Sustainable Production and Product Provenance Come to the Fore

This week the world’s first cultured meat beef burger was unveiled in London.

The burger, grown from the stem cells of a cow was developed by Prof Mark Post from the University of Maastricht.

The research started off being funded by the Dutch government, but when the funds stopped the work was carried on with the support of private funding.

This week the burger was cooked and sampled by a US food writer Josh Schonwald and a food researcher Hanni Rützler.

The development of the artificial burger is designed to help ease what the research team believes will be a growing and unsustainable demand for meat as the population of the world grows.

They say that the cultured meat means that there is less need for a growing livestock population with all the inherent concerns that farming livestock has on climate change and the carbon footprint of meat production.

While the initial test and development has cost around £250,000, the researchers believe that the culture meat burger could be commercially available in 10 to 20 years’ time.

While the research team from Maastricht University were developing their sustainable cultured meat burger, further concerns over the sustainability of the food supply chain have been raised in a report from the Sustainable Consumption Project.

The major fears are that in allowing market forces to form a sustainable food production and consumption policy, commercial tensions will take over and the battle for product prominence will overshadow the need for sustainable production.

The authors of the report say that governments will have to step in to direct sustainable production and consumption and they call for a broader economic thinking on producing a healthy diet sustainably and cutting waste.

Some of the tensions referred to in the report from the Sustainable Consumption Project, emerged in a dispute between the British supermarket giants Tesco and Sainsbury.

Tesco had been taken to the Advertising Standards Authority over a price match campaign, with Sainsbury arguing that Tesco was not comparing like-for-like products because it did not take into account all the production methods and the provenance of the products – such as Fairtrade and good welfare standards for meat production.

The ASA ruled in favour of Tesco, believing that if a product had a certain classification or certification such as Fairtrade, it was not always a determining factor in the consumer’s decision making process, bringing into question the validity of any certification process.