MYSTERY MEAT
Labs create poultry, fish, beef, pork without any animals dying
EMERYVILLE, Calif. — Uma Valeti slices into a pan-fried chicken cutlet in the kitchen of his startup, Memphis Meats. He sniffs the tender morsel on his fork before taking a bite. He chews slowly, absorbing the taste.
“Our chicken is chicken ... you’ve got to taste it to believe it,” Valeti says.
This is no ordinary piece of poultry. No chicken was raised or slaughtered. The meat was produced in a laboratory by extracting cells from a chicken and feeding those cells in a nutrient broth until the cell culture grew into raw meat.
Memphis Meats, based in Emeryville, California, is one of a growing number of startups worldwide that are making cell-based or cultured meat. They want to offer an alternative to traditional meat production that they say is damaging the environment and causing unnecessary harm to animals, but they are far from becoming mainstream and face pushback from livestock producers.
“You are ultimately going to continue the choice of eating meat for many generations to come without putting undue stress on the planet,” said Valeti, a former cardiologist who co-founded Memphis Meats in 2015 after seeing the power of stem cells to treat disease.
The company, which also has produced cell-grown beef and duck, has attracted investments from food giants Cargill and Tyson Foods as well as billionaires Richard Branson and Bill Gates.
A report released in June by consulting firm A.T. Kearney predicts that by 2040, cultured meat will make up 35 percent of meat consumed worldwide.
But first cultured meat must overcome significant challenges, including bringing down the exorbitant cost of production, showing regulators it’s safe and enticing consumers to take a bite.
“We’re a long way off from becoming a commercial reality because there are many hurdles we have to tackle,” said Ricardo San Martin, research director of the alternative meat program at the University of California, Berkeley. “We don’t know if consumers are going to buy this or not.”
As global demand for meat grows, supporters say cell-based protein is more sustainable than traditional meat because it doesn’t require the land, water and crops needed to raise livestock — a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.
And many consumers would love to eat meat that doesn’t require killing animals, said Brian Spears, who founded a San Francisco startup called New Age Meats that served its cell-based pork sausages to curious foodies at a tasting last September.
“People want meat,” Spears said. “They don’t want slaughter.”
Finless Foods, another startup in Emeryville, is making cultured fish and seafood. It’s produced cell-based versions of salmon, carp and sea bass, and it’s working on bluefin tuna, a popular species that is overfished and contains high levels of mercury.
“The ocean is a very fragile ecosystem, and we are really driving it to the brink of collapse,” CEO Michael Selden said. “By moving human consumption of seafood out of the ocean and onto land and creating it in this cleaner way, we can basically do something that’s better for everybody.”
The emerging industry moved a step closer to market when the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration recently said it would jointly oversee the production and labeling of cell-based meat.
Cell-based meat companies, however, face resistance from U.S. livestock producers, who have been lobbying states to restrict the “meat” label to food products derived from slaughtered animals and have been raising questions about the safety, cost and environmental effect of cultured meat.