Environment, health… Is in vitro meat the remedy for the evils of intensive farming?

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14.5% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of human origin come from the livestock supply chains. This represents 7.1 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, according to Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) figures.

And for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the solution to halt climate change is to achieve carbon neutrality in 2050, a state of equilibrium between GHG emissions of human origin and their removal from the atmosphere by man or his fact. Faced with these challenges, meat grown in vitro can be a miracle solution for continuing to feed more and more human beings correctly without worsening climatic phenomena … But the reality is more complex.

Reduction of methane emissions

"Indeed, if we reduce the number of ruminants and compensate for this loss of food by a species of cell culture, a priori we will emit less methane", explains Jean-Louis Peyraud, agricultural engineer and researcher at the National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA), interviewed by The Digital Factory.

These are the results of one of the first studies releases on the subject in June 2011, and conducted by scientists from the universities of Oxford and Amsterdam. In vitro meat would reduce GHG emissions from livestock by 96%. Its production would also require between 7 and 45% less energy than that of conventionally produced meat. Finally, this "clean meat" would only need 1% of the land and 4% of the water currently allocated to livestock, which is an effective way to fight against deforestation and land grabbing. But it is not that simple.

 "Cell culture requires a lot of energy, especially for maintain a constant temperature in incubators, which today continues to come from fossil fuels. So we replace methane with carbon dioxide", continues Jean-Louis Peyraud. As a reminder, CO2 and methane are both greenhouse gases. This is also the conclusion a study published in 2015 in the journal Environment Science & Technology, stating that "making meat in vitro requires more industrial energy – often produced by burning fossil fuels – than pork, poultry and perhaps even beef".

In addition, recent discoveries show that methane, a gas massively rejected by cattle, has a more heating power than CO2, it remains in the atmosphere for a short time because it degrades very quickly. On the contrary, carbon dioxide stays there for several hundred years. "To reduce CO2 consumption to zero, in vitro meat is a solution in the very short term. But over several years, it could worsen the current situation", concludes the INRA researcher.

What do we do with the culture medium?

Jean-Louis Peyraud adds a second problem to this demonstration. "To grow cells, you need amino acids, sugars, fats and vitamins, but also growth factors and hormones", he specifies. Once the cultivation is finished, what will we do with these elements?"If we pour them into the environment, that poses big problems", points out the scientist. Note that some start-ups also claim to use growth hormones to" grow "their meat.

In short, meat in vitro is one of the solutions to reduce the consumption of meat (therefore livestock) but it is not a panacea. Today, scientists agree that the first lever to set in motion to achieve carbon neutrality is to considerably reduce – if not completely eliminate – intensive farming and to promote farming on a human scale. This change requires rethinking the consumption of proteins despite everything essential for the body. Indeed, these macronutrients play a structural role in the muscles and are involved in many processes, such as the immune response, the transport of oxygen in the blood or even digestion.

From a health point of view, it is still unclear whether adopting a meatless diet is dangerous or not, since very few studies have been conducted on this subject. "Some studies have shown that vegans are less at risk for certain illnesses like cancer. Because the assumption today is to consider that people who eat too much red meat could have an increased risk of developing certain tumors", schematizes Benjamin Allès, researcher in epidemiology, contacted by The Digital Factory. A study was recently launched by a German university with a large cohort of vegetarians and vegans, including children. "We must now wait 4-5 years to get the first results", says the scientist. On the consumption of meat in vitro, no study has yet been conducted.

A lack of perspective

In France, this upheaval is starting very slowly. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, per capita consumption of butchery meat is decreasing year by year. At the same time as this decrease, we observe a shift towards other foods of animal origin (eggs, cheeses) but also an increase in the demand for vegetable proteins.

Current studies therefore do not allow us to affirm that completely replacing conventional meat with artificial meat is necessarily a good solution for the environment. Many factors must be taken into account: the size of the farm, the type of farm, the energy used to produce clean meat, the amount of natural resources needed … It will surely be easier to decide when the meat artificial will arrive on the plates of a large number of households. But it is perhaps ultimately consumer behavior, more than technological innovations, that will have a lasting impact on the environment.

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