How I became one of the first on the planet to eat meat grown in a lab
No animal cruelty. Less global warming. Hunger eliminated . . . This chicken nugget could save the world. And it started with a chicken called Ian – who is still alive
THE solitary chicken nugget looks unremarkable. Lightly breaded and pale in colour, the chef submerges it in hot oil where it sizzles away for a couple of minutes until it is perfectly cooked and browned. Moments later I bite into it and my mouth is awash with the delicious and familiar taste of chicken.
But what makes this small piece of meat groundbreaking is that the chicken it comes from is still alive and well, running around a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a 90-minute drive south of the San Francisco lab where I have ‘eaten’ him (or her).
The chicken I’ve just sampled has never laid an egg, grown a feather or been slaughtered. It began life as primordial mush in a glass flask filled with bright red liquid and was grown inside a steel vat in a laboratory.
Last week, I became one of the first people in the world to eat lab-grown, cultured chicken, where stem cells from the base of a feather from a live bird were harvested by scientists, nurtured in a nutrient- rich broth and then placed in a steel container called a bioreactor. The cells then replicated and grew into meat genetically identical to the original animal.
The process takes just two weeks, compared to the seven to nine weeks it takes a real bird to be
‘More people have ventured into space than have tasted this meat’
fattened before slaughter. The taste is exactly the same as chicken, although the texture is slightly smoother than the real thing.
Scientists are still working on introducing muscle tone and texture to the lab-grown meat. They are experimenting with 3D printing to turn the lab version, which has a mushy, minced appearance, into familiar shapes such as chicken breasts and wings. It is mind-blowing stuff and, as Josh Tetrick, founder and chief executive of Just Meat, one of the companies pioneering this new technology, told me with a grin: ‘This will revolutionise the world of food production. Welcome to the future.’
It may sound like science-fiction but thanks to a chicken called Ian – the first bird to have his stem cells harvested in 2017 – the technology is now so advanced that Tetrick and other entrepreneurs claim to have come up with a solution to end world hunger, eradicate food-borne illnesses and reduce global warming.
GRANDIOSE c l a i ms perhaps, but Silicon Valley heavyweights such a s Mi c r o s o f t f o under Bil l Gates and Eduardo Saverin, who co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, have ploughed millions into Tetrick’s company, which plans to make cultured meat available to the public by the end of this year.
British tycoon Jim Mellon, who made £ 1. 1 bil l i on i nvesting in e mer g i n g mar k e t s , recently founded Agronomics, the UK’s first listed company giving investors exposure to the ‘clean meat’ industry which he calls an ‘incredibly exciting sector’. Companies are not just working on chicken – beef, pork and even fish are being labgrown. Mellon’s firm has invested in BlueNalu, a San Diego firm that is growing bluefin tuna in a lab, and New Age Meats in San Francisco, which is focused on pork.
Mellon told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I expect there to be major successes within our portfolio. Our share price has nearly doubled since the beginning of July.’
Environmental benefits could be huge. At the moment, traditional cattle farming uses 70 per cent of world’s non-ice covered land, and the methane produced by cows is a major contributor to global warming. Moreover, a cow takes 18 months to get to slaughter, compared to two weeks to produce lab-grown beef.
While critics warn the technology is too new and more testing needs to be done before the meat is deemed safe to be sold commerci al l y, Tetrick, a charismatic 39-year-old from Alabama, says a deal is already in place to introduce the new meat into a handful of restaurants in Asia, where food regulations are less stringent. ‘The main barrier to us mass-producing cultured meat at the moment is regulatory,’ Tetrick told me as he sat in the centre of Just Meat’s bustling 90,000 sq ft HQ in San Francisco.
‘ Regulators in the US and UK have never dealt with a product like ours. We see Asia, particularly China, as being a very important market for us and they have been very welcoming, which is why we expect to launch in Asia by the end of the year.’
Tetrick, who started his company in 2011 with a plant-based egg product made from mung beans that is now a bestseller in major stores in the US and UK, is one of dozens of entrepreneurs racing to be the first to bring lab-made meat to the market. His firm recently teamed up with Toriyama, one of Japan’s leading producers of wagyu beef. The companies hope to replicate the success of Tetrick’s chicken with wagyu, a prized meat known for its marbled appearance and tender texture.
‘The first product will be ground or minced beef,’ he said. ‘We’re not at the point where we can produce a fully formed steak yet, but that day will come.’
While his company started working on lab- made meat only two years ago, Tetrick – a vegan animal lover – has raised nearly £300 million in growth funding and has had his company valued at $1.1 billion.
He cites Sir Winston Churchill as an inspiration, calling Britain’s wartime leader a visionary. Churchill accurately predicted l ab meat in 1931 in an article in Strand Magazine entitled Fifty Years Hence. Churchill wrote: ‘We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. The new foods will be practically indistinguishable from the natural product.’
The first lab-grown meat, a hamburger, was fried up in London in 2013, more than 30 years later than Churchill’s prediction. So how does it actually work? The Mail on Sunday was given a tour of Just Meat by Tetrick and the company’s head of communications, Andrew Noyes, who told me: ‘More people have ventured into space than have tasted clean meat.’
While some areas were off-limits because of concerns about rivals stealing the technology, we were shown the sterile lab where scientists in white coats extract chicken stem cells by snipping off the base of a feather before dropping it
into a sterilised plastic vial. The first-ever chicken to provide stem cells was a bird called Ian, a fourmonth-old Cornish-Rock cross from Fogline Farm, in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco.
Ian was chosen because he was in prime condition, with a magnificent red plume. He didn’t even have to suffer the indignity of having his feather plucked – the first cells were taken from a naturally shed feather. Noyes explained: ‘We have now accumulated a bank of cells from dozens of chickens. We don’t name them any more. They are identified by letters and numbers.
‘The sample you ate came from a chicken without a name. Ian is now living out his days on an animal sanctuary. But Ian was a pioneer. He might well become the most famous chicken on the planet.’
Beef stem cells are extracted using a thin needle to take a biopsy from a live animal. One firm, Memphis Meats, claims it can make 10,000 cows’ worth of meat with a single biopsy.
Step two is to introduce the cells into a flask containing a nutrientrich proprietary blend of water, sugars, amino acids, lipids, vitamins and minerals. I see flasks being swirled around inside an incubator. No pictures are allowed. To the naked eye the liquid is red and clear but each vessel contains cells that are rapidly splitting and dividing.
The mixture is then placed inside a vat called a bioreactor, which looks like the stainless-steel fermenters used for brewing beer.
It is at this point that the process takes on an even more sci-fi feel. I enter a second pristine lab where a metal vat is spewing dry ice. Vitor Espirito Santo, the director of cellular agriculture, was standing by the vat wearing a pair of pink gloves. ‘ That’s where we store some of our cell lines, chicken and others, for future use. It’s a cell bank of sorts,’ he explained.
Inside Just’s HQ, I see industrial freezers containing sealed bags of the chicken meat, which is frozen as soon as it comes out of the bioreactors to preserve its freshness. A vegan for a decade, Tetrick was raised in poverty by his mother, a hairdresser. ‘ I was raised on cheap food, which was mostly fast food,’ he explained.
After university and failing in his dream of becoming a professional American football player, he went to sub-Saharan Africa for seven years hoping to ‘make a difference’. He worked for charities in Kenya and Liberia and saw starvation and malnutrition up close. It inspired him to ‘want to make a difference and what better way than through cheap, great-tasting food?’
He began his first start-up in an ex-girlfriend’s garage, manufacturing egg-free mayonnaise. When the mayo took off, he developed Just Egg, a protein-rich concoction made from mung beans. A picture of former Prime Minister Tony Blair hangs on his office wall. ‘He tried our egg product and so did Cherie. They loved it. I’m from Alabama. I’m from a culture where meat is more than just taste, it’s identity. My buddies don’t want a veggie burger. They want a juicy steak. I thought, “How about we make meat from animals but we just don’t kill the animals?” ’ The technology already existed. The first lab-made burger was created by Professor Mark Post, of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, using a similar process to the one used today. It was cooked and eaten at a press conference in London in 2013. That single beef patty cost £230,000 to produce.
Some early lab-made meat used fetal bovine serum (extracted from cow foetuses), antibiotics and other chemicals to stabilise and encourage the cells to grow.
Tetrick insists that his meat uses only plant-based products, saying: ‘There’s nothing fake. It’s clean. The meat is not genetically modified. There’s nothing nasty in it.’
The prospect of creating meat from non- slaughtered cows has raised ethical and religious debates. In Israel, Jewish leaders have been arguing over whether lab- made meat can be considered kosher.
One vegan of 43 years told me he would reconsider his position if he knew lab-grown meat was truly cruelty-free. But others have questioned the nutritional value of the meat. Some unverified reports have suggested the lab-grown beef doesn’t have all the vitamins of slaughtered meat but also does not have the high cholesterol levels of fat-laced steaks.
A n i ma l B i o t e c h n o l o g y and Genomics specialist Alison Van Eenennaam, from the University of California, said: ‘Essential amino acids, plus vitamins and minerals such as B12 and iron found in real meat, may need to be added to clean meat if it is to match or exceed the nutritional value of conventional meat products.’
Varying regulatory approval standards worldwide also presents challenges to clean meat’s introduction. In Britain the Food Standards Agency told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Meat grown in labs is considered a novel food and would r e qui r e r i s k a s s e s s ment a nd authorisation before being placed on the market. Any food sold in the UK must be safe to ensure public protection is maintained.’
In America, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will oversee clean meat technology and cell growth up to harvest, while the US Department of Agriculture will control clean- meat production and distribution safety. The FDA has announced it plans to regulate clean meat in the same way it regulates genetically engineered food.
Tetrick added: ‘There are lots of issues to be resolved. But the fact this meat is going to change the world is not one of them.
‘What’s not to like about something that tastes like meat, is actually meat, and doesn’t involve a living being dying?’
When he started his egg-based product he received death threats.
Is he worried about traditional meat manufacturers coming after him as he tries to disrupt the
‘There’s nothing fake and nothing nasty in it’
£ 6 trillion global meat, chicken and seafood industry?
‘ Major meat companies have been in touch. They are supportive. It comes down to economics. They are in the business of selling more protein. Why not team up with us?
‘My dream is people will shop for meat and there will be traditional hamburger meat on sale next to our meat. We will be competitive price-wise and people will choose us because we’re going to taste better.’
The chicken nugget I ate was valued at £82 – a ‘bargain’, said Tetrick, whose first chicken nugget ‘cost tens of thousands of pounds’. When Just Meat’s nuggets go on sale in Asia later this year they will cost significantly less than £82.
Tetrick – who could become an overnight multimillionaire should he choose to sell up – says it is not about money. ‘It was sh***y growing up, seeing my mum upset because we didn’t have enough money for good food. When I worked in Africa, I saw kids going hungry. I want to feel like I’ve done something meaningful in life.’
Eating a chicken nugget that tastes as good as, if not better than, one from McDonald’s and knowing no animal had to die in the process was a profound experience.
If I had the choice, and if I knew the lab-made meat was 100 per cent safe, I would choose it every time. I’ve tasted the future and it tastes like chicken.
Thank you, Ian.