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| RABBI MOISHELE PIGSTEIN - CHIEF CHAZER AT THE OU |
Meat Labs Pursue a Once-Impossible Goal: Kosher Bacon
BERKELEY,
Calif. — Rabbi Gavriel Price has thousands of years of Jewish religious
law to draw on when he is on the job, determining whether a new food
item can get a kosher certification from his organization, the Orthodox
Union.
But all the rules about meat
and milk, and the prohibitions on eating pork and sciatic nerves, are of
limited use for Rabbi Price’s latest assignment.
The rabbi is in charge of figuring out how the Orthodox Union,
the largest kosher certifying organization in the world, should deal
with what is known as clean meat — meat that is grown in laboratories
from animal cells. This brings him in touch with a possibility for
Jewish cuisine that had previously seemed impossible: kosher bacon.
Clean
meat is still not available in stores, but start-ups working on it say
it could be by next year. When it is, they want a kosher stamp on their
product, which indicates it adheres to quality and preparation standards
and follows a set of biblical laws. That brought Rabbi Price, a tall,
lanky father of eight, to Berkeley recently, to meet with companies in
the business.
Clean
meat, also known by names like cell-based agriculture, begins with
cells taken from an animal, often stem cells that are primed to grow.
Once these cells are isolated, they are put into a solution that mimics
blood and encourages the cells to replicate.
This process is very new. The first hamburger produced in a lab was served with great fanfare in 2013 and cost $325,000. But the number of companies competing to create the first commercially available product is growing rapidly.
Rabbi
Price’s investigation touches on questions that anyone might have when
confronted with clean meat. What exactly is it? And should we want to
eat it someday?
His
first stop was a lab operated by Mission Barns, a start-up with six
employees and millions of dollars in funding. It is growing duck,
chicken and pig meat in clear flasks, lined up inside
temperature-controlled incubators.
He
looked through a microscope at a dish of long, pointy duck cells and
peppered the scientists with basic questions about where the cells had
come from, and what was in the red liquid that was helping the cells to
replicate and grow.
“I’d like to spend
more time, because I think it’s an important process to understand in a
deep way, and there’s no precedent for it really,” Rabbi Price said
after the tour.
The issue he is
addressing is much more complicated than the kosher designation of
plant-based meat substitutes already available in grocery stores.
Perhaps the best known company of its kind, Impossible Foods, has created a burger
that is made from all-vegetarian ingredients but tastes more like meat
thanks to a chemical process involving yeast and soy. Like most
vegetarian foods, these burgers have received a kosher stamp.
Mission
Barns, the start-up in Berkeley, is focused on creating animal fat,
where much of the distinctive flavor of meat resides. It recently mixed
the fat with other ingredients to create duck sausages that it served to
investors and employees. Creating more structured meat products, like a
duck breast or a steak, is expected to take much longer.
Environmentalists
and animal activists are proponents of the technology because it could
produce the flavor of hamburgers and sausages without the greenhouse
gases and animal suffering of the factory farming system.
“I’m
extremely excited about it,” said Rabbi Menachem Genack, who leads the
kosher certifying division of the Orthodox Union. “The impact for us
will be very profound, in terms of the economics of kosher meat.”
There
are polls that show that many Americans are turned off by the prospect
of lab-grown meat. And the technology has already generated questions
far beyond the Jewish community.
The
United States Cattlemen’s Association requested this year that American
authorities allow the meat label only on products that come from
slaughtered animals. While large meat companies have pushed back against
the cattle ranchers, in part because they are developing their own
clean meat products, it is unclear if regulators will handle lab-grown
meat with the same rules they use for traditional meat.
Jewish authorities have been studying this because several synthetic meat start-ups are based in Israel.
A number of Israeli rabbis told one start-up,
SuperMeat, that previous rulings in religious law might allow clean
meat to be categorized as pareve, a religious label that is applied to
things that are kosher but not derived from animals.
A
pareve label would mean that observant Jews could eat it with dairy
products, like cheese, which cannot be eaten with traditional meat. In
other words, a kosher cheeseburger might be possible.
Rabbi Genack, Rabbi Price’s boss at the Orthodox Union, initially thought
clean meat could be pareve, based on his belief that clean meat was
created from an animal’s genetic code. But because the process involves
an animal cell, replicating itself millions of times, he now believes
the product should be thought of as meat.
When
Rabbi Price visited the Mission Barns labs, he asked questions specific
to kosher certification.
He wanted to be sure, for instance, that the
pork cells growing in one incubator never come into contact with the
duck cells in the incubator next to it, and that the centrifuge where
the meat cells are processed is cleaned thoroughly between processing.
He
also wanted to know if the cells in the flasks changed as they
replicated, to be sure that they do not morph into something that no
longer resembles the original animal cells.
“The
identity of a given cell, and ensuring that its identity is preserved
and verifiable, would be crucial to our being able to certify a
product,” the rabbi said.
The day after his visit to Mission Barns, Rabbi Price attended a conference held by the Good Food Institute, an organization that is encouraging the move away from animal meat.
He
dived into long conversations with people working for the food
start-ups. They discussed topics as diverse as the kosher status of
gelatin, the religious rulings of venerated medieval rabbis and the
ingredients of the solution that encourages lab-grown meat to grow.
“Does
that cell need to consume all kosher ingredients for it to be kosher?”
the rabbi was asked by Aryé Elfenbein, the founder of Wild Type, a start-up in San Francisco that is focused on lab-grown salmon.
The
rabbi explained that just as kosher cows can eat non-kosher insects, he
is working from the assumption that the growth solution will not have
to be certified as kosher as long as it is cleaned from the surface of
the final cells.
Many
of the questions came back to the original cells that go into the
solution. The rabbi said those cells would have to be kosher, from an
animal that was properly slaughtered and not scraped off a live animal.
(There is a Jewish law against eating live animals.)
This
was not well received by some of the clean meat companies, which want
to produce something that does not involve killing any animals.
The
liveliest conversation grew out of research that is looking into
whether clean meat might be derived from cells in animal saliva or hair.
The
rabbi said those substances are not meat, so they might be used to
produce clean meat that would not be categorized as meat by Jewish law.
Eitan
Fischer, the chief executive of Mission Barns, said he was hopeful that
through some creative chemistry, his company could grow pork that would
get a kosher designation.
“If
we can create kosher bacon one day, as weird as that sounds, I think
there is going to be so much excitement around that,” he said.
Rabbi
Price was cautious. In addition to the kosher laws, there are Jewish
rules that warn against doing anything that would make people look as
though they were violating the rules.
The
rabbi added that there are religious texts that discuss the possibility
of kosher pigs, once the Jewish messiah arrives and ushers in an age of
universal peace. But he is skeptical.
“I’m looking around, and I don’t see much evidence we are in messianic times,” he said.