I have been hearing for years about how insects and lab grown meat could reduce food emissions. What is holding it back?
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Lab-grown meat has several challenges. It’s essentially just muscle cells, the actual meat. But meat gains its flavour from the animal’s fat and the animal’s fat gets its flavour from the animal’s diet.
That makes lab-grown meat flavourless and grey. This is also why most lab-grown meat products are minced meat, so manufacturers can add flavour and fat afterwards.
Essentially it means that lab-grown meat at the moment is mostly an expensive experiment and novelty. If you’re going to turn it into minced meat, hamburger, meatballs etc. you haven’t really achieved much yet.
Insects have scaling and adoption challenges. People still have an aversion to eating insects even though farmed insects are usually intended to be turned into insect flour. A powder that is used much like any grain flour in processed products.
That aversion means there are no ready-made markets or production lines for insect-based foods. There are no large multinationals buying up the supply of insect flour. There are no food brands producing processed foods that need insect flour.
And the other side of the supply chain looks much the same. There is no supplier of food wastage that is exactly right for feeding insect farms. No specialised equipment. Few people working in that industry.
Insect based protein probably has a future but it’s just very much in its infancy right now.
And there’s plenty of competition. Lab meat would be great if you could produce a tasty steak but right now it can’t. And if it’s just producing minced meat, then there’s plenty of plant-based competition that’s a lot cheaper to produce.
And then there’s the competition like mould, algae, seaweed etc. based proteins that might be a lot easier to scale up. Quorn produces mould based protein meat replacements and they’ve been around for 37 years now. It’s not going to fool anyone into thinking it’s meat but it’s tasty, protein-rich and functional.
Right now humanity loves meat. That’s why most protein replacements try to resemble meat so much that people will be willing to make the switch. But once you let go of the notion that protein-rich food has to resemble meat, meat replacements are pretty inefficient, expensive and over-engineered just for putting protein in your diet.
Almost all of the solutions for problems relating to climate catastrophe run into the same thing. Culture is a huge part of the problem and the solution. Humans *need* protein. We don’t need meat. Our desire for meat is cultural. Getting rid of our desire for meat is a more effective solution than finding ways to artificially make meat. But cultural change can be as difficult if not more difficult than technical innovation.
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