CHICAGO, ILL – U.S. regulators have granted approval for the sale of chicken made from animal cells, marking the first time such a product has been authorized.
This decision allows two California companies, Upside Foods and Good Meat, to offer “lab-grown” meat to restaurants initially and eventually make it available on supermarket shelves.
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The approval by the Agriculture Department signifies a significant milestone in the development of “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” meat, where meat is produced in a laboratory setting without the need for traditional animal slaughter.
One of the current challenges with lab-grown meat is the use of highly refined or purified growth media, the ingredients needed to help animal cells multiply. Currently, this method is similar to the biotechnology used to make pharmaceuticals.
Cultivated meat, also known as lab-grown meat, is produced through a process where cells are grown in steel tanks.
These cells can be sourced from a living animal, a fertilized egg, or a bank of stored cells. Upside Foods produces cultivated meat that is formed into large sheets, which are then shaped into various forms like chicken cutlets and sausages.
Good Meat, on the other hand, already sells cultivated meat in Singapore, the first country to permit its sale. They transform chicken cells into cutlets, nuggets, shredded meat, and satays.
According to UC-Davis, “Our findings suggest that cultured meat is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef. It’s not a panacea,” said corresponding author Edward Spang, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology. “It’s possible we could reduce its environmental impact in the future, but it will require significant technical advancement to simultaneously increase the performance and decrease the cost of the cell culture media.”
Even the most efficient beef production systems reviewed in the study outperform cultured meat across all scenarios (both food and pharma), suggesting that investments to advance more climate-friendly beef production may yield greater reductions in emissions more quickly than investments in cultured meat.
Developing the technology that would allow the leap from “pharma to food” is among the goals of the UC Davis Cultivated Meat Consortium, a cross-disciplinary group of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and educators researching cultivated meat. Other goals are to establish and evaluate cell lines that could be used to grow meat and find ways to create more structure in cultured meat.
Bill Gates told Technology Reviews in 2021 that rich nations should shift entirely to synthetic beef.
