Faking it: meat substitutes take centre stage

In 2008, the animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) announced a $1 million prize for the first team to develop and market in vitro meat. They kept their money. The faux meat had to be tasty and appealing to consumers. Alas, one thing seems clear, and that is lab engineered meat has a long way to go before it gets the right "mouth feel" in terms of taste and texture needed to remotely pass itself off as the real thing. What has emerged from the lab "kitchen" so far is sadly a pile of mushy muscle mass.

Venerated Canadian science fiction author Margaret Atwood summed up the lab meat problem succinctly: "Their problem is the texture. It's sort of mush. So they're trying to figure out a way to exercise it."

Back in 2009, Wired Magazine reasoned that the name chosen for the new fake meat product will determine its destiny. So, what is the roll call? From my research, I have seen the following suggestions touted - Lab Meat, VatBeef, In-Vitro Meat, faux meat, fake meat, mock meat,synthetic or test-tube meat, bioprinted meat, 3D print meat, and tissue engineered meat. Perhaps science fiction writers have better ideas. William Gibson gave us shmeat (from 'Neuromancer'), and then there are Margaret Atwood's Secret Burgers from 'The Year of the Flood' (with ingredients we can only assume are similar to those in the 1973 science fiction film Soylent Green).

And figuring out how to present a marketable and palatable version of lab grown meat is just what is happening. Mark Post, Chair of Physiology at Maastricht University, is involved in pioneering research growing bovine stem cells in a vat. This "lab meat" or "VatBeef" could be the answer to protein loving vegans' prayers; save the planet from environmental destruction caused by cattle production; or be a dreadful "Frankenmeat" - depending on your point of view.

Four years ago, Post described the lab grown meat attempts as being "rather like wasted muscle mass" (The Telegraph, 29 Nov 2009). We hope it has improved with age.

In the US, researchers are working on an even more bizarre version of fake meat: print on demand meat using 3-D printer technology. University of Missouri bioengineering Professor Gabor Forgacs touted the concept at the October 2011 TEDMED conference in San Diego with his company Modern Meadow. Modern Meadow is starting out with manufacturing "photocopied leather" before moving to thin slithers of faux meat. You will never look at a photocopier the same way again.

Lab grown leather and lab-gown meat is nothing new in the art world. Bio-artist Oron Catts, who pushes the new frontiers of body art using wet biology, produced "victimless leather" as part of the Tissue Culture & Art Project which used conceptual art projects to explore cultural ideas around scientific knowledge. Catts successfully grew small amounts of cultured meat using muscle cells in 2001. Apparently the results were so repellent (though safe to eat) that diners at the art event spat it out. Catts described his tissue engineering research at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) themed NONHUMAN 26^th Annual Meeting in the US in September 2012.

Catts (who is currently the Director of SymbioticA,the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts within the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at The University of Western Australia) is a Visiting Professor of Design Interaction at the Royal College of Arts, London, and a Visiting Professor at Aalto University's Future Art Base, Helsinki. He wrote a thesis in the mid 1990s looking at the possibility of growing living surfaces over inanimate objects. His work NoArk 11 appeared in the 2009 RMIT Gallery exhibition entitled Super Human.

At an ArtMeatFlesh event hosted by Catts in the Netherlands in 2012, Zack Denfeld from the Centre for Genomic Gastronomy was teamed with Masstricht University's Mark Post to create a menu which would certainly get Margaret Atwood's creative juices flowing. The menu featured Fetal Bovine Serum & Beetroot Salad and Failed Food Utopia Amuse Bouche (with mealworms). If nothing else, the project forced participants to think about the non-human animals they are eating and ponder the ethical implications of what they are putting in their mouths. I am not sure, however, that Failed Food Utopia (FFU) is a good name for Lab Meat marketing campaign.