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Meat Makers: the artificial beef revolution | The Economist

Can we improve on nature? The race is on to create man-made meat.

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Being top of the food chain has its advantages but it takes 65 billion farm animals every year to feed our appetite for meat, and livestock farming is one of the biggest causes of greenhouse gas emissions. So two men are racing to come up with a radical alternative. They’re using competing methods but they share the same bold ambition. Man-made meat.

If successful they’ll transform what’s on all our dinner plates. But are we ready? Most of us don’t like to think too hard about what goes into putting meat on our plate.

In the Netherlands one man is working towards a future where we won’t need to kill a cow to eat beef. Instead, Professor Mark Post is growing his own beef in a laboratory. His innovation could cause the biggest food revolution since farming began 12,000 years ago and all he needs to start is a piece of flesh so small they could even be extracted from a live animal.

The clocks now ticking Mark has to get his meat back to the lab before the precious stem cells start to die. Over in Los Angeles, California, a company called Beyond Meat is also racing to make meat outside the animal.

Ethan Brown and his team believe they found a better way to feed the planet. Meat is muscle, which animals build up over time from proteins in the plants they eat. Ethan believes he can improve on nature and instead of waiting for the animals, extract the plant proteins. Directly using steam and pressure, they’re then rebuilt into something he calls plant meat.

Ethan’s creation has already attracted some major investors including Bill Gates. And Beyond Meat is one of a growing number of companies hunting for the lucrative formula that will convince the world’s carnivores to stop eating animals.

To bring his product to the masses, Ethan aims to build a burger that’s so meat-like consumers can’t distinguish it from the real deal. Helping make Beyond Meats burger as meaty as possible is one of their newest recruits John. Another member of the team is Simone – she’s attempting to improve the burgers taste. The team will soon reveal their latest products to investors and consumers – but reinventing the most iconic of American foods is a challenge that doesn’t faze Ethan.

Across the Atlantic in Maastricht, Mark Post is starting a process he believes will revolutionize the food chain one stem cell at a time. Once extracted the cells are placed in the nutrient-rich serum that enables them to grow just as they would inside an animal’s body. In 2013, Mark revealed his first-ever lab-grown beef burger to the world’s press. Two years on he’s still working on the technology to scale up production and there’s some way to go.

Over in LA, Ethan Brown has no regrets about the different path his company is taking to the marketplace. Ethan’s already selling his plant meat in supermarkets and with the fourth biggest food company in the US, General Mills, he’s about to launch a new range of ready meals. Ethan hopes they’ll show everyone his meat can replace the real thing, at least with the help of some spicy sauces. Today some of Beyond Meats investors are tasting them for the first time. With the investors now assembled it’s time for Ethan to showcase the new dishes. Greg Boland has 30 years experience in venture capital and a lifetime’s experience eating meat.

Adding his plant meat to ready meals clearly has its challenges but Ethan’s true ambitions are even greater – a plant meat burger that’s indistinguishable from the real thing. The team has been working on it for several years and now Simone and John are testing the latest version on the most discerning critic of all – the public. In Maastricht Mark and his business partner Peter believe they will be the ones to eventually taste success.

It’s hard to predict exactly what our dinner plates of the future will hold but it’s clear some of these modern-day alchemists could be about to make a killing.

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