Lab-grown chicken: meat without guilt
“The stuff of science fiction has landed on our plates,” said Jenny Kleeman in The Guardian. Last week, “meat grown in a lab, instead of inside the body of an animal” was approved for sale to the public by a regulatory authority for the first time. The Singapore Food Agency gave its thumbs-up to the “chicken bites” created by Californiabased Eat Just, which grew them from a bird that’s still alive and well today. The start-up took the chicken’s cells, bathed them in a nutrient medium and put them in a bioreactor, “where they grew exponentially until the meat was harvested, encased in batter and turned into nuggets”. This process promises anguished carnivores “flesh without the blood, meat without murder and the beginning of the end of the environmental damage caused by intensive animal agriculture”.
The possibilities are “mind-blowing”, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. The coming “revolution in ‘kind/clean’ meat” could cut down industrial livestock production, and potentially do away with it altogether. Producing meat in this way slashes land use and carbon emissions by more than 90%, along with the contamination caused by “animal waste and industrial hormone/antibiotic overdosing”. It’s no surprise that about 60 firms worldwide are working on lab-grown meat products, and that the market is predicted to be worth £451m by 2032.
The revolution isn’t here yet, said Naima Brown in The Guardian. Eat Just charges premium prices for its product, which is not yet “slaughterfree”. The cells have to be grown in a small amount of serum drawn from a cow foetus. Lab-grown meat is cellular “sludge”, said Jemima Lewis in The Daily Telegraph. That’s why they make it into chicken nuggets. There aren’t “many appetising dishes you can make from sludge”. But if it seems revolting, it is not as revolting as the status quo. Consider the 2.3 billion “normal” chicken nuggets eaten each year in the US alone – made from the meat of miserable, intensively farmed birds, bulked out with connective tissue, ground bone and other horrors. “If humans can learn to eat that with relish, we can surely adapt to anything.”
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