“Lab-grown burgers to combat climate change,” says renowned futurist

The world should be eating fewer animal products and more lab-grown burgers to combat climate change, food insecurity and simultaneously improve public health, according to world-renowned futurist Dr Jamie Metzle. Some of the world’s biggest challenges can be addressed with a razor-sharp focus on new technologies such as synthetic biology, he added.

For perspective, based on consumer uptake, pricing and supply the market for cultivated or cultured meat could touch $25 billion by the turn of the decade, indicates a McKinsey & Company report.

But before moving ahead, let’s understand what really is cultured or lab-grown meat?

It refers to the process of using muscle samples and stem cells from animals to grow a small sample into a large amount of meat.

“If we are treating them [animals] like a means to an end of our nutrition, wouldn’t it be better instead of growing the animal, to grow the meat,” Metzl stated. Pointing towards affordability of lab-grown meat, he added, “the first cell cultured burger cost about $330,000, you can now get one for about $10.”

The Mckinsey & Company report also confirms that since developing the first prototypes, companies have been able to reduce production costs by 99%.

However, a lot must happen for cultivated meat to become a major industry – not least that tens of billions of dollars need to be spent to scale it to even 1% of the global protein market. The focus of the next decade will likely be on proving commercial viability, with modest market penetration. To succeed, the industry must assuage potential concerns around a novel food while delivering deliciousness at the right price, the report states.

A “super-convergence of technology” is “being unleashed and manifested in super-enabling technologies,” Metzle observed. But “the determinant of whether we have a better story, or a worse story is not technology – it is us. We need not just to imagine the kind of future we would like to inhabit but roll up our sleeves and do the hard work to build it.”