《食品工业科技》F5000论文展播：传统肉类替代品——人造肉的研究进展

Objective:  Artificial meat is a new concept proposed by scientists for future global sustainable meat consumption, mainly for replacing traditional meat consumption to achieve energy saving, environmental protection and animal welfare purposes.Although the concept of artificial meat has long been proposed abroad, the research on artificial meat in China is at a preliminary stage, and the perception of consumers about artificial meat is still relatively vague.Therefore, this paper provided a review of the production technology of artificial meat and the current understanding and attitude of people towards artificial meat, to provide a reference for the development of the artificial meat industry.

Methods:  Based on literature analyzing, summarization and reorganization, a review of the concept and production technology of artificial meat was conducted in the form of comparative analysis and example analysis.Suggestions for future development are also provided.

Results: Artificial meat is mainly divided into cell culture meat and plant-based meat, where culture meat refers to artificial animal meat made by extracting animal stem cells and expanded; while plant-based meat usually refers to application of plant protein and other plant-based ingredients through some techniques to prepare plant-based food with meat-like taste and flavor. Culture meat was first introduced in 2012 by Dutch scientist Mark Post, and the main productionsteps are as follows: (i) collect animal muscle samples and isolate the stem cells; (ii) then induce the cells (myogenic cells) to grow and proliferate by giving suitable nutrients and growth factorsin a suitable culture environment; (iii) further induce the cells to form multinucleated myotubes and provide scaffolds to promote muscle fiber formation; (iv) finally producethe final cultured meat by catalyzing protein cross-linking. Although cultured meat can be obtained through a range of biotechnological techniques, there are still some gaps compared to conventional meat, such as the absence of some nerve, blood and fat cells, resulting in differences in taste and flavor.On the other hand, cancer cells caused by genetic instability during the cell culture process and the use of serum with unclear composition pose a great challenge to consumer acceptability. The current survey reports that most consumers cannot accept cultured meat now, but there are some consumers who believe that science and technology can make cultured meat healthy and environmental friendly.Plant-based meat have a long history, but traditional plant-based substitutes are lack full taste, texture and flavor of meat, and thusscientists areworking to develop a novel plant-based meat with meat characteristics usingtextural plant proteins.Generally, the raw material of plant-based meat contains water (50% ~ 80%), textured plantprotein (10% ~ 25%), untextured plant protein (4% ~ 20%), fat (0% ~ 15%), flavoring agents (3% ~ 10%), binding agents (1% ~ 5%) and coloring agents (0% ~ 0.5%).Among them, plant protein is the main part of plant-based meat, providing certain structural characteristics, generally based on soy protein; fat is to give plant-based meat juicy, soft and concentrated flavor, and mainly includescoconut oil, sunflower oil, corn oil and palm oil, etc.; flavoring agents are essential in giving meat-like flavor, mainly containing some reducing sugars, flavoring amino acids and nucleotides, etc.; binding agents are mainly used for water or fat and protein bonding, usually composed of soybean isolate protein, wheat gluten and some polysaccharide gum; coloring agents are to color the product, in order to make people stimulate appetite.Plant-based meat is mainly produced by extrusion, shearing and spinning technologies. Some companies have successfully developed and produced plant-based meat products, such as plant-based burgers, plant-based meat patties, plant-based lunch meat and plant-based meat mooncakes. Owing to the consumption of traditional vegetarian products, domestic consumers are more receptive to plant-based meat than foreign consumers, but it is still difficult to influence the market of traditional vegetarian products.

Conclusion: Artificial meat is a new sustainable protein supply solution that has been proposed in recent years, mainly in the form of cell-cultured meat and plant-based meat. Although both cultured meat and plant-based meat have been produced, there are still challenges in the future production and consumption habit. For cultured meat, mass production and low-cost commercialization arethe biggest challenges; researching safe and harmless cultured meat and improving consumer acceptability through publicity is also a challenge.While for plant-based meat, perfecting the taste and texture and improving the similarity between the product and traditional meat are thepriority targets, and safety is also an important consideration.