The Food Standards Agency says it is aiming to publish findings of its safety review into ‘cell-cultivated products’ within two years.
LONDON — London was the place where the world’s first lab-grown burger was eaten in 2013.
Fast forward 12 years and it remains unlawful to sell such foods for the purpose of human consumption in the U.K. But that could all be about to change.
The Food Standards Agency has announced that it is looking at how it can speed up the approval process for “meat” products that have been grown from animal cells in small chemical plants.
The U.K. food safety watchdog says it plans to develop new regulations by working with experts from high-tech food firms and researchers, with the aim of completing a safety assessment within the next two years.
Earlier this year, lab-grown meat was permitted to be used in dog food in Britain. But considerations around the safety of allowing humans to eat the same are taking longer.
Scarlett Swain, a lecturer in law at Northeastern University, says the watchdog’s move paves the way for the U.K. to become the first European country to legalize lab-grown meat for human consumption.
It was first permitted by Singapore in 2020, with Israel and most states in the U.S. following suit. Europe has been less sold on the idea though, with Italy placing a ban on lab-grown meat appearing on supermarket shelves.
Swain is an expert on the topic, having written her Ph.D. on the issue of lab-grown meat and whether it can be patented.
“In terms of regulation, the Food Standards Agency has been looking at it for a long time,” says Swain, who teaches on Northeastern’s London campus. She says after the stunt of having the world’s first lab-grown burger cooked and eaten in London, following research conducted by Maastricht University in the Netherlands, a scientific research hub sprung up in the U.K.
With other countries having legalized first, there is more data available when it comes to considering the safety of eating cultivated meat products, Swain says. “Human beings are already eating it,” she points out. “In Singapore, it is an American startup supplying the lab-grown chicken and it has passed all the food standard regulations there.”
Uri Weill, assistant professor in biology at Northeastern in London, explains that the process of scientists growing meat starts by taking a biopsy of muscle tissue from an animal like a chicken or cow.
The aim is to isolate stem cells that have the “capacity to proliferate and differentiate into muscle, fat, and other essential components of meat.”
“The definition for a stem cell is a cell that has the ability to multiply,” says Weill. “And the other very important thing is that it can then turn into other types of cells that are important in building a tissue — the whole organ.”
For those cells to be expanded, he says they are placed in a bioreactor and fed a liquid that is stocked full of nutrients and a growth factor containing molecules that give the cells what they need “in order to expand significantly.”
“Once enough cells have proliferated,” he adds, “they are encouraged to differentiate into muscle fibers, fat and connective tissue — the key components of meat. To mimic the texture and structure of traditional meat, these cells can be grown on scaffolds — biodegradable structures that provide support — or in 3D-printed frameworks.”
When those cells are grown to sufficient density, they can be “harvested, processed and formed into final meat products,” says Weill.
The idea that humans could bypass traditional methods of farming and focus on growing the desired parts of animals by scientific means goes back almost 100 years in Britain, Swain says.
In 1931, Winston Churchill — before his days as British prime minister during World War II — predicted that, with advances in science, humans would eventually “escape the absurdity of growing the whole chicken in order to eat the breast or a wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”
But not all of the world’s modern lawmakers are as convinced as Churchill was that chemically produced foods have a place in the human food chain. In the U.S., Alabama and Florida have instituted bans. Rome is against its consumption.
Swain points out that the U.K.’s food regulator has been careful to avoid calling lab-grown products “meat.”
“It is interesting reading through the Food Standards Agency’s regulation — they’re very much focused on calling it ‘cellular products,’” she says. “They don’t use the word meat because they make it very clear that, at the moment, this wouldn’t pass under the definition we have legally of meat.
“But that hasn’t been the case in Singapore, Israel or America. In those countries, they have been very clear that you have to clearly label on the package that it was made in a lab, but you can still use the word ‘meat.’ So whether that changes in the U.K., we will have to see in the next couple of years.”
Swain believes there has been some reluctance from authorities to push for legalizing the sale of lab-grown steaks, burgers and other meaty dishes to consumers due to fear of “backlash” from the farming community. There is also a perception from some older quarters of the population, she says, that it is some kind of “Frankenstein” or unnaturally modified food source.
Polling indicates the British population is not entirely convinced about switching over to meat made by scientists rather than reared by farmers. The Food Standards Agency found that somewhere between 16% and 41% of the U.K. population would be willing to try lab-grown meat.
But Swain argues that concerns over the size of continuing subsidies to farms, the environmental impact of agriculture and the falling cost of producing lab-grown meat is forcing lawmakers and regulators to think again. “To produce the lab-grown burger that was eaten in London in 2013, it cost £250,000 — equivalent to 300,000 U.S. dollars at the time. The same burger would cost around £7.20 ($9.30) today,” she adds.
Weill highlights that there are still challenges for those who see lab-grown meat as heralding a shift away from the need for traditional rearing of animals.
The growth-boosting liquid that stem cells are placed in has traditionally used fetal bovine serum from cows as the source of the nutrients. “There is a huge effort now,” says Weill, “to make media [the nutrient-rich liquid] that is not sourced from other animals. Otherwise, what you are doing is a little bit like taking a puzzle and rearranging it.
“People are saying, ‘Yes this was grown in the lab, but you killed many cows to make the medium to get them to grow.’ And this is some of the criticism around this — there are questions around whether it is truly efficient. Are we able to truly reduce the amount of animals that need to be killed or not?”
Other questions that need to be answered by the burgeoning lab-grown meat industry, says Weill, focus on its ability to scale up manufacturing while keeping costs down and upholding strict safety standards as production moves from research laboratories and into factories. It is something the U.K.’s Food Standards Agency will be investigating over the next 24 months.
“Scientists are saying now, ‘We just made a steak — it is amazing. Let’s give it a thumbs up and start rolling,’” Weill says.
“But scaling up will require its own research, its own development, its own new patent — it is a whole other thing just to be able to scale this up.
“And this is the critical moment where, on one hand, you have got to support it significantly and not hinder it. But on the other hand, you still need to make sure that very important practices in safety and ethics are being kept while this is happening.”