Transcript
This is wild. Researchers just grew beef inside of rice. And no, I don't mean honey I shrunk the cow. We're talking fat and muscle cells. Most lab-grown meat relies on a scaffold that the animal cells can grow on top of. Sort of like tomato cages in a garden. But these are generally made from synthetic or animal-derived materials, and the whole process is very costly, requiring fancy bioreactors and growth media. In this study published last week, scientists coated grains of rice with a mixture of fish sticky scaffold, to which they then added cow muscle and fat stem cells, and let it all grow in a petri dish for around 10 days. The end result was a beefy, ricey mixture that had 8% more protein and 7% more fat than normal rice, while being a bit more firm and brittle. This may seem like a small shift, but those numbers will go up with time. They can even adjust the flavor by changing the types of cells being used, and there are three main reasons why this matters for you. First, beef production produces way more CO2 than rice does. Even per pound of protein produced, rice already eight times better than beef, but meatifying the rice would make it way more efficient. Second, beef production takes one to three years. Rice is less than a year, and adding only 10 days on top to meatify it makes it super promising for global food production. Speaking of which, number three is that by using rice as a scaffold instead of all those fancy, expensive ingredients, they expect to massively cut down on production costs compared to other lab-grown meat. The researchers ran some numbers, which seemed a bit optimistic to me, but they calculated that the market could end up being $2.23 per kilogram compared to almost $15 for beef. So, would you try it?
Additional notes
The study didn’t say whether or not the scientists actually tasted the final product, but if I were working in that lab I don’t know if I could have resisted sampling a wee bit 😆 📚 Study doi: 10.1016/j.matt.2024.01.015 #science #sciencenews #meat #sustainable #edutok
References
- Original source notes.
- ScienceAlert coverage.
- EurekAlert release.
- Rice grains integrated with animal cells: A shortcut to a sustainable food system. DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2024.01.015.