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When I had just graduated college, a classmate of mine went to work for a startup making fake meat. At the time I thought it was kind of silly the way he would talk about trying to get beet juice into the fake meat so it would “bleed” just like a real hamburger. It sort of seemed like he had joined a cult–to be fair, that’s the vibe most Silicon Valley startups give off. Now, eight years later, I buy the Impossible Burgers with the beet juice “blood” at the grocery store, and get Beyond Meat meatballs at my local vegetarian restaurant. The joke was on me, I’ve joined the cult, too. I’m not vegetarian, but I do try to limit my meat consumption, especially beef and pork. Having the “meat substitute” hamburgers on hand helps me do that. But it looks like if you want to eat real meat without an animal dying, that’s now possible for the first time, because the FDA has just approved “lab grown” chicken meat. It’s still made from animal cells, but animals are not slaughtered in production.
Lab grown meat could save land and water as well as animals: For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer “lab-grown” meat to the nation’s restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves.
The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn’t come from slaughtered animals — what’s now being referred to as “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates.
The move launches a new era of meat production aimed at eliminating harm to animals and drastically reducing the environmental impacts of grazing, growing feed for animals and animal waste.
“Instead of all of that land and all of that water that’s used to feed all of these animals that are slaughtered, we can do it in a different way,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and chief executive of Eat Just, which operates Good Meat.
How they make it is wild: Cultivated meat is grown in steel tanks, using cells that come from a living animal, a fertilized egg or a special bank of stored cells. In Upside’s case, it comes out in large sheets that are then formed into shapes like chicken cutlets and sausages. Good Meat, which already sells cultivated meat in Singapore, the first country to allow it, turns masses of chicken cells into cutlets, nuggets, shredded meat and satays.
But don’t look for this novel meat in U.S. grocery stores anytime soon. Cultivated chicken is much more expensive than meat from whole, farmed birds and cannot yet be produced on the scale of traditional meat, said Ricardo San Martin, director of the Alt:Meat Lab at University of California Berkeley.
[From Yahoo]
A couple of years ago I read a super well-researched longform article about the race between Upside and Good Meat to create lab-grown chicken. I tried to find it again, but I couldn’t. In that article, they pointed out how expensive lab grown chicken is. It was something eye-watering like sixty dollars a pound. Who knows what it is now with inflation. So I don’t think this development will meaningfully change anything until it can be produced at scale, like they’ve done with ground beef substitutes. And those are still pretty expensive. The Good Meat website is very slick and they have Jose Andres the celebrity chef as a brand ambassador. He’s going to start using this stuff at one of his restaurants in Washington DC. As an aside, it’s of course great that there’s less land and water use to make the cultured meat, but I see right through the branding here. The “cultured” cells have to be “fed” or grown in some way. They’re not just multiplying by themselves. It’s probably taking an extraordinary amount of energy, and other things I don’t know about, to make this cultured meat. Somewhere in the back of my brain I think at least one of these companies also had funding from a sketchy source, but because I cannot find that article I don’t want to cast aspersions.
Would you eat cultured meat? To be honest, the idea of raw chicken coming out of vats in sheets just feels gross. It’s less gross than a slaughterhouse, yes. But still gross. (I am a hypocrite, I eat chicken, I do not have the moral high ground here at all.) Given how quickly I adapted to the fake meat hamburgers, who knows how I’ll feel about it in a few years. I think I’d rather make a vegetarian version of something–like eggplant parmesan, or “chicken salad” with chickpeas–instead of using cultured meat.
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