Explainer | Lab-grown meat: is it safe, is it vegetarian, when will it be available, is it better for the environment? All you need to know
- Lab-grown meat, also known as cultured meat, cultivated meat and cell-based meat, is the newest alternative protein, but what exactly is it?
- Also: how it differs from plant-based meat, what’s ‘wrong’ with it, will it be widely available soon and some of the companies leading the way
Cultured meat. Cultivated meat. Lab-grown meat. Cell-based meat. Whatever you call it, the newest addition to alternative protein is having a bit of a moment.
Over the past few months, Singapore’s government wined and dined VIP guests with cultivated meat at COP27; lab-grown chicken passed its first hurdle with the US Food and Drug Administration; and a landmark global agreement to protect biodiversity applied new pressure to rethinking how beef, pork, chicken and seafood are produced.
Advocates of cultivated meat say it could be an answer to soaring agricultural emissions, deteriorating biodiversity and alarming food insecurity, while critics worry that the high cost of cultivated meat, alongside its regulatory hurdles and unproven scalability, make it mostly hype for now.
Everyone agrees that many questions remain. For now, here’s what we know about the present and potential future of meat grown in a lab.
What is cultured meat?
Cultured or cultivated meat is made by harvesting cells from live animals, “feeding” the cells with nutrients so they can grow in a bioreactor and turning the result into a product consumers can eat.
Take fish maw, for example. The swim bladder of a fish, it’s considered a delicacy in many Asian countries. To create a lab-grown version of croaker fish maws, scientists from Hong Kong-based Avant Meats place fish cells in a culture medium containing dozens of different nutrients, and store them in a bioreactor connected to an oxygen tank.