Annotated Summary

Mancini, M. C., & Antonioli, F. (2018, December 28). Exploring consumers’ attitude towards cultured meat in Italy. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0309174018309343.

The article mainly focuses on consumers’ attitudes about cultured meat in Italy. 525 Italian consumers responded to a survey that revealed more than half of the respondents stating they are willing to try cultured meat. Cultured meat, as explained in the article, “is produced from animal cells taken from a living animal and then grown in a laboratory environment, stimulated and nourished with a nutrient serum”. Highly educated respondents, which are either current or graduate university students, expressed a significantly higher appreciation of intrinsic and extrinsic attributes of cultured meat compared to less educated participants. 

The article also highlighted the benefits of cultured meat as well. Cultured meat can lessen the concerns of meat consumers associated with industrial livestock operations and address global hunger issues. With the estimated increasing demand for meat in the coming future, the lab-grown meat could overcome the limits of conventional meat production. It is noted that from that survey, respondents familiar with the term, cultured meat beforehand tend to have a positive attitude towards it. This is important for Team FoodTech’s research as the team hopes to introduce cultured meat to university students.

The article provides useful information for our research project on introducing cultured meat to the student population in Singapore Institute of Technology as we can have the benefits of cultured meat to be displayed to the students to encourage the consumption of the future food, and now know that university students will most likely try it. In a country like Singapore which rely heavily on food imports, the city-state population should already have been introduced to cultured meat and producing them as a food alternative in case of emergencies like war or trade market imbalances.