RESEARCH: Growing Meat in a Lab Using Scaffolding Made with Gelatin Shown to Work
This technique could help more people, including serious carnivores, consider lab-grown meat as a sustainable, ethical alternative to meat raised for slaughter, said co-author Dr. Luke MacQueen.
KNVUL SHEIKH: ‘The alt-meat industry has created quite a sizzle, promising delicious burgers, steaks and even sushi that is grown from animal cells in the lab. But most cellular agriculture still looks like mush. The manufacturing process — which starts with animal muscle and fat grown from stem cells in petri dishes — is fine for making burgers, but it fails to provide the kind of texture needed for more substantial cuts of meat, like steaks.
Scientists at Harvard University reported that they had found a way to more closely mimic the form and flavor of real meat, by growing the muscle cells of cows and rabbits on a gelatin scaffold. Their research was published in the journal Science of Food.
“We showed that it can be done,” said Luke MacQueen, the Harvard researcher who led the study. “Now we’ll keep improving our methods, tweaking the type of scaffold fiber to try even more complex textures, tastes and nutritional profiles.” Refining this technique and others like it could help more people, including serious carnivores, consider lab-grown meat as a sustainable, ethical alternative to meat raised for slaughter, Dr. MacQueen said…
“Muscle cells need a structure to grow on, the same way the walls of a building need a steel frame or a house needs a wooden skeleton,” said Kevin Kit Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard and also a co-author of the study. To mimic this cellular environment, Dr. Parker and his colleagues decided to make scaffolds out of different concentrations of gelatin, a protein product derived from collagen. When collagen-rich meat cuts, such as beef chuck, are cooked, the heat naturally melts collagen fibers into softer gelatin, giving meat its succulent texture, Dr. Parker said…
To test whether the final product resembled the texture and behavior of meat that chefs and home cooks use every day, the researchers performed a variety of food industry analyses: simulating cooking by heating the lab-grown meat on a hot plate, compressing it as if with a meat mallet and measuring the force needed to cut each piece of meat. They found that their lab-grown meat fell in between the springiness of a hamburger and a beef tenderloin’. SOURCE…
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