Victoria Erickson, who is finishing her degree in biological science at Chapman University, looked at several articles concerning the environmental impact of cultured meat and wrote the following.

Cultured Meat: Promises and Challenges

Treich N. (2021). Cultured Meat: Promises and Challenges. Environmental & resource economics, 79(1), 33–61. https://doi-org.libproxy.chapman.edu/10.1007/s10640-021-00551-3

https://pubmed-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.libproxy.chapman.edu/33758465/

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This paper comes off as pro-environmental and pro-cultured meat even though they do discuss some concerns with cultured meat. They state that their goal is to initiate the consideration of economic funding for the production and research of cultured meat. Therefore, their intentions are inherently biased towards the pros of cultured meat. They point out the typical pros such as morality, potential use of less resources, and reduced pollution. I can respect that they do mention that the ingredients of tissue culture media are expensive and that a lot of energy is required to maintain live tissue culture due to factors such as temperature regulation, aeration, and mixing.

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Tuomisto HL, Ellis MJ, Haastrup P (2014) Environmental impacts of cultured meat: alternative production scenarios. Proceedings of the9th International Conference on LifeCycle Assessment in the Agri-Food Sector.19-21October2016, Dublin, Ireland.

This paper aimed to determine if cultured meat production does truly result in less greenhouse gas (GHG) than typical livestock meat production under alternative production scenarios including plant-based media instead of cyanobacteria based media and using a suitable bioreactor. They are claiming that these alternative production scenarios would be more suitable for commercialization of cultured meat and therefore they use these conditions as a proxy for the environmental impacts (GHG emissions, energy use, land and water use) of cultured meat. In section 2.2 of the paper where they define the scope, they do a relatively good job at accounting for important factors and cover all the main bases. Once again, this paper does exclude several factors such as production of growth factor and vitamins for the media (although they seem to account for all other components of the media which is good) and production of the animals that donate the initial cells. Overall I am satisfied with the level of detail and coverage they provide regarding their tissue culture process. The concrete conclusion of interest here is that for cultured meat, energy input requirements were at the same level with beef production, whereas GHG emissions and land use were lower than any of the livestock products. They conclude that although uncertainty remains with cultured meat, it does have the potential for lower GHG and therefore this route should continue to be researched. They also make the point that the land being freed up as a result of livestock production stopping could be used to recover the ecosystem and result in even more beneficial impacts of cultured meat. I would like to point out that the odds of that extra land being used for anything that would have a positive impact on the environment are small but there is always the possibility for some positive impact.

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Mattick CS, Landis AE, Allenby BR, Genovese NJ (2015) Anticipatory life cycle analysis of in vitro bio mass cultivation for cultured meat production in the United States. Environ SciTechnol 49:11941–11949

This paper came to the same conclusion of Tuomisto et al. 2014 that cultured meat will have less environmental impacts, but it will require greater energy costs. They overall conclude that cultured meat seems like a suitable alterative to livestock meat production despite the tradeoffs of energy use and unpredictability. They came to this conclusion by evaluating the life cycle energy use, global warming potential and eutrophication potential, and land use associated. I appreciate their acknowledgment of the fact that tissue culture technology will likely evolve in the coming future and that their life cycle analysis is supposed to account for future possible changes. I personally am unfamiliar with the software used to conduct this analysis and therefore cannot comment on the viability of their claim. Overall I feel that this article does not seem to be pushing a pro-environment/pro-cultured meat agenda. Their data and discussion feels unbiased and they go very in depth without excluding too many factors. In fact, this is the first paper I have seen that lists the specific media ingredients they are accounting for and they discuss bioreactor cleaning which is necessary but often excluded in studies.

Chen Zeng, who recently complete his Master of Food Science at Cornell University, reviewed the above and wrote the following.

I think the author did a good job summarizing these three articles.

The first article provides a detailed explanation of the background and history of cultured meat compared to the other two pieces. They also list out some of the topics that are not discussed in the other two articles like demand, supply, and moral and regulatory issues which I think are also important considering that these are also affecting cost of production and resources.

The second article focuses on comparison of the environmental impact of conventional meat and cultured meat under different production scenarios including cyanobacteria based nutrient media with plant-based media and I think they did a good job covering the main factors.

For the third article, the anticipatory life cycle analysis seems reasonable to me and overall I think they also did a good job on it.

One thing I noticed is that these articles are focusing on livestock such as poultry, pork, and beef. I know there are also companies making cultured seafood and I think it would be interesting to add that into the comparison and see how it can affect the result.

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: We expect that there will be many more scientific published peer reviewed articles coming that look at many factors on this subject pro and con, and that it will be awhile before people make confident conclusions with consensus.

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