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COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • MAY 2019
Cultured meat fails to impress researchers All things being equal, lab meat production could actually increase global warming
Would you eat meat from a
lab? Would you stuff your hamburger with meat grown from cell cultures? Would meat produced from cultures rather than cows get the family around the table?
emerging technology using animal muscle cells produced through tissue culture in a controlled factory or laboratory environment as opposed to the traditional way of raising cattle on a ranch. In a recent first-
Research by MARGARET EVANS
And would cultured meat
really fix climate change? Cultured meat is an
of-its-kind study, researchers at the Oxford Martin School, a research and policy unit based in the Social
Sciences Division of the University of Oxford, UK, looked at the climate-change
impact of several production methods for lab-grown and farmed beef to account for the different greenhouse gases produced. The outcome was surprising. By the numbers, 10% of
Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions are from crop and livestock production excluding emissions from the use of fossil fuels or from fertilizer production. The main gases are carbon dioxide released during soil
cultivation, methane emitted by ruminant animals and from manure decomposition, and nitrous oxide from the use of fertilizer and manure spreading. In the US, 42% of
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agricultural emissions come from animal production with two-thirds of those gases, namely methane, emitted by ruminants. While methane is known to be over 20 times as effective at trapping heat as carbon dioxide, it is not always easy to compare one to the other or profiling methane based on carbon- dioxide equivalent footprints because not all greenhouse gases generate the same amount of warming or have the same lifespan. “There has been a great deal of public interest in cultured meat recently and many articles highlight the potential for substituting cattle beef with cultured meat to provide an important climate benefit,” said John Lynch, lead author of the study. “We show that it is not
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yet clear whether this is the case, partly because of uncertainties about how cultured meat would be produced at scale. An important issue in comparing farmed and cultured beef is that the different warming impacts of greenhouse gases are also not well accounted for in the standard measure used in carbon footprints.”
Lab meat fail In fact, the study’s
projections showed that, over the long term, cultured meat production methods requiring large amounts of energy could actually increase global warming more than traditional cattle farming if those systems continue to rely on fossil fuels. The researchers at the
Livestock, Environment and People (LEAP) program found that, while some projections from the uptake of certain forms of cultured meat could be better for the climate, others may lead to higher global temperatures in the long run. The researchers
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approached the study by examining the available data on emissions associated with cattle farming and the four possible meat culture methods. They assumed that the current energy systems remain unchanged. Taking that data, they modelled temperature impacts on each method over the next 1,000 years. After crunching the numbers, the model showed that, while cattle initially have a greater warming effect because of their release of methane, the manufacture of lab meat in the long haul could result in greater warming. They explained that even if the consumption of traditional meat was phased out, warming from carbon dioxide would continue whereas warming from methane (the release of gases from ruminants) ceases after only a few decades. “This is important because
while reducing methane emissions would be good and an important part of our climate policies, if we simply
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replace that methane with carbon dioxide it could actually have detrimental long-term consequences,” said Lynch. In their report “Climate
Impacts of Cultured Meat and Beef Cattle” published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, Lynch wrote, “For the most conservative cultured meat footprint used here, which still had a lower carbon dioxide equivalent footprint than any cattle system in the study, the long-term temperature impact of production is dramatically worse than any cattle system. Furthermore, as emissions from cultured meat are predominantly composed of carbon dioxide, their warming legacy persists even if production declines or ceases.” He says that replacing
cattle systems with cultured meat production before implementing clean energy sources or more optimistic production footprints could risk a long-term, negative climate impact. And of course, efforts to move to clean energy sources for lab meat production would also benefit traditional meat along the production chain as more mitigation options and new technologies become available. But for all the climate consequences, the social implications have their own push-backs. Consumers love their meat but eating lab- raised tissue from a petri dish will undoubtedly raise the questions of safety, quality, nutrition, flavour, texture, cost, and even what the product is called, whether “clean meat”, “non meat”, “alt meat”, or…? For animal activists, lab meat means no animal was killed. Environmentalists may see greater ecological integrity, but ranchers have always been good stewards of the land. As intriguing as this food
production alternative is, there is a way to go before lab meat makes it to the table. Margaret Evans is a freelance writer based in Chilliwack specializing in agricultural science.
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