Explore synthetic foods: precision fermentation, lab-grown meat, and their environmental impact. Benefits and concerns.
Farming, especially in its industrial, broadacre form, is considered by some to be the world’s most environmentally damaging activity, based on the totality of its impacts. Food production represents about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse emissions, and somewhere between 11-20 per cent of global emissions are from animal agriculture alone.
Today, synthetic food technologies are enabling the industrial production of foods that closely resemble proteins such as meat, milk and eggs in terms of their appearance, taste and texture. Other work involves the synthesising of fats and other ingredients. Some products are already on the market in a limited number of countries.
This field of synthetic biology is similar to genetic modification (GM), and many of these “fake” food products use GM technology in their production processes, via “precision fermentation”, with GM microbes or by cell-culturing with animal cells. Production occurs in industrial vats known as “bioreactors” to yield the desired food.
Some large players
The industry is characterised by a mixture of a few larger companies and dozens of hopeful start-ups.
Perhaps most well-known is Impossible Foods, a Silicon Valley manufacturer that launched in 2011. Its products, including the famous burger, are sold in nine countries. These products are more expensive than regular meat, but the price difference has been narrowing. The key aim was to create a product that looks, cooks and tastes like real meat, with the resemblance extending to it even bleeding. Meat-like characteristics are achieved through the addition of soy leghemoglobin (heme), precision-fermented from genetically modified yeast. There is no human history of eating this ingredient.
Heme is one of two GM-linked ingredients in the company’s products, the other being soy protein isolate. Impossible Foods is upfront about its aggressively pro-GM allegiance, with one blog post titled How GMOs Can Save Civilization and Probably Already Have. A 2019 test carried out by the group Moms Across America on the Impossible Burger found residues of glyphosate and its breakdown product AMPA, likely from the Roundup Ready soy used in the isolate, in a combined concentration of 11.3 parts per billion (ppb). While this sounds extremely small, the lowest-known threshold for glyphosate health effects in rats (liver and kidney damage) is 0.05 ppb. (For context, some non-organic foods in the US have been found to contain glyphosate residues orders of magnitude higher than the Impossible result.)
In Finland, Solar Foods has been working to alchemise a protein flour-like ingredient called solein, from carbon dioxide, water, bacteria and nutrients. Interestingly, its production method is very different from precision fermentation, and is free from GM processes, instead using a natural soil-derived bacterium. While a fair amount of electricity is required, the company sources exclusively renewables. Some of the CO2 used is sequestered from the company’s emissions on-site, using direct air capture technology. As of the middle of 2024, solein was not available on the market, but the plan is for it to be used as an ingredient in other companies’ products. The company’s more recent protein project called Hydrocow does use GM technology.
Back in the San Francisco area, Berkeley-based Perfect Day creates dairy analogue foods using GM microbes in bioreactors, with likely GM-derived corn syrup as a feedstock. Products made by its consumer subsidiary the Urgent Company include ice cream (Brave Robot), cream cheese (Modern Kitchen) and whey protein powder (California Performance Co.) However, in 2023, it decided to sell off this subsidiary in order to concentrate on its core business of supplying ingredients to other businesses.
Testing on a synthetic milk product made by a company named Bored Cow was carried out in 2023 by John Fagan of the US-based Health Research Institute. Remarkably, this identified 92 unknown compounds that he described as “completely novel to our food”. Compared to grass-fed milk, the product was found to be depleted in some nutrients found in natural milk, including riboflavin (B2), pantothenic acid (B5), vitamin E and Omega 3 oils, as well as having a very different amino acid profile when compared to regular milk. It also contained traces of a fungicide, at a “significant” level.
Supporters of precision fermentation hope for a smoothly rising exponential growth graph line for the industry, which is currently estimated to be worth US $4.2 billion. However, the synthetic food sector is facing some headwinds. Investors are impatient to see revenue generated from sales, which discourages lengthy product development timeframes. Scaling up can be a complex challenge.
The consumer
Identifying a fake food product, either to sample it or avoid it, may be a challenge to a novice. However, certain words give a clue: “precision fermentation” or “cell-cultured” always refers to a synthetic food, while “plant-based”, “animal-free”, “fermented” or “cultured” could also indicate one. In terms of fully informative labelling, few of these are very helpful.
High-tech meat analogues such as the Impossible Burger are vegan, but according to the owner of the Sydney restaurant Butter, which offers this burger on the menu, it is really aimed at meat-eaters. This targeting of the carnivore market is why such effort has gone into replicating every aspect of the meat experience. However, some vegans are fans and their views are well-represented in the largely positively spun media coverage that these foods have received.
The first food to be manufactured using a precision fermentation method was Pfizer’s GM-derived vegetarian cheese enzyme chymosin, in the 1990s. This technique has also long been used in the manufacture of insulin, and some other pharmaceuticals and vitamins.
Synthetic GM-reliant food manufacturing processes are generally considered by the industry to yield a GMO-free end product, based on the belief that none of the GM DNA from the high-tech production process will be present. However, John Fagan disagrees, and has indicated that these foods are likely to contain fragmented GM DNA from the production process.
Underneath some of the hype, there is a range of concerns about the healthiness of some synthetic meat products:
- Most are classified as ultra-processed foods.
- They can have high sodium levels.
- Where artificial vitamins and minerals are added to imitation meat, these are less bio-available than the vitamins and minerals found in its natural equivalent.
- Such foods are likely to lack the micronutrients important for human health that occur in natural meats.
Champions and opponents
Those who are positively oriented towards the industry include tech nerds, champions of disruptive technologies, some venture capital firms, Bill Gates and the CSIRO in Australia. Another is WePlanet, an “ecomodernist” group with questionable pro-GMO and anti-organic views. Its wider agenda is pro-technology and pro-free-market, opposed to voluntary frugality, and supportive of nuclear power, fracking and urbanisation.
Loosely allied to WePlanet is George Monbiot, a prominent British environmentalist who is unafraid of taking unpopular positions. A long-time critic of the environmental damage wrought by farming, he has become a prominent champion of the synthetic food sector. This dovetails into Monbiot’s second obsession of rewilding, which in his view would be an ecologically valuable use of the vast areas of land formerly used by farms that would have been rendered obsolete.
Among the critics are Gene Ethics (Australia), GMWatch (UK), the ETC Group (Canada), Organic Consumers Association (USA) and Navdanya International (Italy). Arguments affirm support for organics, endorse regenerative farming, see the need for a grassroots and decentralised peasant-led food system, acknowledge the issue of patents on seeds and foods, and oppose novel technology. There is a general mistrust of big business and top-down agendas.
A large-scale shift to these novel foods risks centralising control of most of the food system into even fewer hands than at present. Monbiot’s somewhat unrealistic solution is to remove patents from the picture, which would facilitate a more decentralised, open-source style of production. Impossible Foods currently holds 475 patents, of which 204 had been granted as of May 2024.
Some governments have intervened by taking the controversial step of banning fake meat. These include Italy and Hungary, which are concerned about what they see as threats to traditional food cultures. Florida and Alabama have done the same, and other US states are likely to follow suit.
In Australasia
Australia and New Zealand share a food regulatory system administered under Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ).
At present, the only precision-fermented or cell-cultured food product to hit the Australasian market is from Impossible Foods. A number of restaurants as well as the pizza chain Domino’s offer the Impossible Burger. Woolworths in Australia and New Zealand sells both the burger and an imitation beef mince.
In January 2024, FSANZ granted initial approval for its first cell-cultured food application, a lab-created quail. This product was created by Sydney-based start-up Vow Foods, established in 2019, and its process involves cultured quail cells and GM growth factors. As of the middle of 2024, it is not yet sold in either country, pending a second expected consultation. Its cell-cultured quail parfait (a type of dessert) is now available in Singapore, under the brand name Forged, in the upmarket restaurants Fura and Tippling Club.
Cauldron is a company, based in the New South Wales city of Orange, which facilitates the scaling up of precision fermentation companies from prototype stage to commercial production, via its own patented technology. Other players include Nourish Ingredients in Canberra, with a focus on fats. In Queensland, the Mackay Future Foods BioHub is an ambitious project involving plans for multiple businesses in the industry to co-locate.
Across the Tasman in New Zealand, Opo Bio in the Auckland suburb of Newmarket supplies cell lines to the cultivated meat industry, both for research and commercial production. Daisy Lab in Auckland is working on synthetic dairy product substitutes. In total, more than a dozen companies in New Zealand are operating in the precision fermentation space.
Synthetic versus traditional meat – the climate debate
Environmentally, attention has focused on the massive impact of meat-eating on climate change, with the synthetic alternative being promoted as a solution.
However, a controversial preprint (non-peer-reviewed) 2023 study from the University of California carried out a lifecycle assessment comparison looking at the energy and greenhouse gases associated with both meat types. It concluded that lab-grown or cultivated meat is likely to have a global warming potential four to 25 times higher than normal beef based on current and “near-term” production methods. The major energy demand was the pharmaceutical-level purification of growth media.
Claims are circulating about some regenerative grass-fed meat being carbon-negative. However, Monbiot has carefully trawled through the literature and failed to find convincing evidence of net carbon-negative operations in the pasture-raised meat sector. Part of the issue is that soil carbon sequestration reaches a saturation point, while pasture-raised meat production emissions continue to be released. Pasture-raised meat has also been criticised by Monbiot for the opportunity cost of not using the land for carbon-negative nature-regeneration purposes. Extension of beef pasture is currently resulting in the loss of biodiverse ecosystems, while also generating emissions. In the big picture, grass-fed meat production would be impossible to scale up sufficiently to feed everyone in the world who wants it.
Necessary or not?
High-protein natural meat-alternative foods include eggs and cheese, as well as low-emissions vegan options such as tempeh, tofu, pulses and lentils. While it may be unrealistic to hope that people will abandon their cultural attachment to meat and be willing to eat something that looks very different, the bottom line is that if people don’t want to give up meat-looking foods, some form of fake meat would probably be a non-negotiable part of making a serious attempt at reining in climate change. Meanwhile, meat consumption worldwide is continuing to grow. Meat-eating is a core element of the increasingly common carnivore and keto diets, and is a populist cause for the libertarian-oriented right.
But alongside the bubbling bioreactors are some less synthetic non-GMO vegan meat replications such as the high-profile Beyond Meat in the US and v2food in Australia, whose plant-based burgers are available at Hungry Jacks and in Woolworths.
To its proponents, rejection of these novel foods is a form of “neophobia” that can manifest in an entrenched resistance to new innovations. Whether or not this is a valid judgment, make sure you read the label and pay attention to the various forms of labelling that may be used to indicate these products.