The Meat Revolution | Mark Post
Channel: World Economic Forum
Date: 2015-10-21

Mark Post is worried about meat, but he doesn’t want to give up eating it. In this video for the World Economic Forum, Post - who is professor of physiology from the University of Maastrich - explains why the meat industry is unsustainable and how future beef will be bioengineered in the lab.
 
Find out more about the future of our food by watching the video above, or read key quotes below.
 
On the challenge of meat
“There are many problems with the current meat production that we will soon encounter. So if you think about a quarter pounder hamburger, then seven pounds of grain, 50 pounds of water, 70 square feet of land, and about 1,000 btus of energy go into it - a lot of resources for a simple hamburger.”
 
“That’s all because we feed cows and then cows feed us. But the cow is a very inefficient animal in terms of converting the vegetable proteins that they eat, into animal proteins. We are currently using 70 percent of all our arable land to produce meat, and we could use that land for other purposes. In addition it's increasingly known that our livestock industry is a big emitter of greenhouse gases, allegedly the same as our transport industry.”
 
“There are pressing reasons to start thinking about an alternative way of producing meat, and that's not only because we go from seven to nine or ten billion people, but also because meat consumption is related to the gross domestic product of a country. And as the GDP of some countries (in particular India and China) is going up, meat consumption will increase.”
 
On giving up eating meat
“Of course we can all become vegetarians. It looks very appetizing and two billion people on this planet are vegetarian, and they live happy, creative, procreative lives. So there is nothing wrong. We don't need animal proteins - that's just a myth.”
 
“However we like the product. We are a species designed to love meat, and that especially resonates with me. I know all the problems with meat eating, but I am a meat eater and I will continue to eat meat. That's why it is in my own interest to create a product that has the same quality, but is derived in a different way.”
 
“So what's the other option? Since the year 2000 we know that all our muscle cells have stem cells in them. They are sitting there waiting to repair tissue in case of injury. What you can do is you can take them out: take a biopsy from a cow, get a small piece of muscle out of it - one centimeter long and one millimeter in diameter - that already has a couple of hundred of stem cells. That is a very high in density of stem cells.”
 
On growing a 250,000 dollar burger
“Basically what we did is grow 10,000 of those muscle fibers and produced a hamburger. On our launch we presented it appropriately in a petri dish. Just to remind you that this was a quarter million dollar hamburger, and it was tasted by people from the food critic community. They said it was ok for a quarter-million dollar hamburger. More importantly they said yes, it's definitely meat - it has the consistency of meat, the taste is ok, there was no fat in it yet it was pure muscle.”
 
“But a quarter-million dollar burger is still not a market proposition, so first we have to be able to produce it in a resource efficient way, and second it has to be internally sustainable - that means that all the stuff that we put in there has to be either reusable or be present. Third it has to be exactly the same as meat, because it's not the animal protein we're looking for, it’s the meat product that we are looking for.”
 
“The whole concept of what meat is will inevitably change. It will no longer be a product coming from an animal that we have hunted, killed and shown dominance over. It becomes a very different product with advantages and disadvantages. So you can be creative. You can make it more palatable and colorful for kids. And you can also change the fatty acids that are sitting in those fat cells to be more omega-3 rich. You can create a healthy product so that at some point your physician prescribes weekly visits to McDonald's. I hope you get used to the idea that at some point in time - maybe five to ten years from now - we will have cultured meat as a choice in our food.”