The steak chip (no bull)
Another headline-grabbing session featured Andras Forgacs, co-founder and CEO of Brooklyn-based Modern Meadow, which applies tissue engineering and 3-D bioprinting techniques originally developed for medical applications to grow 'leather' and 'meat' from animal cells in a kitchen, without slaughtering any animals.
The key to making cultured meat a commercial success will be proving it can be done cost-effectively at scale, acknowledged Forgacs, and right now, the company is prioritizing cultured leather over food because the returns will likely come more quickly and there are fewer regulatory hurdles.
But to show delegates what the possibilities might look like in food applications, Forgacs served up some cultured 'steak chips'.
To make them, he extracted muscle cells from a cow (a process that does not harm the animal), and then grew them in a cell culture media (by feeding them vitamins, minerals, amino acids and other things they need to multiply). Then he added pectin for structure, plus seasoning and calcium, and cooked them.
Forgacs, who has had preliminary discussions with the FDA about how these products might be regulated, said they probably won't hit shelves for a "few years", but said the longer-term opportunities were incredibly exciting, both from a sustainability and an animal welfare perspective.
Prices would come down over time as the technology evolved and improved, he predicted: "These products will probably start as high-end novelty foods in wealthy markets before they scale and compete with existing food systems that have been developed over thousands of years, with the help of government subsidies."
Is it 'natural'?
Now some people will argue that growing meat in a laboratory is not 'natural', he accepted. But how 'natural' are modern farming methods in which animals have been selectively bred over thousands of years, pumped full of hormones and reared in conditions many regard as both cruel and unsustainable? he observed.
"There is technology involved in everything that you eat. The only difference between a 'laboratory' and a 'kitchen' is the level of cleanliness."
In future, he said, growing protein more locally made a lot of sense, especially as more people lived in urban environments.