Being able to make small amounts of cultured tissue is nothing new. Making huge amounts is a different story. Scientists have only recently begun contemplating what it would truly take to bring cultured meat to a scale that would notably displace the footprint of traditional meat. The most critical take (for which I provided science communication consulting services) is from an American consulting engineer named David Humbird, whose work was funded by the Silicon Valley-backed funder Open Philanthropy.
Humbird’s assessment suggests that producing cultured meat at scale isn’t physically possible without a number of other significant technological and cost-related leaps in cellular engineering and in the production of the materials that cells need to grow. It was “hard to find an angle that wasn’t a ludicrous dead end,” he told reporter Joe Fassler in 2021.
The problems are daunting. The cells of living organisms are evolved to live as part of a body — a system composed of networks of different kinds of cells that perform many functions co-operatively. Meat cells grown outside that system need the same level of care — waste cycling, nutrients, heat controls, defence from predatory microbes. All of those functions need to be designed into cultured meat manufacturing systems.
