To celebrate National Vegetarian Week 2014, The Tofu Diaries has invited fellow bloggers to get involved and share! Today’s guest blog is from Emily, an undergraduate chemistry student in Birmingham, who is putting her scientific prowess to incredible use by researching in-vitro meat and current meat substitutes. Her research is going to be presented at a research conference in Shanghai this summer. I’m very excited to share this post with you on the work being done in this area as well as the ethical and environmental issues surrounding it.Everyone has their own reasons for not eating meat; health, ethics, or even just a dislike of the taste. All valid reasons – after all, it’s your stomach, so you should be able to choose what goes into it. Now more than ever, though, there is a strong environmental argument for vegetarianism.

I understand I’m probably preaching to the converted, so I’ll keep it brief. Livestock farming used 30% of global land. A recent study conducted by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency showed that while vegan protein sources have a carbon footprint of 1 to 2 kg of CO­₂ per kg of product, beef production can have a carbon footprint of up to 129 kg of CO₂ per kg beef. It is worth mentioning at this point that the carbon footprint of meats – beef in particular – varies considerably depending on the production methods used; essentially, it’s a trade-off between animal welfare and environmental concerns. Other meats are not quite as bad as beef, with pork weighing in at up to 11 kg of CO₂ per kg, and poultry at up to 6kg. Although not as significant as beef, this carbon footprint is still three times bigger than that of plant-based alternatives.

Of course, as I’m sure anyone who’s had to answer the question, “but where do you get your protein from?” will know, the world isn’t going to just go vegetarian overnight. It might be expensive, cruel, and bad for your bowel, but at the end of the day people just like beef. New research is looking into ways around this.

You’re probably familiar with most of the meat alternatives on the market. Some are pretty much accepted by meat eaters; I know plenty of people, vegetarian and otherwise, who cook with Quorn, and tofu is served up in plenty of restaurants. Most people, however, are a bit reluctant to have this be the only source of meat in their diet.

For years, scientists have been looking into “lab grown meat” as an alternative to farming. This involves using cells taken by a harmless biopsy from the muscles of a living farm animal to culture stem cells, which can then be used to grow muscle cells, or “myofibres”, in a lab. These cells can be used to produce edible meat products without the need for slaughter.

A burger produced in this way was served up last year in London and was fairly well received. The fat content was much lower than your average piece of meat, as it was made entirely from muscle fibre; this made for a very lean burger, which apparently didn’t do a lot for the flavour. The media focus was mostly on the cost – which was around £200,000 for the burger – however as a proof of concept it was successful. Scientists are now looking into making the process more efficient, and producing a product that more closely mimics the meat people are used to eating.

So, if the process can be scaled up, we now have the technology to produce meat without the need for slaughter. For many vegetarians this could become an ethical grey area – although I for one don’t see a problem with it. What do you think? Would you be up for trying it?

Thanks so much to Emily from Chemily Blogs for this very informative and fascinating article. Be sure to check out & follow her blog for more!