Today, an article in The Guardian discussed the recent proliferation of plant-based meat analogues, celebrating the authenticity of the new vegan alternatives on the market. I’m sure you’ve read a similar article, if not this one: plant-based meat is hot right now. Nonetheless, the journalist wasn’t completely sold. Tasting a new vegan burger, Tim Lewis writes:
The first mouthful delivers a dense, satisfying umami whoomph I haven’t tasted before from plant-based fast food. That’s not to imply that I’m tricked into thinking I’m eating a beef burger: it doesn’t fall apart in your mouth in quite the same way.
It doesn’t “fall apart in your mouth in quite the same way”. The texture was wrong. And texture is important. As Lewis says, for plant-based producers, replicating meat exactly is an outsize, “maybe even impossible” culinary and scientific challenge. But what about the other alternative protein that’s receiving a growing amount of media attention, cell-based meat?
The authenticity of cell-based meat
In the same article, Lewis talks with Illtud Llyr Dunford who runs Cellular Agriculture, the first UK startup in the cell-based meat space. Dunford believes that cultured meat is the future. Why?
There’s an organoleptic quality when you consume meat, and none of these plant-based products offers exactly the same response. You don’t quite have that little glob of hot fat going down your chin you get with real meat.
It’s not quite that simple though. Yes, growing stem cells from an animal’s muscle (obtained harmlessly from a few living donor animals) creates meat muscle identical to that composed of conventionally derived animal cells. But so far it’s only possible to create basic mincemeat products: ‘cuts’ of meat like steak are far too complex. In a Wired article last year, Matt Reynolds explains,
When the first hunk of lab-grown meat finally hits our dinner plates, it’s unlikely to look anything like the flesh of the animal it didn’t come from. We’re more likely to bite into chicken nuggets sculpted out of an amorphous gloop of plant and animal cells, rather than sink our forks into a perfectly-formed chicken breast.
Cell-based meat producers are hunting for a ‘scaffold’ that enables them to grow different cell types alongside each other, fitting together fat, muscle and collagen in a way that looks and feels like a cut of meat. Until then, that textural authenticity won’t be there. The Federal Meat Inspection Act defines meat as
The part of the muscle of any cattle, sheep, swine, or goats which is skeletal or which is found in the tongue, diaphragm, heart, or esophagus, with or without the accompanying and overlying fat, and the portions of bone (in bone-in product such as T-bone or porterhouse steak), skin, sinew, nerve, and blood vessels which normally accompany the muscle tissue and that are not separated from it in the process of dressing.
Meat grown in a lab from animal cells therefore counts as “meat” but currently it can only be created without the accompanying portions of bone, skin, sinew and nerves. Those parts that make meat look and feel like animal flesh. So is this a major problem? The answer’s complicated. One of the most interesting findings in my dissertation, which looks at pet owner willingness to feed cell-based meat to dogs and cats, relates to texture. My initial assumption was that pet food won’t need to have perfectly realistic texture and aesthetics so long as it’s nutritionally adequate, safe and tasty. However, this was disproved by my research: one owner explaining:
I feel the texture of foods and treats is also important to consider and has additional benefits. For example teeth cleaning from chewing of raw-hide sticks, bones etc.
The trend for raw meat feeding has made a significant contribution to the negative environmental impact of pets’ meat consumption, fueling demand for human-grade meat rather than byproducts (30 percent of intensively farmed animals in the U.S. are now purpose-bred and slaughtered for pet food). It follows that if these pet owners could be convinced to feed cell-based meat instead, the impact on the planet and reduction of farmed animal suffering would be huge. But for this group, texture is important. A different raw meat feeder in my survey pointed out that “Bone content is a vital element of a raw meat based diet, thus cultured meat would require additional dietary supplements”. Inability to replicate the ‘bite’ of conventional meat could therefore be a significant barrier for switching raw meat feeders over to cell-based pet food.
When it comes to meat for human consumption, lack of realistic texture is an even bigger stumbling block: we relish the visceral experience of eating chicken thighs off the bone, of cutting into a tender fillet steak, or serving up a rack of lamb at Easter. These ‘cuts’ of meat have cultural and social significance as well as physical appeal: can cultured minced turkey meat ever successfully displace the ritual of stuffing or carving a bird?
Do we actually want to replicate conventional meat?
Given all of this, reproducing the exact texture and aesthetics of animal meat seems an obvious end goal for cultured meat producers. After all, consumers want their ethical, sustainable meat to be indistinguishable from their conventional steaks and chicken wings, right? Maybe, maybe not. In his paper “Making a Mockery of Meat: Translating Texture and the Failings of the Flesh“, media studies academic Geoff Stahl describes how meat alternatives strive to replicate the appealing textural forms of conventional meat, particularly ‘mouthfeel’, and in doing so:
Point to an ineluctable and fundamental ambiguity, the crux of which… is semiotic, visceral and ethical, establishing a kind of gastronomic provocation that needs to be made sense of within a wider semiosphere that functions to position meat analogues in an unsettled, unsettling and irreconcilably haunted relationship to “real” meats.
In essence, the more effectively that cell-based and plant-based meat alternatives reproduce the texture of conventional animal meat, the more uneasy the relationship between the two becomes, and the more ‘freaked out’ the consumer. I know both a meat eater and a long-time vegetarian who are happy to swap out animal meat for vegetable dishes like curries and stews but refuse to try “fake meat”. They think it’s gross, pointless, processed, artificial, repulsive. Stahl quotes from a 2010 AlterNet article:
It’s not meat, but the more it looks and tastes and feels like meat, the more eating it is like having sex with rubber blow-up dolls: Both are the simulacra of primal adventures for which we are born and built.
Whenever a vegan company or news outlet posts about cell-based meat or the Impossible Burger (perhaps the closest a plant-based meat has come to replicating conventional meat: the burger ‘bleeds’), you’re guaranteed a barrage of complaints from vegans about unhealthy processed alternatives. We know that many meat eaters demand that their beef or pork be raised ‘naturally’ in a field or farm and butchered directly from the slaughtered animal rather than grown ‘artificially’ in a lab. But it’s not just carnists who buy into the ‘natural’ fallacy; many vegans and vegetarians also want their food grown in field or farm (just don’t mention pesticides) and for it to be presented to them tasting and feeling like plants, not animal meat. When it boils down to it, a lot of us want to eat food that is what it is, that isn’t pretending to be anything else. We don’t want Tofurkey at Christmas dinner, we want turkey or we want nut roast.
But while this preoccupation with authenticity is a problem for plant-based meat analogues, it’s only an issue for cell-based meat if people don’t see meat cultured in a lab as “real meat”. Why shouldn’t we want or expect cellular meat to have the same aesthetic, taste and texture as conventional animal meat? It is animal meat. Stahl talks about how plant-based meat producers shoot themselves in the foot by using brand names that point to “the very thing they cannot be”. But cell-based chicken isn’t ‘Chick’n’, it’s chicken. It’s just grown outside of the animal. Does the removal of the slaughterhouse and its contaminants make the end product any less authentic? Of course not, it just makes it healthier and more ethical. In the future, it may be that cell-based producers find their scaffold and can give us that guilt-free, melt-in-the-mouth fillet steak. Even then, we still need to understand that the creative process that gives us that visceral meat-eating experience is no more unnatural than masterful grilling.
Can cell-based meat become the meat to aspire to?
We have to stop seeing cell-based meat as “faux meat”. Once we realise it’s already real animal muscle, adding an imitation bone or shaping the meat into something that resembles the relevant animal part is simply a concession to consumers who need a little help getting there. In fact, Stahl describes ‘mouthfeel’ as more than just how the meat physically feels in terms of chewing and biting: it’s “sociosemiotic”, which means it evokes social and cultural connotations. We need to know that the meat in our mouth is real animal meat if we are to truly enjoy it. Maybe once people are sold on the authentic nature of cultured meat, these mouthfeel tricks won’t be needed at all. As vegan podcaster Colleen Patrick-Goudreau points out in a comment on a recent Wall Street Journal article: “Meanings evolve, context matters, and consumers aren’t stupid.”
In her Introduction to The Future of Meat without Animals, University of California, Irvine Professor Brianne Donaldson talks to Aubry and Kale Walch, founders of The Herbivorous Butcher. They pitch their ‘meat-free meats’ as way “to bridge the gap between past traditions ‘of protein that
sticks to your ribs, shared with your family’ and the formation of new habits.” Donaldson asks why, if their aim is to move away from the traditional consumption of meat, do they recreate the most quintessential image and vocation associated with it? Isn’t imitation the highest form of flattery? Aubrey replies “These knives are ours now; we’re going to cut vegetables; this word “butcher” is ours now.” Just like Walch, cell-based meat producers can reclaim and redefine an industry and ultimately displace it: they can send out a clear message to the conventional meat industry: “It’s time you stop what you’re doing.”
In fact, cell-based meat is actually in a position to do what plant-based analogues never can. While the latter must always ape chicken, beef or pork and thus inadvertently position conventional animal meat as superior and aspirational, cultured meat can compete on its own terms. Ultimately, it can usurp conventional meat and reposition itself as the most authentic product: beef without slaughterhouse bacteria, chicken without antibiotics, pork without gestation stalls. A 2018 article on Slate asked, “Is meat the muscle of an animal? Or is it the remains of a living creature? If the former, this lab-grown stuff is meat. If the latter, it’s not.” Cell-based meat offers us an opportunity to redefine animal meat, to cancel out the “remains” and posit meat as something extracted from the living, not the dead. There’s potential to create not only more ethical, but healthier versions of any animal meat, containing fewer artery-clogging fats, healthier fatty acids, even cancer-preventing fibres. After all, as we ask in The Clean Pet Food Revolution, why does protein-in-a-tube have to come from a corpse to be considered an “authentic sausage”? Maybe cell-based alternatives will open up a pathway to a society that doesn’t want meat to look and feel like dead animal parts.
As for your dog? Just throw him a plant-based dental chew along with the cultured pet food. I recommend Lily’s Kitchen Woofbrushs.
