More on lab grown meat
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It was a confronting moment for a vegetarian. First, a pork meatball and then slices of bacon, balanced in a sort of mini BLT, were served to eat by beaming, expectant hosts. The meat even came from a named pig, an affable-looking swine called Dawn.
With some trepidation, I sliced into the meatball and ate it. I then took a nibble of the bacon. It was my first taste of meat in 11 years, a confounding experience made possible by the fact that Dawn, gamboling in a field in upstate New York, did not die for this meal.
Instead a clump of her cells were grown in a lab to create what’s known as “cultivated meat”, a product touted as far better for the climate – as well as the mortal concerns of pigs and cows – and is set for takeoff in the US.
“A harmless sample from one pig can produce many millions of tons of product without requiring us to raise and slaughter an animal each time,” said Eitan Fisher, founder of Mission Barns, a maker of cultivated meat that invited the Guardian to a taste test in an upscale Manhattan hotel. The meatball was succulent, the bacon was crisp and, even to a vegetarian, both had the undeniable quality of meat.
“We got that sample from Dawn and she’s living freely and happily,” said Fisher, whose company has identified a “donor” cow, chicken and duck for future cultivated meat ranges. “This industry will absolutely be transformative to our food system as people move toward consuming these types of products.”
Mission Barns is one of about 80 startup companies based around San Francisco’s Bay Area now jostling for position after one of their number, Upside Foods, became the first in the country to be
granted approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in November, a key step in allowing the sale of cultivated meat in the US.
More than $2bn has been
invested in the sector since 2020 and many of the new ventures aren’t waiting for regulatory approval before building facilities. In December, a company called Believer Meats
broke ground on a $123m facility in North Carolina it claims will be the largest cultivated meat plant in the world, set to churn out 10,000 tons of product once operational.
So far cultivated meat – the nascent industry settled on this name over lab-grown or cellular meat – has only started selling in Singapore, where another Bay Area contender, called Eat Just, was given the green light to sell chicken breast and tenders in 2020. But the “world is experiencing a food revolution”, as the FDA put it, with the rise of cultivated meat holding the promise of slashing the meat industry’s ruinous planet-heating emissions and shrinking its voracious appetite for land, as well as sparing livestock the barbarity of factory farming………
This
challenge is particularly stark in the US, the world’s
largest producer of beef and chicken and the second largest producer of pork, a country where meat-eating is deeply embedded through ingrained habit or the lack of available, affordable alternatives to the point that each American eats more than 260lb of meat each year, on average, a figure that appears to
be edging up.
An excited,
yet brief, craze over Impossible and Beyond Meat has underscored American desires for actual meat, rather than plant-based imitations. “In consumer research a lot of people say, ‘I’m not eating that plant stuff, I don’t care how good it tastes,’” said Swartz…….
https://www.theguardian.com/environ...n-meat-animals-climate?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other