Technologies that could end animal agriculture

Sharon Loh
Feb 19, 2019
2 min read

Background

How can we entirely eliminate animal slaughter to bring food to our table without compromising our dietary needs? How can we generate food with sustainability, eating with consciousness, improving human health while possessing the consideration for animals’ welfare. Alternative meat.

Technological disruption is the new normal and there are many ways which alternative meat can be manufactured. This can be done by replacing animal protein with plant-based protein or using genetic editing technologies to create lab-grown meat.

Manufacturing lab-grown meat requires various tissue engineering technologies such as recombinant technology, synthetic biology and bioprocessing. The generation of individual meat components such as amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates and scaffolding them correctly to create the structure of meat is crucial to creating texture and taste analogous to animal-derived meat.

Protein-centric companies such as Tyson Foods and Beyond Meat have made huge progress in marketing lab-grown meat. However, major roadblocks to lab-grown (or cultured meat) meat include scalability, health impacts and labeling/branding issues.

Plant-based meat substitutes have infiltrated into the food chains in Singapore eg Hello Baby, where they import their burger patties from the US.

Possible ideas for Food Science Business Ventures in Singapore

Singapore constantly faces land scarcity and limited natural resources. Hence, we depend largely on external imports for CPG items. How can we be independent in our food sources? Perhaps, the first step is to access the feasibility of scaling up the production of lab-grown meat. Engineering a Bioreactor, similar to large-scale drug production, might be the way to go. Besides making meat that is similar to the taste of beef, other meat types could be explored eg mutton, fish, chicken etc.

Thoughts

Alternative meat (or cultured meat or lab-grown meat) provides many benefits as it allows us to customize nutritional intakes, improving human health, positively impact climate change, improving animal welfare etc. Such groundbreaking technologies, however, require refinement in the areas of food safety and catering to people with dietary restrictions eg immune disorder. The food industry is revolutionizing very quickly and the emerging trend of lab-grown meat could potentially change animal agriculture entirely (perhaps even end animal-farming) and the way we perceive food in the near future. This is an exciting area for the Biotechnology and food industries and animal welfare activists. I am hyped.