Researchers have developed a new form of meat. It would have a taste and a texture close to the classic meat. 

Canadian, researchers, create, new, form, of, meat

 

Will this meat be on your plate soon? Researchers at McMaster University in Canada have developed a new form of cultured meat that promises to be similar in taste and texture to traditional meat. The fake meat was developed by stacking thin sheets of muscle and fat cells in the lab. The technique used by researchers Ravi Selvaganapathy and Alireza Shahin-Shamsabadi, both of the university's School of Biomedical Engineering, is directly adapted from a method used to grow tissue for human transplants.

Tailor-made meat

The different layers can be stacked into a solid piece of any thickness and adjusted to reproduce the fat content and marbling of any other piece of meat. An important difference compared to other artificial meats already imagined. "We create slices of meat. Consumers will be able to buy meat with the fat percentage of their choice - just like they do with milk," the scientists say.

As they describe in the journal Cells Tissues Organs, the researchers made and cooked a meat sample they created from rabbit cells. "It looked and tasted like meat," says Ravi Selvaganapathy. There's no reason to think that the same technology wouldn't work for growing beef, pork or chicken, and the model would lend itself well to large-scale production, the researcher points out.

Limiting waste

At the root of this discovery, the researchers were moved by the current crisis in meat supply. As global demand continues to grow, current meat consumption is straining the earth's resources and generating disturbing levels of greenhouse gases. "Currently, meat production is not sustainable. There must be another way to create meat," notes Ravi Selvaganapathy. Producing sustainable meat without raising and killing animals would be much more sustainable, more hygienic and there would be much less waste, the researchers point out.

Compared to other forms of meat already grown in laboratories, the two Canadian researchers believe that theirs has the best potential to create products that consumers will adopt in their daily lives and enjoy. A project that is far from being only in the minds of scientists. Indeed, to make this idea a reality, they have formed a start-up company to begin commercializing this new technology in the near future.