The world population is about
to grow from 7b to 9b. We keep hearing
and wondering about this question: Can
the earth sustain such a large population?
There are many
people who are certain that we need more wars to kill some people. These people cannot comprehend that it is possible
to feed everyone. There are also those
who demand less cruelty to animals. The
most convincing advocate that I enjoy reading and listening to is the Israeli
historian who wrote two international best sellers: Yuval Harari. I followed many of his lectures and that is
when I first heard of 3D printing of hamburgers. Searching for the latest data in 2017 I found
a 2013 Guardian article Titled:
Google's
Sergey Brin bankrolled world's first synthetic beef hamburger.
The article states:
The man who has bankrolled the
production of the world's first lab-grown hamburger has been revealed as Google
co-founder Sergey Brin. The internet entrepreneur has backed the project to the tune of
€250,000 (£215,000), allowing scientists to grow enough meat in the lab to
create a burger – as a proof of concept – that will be cooked and eaten in
London on Monday.
Brin's money was used by a team
led by physiologist Dr. Mark Post at Maastricht University to grow 20,000
muscle fibres from cow stem cells over the course of three months. These fibres
were extracted from individual culture wells and then painstakingly pressed
together to form the hamburger. The
objective is to create meat that is biologically identical to beef but grown in
a lab rather than in a field as part of a cow.
The world's first lab-grown beef burger was cooked in London in 2013. The in-vitro burger was cultured from cattle stem cells.
In experimental biology the
jargon is: IN VIVO- experiments in the whole living animal. IN VITRO- experiments in the test tube using
tissue or cells from the animal.
The impact of meat consumption
from raising cows is immense: It
produces 18% of greenhouse gases. 70% of
antibiotics used in the US are used on cows.
"Cows are very
inefficient, they require 100g of vegetable protein to produce only 15g of
edible animal protein," Dr Post told the Guardian before. "So we need
to feed the cows a lot so that we can feed ourselves. We lose a lot of food
that way. With cultured meat we can make it more efficient because we have all
the variables under control. We don't need to kill the cow and it doesn't
produce any methane."
Then I found another article
from 2015 by a New Zealand blogger repeating the same facts and talking about
3D printed food:
In 15 years' time, there's a chance some of the
beef you consume will have been grown in a test tube. The cow
never would have had a beating heart, nor a brain, nor would it
have seen a paddock or a feedlot. It would just be a bunch of cells
and tissue.
Not in 100 years, not 50 years, but 15 years. Perhaps
even less. Known as "cultured meat" it's just one of the ways
scientists are trying to solve a very global problem. Namely: how do you feed a
population that doesn't stop expanding when there's a finite amount of
farmable land in the world?
Meat, particularly grain-fed beef, is also a massive
contributor to global warming. Thanks to factors like methane emission,
deforestation to create more grazing land and the amount of energy it
takes to harvest corn and other grains for feed, the livestock
industry produces more greenhouse emissions than every mode of transport on
earth combined.
The bottom line is if we keep eating meat in the
manner we do and don't invest in more sustainable farming solutions, the world
as we know it is likely to end. This isn't hyperbole. And scientists the world
over are working on some far-out solutions that are close to becoming
real.
Cultured meat
If we all started eating more vegetables grown with
solar power instead of fossil-fuel draining livestock, things would
start to turn around for the environment in a big way. Unfortunately,
experts say world meat consumption shows no sign of slowing and demand for it
is expected to increase 73 per cent by 2050, even though 70 per cent of
farmland is already used for livestock.
Test tube meat could be a solution to the globe's
insatiable appetite for protein. In 2013, Professor Mark Post, of
Maastricht University in the Netherlands, presented a burger made of cultured
beef to an audience in London. Made using stem cells harvested from a cow's
shoulder, the burger took three months to grow and, by all reports, tasted much
like a normal burger, if a little less juicy.
According to the Maastricht University's website,
cells taken from just one cow could produce 175 million burgers.
"I expect cultured meat to be available in 10-15
years," says Canberra-based science writer and author Julian Cribb.
"It is likely to catch on as it will be cheaper, use far fewer resources
such as water, land, nutrients and pesticides, and can in theory be tailored to
the precise dietary requirements of the individual. Synthetic clothing is
already universal and food is likely to follow."
Cribb says cultured meat will end the reign of
industrial meat by replacing it. "It will ensure the production of real
meat from animals goes upmarket and farmers receive a much better price for it,
as happened with wool since synthetic fibres arrived, enabling them to care for
their land better," he says.
As for consumers possibly not wanting to eat a cow
that never went moo?
"If it's cheap, healthy and tasty, people will
eat it even if they don't know how it was grown," Cribb says. "Do you
really know what's in your snack food today?"
Other subtitles in this
article:
3D Printing
Soylent
Personally and genetically modified food
More current articles:
Ten Food Trends that will Shape 2017 - Forbes
There is a 2017 publication from FAO:
The future of food and agriculture in
the US: Trends and Challenges
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