Ethical vegans can look forward to a future of burgers, bacon and biltong

The concept of eating meat grown in a lab might be hard to swallow but it could become a reality for SA in less than a decade.

Tucked away in a lab at the Nuclear Energy Corp in Pelindaba, Hartbeespoort, Paul Bartels and his team at the nonprofit Mogale Meat Co are researching, innovating and growing cultivated meat products in bioreactors.

“We made our first chicken breast and I got to take the first bite,” said Bartels, who  took the Sunday Times team on a tour of the facility.

In November, the company's subsidiary MeatOurFuture will compete in the semifinals of the $15m (R270m) Xprize Feed the Next Billion competition in Abu Dhabi.

Xprize is a global nonprofit organisation that hosts public competitions to encourage technological development to benefit humanity. Trustees include filmmaker James Cameron, Google co-founder Larry Page, HuffPost co-founder Arianna Huffington and Indian industrialist and Tata Group chair Ratan Tata.

The only semi-finalist from Africa, MeatOurFuture will compete with 26 other companies for one of the top 10 spots in the finals, where the best will be identified for commercial production.

Bartels is realistic about MeatOurFuture’s chances as it is up against world-class cultivated meat companies. These include Israeli cell-based meat producer Aleph Farms, which cultivated a rib-eye steak last year using 3D bioprinting, and US-based Eat Just, which  received regulatory approval in Singapore to sell its cell-based chicken nuggets there. 

The global race is on for countries to develop food laws that are in line with technology,  health and safety. The US leads in production and Singapore with food legislation.

However, South African food experts say affordability, legislation, corporate monopolies and the threat to farming communities could be drawbacks to the fledgling industry.

In SA, Bartels and his team are also working on growing venison  products in their laboratory, and they're collaborating with a food law expert to draft legislation that can be presented to the government once the technology is ready.

If the company is successful, in a few years, consumers  will be able to eat meat knowing that no factory farming was involved and no animals were harmed in its production. 

“If developments progress well, enough engineers are trained, bioreactors secured, and the legislation is processed quickly, cellular agriculture could go commercial within six-eight years,” Bartels said.

He founded Mogale Meat Co in 2020 as a conservation organisation. This led to the creation of MeatOurFuture — a subsidiary to promote the cultivated meat industry and skills development in SA.

Bartels is also the founder of the first Wildlife Biological Resource Centre — a biobank of wildlife biomaterial and resources for conservation — which later became the Wildlife Biobank of the South African National Biodiversity Institute. It contains more than 75,000 samples of sperm, eggs, feathers and blood from SA wildlife.

Bartels lectures in wildlife diseases and game management, but his passion is the realisation of a dream in which a “pinky size” biopsy from a healthy animal can be placed in a bioreactor and grown into  tonnes of healthy, real meat product within a few months. The process, he says, is limited only by the size of the bioreactor.

His initial plan is to have small bioreactors set up in mobile labs in rural areas or where the need for meat is greatest.

“But it could also be grown in huge bioreactors like the ones you see at the breweries, where you could grow tonnes and tonnes of meat. We have the science, so technically there is no limit on how much meat can be grown from a biopsy of stem cells.”

Bartels believes the technology will  disrupt the meat industry, potentially end hunger and see the start of an entirely new way of eating.  The traditional chicken, beef, pork, mutton or fish options could be expanded to include game, caviar — “basically anything you can think of”.

For now, cultivated meat is an expensive option that will only become viable once the cost moves closer to that of  the natural version.

Bartels said Mogale Meat has been funded by venture capitalists — two from the US and one from Canada, and his own bootstrapping of an additional R2.5m.

Growing cultured meat involves harvesting stem cells — present in muscle tissue — from an animal. These cells can be encouraged to grow into any part of the animal  from sperm and egg cells to bones and horns.

The cells are put into a bioreactor in a solution that contains concentrated growth factors,  supplemented by animal-free factors developed from yeast. The cells then attach to an edible microcarrier — a  material to give structure — where they multiply and grow.

Bartels says that while a cow takes about 18 months to develop from a foetus into a full-grown animal and yield about 250kg of meat, the equivalent can theoretically be grown in a lab in two to three months, with no waste in the form of hooves, horns, eyes, bones or other unwanted parts.

The six-member Mogale Meat team will, in about a month, receive their first container miniplant facility in which they will fit bioreactors and the equipment they need to cultivate meat.

They are training staff, partnering with universities and calling for more investors.

“The idea is to have a set-up that can be picked up, placed wherever there’s a great need for food, and they can start cultivating meat on demand,” Bartels said.

Professor Arno Hugo of the Free State University's animal science faculty said the first cultured beef burger had cost about R5m but today the price would be closer to  about R200.

He said there were two main hurdles to widespread adoption of cultivated meat in SA.

“The one is upscaling to industrial volumes at an affordable price.  The other is regulatory approval. In South Africa, meat is still considered as a carcass or part of a carcass and not grown in a lab or bioreactor,” he said.

Mervyn Abrahams, programme co-ordinator of the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice & Dignity Group, said he had misgivings about “greedy corporates” getting involved. 

“We saw this years ago with seed manipulation. It’s dangerous territory. Our food system is already captured, and so my worry is it will be another thing that ends up on the plates of the wealthy while the poor continue to starve.”

Corine Steyn, liaison manager of the Red Meat Producers Organisation, said the group regarded  cultivated meat as being in “direct opposition to the primary producer”.

Marina Fourie, project manager at Lamb and Mutton SA, said it was unlikely that lamb grown in a test tube would taste anything like a chop from a free-range animal that had spent its life grazing aromatic herbs and other wild plants. 

“I highly doubt this can be replicated in a lab. Furthermore there are parts of the Northern Cape where producers can only farm with sheep,” she said. “Sheep meat production plays a major role in biodiversity, the welfare of the surrounding communities and overall sustainability of these areas.”

All this could be at risk if cultivated meat products made inroads in the market.  Wool from real sheep was another valuable export product and contributor to the economy, Fourie said.

But clinical dietitian Tabitha Hume said she would rate cultivated meat “10 out of 10” from an ethical and environmental view.

“I am an ethical vegan and refuse to eat meat, but I miss it and  like the taste. So I am all for it,” she said. But added: “Like wine, I wouldn’t recommend it as a big part of a healthy diet.”