Is this the food of the future? It’s meat, but not as you know it
A handful of companies are racing to develop technology that could drastically reduce the price of so-called ‘cultured’ or ‘clean’ meat, grown from starter cells taken from live animals
Juicy lab-grown steaks and burgers made of plant-based meat could soon be tempting hardened carnivores scanning restaurant menus in the world’s biggest cities, as food producers explore fresh ways to feed booming populations.
With people pouring into cities across the developing world, rocketing demand for meat and dairy products will make it essential to find high-protein alternatives that have a lower environmental impact, some experts say.
“The food of the future, as we become more and more urban, will continue to be meat but it won’t be meat from industrialised animal agriculture,” said Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Washington-based Good Food Institute.
“It will be meat made from plants, and it will be meat grown in factories without farmers and slaughterhouses,” said Friedrich, who calculates that traditional meat will be eliminated in high-income countries by 2050.
Others predict bugs or high-protein algae such as spirulina will be high on the list of future foods, along with fish produced in deep-sea farms or vast urban warehouses.
But with a 50 per cent jump in agricultural production needed to support nearly 10 billion people by 2050 as climate change bites, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), more obvious solutions may lie in cutting calories and animal protein in the diets of the rich, making agriculture more efficient, and reducing the one-third of food that is wasted.