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Today, farms around the world produce chickens for sale by raising fast-growing breeds of chickens in batches of tens of thousands, packed in warehouses that are a public health hazard, a fire hazard, a danger to worker safety and a danger to the well – being from the chickens themselves.
What if we could grow meat instead? without The chickens?
Researchers around the world have been chasing that dream for years, of “lab-grown” or “cultured” meat. Today, laboratory-grown meat took a step closer to reality when the Singapore Food Agency approved the sale of bioreactor-grown chicken meat, becoming the first agency in the world to issue such approval. Its approval means that the chicken bites of the American company Eat Just will be available to consumers in Singapore. (There are a few other places in the world where you can try lab-grown meat, like an experimental restaurant in Israel.)
It’s a huge step forward for a technology that can bring desperately needed change to the way the world eats.
Lab-Grown Meat Explained
Laboratory-raised chicken is intended to be physically identical to chicken from slaughtered animals. It is made from genuine chicken cells, but is grown on a cell growth scaffold in a factory rather than grown in a live animal. (This approach differs from plant-based meats like Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat, which use plant proteins to create meat-tasting products; plant-based meat often tastes very similar to the meat products it replaces, but It is not identical at the cellular level.)
The same approach can be used for beef, pork, and other animal products, but for various reasons, chickens are the most attractive place to start. First, chickens make up the majority of animals raised and slaughtered for their meat in the U.S., and they’re raised in particularly dire conditions, making them a good first target in the effort to alienate Americans. of factory farm food. Second, the biggest challenge for lab-grown meat so far has been getting the meat structure correct: Lab-grown products don’t yet have the texture of tissue produced within an animal. That would make a lab-grown steak disappointing, but it’s a minor limitation for many chicken products.
To grow a lab grown product, chicken cells are taken from a real live chicken. The process does not involve killing the animals, so producers hope they can gain acceptance from vegetarians and vegans, although the target market for lab-grown meat products is primarily meat eaters, not vegetarians. These chicken cells are then immersed in a liquid solution known as “growth medium” that stimulates the cells to multiply. Today, a serum from cow fetuses is used as the growth medium, but the manufacturers of the product say they hope to switch to a plant-based one. Inside the bioreactor, the cells grow to produce chicken meat, without the chicken.
“A new space race for the future of food is underway,” Good Food Institute executive director Bruce Friedrich said in a statement when Singapore announced its approval of Eat Just’s chicken.. “Cultured meat will mark a huge step forward in our efforts to create a food supply that is safe, secure and sustainable, and Singapore is leading the way in this transition.”
Deadlines for Lab-Grown Meat
Bringing lab-grown meat to consumers would be a great advantage for the climate and the animals. Proponents believe it could be the most feasible way to end industrial agriculture and make our food production system sustainable. But there are still substantial barriers to widespread access to lab-grown meat.
The first is that the technical challenges of bringing lab-grown meat to the table are far from resolved, despite years of effort and investment. Getting meat in a laboratory to mimic the texture and structure of an animal’s muscle is very difficult. No one has yet figured out how to mimic, say, a steak, hence the focus on products like chicken pieces, where structure is much less important.
Even replacing chicken products with lab-grown chicken products that don’t require a lot of internal tissue structure would be a huge achievement for the world. But there are still many obstacles to getting to that point. Existing projects, such as Eat Just’s in Singapore, are small in scale and produce relatively small quantities of meat for specialty dishes. The meat industry kills tens of billions of animals a year. Matching that up will be a challenge.
“With the numbers we have today,” Ricardo San Martín, from UC Berkeley, who studies alternatives to meat, told me last year, “we don’t see how [lab-grown meat] can scale and deliver products promptly at a competitive price. In addition to all the technological hurdles, scaling up can be very complex. So far, I have not seen a medium-sized operation that grows these types of cells for this purpose. It is very difficult, and with what we know today, it may not be the right approach. “
The next challenge, closely related to the challenge of climbing, is cost. Laboratory-grown meat is much more expensive than intensive farming. As cell-based products grow, they will discover new cost savings and benefit from economies of scale. However, factory farming also benefits from the ability to expand and discover new cost efficiencies and, through more than half a century of optimizations, has managed to make factory farm chicken incredibly cheap.
“The most processed cheap forms of chicken are incredibly cheap, relative to historical standards and relative to other food products on the market,” Lewis Bollard, an animal researcher at the Open Philanthropy Project, told me in August. “The chicken industry has managed to do everything it can, it doesn’t pay its environmental bills, it doesn’t pay for many of the public health hazards that they cause. They have managed to produce a product that is artificially cheap and difficult to compete. “
But despite the many challenges ahead, today’s approval in Singapore is cause for celebration. The global food system faces many challenges in the coming decades, from feeding a growing middle-class population around the world who want to enjoy the same variety of foods that Americans enjoy at the same low prices, to tackling climate change. and reduce the hazards of factory farms. raises public health. Progress in laboratory-grown meat is a step toward solving one of the biggest problems we have.
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