State of the art, update and gaps of knowledge about "cultured meat"

This talk has been prepared in collaboration with Marie-Pierre Ellies-Oury and Dr Sghaier Chriki.

The major challenges facing our evolving agri-food system nowadays are to provide enough food to the growing human population while protecting the planet, farm animals and consumer health. To meet these challenges, more and more FoodTech companies are proposing a disruptive technique based on laboratory food production: muscle cell culture to produce “meat”.
However, “cultured meat” is the subject of various controversies, including three major ones.
The first one concerns the ethical aspects not only about the potential to improve animal welfare, but also regarding the ethical values of our society with questions about food artificialisation, in a context where the demand for naturalness is high.
The second controversy concerns the environmental, health and nutritional aspects, i.e. the properties of "cultured meat" with an associated question: is it really meat?
The third controversy concerns its economic model, and above all how to produce it on a large scale? and at which cost? with which quality?
These three controversies interact with each other around technical, political, legal and societal issues. They concern the different visions of the World that citizens and stakeholders may have, including the total abolition of livestock farming for ideological reasons, or simply the reduction of intensive livestock farming, which is strongly criticised. Being in competition with other sustainable solutions for the future (reduction of food waste and loses, new habits of food consumption, development of agro-ecology, etc.) or simply with other meat substitutes (proteins from algae, plants, mycoproteins, insects), the future of "cultured meat" is questioned.