![]() ![]() “Throughout history, the only way to eat meat has been to take the life of an animal,” says Eitan Fischer, the CEO of Mission Barns, which is cultivating pork fat to flavor and enrich plant-based meatballs, sausages, and more. People who like meat but don’t support the meat industry can also eat the foods they love without compromising their morals. “But experts who know better than me tell me that that’s not even possible.” With cultivated meat, that one initial biopsy could, in theory, feed millions of people. “One way of doing that would be to expand conventional animal agriculture,” says Block. By 2050, when the global population is assumed to reach 10 billion (up from almost 8 billion now), meat consumption is expected to grow by another 73%. The commercial argument for companies going head-to-head with conventional agriculture is simple: “The demand for meat is growing tremendously,” says Block, but our natural resources are finite. What are the pros and cons of lab-grown meat? Fetal bovine serum, which Block says is made from slaughtering pregnant cows, is also used to store the harvested cells of any animal-though every company I spoke to is working on engineering an alternative solution. The initial biopsy necessary to harvest cells won’t harm a larger animal, but could kill a small creature, such as a shrimp. ![]() That means that cultivated meat does require some animal involvement. One is animal tissue and the other is plant matter masquerading as animal tissue. Plant-based burgers, nuggets, and sausages sold by companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are made with a variety of vegan ingredients and formulated to mimic meat. It is beef grown from cow cells and pork grown from pig cells. On a cellular level, lab-grown meat is meat. How is lab-grown meat different from the plant-based stuff? “It’s happening right now in the biopharmaceutical industry, where they’re growing cells mostly to make monoclonal antibodies,” such as those used to treat some COVID-19 patients. “It shows, ultimately, that this industry is one step closer to commercialization,” says Amy Chen, the COO of Upside Foods.īut this isn’t new: We’ve been able to grow tissue from cells for decades, says David Block, a chemical engineer working on cultivated meat at UC Davis. But the move was a major milestone for the entire sector, which has been steadily growing for almost a decade. The company still needs US Department of Agriculture (USDA) approval before it can sell its cultivated meat domestically. The San Francisco start-up takes muscle, fat, and tissue cells from fertilized chicken eggs and grows them into a product that is biologically indistinguishable from the flesh of a slaughtered bird. In mid-November last year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent Upside Foods a “no questions” letter, which means it views the company’s products as safe to eat. That might sound like the narrative arc of your stoner cousin’s self-published sci-fi novel. Only, instead of killing billions of animals each year, it’s grown in a sterile lab from a few cells. Whatever you want to call it, it’s real meat. ![]() Cultured meat, lab-grown meat, cultivated meat. ![]()
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