Material Perspective on the Structural Design of Artificial Meat

Abstract

products are receiving increasing attention in the market and academia, but many challenges are still being tackled. [3a,5] Among them, the poor texture resemblance is a major limitation to the development of artificial meat. The existing plant-based meat alternatives products usually develop a mushy texture during chewing due to the lack of structure that animal meat holds. [4] Thus, many studies focus on controlling structures breakdown of the non-meat proteins when chewing. Furthermore, it is generally believed that muscle fibers consisting of bundles of thin filaments give meat products their characteristic texture. [4,6] The available production techniques and strategies for converting non-animal proteins into meat-like fibers have been extensively discussed by Goot and Xiong. [3a,6] However, the skeletal muscle comprises both muscle fibers and surrounding intramuscular connective tissues (Figure 1), which indicates that simply creating a fibrous structure is not enough to mimic animal meat. [7] The connective tissues, an extracellular matrix consisting mainly of collagen, form a thin sheet around the muscle fibers and hold them in hierarchical bundles within the muscles. [8] Anatomically, individual muscle is usually attached to the skeleton or bone by the epimysium that is the outermost layer of connective tissue. Within this connective tissue sheath, a group of muscle fiber bundles is surrounded by the perimysium. Each muscle fiber is consisted of myofibrils and is separated by the endomysium, which is directly attached to the muscle cell membrane. The epimysium, perimysium, and endomysium are hierarchically arranged in complex network architecture and support the morphology of muscles and their locomotion. [9] Also, the contraction and disaggregation of collagenous networks are responsible for the meat texture during meat processing. [7] Thus, defects in the texture of artificial meat may be ascribed to the lack of integrated skeletal muscle structures containing the connective tissue and fibers, resulting in an insufficient supporting capacity. Moreover, the integrated skeletal muscle structures significantly affect the meat quality, including sensory experience and nutritional benefits. [10] It is essential to manufacture artificial meat with desired structures to improve supporting capacity, especially for whole-muscle artificial meat products.Previous researches in materials science have already reported that porous or network structures like the architectural skeleton, tissue engineering scaffold, or metal-organic Artificial meat is a promising solution to the negative impacts of meat consumption on natural resources, public health, and animal welfare. Inspired by the use of framework, scaffold, and skeleton in material science, the concept of supporting structures is introduced into the artificial meat to complement the existing theory of structural design. The available structures in artificial meat are evaluated in prefabrication and post-build strategies to illustrate the relationship between...

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