In 2017, I wrote a column titled “The Coming Meat Wars – 17 Mind-Blowing Predictions.” My second prediction on the list was that cultured meats would be available in grocery stores by 2020.

That’s about to happen. Cultured chicken, in the form of nuggets, will soon be available in a Singapore restaurant after the meat product passed a safety review by the Singapore Food Agency. The U.S. company that’s producing it is called Eat Just, Inc. and their product is called GOOD Meat. Similar pioneering work is being done by this company and others to grow fish, beef, and other meat products.

What is Cultured Meat?

Not to be confused with plant-based meat substitutes, cultured meat is grown from cells obtained via biopsies from live animals. The cells are immersed in plant-based nutrients so they can grow in a fashion similar to the way animals put on weight, but in the confines of a bioreactor.

These cells multiply very quickly until the specimen has grown sufficiently, to a point where they can be harvested, and eventually find a place on our dinner-tables.

I should point out that growing cultured meat is actually faster than growing a cow, pig, or chicken.

Cultured meat production relies on the same science and technology that’s being studied for restoring or replacing human cells or even organs in the world of regenerative medicine.

Benefits of Cultured Meats

Current cultured meat technology and its production processes are still rather pricey and they’re not sufficiently scalable to make a dent in our consumption of traditional, slaughtered meat just yet. But that day may not be as far off as many people think.

A Dutch company, Mosa Meat, led by famed researcher Mark Post and his team of food scientists, is making impressive strides in using a newer, less expensive form of growth factors in making its cultured beef products. The company believes they can achieve “price parity” with traditional meat by 2026.

The potential benefits of cultured meat are huge. First and foremost, there’s the reduction in greenhouse gasses. Enteric fermentation – yes, you know what I mean – within farm animals (especially cows) accounts for 27% of the human-based methane emissions into the environment – a total of 90 million metric tons each year. Also, most industrial-sized cattle farmland can be converted to crops.

Meat cells, grown in this fashion, are essentially purified to deliver a healthier meat product with fewer of the additives or residual steroids and hormones found in slaughterhouse animals. And if the squalor of an animal’s life on the farm, or the thought of killing animals for food is a concern, those elements are, for the most part, eliminated as well.

Cultured Meat as a Pandemic Preventer

So far, most industry observers aren’t picking up on one additional benefit that really jumped out at me recently. As we search for ways to pandemic-proof our world, we need to clean up the world’s meat supply.

Nipah, HIV/AIDS, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, and now COVID-19 … it’s very likely that each of these was caused initially by animal-to-human contact and ingestion. These situations are often traced to bats, but also to other animals. Pigs or camels can also serve as a middle mammal in the transference to humans. We can only hope that those people who choose to eat these exotic meat products will be just as eager to “experiment” with cultured meat.

With regard to controlling our exposure to threats from the meat supply, we have four basic options:

• Prohibit the sale of raw meat that hasn’t been irradiated, cleansed with UV lighting, or undergone similar measures.
• Transition to cultured meats.
• Transition to plant-based meat substitutes.
• Stop eating meat altogether.

Cultured Meat is Here to Stay

It’s just in its infancy now, but I predict that cultured meat will become a dynamic new
industry over the coming decade. Just ask Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Tyson
Foods, who are investors in the cultured meat company Memphis Meats, which seems
to prefer the term, “cell-based meat” which it “harvests from cells instead of animals.”

Another positive sign that the cultured meat industry is in it for the long haul is the
formation last year of their Washington, DC-based lobbying group, the Alliance for Meat,
Poultry, and Seafood Innovation. Their advocates will spend time dealing with federal
regulators – especially the FDA and the USDA who oversee the cultured meat process
and the finished product side of things respectively. Presumably, these lobbyists will
also pitch the pandemic prevention angle.

Similar Future Innovations

It’ll be interesting to see how many of my other similar 2017 predictions will come true.

For example:

• The same process for growing meats will be used to grow ‘mother’s milk’ for children and ‘human blood’ to give us an inexhaustible supply of clean blood.
• Cultured blood will cause today’s blood bank industry to disappear. Cultured baby’s blood, or ‘young blood’ with its anti-aging properties, will pave the way for a variety of “cultured” anti-aging products.
• Early uses of these cultured product-technologies will be to grow non-edible materials, like leathers, for the creation of designer purses, belts, gloves, and other accessories.
• Rather than competing head to head with the existing industry, there is a golden opportunity to open up new markets with unusual meats like wombat meat, penguin meat, or bumblebee meat.
• Over time we will even develop cultured meats from extinct animal species like saber tooth tigers, woolly mammoths, and dodo birds. There will be a certain mystique to eating the meat of animals that no longer exist.
• Before long we will see cultured hair cells to regrow our hair and cultured skin cells to remove our wrinkles. The fountain of youth will be springing to life in a way we never anticipated.

I’m scanning the media every day to find good news to report on these fronts as well!

For most people the answer centers around two key questions. How does it taste, and how much does it cost?

Will there be cultured meats in your future?

Are we willing to do and spend what’s necessary to prevent another pandemic? From the data I’ve seen, it seems like the cost of critical preventive activities is far less than the costs we’ve already incurred, and will continue to incur, since COVID-19 has reached pandemic status.

Viruses vs. Pandemics

It’s important to differentiate between preventing viruses and preventing pandemics. Webster defines a pandemic as an “outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population.”

So, when the first cases of this latest virus were reported in China was it a pandemic? No, this was simply another new virus that had made its way from wild mammals to the human race.

In the following weeks, though, the COVID-19 virus wasn’t contained. And as it spread to other cities, regions, and continents, with a rising number of fatalities, COVID-19 crossed that admittedly fuzzy threshold to the point where it could legitimately be considered a “pandemic.”

Preventing/Minimizing viruses

There are hundreds of species of bats and they continue to carry a wide variety of constantly evolving coronavirus variants. Some of the viruses prove to be relatively harmless when passed to humans. Others are incredibly contagious and deadly.

Nipah, HIV/AIDS, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, and now SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) … it’s very likely that each of these was caused initially by animal-to-human contact. Unusually it stems from bats but sometimes other animals, such as pigs or camels serve as a middle mammal in the exchange.

To minimize the emergence of another new and deadly virus that can lead to pandemics, we, and this is a global “we” – including governments at the highest and lowest levels, can create systems to minimize the instances of these exchanges by:

• Eliminating the wildlife markets that exist in some countries and cultures
• Not only reducing deforestation, but increasing forestation to restore buffer zones between the habitats of wild animals and domestic livestock

Think what you will about the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and other regional or global collectives of national, sovereign governments, but these kinds of collectives are exactly what’s required to coordinate any kind of global efforts to accomplish this. There can be no weak links among nations because viruses cross borders with ease.

Manage the Meat?

But beyond minimizing the emergence of new viruses at their source, what about protecting our food supply? We should at least consider these steps as well:

• Prohibit the sale of raw meat that hasn’t been irradiated, cleansed with UV lighting, or undergone similar measures.
• Transition to lab grown meat, also called “clean meats” or “cultured meats“.
• Continue to develop and promote plant-based meat substitutes
• Stop eating meat altogether

These all make sense in theory, and they may be beneficial in their own right. But the fact is that pandemic viruses have never started with hundreds of people eating virus-laden meat. Pandemics all begin with one person.

Once that animal to human threshold is crossed in one person (Patient Zero), no amount of meat irradiation or vegetarianism will stop the virus. From that point on, it’s passed through normal, person-to-person interaction – sharing space, breathing air, or coming into contact with bodily fluid, as in the case of Ebola and HIV/AIDS.

So, we need to go back to that fundamental point: minimizing new viruses means reducing the likelihood of these initial interactions and infections ever taking place. That said, I don’t think it’s possible to prevent another viral outbreak, but we certainly can prevent another pandemic.

Pandemic-Proofing

Okay, so maybe we’ll always have some periodic emergence of localized, horrible viruses. How do we keep them from spreading? How do we “pandemic-proof” the world?

We’ve learned a lot in the last six months, lessons we seem to learn about every century or so, about how to slow a virus and contain its spread. Medical science has a lot to say about how to prevent a virus from becoming a pandemic. Trace the contacts of infected people. Quarantine suspected or actual cases. Dutifully wash hands and surfaces. Wear masks. Limit public gatherings. Socially distance.

We’ve also been reminded that healthcare workers need to have quick access to certain equipment and supplies, especially personal protection equipment (PPE), ventilators, and other medical necessities.

Additionally, in a recent article, William A. Haseltine, formerly of the Harvard Medical School and School of Public Health, points out that antiviral drugs (as opposed to vaccines) can control a coronavirus by binding and blocking the enzymes that most of them need in order to grow. Those enzymes are similar across all coronaviruses. He suggests that it’s not only advisable but very possible to stockpile combinations of these drugs under the BioShield program adopted after 9/11 that’s intended to prevent “new and emerging biological threats.”

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Yes, all of this costs money – from reversing deforestation, to educating people about consumption of exotic animals, to stockpiling drugs, to maintaining a significant cache of healthcare worker PPE and citizen masks. There’s no definitive figure that captures all of these, but let’s at least start with:

Conservation International’s estimate that we need to make an investment of between $22.3 billion and $30.1 billion per year (globally) to address deforestation and to minimize the spread of viruses from wild mammals to humans. They compare that figure to the $10-20 trillion that COVID-19 has cost the global economy in 2020 alone.

Researchers at Princeton University offer an even more compelling case for these expenditures. They estimate that the global price tag to regulate the wildlife trade, maintain adequate disease surveillance, and reduce deforestation in critical areas (all at a total cost of $260 billion over 10 years) is a little more than two percent of the estimated global economic cost of COVID-19 over time.

These are very rough estimates of course but if we compare a few billion to the trillions we’re currently spending, plus the magnitude of benefits to humanity makes these programs seem like a pretty solid investment!

Our goal needs to be to not only pandemic-proof our world, but to pandemic-proof our future!

Futurist Thomas Frey speaking on the future of cultured meats.

Since I do many talks on the future of agriculture, I was recently interviewed by the Feedinfo News Service as part of their 20th Anniversary Edition.

In this interview they asked me to help them think through what the cultured meat industry would look like 20 years in the future.

To give you some background on this emerging industry, a 1998 U.S. patent filed by Jon F. Vein laid claim to the “production of tissue engineered meat for human consumption, wherein muscle and fat cells would be grown in an integrated fashion to create food products such as beef, poultry and fish.”

In 2008, PETA offered a $1 million prize to the first company to bring lab-grown chicken meat to consumers by 2012.

In November 2009, scientists from the Netherlands announced they had managed to grow meat in the laboratory using the cells from a live pig.

In 2010, Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s family foundation reached out to Dr. Mark Post to support his efforts in developing cultured meat. They also encouraged Mark to create a huge media event where the first cultured hamburger would be tasted, supporting the costs of the research and the event.

In 2012, a total of 30 laboratories around the world were conducting cultured meat research.

The cultured meat industry is evolving quickly. Here a partial transcript of the interview with the Feedinfo News Service and what the cultured meat industry will like in 2040.

FNS – To what extent in the next 20 years will cultured meat potentially traditional impact livestock production, and by extension animal feeding? Will industrial livestock and meat production find itself at a significant cost disadvantage?

Futurist Thomas Frey – A good analogy to this is ecommerce. It has taken ecommerce a full 25 years to reach 10% of all retail sales in the U.S. In the late 1990s, many were predicting the demise of physical stores altogether, but that hasn’t happened. The transition of ecommerce speaks to our human ability to make a transition and adapt to something new. It will be the same with the meat industry.

My sense is that cultured meats will start out as a novelty and quickly make their way into a variety of new kinds of foods that currently don’t exist – meat chips, meat candies, meat desserts, etc.

Rather than competing head to head with the existing industry, there is a golden opportunity to open up new markets with unusual meats like wombat meat, penguin meat, or bumblebee meat.

Other new markets will be things like kosher meats, vegan meats, non-GMO meats, and vegetarian meats.

I would be surprised if cultured meats grow to more than 10% of the meat market by 2040, and I only see half of that affecting our existing livestock and meat production. The rest will come from opening new markets.

Yes, our existing livestock and meat production will find itself at a significant cost disadvantage. Live animals are far more work than non-living organisms, but it’s not clear how much processing and production work will still be required for cultured meats.

It’s also important to ask how long before we reach “peak cultured meat?” I certainly can’t imagine it will ever reach 100%, so at what percentage will it peak, and how long will that take?

FNS – Which sectors will be the most affected by 2040: farmers, veterinarians, slaughterhouses, processing plants? And what about in our industry: the feed suppliers and feed additive companies, or the animal drug industry?

Futurist Thomas Frey – Cultured meats will have a cascading effect on other industries, but it will take time. Perhaps the biggest mistake will be to over-anticipate its affect in the near term.

Over time it will affect demands for feedstock, water, acreage for grazing, hay, veterinarians, animal medications, trucking, auction houses, auctioneers, slaughterhouses, processing plants, western wear, horses, 4H competitions, feed suppliers, meat inspectors, feed additives, FDA personnel, animal drug industry, and the overall demand for ranchland. But all this will take time and during these decades of transition it will be the perfect time to discover new opportunities.

FNS – What will be the market drivers of the cultured meat sector in 2040?

Futurist Thomas Frey – After the initial “race to be first” – first cultured bison, first cultured swordfish, first cultured rattlesnake in the mid-2020s, I expect we’ll see a period where people will try to “grow their own cultured meat farms,” followed by an underground movement of people attempting to design “super hacker foods.”

This will also give rise to a new snake oil era where people will claim their special concoction of cultured meats are a cure for everything from melanoma, to depression, to dyslexia. Will cultured meat infused with cannabis make you more calm and relaxed? Maybe!

Cultured meats will be developed for non-edible materials similar to leathers, plastic, and rubber. Think in terms of exotic materials such as tarantula skin seats, hedgehog jackets, and anteater shoes.

Over time we will develop designer materials from the stem cells of famous people. If you can imagine George Clooney handbags, Scarlet Johansen furniture, Stevie Wonder lampshades, or Drew Barrymore wallets, you’ll get the picture.

Cultured milk derived from mother’s cells will be considered far superior to other baby foods. These products will compete directly with today’s baby formula industry. Cultured blood will cause today’s blood bank industry to disappear.

Cultured baby’s blood, or ‘young blood’ with its anti-aging properties, will pave the way for a variety of “cultured” anti-aging products. Before long we will see cultured hair cells to regrow our hair and cultured skin cells to remove our wrinkles. The fountain of youth will be springing to life in a way we never anticipated.

FNS – Do you think there is a future for “cultured animal feed” production?

Futurist Thomas Frey – Very definitely. This is still an emerging field with incredible opportunities. As we add more and more sensors to our bodies, we’ll know instantly what affect the food has had on us. Expect to see lots of experimentation on trace elements, protein engineering, and rethinking our individual microbiome.

FNS – Will the concerns of today linked with animal production (pollution, antimicrobial resistance, animal welfare, food poisoning…) have disappeared from people’s mindsets by 2040?

Futurist Thomas Frey – By 2040 the lifecycle of this “cause” will have waned, but there will be new concerns over things like unexplainable cultured meat diseases that have never been seen before, hereditary shifts happening because of our new diets, and vocal alarmists over the long term effect of eating “frankenfood.”

How will cultured meats change your diet?

FNS – How do you picture the feed mill of the future?

Futurist Thomas Frey – With the increasing fear of fake news and fake data, most consumers will rely on their own testing devices to sort through a product’s efficacy and value. For this reason, many of today’s concerns over topics like GMO, organic, or responsibly farmed foods, will be replaced with apps used for “certified testing” and managing “personal markers.” The work happening at today’s feed mills will be largely invisible to the end users in the future. That said, food production will continue to evolve and much of the work done at feed mills will get absorbed into the cultured meat production facilities. Many of these “meat labs” will evolve into sophisticated research facilities where many of tomorrow’s grocery store products will be born.

FNS – What will be the jobs of the future in our animal nutrition sector?

Futurist Thomas Frey – New age cultured meat producers will become known as “vat farmers” (or something similar). Each production facility will be run from a central control room with constant monitoring and testing to guide the overall quality of the product. Consumer data, in turn, will drive this, from the body sensors of those who consume the products. For this reason this emerging new industry will be run by lab techs, data analytics techs, control room monitors, account managers, salesmen, delivery people, and the grunt workers filling and cleaning the vats. Over time many of these tasks will become automated, but it will be many years before the jobs become refined enough for significant automation to take place.

FNS – Is artificial intelligence THE key to feeding a global population of 9 billion+ people in 2040 in a sustainable manner?

Futurist Thomas Frey – As the global economy improves, worldwide demand for food will continue to increase. At the same time, we are moving towards far more hyper-individualized diets, with far more concern over our individual health and well-being. The amount of data the food industry will be dealing with is about to explode exponentially, far exceeding any individual’s ability to make sense of it. That’s where AI comes into play. However, AI will only be part of the answer. I think of AI as an additional tool, not a replacement for workers.

A person with a toolbox is generally more valuable than one without. A person with a robot, is generally more valuable than one without. And a person with AI is generally more valuable than someone without AI. But every tool is constantly being upgraded. AI will break down, wear out, and need ongoing attention. Since we are the consumers, AI needs us. AI will help us think faster, smarter, and quicker than ever before in history. It will be very important, but we tend to have a distorted view of its overall importance.

Final Thoughts

There’s an adoption cycle for every emerging technology and cultured meats are no exception. Reduced environmental stress surrounding ranches, feedlots, and slaughterhouses, coupled with a cleaner, faster, cheaper, and superior food source are all marketing points that will move the needle quickly.

As global incomes improve, meat consumption rates will grow exponentially over the coming years. Demand for meat in Asia is expected to grow rapidly over the coming years.

Even some of the large companies in the meat industry are beginning to take notice. It was reported in December that mega processor Tyson had opened a $150 million fund to invest in startups that are preparing for a meatless future.

For most people the answer centers around two key questions. How does it taste, and how much does it cost?

Will there be cultured meats in your future?