It doesn’t come as a surprise that there has been a significant rise in people adapting to more vegetarian and vegan-type meals. Of the 26% of greenhouse gases (GHG) emitted by the food industry, livestock and fisheries are responsible for 31% and land use for 24%. Besides from the fact that this takes a toll on the environment, many people have shifted to vegetarianism and veganism due to ethical concerns, and many companies have started looking for delicious alternatives, like lab-grown meat.
Enter Aleph Farms: an Israeli startup named that has successfully created the world’s first 3D bioprinted meat steak. Along with the Israel Institute of Technology’s Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion, they have created a slaughter-free ribeye steak. This comes as great news for many niches of the world: animal rights advocates, gastronomy experts, environmental rights activists and most importantly, consumers worldwide who have just started to receive a more diverse offer of vegan meats.
In an interview with Sustainable Brands, Aleph Farms CEO Didier Toubia gave a more detailed explanation for how the innovative steak was created: “We assemble a whole, muscle-cut steak from the bottom up. It is assembled outside of the animal, replicating its natural building blocks using different types of living animal cells. We use non-GMO and non-immortalized cells. The 3D-bioprinted tissue is then incubated, where the cells develop and interact in a similar manner as in nature — granting the tissue the texture and qualities of a ‘real’ steak. We have been successful in forming a structure which functions like the vascular system occurring naturally in tissues to enable the perfusion of nutrients across the thicker tissue, granting the steak the similar shape and structure of its native form as found in livestock.”
