After a laboratory mishap involving a consumer drone, a malfunctioning smartphone app and an impressive puff of smoke, Annebelle and Phil wake up at the controls of a two-seater quadcopter, flying over a strange land. That land is the world in 2045…
With a sudden bang! and plenty of sparks, our quadcopter dropped through the clouds, narrowly avoiding a hologram sign reading ‘Welcome to the Future of Food.’
The ‘copter’s alarm systems were in full swing:
System malfunction!
Land-surface recognition failure!
Emergency landing!
Emergency landing!
It seemed our quirky AI pilot JCN had made a ‘calibration error’.
Phil leapt into the swivel chair, wrestled with the joysticks and finally regained control.
As the clouds cleared, we were hovering above a sprawling complex of high-tech-looking buildings. The GPS showed we were on the island of Langeland, southern Denmark.
“Glad we avoided smashing into that old windmill over there,” I said, composing myself.
Phil looked nonplussed: “Of all the places… why Denmark?,” I heard him mutter.
“I guess we should at least take a look?,” I suggested, curious to discover what claimed to be the ‘future of food’.
We touched down and were immediately greeted by a hovering robot with all the exuberance of a tour guide who’d had one too many espresso shots.
“I’m Beepz!!” it chirped with slightly more excitement than the moment required. “Welcome to the Cell-Ag BioFactoryyy!”
Intrigued, and only slightly wary, Phil and I let Beepz lead the way. Little did we realise, we were about to step into an upside-down world in which meat is produced without a single animal in sight.
Animal-free meat soup
Inside the factory we were met with rows of glass-walled bioreactors. Each was filled with floating cell cultures, illuminated by LEDs that changed colour like disco lights.
Beepz introduced us to Dr. Imara, the chief biologist. She wore the collars of her lab coat up, like everyone seems to in the future.
“Those are animal cells in there,” she said, matter-of-factly, pointing at the bioreactors. “They receive a nutrient-rich solution every hour on the dot. On a cellular level, it’s as nourishing as mother’s milk,” she continued, blowing a nonchalant chef’s kiss. “Nowadays, this is how we make beef.”
According to Dr Imara the process uses only 10% of the water associated with old-fashioned livestock production. It also virtually eliminates methane emissions, and doesn’t require things like space for pasture fields or feed.
“No cows, no burps,” she continued. “Production isn’t tied to the seasons either. Floods and droughts don’t affect us; we don’t even need daylight.”
Beepz chimed in: “Sustainable AND tasty! Save the land, feed the worllllld!!!’”
Abruptly stepping in front of the excitable Beepz, Phil implored, “Where do the animal cells come from?”
“Stem cells from biopsies of live animals,” replied Dr Imara. “Or from our stock of cryopreserved animal cells, just like—.”
She was cut off by a loud hiss from the corner of the lab, where liquid nitrogen began billowing out of a large drum. A technician in a spacesuit slowly extracted frozen tubes and set them on a racking trolley.
“Just like that,” continued Dr Imara, looking over the top of her spectacles.
“Once defrosted and nurtured, these cells can develop into many of the different cell types in an adult cow. That includes all the cuts of beef you might have bought from a butcher – back when butchers were still the norm.”
She continued: “We put the stem cells into an oxygen-rich mix of nutrients like amino acids, glucose and vitamins. The bioreactors you can see over there are basically giant vats of soup.”
“Looks a bit like a brewery,” said Phil, a bit misty-eyed. “All those gleaming steel vessels and pipes and gauges.”
Hearing him but ignoring him, Dr Imara resumed: “We modify the soup to trigger young cells to differentiate into the skeletal muscle, fat, and connective tissues that make up meat. Then we harvest the different cells from the bioreactor and form them into recognisable meat products. The whole process takes 4-6 weeks, depending on what kind of meat we’re growing.”
She flashed us a playful glance: “We like to call it… ‘labriculture’,” before chuckling faintly, for a bit too long.
“Cheers to that,” mumbled Phil.
I had to ask: “So, other than a few stem cells, there are no actual animals involved in making beef?”
“Precisely,” she replied proudly. “These days there are kids who only know cows as pictures in books; there just aren’t many cows around nowadays. But every town has a Cell-Ag BioFactory,” she gleamed.
“Yippeee!” enthused Beepz, making an airborne pirouette.
Tucking in
My stomach was rumbling by the time we sat down for lunch with one of the engineers, Talia.
“The early days were tough,” she confessed. “Cultural acceptance of lab-grown meat was a huge hurdle: People thought it was weird, unsafe, or unethical. Some even protested about our ‘Franken-meat’.”
With that, a robot server raced out of nowhere, flapped out a napkin, clumsily tucked it into the collar of a surprised Phil, before racing off again. It was back in a shot, delivering a sizzling lab-grown quarter-pounder. Phil looked ambivalent at best.
“No need to be worried,” said Talia. “Over time, lab-grown meat was proven to be safe and genetic engineering allowed us to enhance its nutritional profile—increasing omega-3s, and reducing saturated fats, for example.”
She nodded at Phil and his burger: “It means this stuff is even healthier than the real thing.”
With Beepz and the robot server observing him from a bit too close, Phil took a tentative bite. Any hesitation immediately gave way to surprise.
“It tastes…real,” he said, eyebrows raised. “And… it’s delicious.”
Talia was delighted: “That’s the idea.”
She continued: “Labriculture might not replace traditional livestock farming completely, but it reduces the need for intensive meat production, which has significant downsides in regard to animal welfare, ecosystem health and climate-change.”
Phil raised his half-eaten burger in a mock toast. “To a low-impact future,” he mumbled through a mouthful of meat. And quite the fan he appeared to be, wolfing down the rest in just a few bites. With that, my scrumptious burger arrived and I tucked in too.
As we walked back to the quadcopter, satiated and marvelling at how quickly food technology had evolved, I mused: “Think about it, Phil: Meat produced with no farmland, no fertilizers, and no irrigation – this could help feed the world while giving natural ecosystems a chance to recover and thrive.”
And that’s when it dawned on us: The advent of lab-grown meat meant the areas of Langeland formerly devoted to crops for animal feed – the dominant land use on the island – were now reforested. This had thrown the quadcopter’s land-surface recognition software out of whack, and initiated the emergency landing protocol!
With that, we climbed aboard, assured a somewhat sheepish JCN that he was still the best AI quadcopter pilot in the known universe, and rose up above the Cell-Ag BioFactory and the island of Langeland, and zoomed off for another adventure.
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A sustainable food future requires imagination, and Clim-Eat’s Journey to the Future of Food series is an attempt to bring that future to life. But the approaches and technologies visited by Annebelle, Phil and JCN in 2045 are already under development today. Clim-Eat’s Food Systems Tech website – produced in collaboration with the Bezos Earth Fund – showcases the latest potentially game-changing innovations in Next-Generation Crops, Plant Nutrition, and Sustainable Livestock that are happening right now. It’s being continually updated as new technologies develop, with explainers, and assessments of the likely impacts and the readiness of each technology. So if you want a glimpse of the future without waiting for the next installment of JTTFOF, you know where to go. And if you don’t, Annebelle, Phil, and JCN will probably take you there soon!
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See where else the quadcopter has taken Annebelle and Phil in Clim-Eat’s Journey to the Future of Food series:
Gene-edited bugs for less methane from livestock – Kenya’s transition to sustainable livestock
Integrated crop, livestock and energy systems in Kenya – the view from 2045
