To say Kevin “Kit” Parker is comfortable with animal protein would be understatement. He grew up eating barbecue in the South, taught a barbecue class at Harvard — where he’s a professor of bioengineering and applied physics — and helped launch a meat-smoker startup called Desora.
Recently, in Desora’s Cambridge offices, Parker seasoned a massive piece of beef brisket while expounding on the cut’s signature traits.
“See these nice long fibers of muscle here? And this marbling with fat?” Parker asked. “This brisket has really tough collagen that holds the fibers of the meat together."
“This is the goal for lab-grown meat,” he added.
As the latter comment suggests, Parker is part of a push that could transform our understanding of what meat actually is. Lab-grown meat may sound like something from science fiction — think of the ChickieNobs from Margaret Atwood’s novel "Oryx and Crake" — but at Parker’s Harvard lab, it’s edging closer to reality.
Parker and his colleagues have devised a method for creating lab-grown meat that's straightforward, adaptable and yields something that closely approximates the meat we're used to getting from animals. In so doing, they may have surmounted two of the biggest challenges facing the nascent lab-grown meat industry, which still hasn't brought a product to market: How to create a product that's aesthetically appealing at a price point that's not prohibitively expensive.
This new method, publicly announced in October in a study published in the journal npj Science of Food, utilizes techniques the team previously employed while working in regenerative medicine, which uses cellular building blocks to repair and replaced damaged tissues and organisms.
The process starts with a device resembling a cotton-candy machine, which is filled with gelatin. The gelatin is spun out into an ethanol bath, where it solidifies in the form of long, incredibly thin fibers. (While those fibers don’t look particularly appetizing, they are edible.)
After drying, the fibers are shaped into a structure whose shape and texture resemble an actual cut of meat. The structure functions as a scaffolding, which is then seeded with cells from the animal in question.
At that point, said Luke MacQueen, a Harvard research associate and the study's lead author, the cells proliferate, responding to both the geometry and the chemistry of their new home.
“Collagen is part of the matrix or glue that holds our tissues together, and when you cook it, it becomes gelatin,” he said. “So when we make our fibers out of gelatin, the muscle cells recognize that it’s gelatin. And they really like it, so they stick to it and they grow within it.”
The end result, after roughly a month of cell growth and maturation? Something that isn’t just made of chicken cells, but actually looks and feels like chicken.
With a little refinement, MacQueen said, physical frameworks resembling a number of different cuts of meat could be produced quickly and easily.
While the idea of buying a lab-grown chicken breast may seem radical, the other possibilities this process opens up could be even more transformative. MacQueen notes that the scaffolding could also include plant-based proteins, which would make a hypothetical chicken breast a strange hybrid of animal and plant.
Consider, too, another scenario, which Parker described with enthusiasm.
“Imagine that you make a filet mignon,” he said. “But instead of using beef fat, you build it with fish fat — so you have Omega 3 fatty acids, which have all types of health benefits.”
The obvious question: Would people actually buy this stuff — and eat it?
According to Parker, there's been intense interest from prospective investors since the study was published, which suggests the answer may be yes. And the timing may be right — concern about the traditional meat industry’s environmental impact and the ethics of factory farming could boost consumer interest.
“The only people who complain about lab-grown meat,” Parker said, “are usually folks who’ve never been in a meat-processing plant.”
