Laboratory progress creating many meaty questions

Meat grown in a laboratory after being cultured from animal muscle stem cells - a first in China - needs to undergo food safety evaluations and other reviews before it can be served on people's dining tables, industry insiders said.

Nanjing Agricultural University in Jiangsu province announced on Thursday that a research team had produced 5 grams of meat after cultivating pig muscle stem cells for 20 days.

Experts from the China Association of Agricultural Science Societies evaluated the claim and confirmed it the same day.

Zhou Guanghong, the professor who led the project, said the lab-grown meat has a color, texture and other qualities similar to natural pork after being minced in a grinder.

"Lab-grown meat is only at the laboratory testing stage now," he said. "To serve it as food in the future, certain technological problems of large-scale production need to be solved. It needs to go through food safety evaluations and be subject to production process oversight."

Cultivating meat in laboratories requires that many strict conditions be met, the university team said. The team took muscle tissue from living animals and then isolated the stem cells in that tissue.

The cells were later put in a solution rich in nutrients before growing into a mass of muscle precursor cells. In the final stage, they were differentiated into muscle tissues in edible, three-dimensional scaffolds or lattices.

Since 2009, Zhou and his team have studied stem cells with the objective of producing meat in a laboratory. From 2015 to 2017, they isolated high-purity pig and cattle stem cells and learned how to cultivate the cells artificially, in vitro, in a dry environment.

Many people have shown interest in lab-grown meat, saying it could provide better nutrition for some vegetarians (though, strictly speaking, it's still meat) and help the environment.

"I don't mind having lab-grown meat," said Ju Qing, a retired teacher who has been a vegetarian for more than 20 years. "It may provide us with a new kind of food that has better nutrition and flavor."

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated that by 2050, the world may have a human population of 9 billion, meaning that agricultural products need to increase by 50 percent to meet people's food requirements by then, Workers' Daily reported. It added that nearly half the world's grain is used as animal feed.

That grain, if redirected, could provide food for another 7 billion people, it said.

Zhong Kai, deputy director of the China Food Information Center, said that meat grown in a laboratory could be divided into two main categories - one using plant proteins to produce meat alternatives and the other using animal cells to cultivate meat.

"It's hard to promote lab-grown meat cultured from animal cells now because of its low production yield and high cost," he said. "But its safety can be ensured because cultivating animal cells requires strict conditions."

He added that China currently has no laws or regulations on the books to monitor the emerging technology of lab-grown meat.

"It is urgent to define lab-grown meat," Zhong said. "The government should decide whether to consider it as normal meat or as a new category of food."

Guo Jun contributed to this story.