Singapore OKs lab-grown meat

HONG KONG — First, meat came from farms and forests. Then, it came from factories. More recently, entrepreneurs have been making it from plants.

Some have wondered whether there’s a more advanced approach: Could meat be grown in a laboratory, from existing cells? That effort has faced multiple challenges, from skepticism over something that comes from a lab to questions about what governments might think.

The nascent laboratory meat industry won a small victory Wednesday on that last point, as a U.S. startup became the first to win government approval — in this case, an announcement by the city-state of Singapore

— to sell the fruit of its labs to the public in the form of “cultured chicken.”

San Francisco-based Eat Just describes its product as “real, high-quality meat created directly from animal cells for safe human consumption.” Singapore’s Food Agency said that it had approved the product for sale as an ingredient in chicken nuggets.

“This is a historic moment in the food system,” said Josh Tetrick, Eat Just’s chief executive. “We’ve been eating meat for thousands of years, and every time we’ve eaten meat, we’ve had to kill an animal — until now.”

Singapore’s move is “the world’s first regulatory approval for a cultivated meat product,” said Elaine Siu, managing director of the Good Food Institute Asia Pacific, a nonprofit that promotes cultivated meat and plant-based substitutes for animal products.

Singapore’s Food Agency said it approved the nuggets after Eat Just submitted a safety assessment to the agency’s “novel food” working group, whose seven members are outside experts on food science, toxicology, nutrition, epidemiology and other fields. The agency includes “cultured or cell-based meat grown under controlled conditions” under its definition of novel foods, along with some species of algae, fungi and insects.

The company has previously said that it would cost $50 to make a single nugget. It now says on its website that the nuggets will be available at “price parity for premium chicken you’d enjoy at a restaurant.”