The attraction of lab-grown meat for some consumers and many investors is that it should vastly reduce the huge land requirement and punishing greenhouse gas emissions from conventional livestock farming.
Ivy Farm, on the outskirts of Oxford, is not a farm as you know it.
There is grass but it’s artificial, there are pigs and sheep but they are upholstered foot-stools with sewn-on faces. There are offices and labs where meat is grown.
This could be the future of farming.
That future could be about to take a small step closer, as the prestigious Piccadilly grocer Fortnum & Mason tests the meat in its famous scotch egg.
But the immaculate afternoon tea service will have to wait.
As we step back to the lab, and even before that, to the abattoir. Because, whether you are cultivating beef, chicken or pork, it has to start with muscle and fat cells from a very recently deceased animal.
They only need a sugar cube-sized lump of flesh and they only need it once. That will provide the root-stock cells potentially forever.
The next stage is to identify and separate the barely 3% of that tissue that contains the particular stem cells required for future growth. These cells and a very carefully researched liquid feed are then combined.
Lab-grown meat should vastly reduce land requirements and emissions
Ben Kinder, Ivy Farm’s director of manufacturing and operations, oversees these bioreactors, clear-sided glass cylinders where pale brown liquid darkens and thickens as the cells grow over a few days.
“It’s essentially a mixing tank,” he says. “In there we have some beef cells at the moment, some beef muscle, stirring around. And then we’ve got our own culture media formulation, which is the nutrition for the cells. It’s food.”
The attraction of lab-grown meat for some consumers and many investors is that it should vastly reduce the huge land requirement and punishing greenhouse gas emissions from conventional livestock farming.