BENEFITS
Cultured meat has enormous benefits for everyone - for our health, the environment and animals.
We're excited to be developing cultured meat so people everywhere can enjoy the meat they love, while protecting our precious planet.
Helping feed our growing population
Meat demand is growing fast. By 2050, the world’s population will surpass 9 billion, and meat demand is expected to be 70% higher than today’s level, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN.
We already use the majority of farmland for livestock rearing. Furthermore, water scarcity is a growing problem to which livestock contributes significantly (a single quarter pounder hamburger takes 5900 litres of water to produce).
It’s easy to calculate that we simply don’t have enough land and water to increase meat production by 70% using livestock.
This means that we either have to reduce our consumption of meat, or find a more efficient way to produce it.
It is projected that cultured meat production will use up to 99% less land, and 96% less water. This greater efficiency will make it possible to provide the world’s growing population with real meat in a sustainable way.
Healthy for you
Cultured meat is the same as conventional meat so it's just as safe and healthy - potentially more so.
Cultured meat is produced in a sterile environment. On the other hand, slaughterhouses are not sterile and are therefore more prone to contaminations, in some cases leading to foodborne illnesses amongst consumers.
There is also the overuse of antibiotics and growing concern around antimicrobial resistance. In some parts of the world, farmed animals are still given antibiotics preventatively in order to keep them healthy in feedlots or to support their growth. This misuse of antibiotics is causing the emergence of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs”. There is research showing a growing number of patients appearing in hospital with bacterial disease that is resistant to all known treatments.
In contrast, because cultured meat is produced in a clean environment, there is no need to use any antibiotics at all.
Cultured meat is also free from artificial growth hormones that are sometimes used to make livestock grow faster, and does not involve any genetic modification.
Better for our planet
Animal agriculture produces 15% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. This is similar to the entire transportation sector (including all cars and planes) combined. Furthermore, cows and their manure emit methane, which is 20-30 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat-trapping gas.
Cultured meat generates up to 96% less greenhouse gas emissions, helping us avoid the disastrous consequences of climate change.
Beyond climate change, livestock production has a number of other serious effects on the environment.
We use large amounts of pasturable and arable land to raise and feed livestock, leading in some dramatic cases to mass deforestation. Large parts of the Amazon rainforest have already been cleared for cattle, for instance.
This in turn leads to drastic loss of biodiversity. Each day we lose upwards of 80,000 acres of tropical rainforest, and with it about 135 plant, animal and insect species. That’s 50,000 species going extinct every year.
A further issue is agricultural pollution, provoked by the release in the environment of runoff such as pesticides and fertilisers, which overload waterways, and run into rivers and oceans. Once there, run-off can kill marine life and coral reefs, and even cause “dead zones” (low oxygen areas) where marine life suffocates and dies.
Cultured meat production is a more environmentally-friendly type of production, which does not necessitate the use of chemicals and is performed in a closed system, preventing run-off from entering the natural environment.
Kind to animals
Around 70 billion animals are reared for food each year, the majority in industrial farms.
Cultured meat does not require the slaughter of animals. Instead, cultured meat is made by growing cells taken from a live animal (using a small biopsy done under anaesthesia, which does not cause any harm to the animal).