Steakholder Foods, an Israeli biotech company, has announced that it has developed a method of printing meat using a cultivated blend of animal stem cells and an augmented 3D printer. So far, the company can create four different types of meat: beef, chicken, seafood and pork. The cuts, well you may call it prints, are made of a blended stem cell culture harvested once and grown as needed. The piece is then printed to the specifications of the chef.
The result is not an alternative protein but it’s meant to be bona fide meat as per the company. Well it is a sustainable considering the rising demand for animal protein, especially in the face of a growing global population who are essentially meating eating. Cultivated meat is a cruelty-free, low impact alternative to the current standard of operations in the meat business, according to the company. The “traditional” meat and dairy industries have titanic impacts on climate change. Emissions and waste from animals; their feed, housing and land; machinery used to process animals into edible meat; shipping, handling and packaging the meat — all contribute to about 15% of global emissions.
For the time being, 3D printed meat is still a novelty. In the beginning, it will be relevant only to high end restaurants because of the cost barrier but As the scale and volume goes up, costs will decrease more so becuase you can produce this kind of meat anywhere — regardless of climate.As a leading chef put it “If chefs can provide a good meal to people that has a low price point and environmental impact, they’ll be open to it.”
Steakholder Foods recently announced that it has signed a multi-million-dollar agreement with an accredited GCC-based governmental body to establish the ‘first-of-its-kind,’ large-scale production facility in the Persian Gulf. In a recent interview, Arik Kaufman, CEO Steakholder Foods said “Our vision is to create real meat without slaughtering animals. So we have two assumptions, one that people will continue and consume meat because that’s what we are used to do forever. And the second is that we need to create meat in a different, more up to date way. And our printers that we’ve developed can do exactly that. They can create real meat meat without hurting the animals”.
A video of Israeli Premier Netanyahu trying it can be seen here. By the way, as we are talking about printing and meat, for those of you who remember Alon Bar Shany, the then long haired HP senior management guy, is also presently in a venture doing a similar cultured meat market, namely Redefining Meat in Israel.
