DAVIS, Calif. — A liquid nitrogen tank nicknamed the “Cryocow” in a medical science lab at the University of California, Davis could contain the meat of the future.
The tank contains frozen vials of bovine stem cells, which the scientists are able to coax into transforming. The stem cells can be made to convert into real cow muscle cells: lab-grown beef.
The methods these scientists are experimenting with happen at the microscopic level, but they could hold the key to large-scale production of cultivated meat: real animal meat, grown without the animal’s body.
Instead, the cells are placed in a nutrient-rich soup inside of a fermentation tank, similar to the process used to grow the yeast cells making wine and beer.
“For cultivated meat, what you're doing is you're taking stem cells from a cow or another animal and you're growing them in here in a very controlled environment,” said UC Davis professor David Block.
Block leads the Integrative Center for Alternative Meat and Protein (iCAMP), a campus-wide initiative with more than 50 researchers working to create new forms of protein to feed the world.
“We have to do something,” Block said. “There won't be enough meat, enough supply to meet demand in the next 25 years if we don't do anything.”
Forecasters predict a serious shortage of meat in the global food supply in the decades ahead, predicting global meat production needs to increase by 25-100% by the year 2050 in order to meet the increased demand.
There likely isn’t enough additional farmland or natural resources available on the planet to raise that many cows, pigs and chickens.
“The world's population is growing and that's a big part of it,” Block said. “But maybe even more important part of this growing demand is that people in developing countries are developing more of an appetite for meat.”
It's why many of the scientists at UC Davis — and in labs around the world — are working on technologies to replicate the same cuts of meat we find in the butcher shop today.
The iCAMP program is also researching ways to make plant-based protein better and cheaper. Existing meat alternatives, nearly all of which are made out of plant proteins, are often more expensive than their real meat counterparts.
Trying to make lab-grown meat at scale is a goal so complex, even some of the scientists working on it remain skeptical it can be done.
“We see cows grazing here in California that eat dry grass and turn that into the highest quality protein that we know, which is meat,” said animal science professor Anna Denicol. “We are really trying to replicate in the lab something that nature took thousands of years to perfect.”
The steaks you buy in the store came from a cow that walked, ate and grew the meat in its body over the course of a year or two. In that time, the animal’s body sends countless signals to its muscles to make them shape and grow — combining muscle cells, fat cells and connective tissue cells to form the ribeye and tri-tip we buy in the store.
“If you really want to go all the way and make a steak, you really have to try to replicate what happens inside the animal,” Denicol said. “What we can do now is we can take a [stem] cell and make a muscle cell, but that's at the microscopic level.”
Denicol’s students typically do research focused on things like improving cattle breeding.
In another lab on campus, professor Lucas Smith’s students usually conduct clinical trials on new treatments for diseases like muscular dystrophy.
Both labs are using their specialized knowledge and different types of stem cells to make cultivated bovine muscle cells: beef.
It’s happening at too small of a scale to feed you a meal.
“It is a challenge working from something that we can't really get our hands on, at least at this stage yet,” Smith said. “Under the microscope… the images that we get are quite beautiful to me. Muscle is a very ordered structure."
Microscope images show the former cow stem cells converted into muscle cells, which begin to arrange themselves into muscle fibers.
“An actual muscle fiber has hundreds of former cells that have merged together to form these long giant cells that are packed with protein,” Smith said.
If scientists can grow longer muscle cells, along with fat and connective tissue cells, they might be able to mix it into a lab-grown, real beef burger. Someday, perhaps using special molds or food-grade 3D printers, they may make you a perfectly marbled steak.
But it’s going to take a long time before you see one in your grocery store.
“That might be 10, 15, 20 years out,” Block said. “So in the interim, I think there needs to be other approaches.”
Other approaches are already swirling in yet another lab on campus.
Professor Ruihong Zhang and her students are working with mycoprotein, a type of protein made by growing fungi humans have used to ferment foods for thousands of years. Zhang was studying the fungi as a means to break down sewage at wastewater plants.
By feeding the same fungi food-safe nutrients, her research team figured out how to make nutritious new protein-packed food in a wide variety of forms and textures.
“We can add the natural colors, natural flavors into fungi to make different products,” Zhang said.
Her lab has produced mycoprotein powder, jerky and also a way to shape the protein into little spheres that can be made in different textures.
That breakthrough led a startup, co-founded by one of Zhang’s students, to license the technology to make a new product launching this fall: cultured caviar.
“Right now this is the most expensive caviar in the world because it's made by PhDs,” said entrepreneur Zane Starkewolfe with Optimized Foods.
The fish “eggs” look real, modeled on local white sturgeon caviar. The taste is soft, creamy, slightly slimy and not too salty.
Starkewolfe says in blind taste tests, professional chefs have been unable to tell the real caviar from the fungus-based alternative.
The caviar product will soft launch in a couple of restaurants this fall, at about the same price as the real caviar. Not bad considering it’s made by feeding the fungus farm waste: leftover almond hulls.
That sort of breakthrough is what it might take to make cultured meat work at large scale.
“We want to produce protein rich foods that everyone can afford,” Block said.
The most expensive part of growing animal meat in the lab is making the liquid soup the animal cells grow in.
Researchers are using purified ingredients, including special proteins that make animal cells divide and change. Filling a big metal tank with the ingredients they’re using now, which come from the pharmaceutical industry, would grow meat no one could afford.
“We can't have a $5,000 hamburger,” Smith said.
Even if scientists find a way to make it affordable, we’ll be left with big questions. Could it be considered Halal or Kosher?
“I'm not sure I want to discuss that on camera,” Block said. “I've heard that several rabbis have already decided that something like lobster that wasn't kosher to begin with will still not be kosher.”
How about vegan?
“I've had vegan students who said that they would try it,” Block said. “When cultivated meat is at scale, assuming that the initial cells came from a biopsy, then it could be slaughter-free.”
One thing’s clear. If slaughter-free meat eventually comes to the masses, the scientists will need some help from the humanities to get people eating it. People aren't going to stop wanting to eat real steak anytime soon.
“Well, I can speak for myself,” Denicol said. “I won't.”
WATCH MORE ON ABC10 | Serial squatters: Couple has lived rent-free for years, despite being evicted from more than 8 homes
