Laboratory meat to feed people in future

Scientists have developed man-made meat in the laboratory with the first sausage expected to roll out within six months.

Last week, Dutch scientists said they created artificial meat, eliminating the need of keeping or slaughtering animals.

The researchers led by Prof Mark Post of Maastricht University in the UK say initially, the cost of producing a sausage could be as high as £220,000 (Sh3.3 million) but if well accepted, volumes could bring the prices down.

Prof Mark Post and his team have made the product from thousands of stem cells from a pig which multiply to produce strips of muscle tissue without ever leaving the lab.

The same technology can be applied to develop beef and other meats and even allow man to taste protected game without having to kill the animals.

Not appetising

As reported in the NewScientist, last week, Dr Post said the developed meat does not look very appetising for lacking blood in it but they are working to give it the natural colour.

“We are looking at ways to give it colour. I’m hopeful that we can have a hamburger in a year,” he told the magazine.

So far nobody has told of how the synthetic meat tastes because strict regulations forbid people from consuming such a product until new guidelines are developed.

The new development comes when medical doctors are excited after having fitted what could be the world’s first wholly laboratory-grown organ into a patient.

In July, a team of British and Spanish doctors replaced the windpipe of an Eritrean cancer patient made from his own cells and the man is recovering well.

Such an operation, carried out in Sweden, had never been done on a human being but it proves that indeed human spare parts can be developed in the laboratory.

Unlike patients who use organs from donors, the Eritrean man will not be on life long-medication because there is little danger of organ rejection.

Scientist have been grappling with the possibility of applying such revolutionary technologies to solve growing global food insecurity.

To feed a projected global population of nine billion by 2050, Dr Philip Thornton, a system analyst with the Nairobi based International Livestock Research Institute had last year suggested the possibility of turning to artificial meat.

Dr Thornton had floated the idea of making artificial meat in some giant containers as a wild card but this is already becoming a reality and theoretically man may in future need to keep only a few animals for meat.

The mass production of artificial meat is still a long way off but it also comes when the herding community in Kenya is faced with shrinking grazing land and the challenges of increasing production.

Last week, Mr Le Page, the CEO of the Consortium of International Agriculture Research Centres, criticised current solutions been tried on the drought crisis in Nothern Kenya. (READ: LE PAGE: Ending East Africa’s chronic food crisis)

He said high-yield, drought-tolerant crops and irrigation schemes were receiving a lot of attention but may not be the most appropriate.

“They are important but they are not the answer for areas where livestock are the mainstay,” he wrote in this newspaper.

If laboratory developed meat becomes a widespread practice in future, then it will be the third major development between man and animal. The first one was the ability of man to kill and slaughter large animals.

Initially man could only feed on small animals because he lacked the necessary technology to kill and slaughter large game.

However this problem was solved some 1.8 million years ago most likely by a Kenyan who development the first recorded hunting tools that could bring down a big animal.

This was confirmed a fortnight ago by scientists who recorded a place called Kokiselei at the western side of Lake Turkana, where the tools had been found as the oldest stone tools’ technology site in the world.

Many years later about 8000BC man dramatically changed his relationship with animals when he started domesticating them, starting with goats, sheep and pigs.