Lab-grown meat is on the rise. It’s time to start asking tough questions
T he salad looks relatively normal: fried chicken, leafy greens, red cabbage, slices of mandarin, a mango-sesame dressing on the side. But this is no ordinary salad. Getting hold of this particular lunchbox involved staking out a hotel lobby and quick fingers on a delivery app. The prize? Not tickets to a K-pop concert, but one of the world’s first servings of cell-cultured meat.
Our modest serving has been breaded and fried and tastes like a diced chicken schnitzel. With some poking and prodding, the nugget reveals none of the long muscle fibers you would expect to find in a chicken breast. This is perhaps responsible for a slight hint of rubber-ball bounciness, but overall the texture is impressively avian. We’d eat it again.
We have pescatarians, vegans, flexitarians, locavores and of course vegetarians. But what’s the word for those of us who make the choice to eat meat not raised on a farm or slaughtered in an abattoir, but grown in a lab? Perhaps the “cytovore”, consumer of cells.
It sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. In Singapore, the US company Eat Just gained approval to sell its nuggets of lab-grown chicken to consumers in December 2020. Under the brand name “Good Meat”, Eat Just rolled out its first products at an exclusive social club. Diners sample a bao with sesame chicken and pickled cucumber and a maple waffle served with chicken nuggets.
