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According to who you ask, the future of food is bleeding herbal burgers. Or we should all eat insects instead of cows. Or we must grow burgers in the laboratory by growing cells, thus avoiding feeding and hydrating legions of cows accumulating greenhouse gases.
Or how about crushing them a bit: What if, in the lab, we grow not beef but insect meat? According to a group of Tufts researchers, bedbug cultivation could be easier and more effective than growing cow cells. To be clear, this remains theoretical work. But who knows, maybe one day you'll be cooking a cricket burger grown in the lab. Without legs and wings, of course.
On paper, cultivating meat in the laboratory is simple: just grow cells, as in animals. In practice, it is extremely difficult. A big part of the problem is the nutrients you need to feed those cells, whether it's chicken, fish, or beef. This usually comes from very expensive sera made from animal blood (an ounce of fish serum costs $ 850), which makes it difficult to develop a laboratory-produced meat industry. Aside from the sera, it's hard to get cells to grow outside the body – you need the right temperature and the right amount of oxygen, for example. In essence, you reproduce the environment in the body of an animal without the animal.
Invertebrate cells, like insects, are, however, very different from vertebrates. "Insect cells are usually so strong that you can not kill them," says David Kaplan, a biomedicine engineer at Tufts, who co-authored a recent article on insect tissue culture. "This implies that you can somehow not have rigorous cultivation conditions to get them to grow."
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Why are insect cells so different from mammalian cells? "I do not have a good answer to that because I'm not sure anyone else has it," Kaplan says. The type of response to the hand, he says, boils down to the biology of evolution: mammals must constantly adapt to changes in temperature, often with difficulty, while insects are more resistant to changing conditions. "I think it reflects their evolution in the niches exposed to ranges of temperature, salinity, pH, etc. And yet, they survive and thrive, while we are subject to environmental restrictions to survive in very defined temperature ranges. "
It can therefore be assumed that the metabolism of insects being relatively simple, it is possible to cultivate the cells in the laboratory without necessarily using all the micronutrients of the sera. This theoretically makes the cultured insect meat more scalable, both because you eliminate the senseless costs of the sera and that the process is intrinsically simpler: when you grow insect cells in the lab, they "immortalize" or propagate easily in perpetuity.
"It just seems to be a natural process with these cells," says Kaplan. "They are robust in cultivation, but they are also robust in maintaining stocks and keeping them in full bloom." This means that it would be easy to ship these stocks to other facilities to start growing their own insect populations.
How does Kaplan know that insect cells grow so easily in the laboratory? Because he did not just cultivate them, he made robots. Well, the simplistic components of the robots – the actuators, or the motors, that feed them. "The key is to grow muscle cells from insects into very aligned and organized clusters, if you will," says Kaplan. Then, using electricity, it can trigger the contraction or expansion of these bundles of insect cells, such as muscles.
But let's say you want to grow insect cells for food, not robots. What does the finished product look like? The companies that grow cow cells in the laboratory are limited to ground beef for the moment. This formless meat product does not have the complicated connective tissue of something like a steak.
But there is no cricket steak or even cricket burger. So, in a way, the cricket meat grown in the laboratory will have to acquire some structure. "You need a scaffold just to give shape and function," says Kaplan. With an extra type of scaffold, the insect meat could also acquire a more desirable texture. In their article, Kaplan and colleagues point out that mushroom chitosan, a fibrous material found in the cell wall of fungi, is a potential scaffold material.
Again, you may not need a lot of structure. In Madagascar, for example, people grow crickets to powder, which can be added to foods to overload them with protein. Meat-grown insects could play a similar role, which would avoid the difficulties associated with marketing a laboratory-grown insect burger.
Nevertheless, it is unlikely that people forget that creatures had six legs. And they could keep romantic notions about meat from "grass fed" or "pasture-raised" animals, as opposed to those from some labs. "I do not understand the market of cell-based insect meats. It sounds like a lot of things that people hate are all in one package, "says Mike Selden, CEO of Finless Foods, which develops farm-raised fish in the lab. "But it's not impossible."
And consider this: crustaceans like lobster and crab are also invertebrates and can also grow in the laboratory. "Part of the technology used to mimic crustacean texture is already present in the world of food science," says Selden. This is called surimi, and it is the culinary magic that makes crab sticks possible. "If you can grow a group of crab cells and turn them into surimi, a lot of the work has been done for you, basically."
For now at least, the cultured insect cells are just one idea, the young world's fusion of cultured meat and a growing interest in insect-based proteins. But if it turns out companies can grow non-serum insect meat, "that's a huge advantage from the start," says Elliot Swartz, senior scientist at the Good Food Institute, which promotes the industry. meat in the laboratory. "Because you do not really need to invest time, resources and capital to develop an optimized formulation without serum."
What this represents for the environment, however, remains a glaring unknown. A study earlier this year suggested that beef in the laboratory instead of the field would reduce methane emissions from cow-sucking, but that plant feed could generate significant CO2 emissions. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas, but it disappears from the atmosphere after about 12 years, while CO2 is maintained for thousands of years. Meat grown in the laboratory could therefore cause serious damage to the environment, since these facilities are not powered by renewable energies. It is almost inevitable that they are, given their degree of respect for the environment.
So while insect cells appear to be more effective, you would need a life cycle analysis to prove it, which describes in detail the impact of such an industry. "Not only cells and tissues, but all the auxiliary energy needs – water use, land use," says Kaplan. "It's not a trivial business."
And so we slowly crawl into the future of food.
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