The world's appetite is growing, and the global larder is suddenly looking bare. The oceans are all but fished out. New arable land is scarce. People now compete with ethanol-slurping cars for corn. And the population will hit 9 billion by 2050, 2.5 billion more than now. No wonder food costs are soaring.
The notion of lab-grown meat is not as nutty as it sounds. Scientists have grown living tissue in the laboratory since the 1880s, though generally with medical uses in mind. In 1912, Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon and Nobel Prize winner, started growing embryonic chicken heart cells in a flask in his lab at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York and maintained the culture for over 20 years. The experiment sparked intense popular interest in science's potential to grant humans immortality.
But growing organs for transplant is an art form. Growing meat to meet the world's appetite would require Wal-Mart-like efficiency and economies of scale. So far, even boutique-style meat production has proved problematic.
Plant breeding is undergoing a renaissance on terra firma, too, in part thanks to funding from the Gates Foundation and other big-wallet philanthropies. The goals are to improve crops such as sweet potato and upland rice, which remain the key source of nutrition for people in sub-Saharan Africa and other impoverished regions, and to fend off threatening new pathogens, including a variety of wheat rust.
It would make sense, of course, for the whole world to become vegetarian: A plant-based diet is more healthful, more economical, and more environmentally benign.
But obstacles remain to commercially brewed beef—most significantly, cost and taste. Unfortunately, cutting live animals out of the equation doesn't remove all the ethical problems. Lab meat also needs exercise before it is fit for the fork. Meat's distinctive texture is formed by the stretching and flexing of muscle fibers as the animal moves. Even if lab-grown meat can soon be grown in abundance, it will still have to taste good. That may prove to be the biggest challenge of all.
