 500-litre bioreactors, shown to visitors as making meat, including to CBS as recently as July 2023, had to be abandoned because they were a contamination nightmare. The machines were the key to growing meat cells at scale, but they were too complex to clean adequately between experimental batches, eventually leading the company to abandon them entirely – though they continued to use them for PR purposes.

And while visitors were sold the dream of meaty flesh self-multiplying ad infinitum in high-tech, stainless steel cell growing chambers, according to internal company documentation and former employees, Upside at the moment is actually growing just minuscule numbers of chicken skin-type cells in small plastic bottles, then scraping them out gram by gram to compress and mould them into a single forkful of flesh. And publicly available company documentation shows that this hugely labour-intensive chicken has higher levels of cholesterol and lead than the real thing. (In case of access problems, an archived version of this Bloomberg article is here).

“Are we the next Theranos?”

WIRED has also reported on the major problems at Upside Foods, using insiders and former employees of the lab-meat sector’s leading company to get at the truth about whether whole cuts of chicken were being produced at large volumes in big bioreactors. WIRED reported that they weren’t and that within the company, employees would joke that the startup could be the next Theranos – the biotech startup that imploded spectacularly, ending with its founder and chief operating officer both going to prison for fraud. “It was a running joke: ‘Are we the next Theranos?’” says one former employee. “I don’t think it necessarily means that they are the next Theranos,” the former employee adds. “No one is dying. People are being lied to, but no one is going to die. Ideally.” Another former employee confirmed that staffers at the company would make jokes comparing Upside to Theranos.

Lab-grown meat has a terrible environmental impact

Upside Foods’ co-founder and chief executive officer, Uma Valeti, has claimed, “The greenhouse gas emissions from our process is [sic] 90% less than what traditional animal agriculture would cause”. But a recent study shows that lab-grown meat – far from being a massive step forward – could be 25 times worse for the climate than regular beef.

Insiders say Eat Just is in big financial trouble

Eat Just is Upside Foods’ biggest rival. In December 2020, Eat Just’s lab-grown meat was approved by Singaporean regulators – the first approval of its kind anywhere in the world. Shortly after, its “meat” – in the form of chicken nuggets, chicken curry and other dishes – was sold at a restaurant in one of the city-state’s five-star hotels. In mid-2021, Eat Just created a wholly owned subsidiary called Good Meat to focus on lab-grown meat. In May 2022, Good Meat announced it had signed an agreement to build 10 giant bioreactors to grow animal cells for cultivated meat – a project orders of magnitude larger than anything attempted before.

But a WIRED investigation has revealed that even as the company embarked on the nine-figure bioreactor project, there were concerns it was struggling to pay vendors and contractors. Ultimately the Good Meat deal would collapse into a legal dispute, with bioreactor firm ABEC alleging that the company owes more than $61 million in unpaid invoices. The startup is also being sued in two separate recently filed legal disputes: one from an engineering firm for more than $4.2 million for alleged unpaid work and another from a food processing firm alleging more than $450,000 in unpaid invoices for ingredients. Eat Just has said it is no longer trying to build the large-scale lab-grown meat facility or working on large bioreactors.

You can’t buy lab-grown meat even if you wanted to

In January of last year, Reuters reported under the headline Lab-grown meat moves closer to American dinner plates that “Executives at cultivated meat companies are optimistic that meat grown in massive steel vats could be on the menu within months after one company won the go-ahead from a key regulator.” This American go-ahead followed a similar approval – the first anywhere in the world (see item above) – in Singapore.

But later in the article, readers were told that they wouldn’t be able to buy it in grocery stores, although the company that won approval, Upside Foods, “is now hoping to bring its product to restaurants as soon as 2023”. And during 2023 lab-grown meat did go on the menu in two exclusive US restaurants, where some of the meat was also sold at special events.

But WIRED reports that all the restaurants that once served lab-grown meat have now stopped offering it, “leaving the industry in a strange limbo”, and that lab-grown meat is no longer on sale anywhere in the US or Singapore. Steve Molino, an investor at Clear Current Capital, a plant-based and lab-grown meat venture capital firm, told WIRED that the lab-meat companies had probably made a loss on selling their meat, given the high costs of production.

ALSO ON THE MENU: LAB-GROWN BREAST MILK, WOOLLY MAMMOTH MEATBALL, KIND OF QUAIL, AND PET FOOD

Be wary of lab-grown meat firms claiming they’re heading to market

In early November 2023, Reuters ran the headline Czech firm Bene Meat gets EU approval for lab-grown meat for pet food. And Reuters quoted the company’s managing director as saying, “Today we have become the first company globally that has an official authorisation for the production and sale of cultivated meat for cats and dogs”. The company’s press release likewise claimed that Bene Meat Technologies had “won the world championship” by becoming the “the first company in the world to be licensed” to bring lab-grown meat to the pet food market. But all this groundbreaking news of “EU approval”, “official authorisation”, and being “licensed” turns out to be a PR confection. There was no EU approval. Bene Meat had merely self-listed its lab-grown cells in the EU feed materials register – something any feed business operator can do. The register is managed by an industry-led body which doesn’t grant approvals, certificates, or licences. This is all part of what Joe Fassler calls “creating the illusion of a thrilling race to market” to suck in investors.

More lab-grown meat for pets racing to market?

In mid-November 2023 came the headline: Meatly to sell “first-ever” cultivated pet food. But in case you thought that meant they had gained approval to do so (see item above), four months later in March of this year came the headline: “World’s first” cultivated pet food seeks regulatory approval. The approval being sought is in the UK and so needs to be seen in the context of the UK regulator’s current efforts to fast-track and green light lab-grown meat (see TRASHING REGULATORY SAFEGUARDS), but even so, Meatly’s claim that it expects to get the regulatory greenlight to sell its cat food within three months seems extremely improbable.

Why all the interest in pet food?

Reading between the lines of Meatly’s coverage, here’s why pet food seems to be on the menu:
1. The regulatory requirements are much lower for pet food.
2. Consumers are more willing to give lab-grown meat to their pets than to eat it themselves.
3. Replicating the correct texture for meat from a vat of cells is tricky, but that’s considered unnecessary for pet food because – in the words of Meatly’s CEO – pets “don’t particularly care what it looks like or if it has the right kind of texture.”
4. Lab-grown meat is difficult and expensive to produce but it only needs to form a portion of pet food. Meatly’s chicken cells, for instance, will only make up about a third of the final product, with another company’s pulses and vegetables making up the majority of the canned “chicken pâté”.

Risks of lab-grown quail meat

Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) is currently assessing an application from Vow Group Pty Ltd, the firm that in March of 2023 produced a lab-grown woolly mammoth meatball, generated from mammoth and African elephant DNA. That was just a publicity stunt, as the meatball was not made available for human consumption on the grounds that it was “hard to tell if our immune systems would react well with protein from 4000 years ago”, and was just used for display. Now though the same firm is seeking approval of its lab-grown (cell-cultured) quail meat.

The Australian NGO GeneEthics has strongly objected – see their detailed submission at the link above. They are calling, among other things, for the removal of growth factors (derived from GMOs) from Vow’s cell-culture media where they are used to promote the cancer-like proliferation of immortalised animal cells in vats. They also point out that the UN’s FAO report on the food safety aspects of lab-grown food notes several important scientific uncertainties that regulators need to face, such as that animal serum in the culture media may introduce pathogens and that antibiotic residues may remain in the final product. Antibiotic residues are one of the concerns about factory-farmed meat that lab-grown meat was supposed to avoid.

Singapore gives woolly mammoth meatball firm nod for lab-grown luxury quail-like product

Despite all the concerns (see item above), in early April, Vow announced that it had just secured regulatory approval in Singapore to commercialise its new lab-grown quail product, “Forged Parfait”. Interestingly, the Australian firm is not claiming the product is the same as quail meat. It says it is “inspired by” quail cells, and that “Quailia is a metaphor for what we are doing”, while the product is technically from “an entirely new animal”, crafted from a subspecies of the Japanese quail. Forged Parfait is also not a structured whole-cut product (see LAB-GROWN MEAT above for the problems with producing whole cuts at large volumes), but a more custard-like product made of undifferentiated cells, which are much easier and cheaper to produce. And the quail-like cells (“Qualia”) will only form part of “Forged Parfait”, which will also include butter, shallots, tapioca starch, port wine, brandy, garlic, vegetable and fruit concentrates, olive oil, salt and thyme.

Once again, regulatory approval does not mean that the product is about to go on sale. Vow say their quail-inspired product will be available exclusively as part of a seven-course menu at an upmarket restaurant from April 12 to 27. After which, it is “expected to be available at upscale restaurants in Singapore”. It will be interesting to see whether it follows the pattern of other approved lab-meat products to date and quietly disappears into limbo once the limited restaurant runs are complete (see LAB-GROWN MEAT above). Or perhaps it will go on sale as an expensive novelty item for futuristic foodies, with no more pretence that it's trying to displace significant meat consumption – the whole supposed justification for lab-grown meat – than a one-off non-edible woolly mammoth meatball.

Also on the menu: lab-grown breast milk

Leila Strickland was inspired by seeing Mark Post unveil the first hugely expensive lab-grown hamburger at a press conference in 2013. “To create the pinkish, flat patty, Post, a professor of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, had taken thousands of tissue culture plates full of bovine stem cells, mixed them with fetal calf serum and other nutrients, and waited until they differentiated into muscle cells. This was exciting in and of itself. But Strickland’s mind wandered to another potential application of cell culturing: human breast milk.” In May 2020, Biomilq, a company she had founded, got $3.5 million from a group of investors led by Bill Gates. Biomilq is now in a race with competitors in Singapore and New York to shake up the world of infant nutrition. But in GMWatch’s view, the obvious concerns about the health impacts of these novel lab-grown products apply even more to a food that is going to be a baby's sole source of nutrition and hydration for six months or more.

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