Nutrition-related diseases, food-borne illnesses, resource use, pollution and use of farm animals are serious consequences associated with conventional meat production systems and consumers have expressed growing concerns over them. Biofabrication, production of complex living and non-living biological products, is a potential solution to reduce these ill effects of current meat production systems. The industrial potential of biofabrication technology is far beyond the traditional medically oriented tissue engineering and organ printing and, in the long term, biofabrication can contribute to the development of novel biotechnologies that can dramatically transform traditional animal-based agriculture by inventing animal-free food, leather and fur products. This paper reviews the possibility of producing in vitro meat using tissue-engineering techniques that may offer health and environmental advantages by reducing environmental pollution and land use associated with current meat production systems. Besides significantly reducing the animal suffering, it will also ensure sustainable production of designer, chemically safe and disease free meat, as the conditions in an in vitro meat production system are controlled and manipulatable. The techniques required to produce in vitro meat are not beyond imagination. The basic methodology of an in vitro meat production system (IMPS) involves culturing muscle tissue in a liquid medium on a large scale. However, the production of highly-structured, unprocessed meat faces considerably greater technical challenges and a great deal of research is still needed to establish a sustainable in vitro meat culturing system on an industrial scale. In the long term, tissue-engineered meat is the inescapable future of humanity. In the short term, however, the extremely high prohibitive cost of the biofabrication of tissue-engineered meat is the main potential obstacle, although large-scale production and market penetration are usually associated with a dramatic price reduction.
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