Annotated Summary

Stephen, N., Di Silvio, L., & Dunsford, I. (2018, August). Bringing cultured meat to market: Technical, socio-political, and regulatory challenges in cellular agriculture. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6078906/#bib59

This article has aimed to review the technical, potential benefits and social challenges of cultured meat. As explained from the article, cultured meat is at its early stage of development which tissue cells taken from living animals are engineered in an effort to produce alternative protein source for food consumption.  

The technical challenges of producing cultured meat is a tedious process where these extracted animal cells can only be grown in its habitat environment, which laboratory have to replicate or stimulate the “in-vivo environment”.

The article also further illustrated on the benefits of cultured meat, as it could potentially reduce carbon footprint and land consumption that are associated with conventional livestock production. In addition, the article also mentioned that cultured meat are possibly less prone to biological risk and disease through standardised as its versatility to tailor production through cellular engineering that generally improves nutrition, health and wellbeing.

The author also mentioned that the main social challenges related to cultured meat have always been ethics and consumer acceptance. A diversity of public opinions was collated in United States and nearly two thirds of respondents said they would try cultured meat and only one third would eat it regularly (Wilks & Phillips, 2017). As evident from the article, a Dutch study also suggested that more participants are willingly to support cultured meat when they are properly introduced.

This article is insightful where it provides an overview essence of cultured meat. That being said, Singapore is currently experiencing land scarcity and heavy food imports, where food sustainability is often overlooked. Thus, our research team (FoodTech) are determined to introduce cultured meat to the population of students in Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) and advocate the acceptance of future food.