Could a chicken in San Francisco provide us with a solution to the crisis over the world’s appetite for meat?
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.” Unfathomable to us then, who would’ve thought that eighty-seven years later, that day has come. We have now discovered at Just, a food company in San Francisco, chicken nuggets grown from the cells of a chicken feather.
This meat is not to be confused with vegetarian and vegan plant-based burgers or other meat-substitute products that are gaining popularity. This is real meat from a chicken. It has been grown from animal cells and has been referenced as cultured, synthetic, in-vitro, lab-grown and even “clean” meat. How is this being done, you ask? The chicken’s cells take two days to produce in order to create a chicken nugget. A protein is used to help the cells multiply, and some type of scaffold is used to give structure to the product and a culture, or growth medium to feed the meat as it develops. This meat is not commercially available yet, but Just’s chief executive Josh Tetrick says it will be on the menu in a handful of restaurants by the end of the year. “We make things like eggs or ice cream or butter out of plants and we make meat just out of meat. You just don’t need to kill the animal,” Tetrick says to the BBC.
Tetrick and other entrepreneurs working on developing cellular meat say that this initiative stems from their ethical and environmental concerns, saying that they want to stop the slaughter of animals and protect the environment from the degradation of industrial farming. They say they are helping to solve the problem of how to feed a crowded earth without destroying the planet, by pointing out that their meat is not genetically-modified and does not require antibiotics to grow.
Courtesy: livekindly
The United Nations says that raising animals for food is one of the major causes of global warming and air and water pollution. “We slaughter 70 billion animals each year to feed seven billion people,” says Dr. Uma Valeti, a cardiologist who founded Memphis Meats, a cell-based meat company. “So, we could just literally grow any meat, poultry or seafood directly from those animal cells,” Dr. Valeti says. “I think that is probably much bigger than sliced bread.”
With companies like Tyson investing in these cell-based meat companies, a shift is being made to become more than just “meat companies” but rather “protein companies”. Along with cellular-meat’s potential on the rise, there has already been talk of backlash from farmers. Similar to the almond milk debacle on whether or not it should be labeled as “milk,” the state of Missouri has decreed that meat labels may only be applied to the product of livestock. It is a hint of the disruption which traditional agriculture feels could be on the way. “From a transparency standpoint for consumers, so that they know what they’re purchasing and what they’re feeding their families, we think that it needs to be called something different,” says Kalena Bruce.
Despite the resistance, Tetrick has already faced from these farmers, he is still betting on human experience favoring progress.
“At the end of the day whether you’re talking about a move from picking ice to refrigerator or from slaughtering a whale to refining oil into kerosene and moving from kerosene to a light bulb… even though people called the light bulb the Devil’s current… humanity managed to embrace something new. It always happens and if I had to bet it’ll happen for this too.”