What are the pros and cons of lab-grown meat? Fetal bovine serum, which Block says is made from slaughtering pregnant cows, is also used to store the harvested cells of any animal-though every company I spoke to is working on engineering an alternative solution. The initial biopsy necessary to harvest cells won’t harm a larger animal, but could kill a small creature, such as a shrimp. That means that cultivated meat does require some animal involvement. One is animal tissue and the other is plant matter masquerading as animal tissue. Plant-based burgers, nuggets, and sausages sold by companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are made with a variety of vegan ingredients and formulated to mimic meat. It is beef grown from cow cells and pork grown from pig cells. On a cellular level, lab-grown meat is meat. How is lab-grown meat different from the plant-based stuff? “It’s happening right now in the biopharmaceutical industry, where they’re growing cells mostly to make monoclonal antibodies,” such as those used to treat some COVID-19 patients.
“It shows, ultimately, that this industry is one step closer to commercialization,” says Amy Chen, the COO of Upside Foods.īut this isn’t new: We’ve been able to grow tissue from cells for decades, says David Block, a chemical engineer working on cultivated meat at UC Davis. But the move was a major milestone for the entire sector, which has been steadily growing for almost a decade. The company still needs US Department of Agriculture (USDA) approval before it can sell its cultivated meat domestically. The San Francisco start-up takes muscle, fat, and tissue cells from fertilized chicken eggs and grows them into a product that is biologically indistinguishable from the flesh of a slaughtered bird. In mid-November last year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent Upside Foods a “no questions” letter, which means it views the company’s products as safe to eat. That might sound like the narrative arc of your stoner cousin’s self-published sci-fi novel. Only, instead of killing billions of animals each year, it’s grown in a sterile lab from a few cells. Whatever you want to call it, it’s real meat. Cultured meat, lab-grown meat, cultivated meat.
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