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Foodies of the long run could also be eating on beefed-up rice.
A brand new lab-grown meat product merges rice grains with cow cells, scientists report February 14 in Matter. The rice acts as a scaffold that helps the expansion of fats or muscle cells. Collectively, the substances type a rice-meat hybrid that steams as much as a pinkish-brown mash.
It tasted scrumptious, “nutty and somewhat candy,” says Sohyeon Park, a chemical engineer at Yonsei College in Seoul, South Korea. Lab-made beefy rice isn’t prepared for the dinner desk but, she says, nevertheless it might sooner or later supply a extra sustainable strategy to eat meat.
Present strategies for producing meat embody farming cattle, which requires huge expanses of pastureland and emits greater than 100 million metric tons of methane into the ambiance every year. Discovering methods to eschew the moo could also be higher for the atmosphere, scientists counsel. Some potential alternate options embody cricket farming and swapping meat for fermented fungal spores (SN: 5/2/19; SN: 5/5/22).
Lab-grown meat is one other strategy to minimize the cow (principally) out of the equation. Within the lab, Park and colleagues coated rice grains with fish gelatin and enzymes after which added cow cells to every grain. The fishy coating helped the cells keep on with and develop contained in the grains. And rice presents a 3-D construction for cells to cling to, like vines climbing a trellis. That construction offers the aesthetic cells a extra meatlike heft, Park says. On their very own, the cells develop in skinny, flat layers.
Nutritionally, the hybrid rice is extra sizzle than steak, with simply 8 % extra protein than standard rice. However Park hopes to spice up that quantity by packing extra cow cells into every grain. Rice wasn’t initially on her radar; however the grains labored surprisingly properly, she says. What’s extra, they’re cheap, nutritious and already in style — a grade-A ingredient.
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