Lab-Grown Meat Developed by IIT Guwahati Researchers, Nutritious and Tasty
There are countless meat lovers all over the world while the vegans scrunch their noses at the mention of it. The meat industry is under constant pressure to fulfill the needs of the consumers, but with the increasing population, the demands aren’t meeting the required supplies. Recently, to reduce this pressure and to explore new aspects of the food industry, researchers at IIT Guwahati, India have developed lab-grown meat, which will be nutritious and will taste the same as raw meat.
Lab-grown meat, Representational image / Image: Twitter
This will open new prospects in food development and eliminate animal slaughter too. In Biomaterial and Tissue Engineering Laboratory, the researchers have grown meat using inexpensive culture media developed and patented by their lab.
According to Biman Mandal, an assistant professor at the institute, there has been no usage of external chemicals like hormones, animal serum, growth factors or antibiotics in the making process of this meat. Thereby, making it safe for any ethical concerns that the users may have.
Talking about the making process, Mandal further says that this meat is produced using muscle progenitor cells isolated from the animals through small biopsies, which are then grown on edible material base patented by the team. Fat cells, cartilage cells or bone cells can be grown in conjunction with the muscle stem cells in different layers and this process is now being developed.
The team of researchers has also explained that lab-grown meat can be customized according to the needs of consumers. As per the users’ demand for lean and fatty meat products or solid dry meat the production method can be manipulated. This process can yield approximately 100 chickens from just one chicken through the bioreactors for large scale production.
According to the details provided by the team, around 4,000 liters of water is required to produce one kg of chicken meat while a double amount of water is used in the production of mutton.
Billions of animals are slaughtered every year to meet the demands of consumers. Moreover, the meat industry contributes to wastewater and greenhouse gas emissions. The lab-grown meat would be helpful in reducing these effects and a much-needed step toward a healthy environment.
The meat grown in the lab will have immense value in the domestic market as well as the international market. Although it would be interesting to see if this laboratory-produced meat will have any side-effects on the consumer or not.
However, with the success of this invention, there won’t be any scarcity for meat in the future, cruelty-free food will be easily available and animal massacre would stop for good.
Via: Live Mint
