I’m sold. I just watched a fantastic documentary called The Game Changers and I am ready to significantly reduce my meat intake. It may take time to be completely animal-free, but I can certainly consume less meat and farmed fish. I predict that when this documentary gets worldwide distribution, probably in September 2019, it will have an impact on meat consumption patterns and stem cell meat will gain notoriety, again.
The Game Changers is a well-constructed, science-fueled, entertaining documentary that features elite athletes and body builders, from around the world, who exist on plant-based diets. There are even a few cultural icons like Arnold Schwarzenegger and football players thrown in for impact and comic effect.
Interspersed with their remarkable and awe-inspiring stories of personal achievement are interviews with medical and scientific experts – clinicians, anthropologists, medical administrators and more – explaining that our bodies are healthier, less prone to heart disease, more energetic, and recover faster from injury when we get our protein from plants rather than animal and fish products. As well, the environmental footprint is significantly reduced (dramatically less water and land consumption) and animal welfare would improve.
The documentary provides compelling arguments to extoll the virtues of going vegan, and does so without being preachy. Vegan has a stigma attached to it and The Game Changers carefully rebrands it as “plant based” to be more attractive to viewers. All the rippling muscles help too.
I recognize that stem cell meat derives from animals, so I’m not mentioning it here as a source of plant protein. However, for people who want to eat less meat for environmental or ethical reasons, or because they want to support a more sustainable way of producing meat for a growing global population, stem cell meat is an option. I think the film will get people thinking in that direction.
If you are unfamiliar with stem cell meat, you can catch up here. You may be wondering what has changed since we last blogged about it?
Lab grown meats are getting closer to the market. In December 2018, Israeli firm Aleph Farms created steak grown from cells. Apparently the taste needs some tweaking, but it is the “first meat grown outside an animal that has a muscle-like texture similar to conventional meat.” And at only $50 for a small piece, the cost has reduced dramatically from the jaw-dropping $300,000+ burger from earlier this decade.
A Forbes’ headline proclaims “lab-grown meat is getting cheap enough for anyone to buy.” A company called Future Meat Technologies, also Israeli-based, is growing their “clean meat” in a bioreactor!
Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientist of Future Meat Technologies, says the biggest expense in cellular agriculture is the medium (doesn’t that sound familiar?), which has to be replaced as the cells grow. The company is also avoiding the “huge bioreactors that are used in the pharmaceutical industry [that] are also very expensive.”
The company’s plan is two-fold: “If we start small and stay small, we can essentially dramatically reduce the cost, and the capital burden drops by an order of magnitude or more. With these two plays–a more efficient bioreactor and a distributed manufacturing model–we can essentially drop the cost down to about $5 a kilogram [$2.27 a pound]. This is where it starts getting interesting, because the distributed model also allows you to use the current economics.”
This is an interesting model for cellular agriculture, but the quality release testing required when developing allogeneic therapies for patients (from unrelated donor tissues) is too expensive to adopt this model in the regenerative medicine field. It sounds more like the model being evaluated for autologous cell therapies (using the patient’s own cells) that could use a distributed approach.
A “friendlier” meat alternative could be arriving at your grocery store very soon and The Game Changers may be just the push some consumers need to give stem cell meat a try.
Stacey Johnson
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