Out of the lab and into your frying pan: The advance of cultured meat

No cultured meat products are on the market yet and nor has it been approved in any country, but they are expected to begin trickling into restaurants over the next couple of years.

ZOE CORBYN: ‘Cultured meat, not to be confused with “meat” that is plant derived, is produced directly from animal cells with little need to raise and no need to slaughter actual animals. It is a technology with the potential to fundamentally change the world – significantly replacing the way meat is produced now with a kinder and less environmentally damaging alternative…

No cultured meat products are on the market yet and nor has it been approved in any country – but they are expected to begin trickling into high-end restaurants over the next couple of years. A plethora of companies are at various stages of scaling up production and several have done public and private tasting of various prototypes. They are working on everything from chicken to beef to fish and have both humans and pets in their sights…

Cultured meat is a “colossal” market opportunity says Bruce Friedrich, co-founder and executive director of the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit organisation that promotes cultured meat and plant-based meat. Even a tiny bite of the $1.4tn annual global meat market would be a lot… Establishing this industry isn’t easy, however. While companies work out technicalities, voices raising concerns about the technology and its implications are coalescing.

It is also clear there is no agreed position on whether the material itself even counts as meat. “Cultured meat is in a process of becoming,” sums up Neil Stephens, a sociologist at Brunel University, London, who has been studying the area for over a decade and co-founded the group Cultivate to help build discussion of the technology. “It might become a stable category as meat, but it’s not there yet”.’ SOURCE…

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