Certified Cultured Beef:
Raising Beef Without the Cow?

by
Bryan Hains^*, Dawn Hains^†, and Mark Balschweid^‡
Youth Development and Agricultural Education
Purdue University

Part I—Steak?

Jeff Rodriguez was feeling nervous as he drove over to pick up his date for the evening. As a new graduate student, he hadn’t had time for any social function let alone dating. Fortunately he had met Samantha, a second-year graduate student who sat next to him in the cramped graduate office. He had been planning this night for a week now and was hoping to impress her by taking her to the new steakhouse in town.

As the two were seated, the waiter explained the evening’s special, “We have a special treat this evening. We are currently serving our certified cultured beef steaks.”

Jeff, who was raised on a beef cattle ranch, thought that he had heard the waiter wrong. “Do you mean certified angus beef steaks?” he asked.

The waiter paused as though this was a common occurrence and said, “No sir, this is a new line of beef being offered to only the finest restaurants. It is truly the latest meat product and is supposed to be more nutritious than traditional steaks as it is biologically cultured.”

Fascinated by what he was hearing but not wanting to try a new product on such an important date, both Jeff and Samantha declined the special and ordered a more traditional meat-based cuisine.

“Jeff, didn’t you say you and your family raise cattle?” asked Samantha.

Still dumbfounded Jeff answered, “Yes, we’ve raised cattle for generations. In fact my dad works for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, but he’s never said anything about certified cultured beef. Even more ironic is the fact that I completed my undergraduate degree in animal science and I took a few meat science courses, but I have never heard that meat can be biologically cultured. I wonder what it tastes like.”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine how or why anyone would want to grow meat in a science lab. What is the purpose of growing beef? It can’t be more nutritious than naturally raised beef from cattle, and how can they mass produce meat in a lab? Surely, they can’t produce the quantity of meat that the meat packing companies can,” Samantha mused.

Questions

1. Compare and contrast naturally raised beef and meat grown in a lab based on Samantha’s question “What is the purpose of growing beef?”
2. What are the social, economic, and environmental effects of this type of biotechnology?
3. Is there a possibility that beef could be cultured in a scientific laboratory?
4. What current scientific methods could be used to culture meat?

^*Ph.D. Graduate Student, ^†Independent Educational Consultant, ^‡Associate Professor

Date Posted: 05/18/06 nas

Image Credit: Photograph copyright © Radu Razvan.

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