Disrupting dairy: cell culture technology could revolutionise milk production, but will it remove animals from the equation?
Marking the release of our latest video - The Truth About Plant Milks: Displacement of Indigenous People, Destruction & Deforestation - we take a look at cell-cultivated milk technology, said to take cows and other animals, including humans, out of milk production. More sustainable it might be, but is it actually more ethical?
The cell-cultivated animal products scene has received a huge boost of late following several noteworthy investments into pioneering start-ups, particularly those in Israel. Aleph Farms, which produces steaks from lab-grown cultures of cow cells, recently received $105 million in funding from global meat giants including Thai Union and Cargill, while Nestlé has announced it is working with Future Meat Technologies - the company behind the world’s first industrial cell-cultivated meat production facility producing the equivalent of 5,000 hamburgers per day - plus other as yet undisclosed start-ups.
Now another Israeli cell-cultivated startup has received support from a huge multinational with Coca Cola Israel set to invest $2 million into research and development at Biomilk in an effort to accelerate the arrival of its cell-cultivated products. Biomilk isn’t the only company exploring this technology, with one of the more interesting - and lucrative - applications being its ability to create human breast milk to replace baby formula.
With the tagline ‘the sustainable real milk company’, Biomilk uses cells from different species of mammals to create milk. Not plant-based milk made from soya, oats, peas, hemp and so on, but milk as we know it to come from cows, humans and other mammals using isolated mammary cells.
As with all cell-cultivated technology so far, the technique means animals aren’t used in the same way, nor do they die on the same scale as with traditional milk and meat production, but controversy remains in how the growth medium - the substance in which the cells are cultured - is obtained. The most commonly used and effective growth media have been those based on Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS), taken from dead calves. For ethical vegans, this clearly contradicts the claim that cell-cultivated meat and milk is slaughter-free, and therefore incompatible with our principles of causing the least harm possible.
As discussed in The Myth of Cultured Meat: A Review, an article published last year in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition, FBS is not only incompatible with ethical claims but is expensive and has largely made cell cultivation impractical for industrial production on a scale that would rival traditional meat and milk production. Start-ups are racing to address this issue as the single greatest barrier to the roll-out of lab-grown animal products, being both financial and ethical, with as many different solutions as there are companies conducting their own proprietary research and development.
Taking the example of Future Meat, its industrial cell cultivation facility has been made possible by several developments unique to the technology that has eliminated its reliance on FBS completely, greatly reducing the cost of production and making it a viable challenger to traditional meat production. In February, the company reportedly produced one pound of cultured chicken for $7.50, 1,000 times cheaper than other attempts. To achieve this, Future Meat uses ‘undifferentiated fibroblast cells’ that they say require no growth factors at all, but are limited to creating fat or muscle cells triggered by the addition of certain ‘small molecules’. The Future Meat technology isn’t entirely ethical, however, as the small molecules are derived from cells taken from Chinese hamster ovaries (CHO).
Furthermore, the use of fibroblasts - which can only turn into either fat or muscle cells - is unlikely to be of much help to Biomilk and other cell-cultivated milk startups that require mammary cells to secrete milk. For them the race is on to find plant-based alternatives to FBS that are not only truly ethical, but cheaper, unlocking the all-important financial viability and price parity with traditional dairy production.
Only at the point at which cell-cultivated milk costs the same as producing milk by breeding and rearing dairy cows, repeatedly inseminating them and taking their calves from them until they are ‘spent’, will the other benefits of cell technology come into play - specifically the environmental ones. According to Biomilk, these include far lower water consumption, land use and carbon emissions. Lower land use is obvious, requiring no huge tracts of land on which to graze ruminants, but the last point about greenhouse gases (GHG) is less clear cut. As we know from our own coverage of the recent IPCC Sixth Assessment on climate change, raising animals to eat is associated with methane production, shorter lived in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide but with a far greater warming potential. However, cell-cultivation technology may be associated with carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels to warm the cultures, although this could be addressed by the use of sustainable energy.
Referring once again to the article in Frontiers of Nutrition, a largely critical review of cell-cultivation technologies, the problem of FBS is likely to be solved with time:
One of the main goals of the laboratory start-ups (about 25–30) as of this writing, scattered over the globe and working on cultured meat is to find a cheaper medium derived from plant ingredients and as efficient as FBS. Apparently (from personal communications), this problem has been solved, at least in research prototypes to produce cultured meat. Once this problem has been solved on an industrial scale (and it is likely to be solved), in vitro meat could become competitive in terms of production costs and animal ethics compared to regular meat from livestock. In addition to FBS, antibiotics and fungicides have been commonly used to avoid contamination of cell cultures. All the start-ups claim that this problem has also been solved.
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Finding an alternative to FBS isn’t the end of the story, as producing the right cells for meat or milk production would also require the addition of the right hormones and other growth factors to the culture itself. The problem of where to obtain these presents other ethical hurdles.
Yet the imperative to remove animals from the equation entirely isn’t purely ethical, but also financial and environmental, and for that reason research into alternatives for FBS, hormones, growth factors and other animal-derived constituents of cell-culture technology looks set to continue and with considerable support as we have seen from the recent aforementioned examples of Cargill, Nestle and Coca Cola.
The issue of how the animal starter cells, the fibroblasts and mammary cells, are harvested in the first place should also be acknowledged. A cell harvested from an animal can be reproduced to create a ‘cell line’ and the creation of these for large-scale cell-cultivated meat production is in itself a future industry - for example, Future Meats does not intend to sell meat directly to consumers, but rather produce the equipment and viable cell lines for other companies.
Indeed, there is right now something of a crusade to find cell lines for cultured meat products that are either well-researched and accessible - as in not locked away in private labs - or freely accessible for subsequent research. Scientists believe this issue is holding back the cell-cultured meat industry. The ethical issue is that usually, cell lines are finite and can only reproduce a limited number of times and therefore need to be replaced. Only the widespread availability of so-called ‘immortal’ cell lines - lines that can reproduce ad infinitum - ever truly eliminate the need to harvest more cells from animals directly.
One of the most famous examples of an immortal cell line is the one derived in 1951 from the body of Henrietta Lacks, a woman dying of cervical cancer. The cells from her cervix would go on to help scientists develop the polio vaccine, and more than 50 million tonnes of ‘HeLa cells’ have been grown in the seven decades since.
According to The hunt for the master cow that will feed the world, an article by Wired, we have yet to find an immortal cell line for use in lab-grown animal products. Immortal cell lines would reduce or eliminate the need to harvest new cells from animals, but also safeguard the long-term viability of the cell-cultured meat industry. Not every starting cell is equal, and a great deal of research goes into finding ones that produce the right end product:
Getting those cells right is a make-or-break issue for the cultured meat industry. Start with the wrong cells and your vat full of would-be-burgers can very quickly turn into a sludge of proto-meat soup. Solve that problem and you’ve still got to work out how to grow those cells at a cost close to conventional meat and then build a whole production process to reliably brew up thousands of tonnes of meat a year. Distilling the essence of an animal into a slice of cells no bigger than a fingertip is a colossal challenge. So far, no one has managed to crack it.
Cell-cultured meat technology is arguably further along and better funded than milk yet with technologies that differ in fundamental ways. This means that Biomilk and other milk startups face many of the same challenges, but also some unique ones. If an immortal cell line is found for beef production, as discussed in the Wired article, then that would not help with milk production as the cells needed are mammary cells and not fibroblasts, in the Future Meats example. Different types of mammalian milk would also need different hormones and growth factors, meaning that a solution for cows’ milk may not apply to human milk.
But as we have already discussed, there is no shortage of funding for the research necessary to overcome all of these challenges. The rewards for the startups that do, and the multinational players involved, are enormous. Dairy that requires no cows would drive down the cost of milk, cheese and other dairy products, while the ability to feed babies the ‘gold standard’ of breast milk without donor mothers has the potential to revolutionise infant nutrition. If cell-cultivated breast milk costs the same as formula and passes all safety checks, it would be hard to imagine that any postnatal health service would spend taxpayer money on cow-derived baby feed when ‘breast is best’ is an almost universal mantra.
For those of us more concerned with ethics than the greenwashing and ‘humane washing’ of multinationals whose other activities are exploitative and unsustainable, we must accept that it is this enormous financial incentive that is driving them to remove animals from the dairy and meat industries.
So is all the research into immortal cell lines and the development of technology that for the time being is still largely reliant on FBS, hormones and other growth factors a necessary evil on the road to ethical food production? Well, no. With the possible exception of replacing breast milk with dairy-based formula for very young babies, a whole other discussion, we don’t really need to consume animal products at all. We know that we can thrive on plant-based milks and very acceptable non-dairy versions of cheese, yoghurt and so on, and alternative meats like those from Beyond Meat and Impossible Food are great for people transitioning to plant-based lifestyles and ethical veganism. But lentils, soya and other plants can provide all the protein we need and without elaborate, resource-intensive processing.
There are also other innovations in dairy protein manufacture that don’t require animal cells. Startups using fermentation techniques to produce dairy, funghi, algae and yeast proteins to create ‘real milk’ are also receiving funding for research. Imagindairy for example, another Israeli startup, is developing a proprietary technology that recreates what it claims are nature-identical, animal-free versions of whey and casein proteins that can be used to produce dairy analogues.
Cell cultivation could one day provide a truly ethical alternative to meat and milk produced by animal cells, but we’re still a long way from that. Even when lab-grown options do appear on the consumer market, as ethical vegans we must look closely at the processes involved and whether certain aspects of their production are compatible with our own personal interpretation of veganism.
We should certainly keep a close and critical eye on developments, but while we enjoy our delicious oat milk lattes and seitan burgers safe in the knowledge that no cows were harmed in their making.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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