Would you eat slaughter-free meat?
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
There's a looming crisis over the world's growing appetite for meat. Could a chicken running around a farmyard in San Francisco hold the key to a solution?
In 1931, Winston Churchill predicted that the human race would one day "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".
Eighty-seven years later, that day has come as we discovered at Just, a food company in San Francisco where we tasted chicken nuggets grown from the cells of a chicken feather.
The chicken - which tasted like chicken - was still alive, reportedly roaming on a farm not far from the laboratory.
This meat is not to be confused with the vegetarian plant-based burgers and other meat-substitute products which are gaining popularity in supermarkets.
No, this is actual meat grown from animal cells and variously described as cultured, synthetic, in-vitro, lab-grown or even "clean" meat.
It takes about two days to produce a chicken nugget in a small bioreactor, using a protein to encourage the cells to multiply, some type of scaffold to give structure to the product and a culture, or growth, medium to feed the meat as it develops.
The result is not yet commercially available anywhere on earth but Just's chief executive Josh Tetrick says it will be on the menu in a handful of restaurants by the end of this year.
Eighty-seven years later, that day has come as we discovered at Just, a food company in San Francisco where we tasted chicken nuggets grown from the cells of a chicken feather.
The chicken - which tasted like chicken - was still alive, reportedly roaming on a farm not far from the laboratory.
This meat is not to be confused with the vegetarian plant-based burgers and other meat-substitute products which are gaining popularity in supermarkets.
No, this is actual meat grown from animal cells and variously described as cultured, synthetic, in-vitro, lab-grown or even "clean" meat.
It takes about two days to produce a chicken nugget in a small bioreactor, using a protein to encourage the cells to multiply, some type of scaffold to give structure to the product and a culture, or growth, medium to feed the meat as it develops.
The result is not yet commercially available anywhere on earth but Just's chief executive Josh Tetrick says it will be on the menu in a handful of restaurants by the end of this year.