29th July 2021. Food | Animation
Cell-based meat substitutes; Animation as a safe place
#1: The prospects for cultivated meat
McKinsey has a slightly excited piece on cultivated meat—by which it means meat that is developed from a few cell lines of an animal.
It defines the process that sits behind cultivated meat this way:
Instead of relying on animal husbandry to provide meat, or approximating the characteristics of meat with plants, (scientists) endeavored to create meat by taking small samples of animal cells and growing them in a controlled environment. Through manipulation of cell density and shaping techniques, the resulting product could be made to replicate the experience of eating, say, chicken breast or ground beef
The fall in price of cultivated meat has been spectacular, as seen from McKinsey’s chart, which has a logarithmic scale:
On their most optimistic estimates, costs of cultivated meat could match costs of farm-grown meat by 2030, while it might represent something under 1% of the global meat market by then.
There are some complex issues here. The first is that the amount of investment needed to scale the market is prodigious:
Reaching a $25 billion cultivated-meat market by 2030 will require the annual production of 1.5 million tonnes of cultivated meat. At current levels of cell-culture productivity, the industry would need anywhere from 220 million to 440 million liters of fermentation capacity, enough to fill 88 to 176 Olympic-size swimming pools. Considering that the pharma industry’s current cell-culture capacity is estimated to be between 10 million and 20 million liters (less than ten swimming pools), it will take a massive capital build-out just to reach 1 percent of the protein market.
The second is that while there are some intriguing benefits—cultivated meat isn’t restricted to the animals that we can grow in captivity most easily—we don’t really know what the possible health risks are.
At the moment, cultivated meat is legal only in Singapore, so there’s a lot of regulatory work to do.
McKinsey does some calculations to suggest that the employment implications of cultivated meat are about the same, but there will be some relocation effects. Potentially cultivated meat could be produced in a wider range of locations, since it is less dependent on climate.
It reckons that there are five critical issues to getting to market scale:
Consumer acceptance. Will diners dig into cultivated chicken nuggets and burgers and, eventually, filet mignon and salmon steaks?
Risks. How will the industry address concerns about health and safety, jobs, and possible economic ripple effects?
Cost position. Will cultivated meat become a bargain, relative to conventional meat, energizing demand?
Policy response. How will countries and regions address the development of this new industry?
Supply. Will the world make enough cultivated meat to achieve economies of scale?
My guess is that cultivated meat will become a real thing—if it represents a lower carbon cost of protein—because humans like meat and the carbon price attached to conventionally produced meat is going to increase.
But looking at these five questions—that’s all going to take a lot longer than a decade. Food is an emotive subject that runs deep into our psyches, and the global food industry is dominated by some large and powerful multinationals that have got where they are today partly by being supremely effective lobbyists.
It would be interesting to go beyond the rationalism of the McKinsey analysis and use tools such as causal layered analysis to scratch below the surface.
Because there’s something quite big missing in all of this discussion. (I’m indebted to a discussion at Chatham House’s Sustainability Accelerator for this). The whole McKinsey model takes a potentially revolutionary technology—and a technology which raises complex issues about the relationship between humans and other species—and immediately turns it into a business in which humans exploit other species. It’s exactly the same model that got us into this mess in the first place.
#2: Animation as a safe place
Not much time today, so I’m going to share some completely charming short animations by the artist Rosa Sawyers, shared on It’s Nice That. She turned to animation during the pandemic, “initially for comfort”. Lucy Bourton writes:
One of our favourite shorts is simply the sun rising and setting over an idyllic house, panning down to its reflection in a nearby lake. Although less than a minute long, the calming effect is immediate... While discussing this practice, the animator succinctly describes her work as: “Playful yet meditative moments that are both satisfying to make and watch.”
Rosa Sawyers: Wyrd (Copyright © Rosa Sawyers, 2021)
To see the animations you’ll need to visit the site: there’s several there, none of which are longer than a minute. In terms of her practice, I was struck by the openness of her approach. Because she’s new to this work, so publishes everything to gauge the sense of the audience:
“I try to put as little pressure as possible on what I make, and I post almost everything,” she tells us... (S)uch regular uploads also provides a sense of escape for those who come into contact with Rosa’s work. “Whilst learning to animate and developing my own visual language, I was also escaping from the day-to-day unpredictability of the pandemic,” she elaborates. “The comforting nature of looping video art acted as an endless safe place that I could immerse myself in, and the process itself became a way for me to relax.”