Would you eat lab-grown meat? How meat made from cells is picking up steam

Story by Eric Stober • Jun 28, 2023

Pieces of Good Meat's cultivated chicken is shown at the Eat Just office in Alameda, Calif., Wednesday, June 14, 2023. The Agriculture Department issued final approvals Wednesday, June 21 to California firms Upside Foods and Good Meat to sell the products, known as “lab grown” or “cultivated” meat.© AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Lab-grown meat, also known as "cultivated" meat, may soon be sold to the public in the U.S. after two companies received full approval from the government.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, allowing the California-based companies to sell their products in restaurants.

It may be a while longer until Canada sees the same style of products, though -- Health Canada told Global News in an email that it has not received any applications for lab-grown meat.

Nevertheless, one cultivated meat company, SCiFi Foods, hopes to be selling in Canada in a year's time, although it has not submitted any applications yet. That's according to co-founder and CEO Joshua March, who spoke about the new style of meat at a panel during Toronto's Collision tech conference.

March said his company's mission is to "electrify the cow," meaning that the huge amount of methane produced from animal farms would be avoided and the main energy drain for cultivating meat would be electricity

Video: How meat grown from animal cells could help tackle climate change

"We are producing essentially real meat," March said Wednesday. "But the prime input becomes electricity."

Those in favour of growing their meat in a lab point to the environmental costs of traditional farm-raised animals and food production, which Our World in Data found in 2019 contributes 31 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions from the food production process.

More broadly, food production is responsible for just over one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Marsh explained that cultivated meat is grown from actual animal cells and is done in a bioreactor, which is a big steel tank powered by electricity. He said the end goal is to produce an infinite amount of meat from the cells by feeding them sugar and amino acids.

For the U.S. company Upside, its meat comes in large sheets that are then shaped into more familiar forms, such as chicken cutlets or sausages. Good Meat says it has a "master cell bank" derived from a commercially available chicken cell line that it uses to create meat.

Once cell lines are selected, they're combined with a broth-like mixture that includes amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, salts, vitamins and other substances cells need to grow. Inside the tanks, the cells multiply quickly.

The new technology faces some barriers, though.

March pointed to how expensive it currently is to lab-grow meat, which makes scaling it up to compete with farm-raised meat on a quantity level difficult. But he is hopeful that, like other novel technologies such as solar panels, the cost will eventually go down and it can be done at scale.

Neither Upside nor Good Meat has revealed the price of a single chicken cutlet, but did say it has reduced in price greatly since they started offering demonstrations.

Another barrier is public perception.

While milk alternatives such as oat milk have taken off, meat alternatives still have relatively low adoption among consumers.

March said meat alternatives, such as plant-based meat, have a branding issue that has also been impacted by the "culture wars" happening in North America.

"In America, in the Midwest, they don't want to be told to not eat meat by vegans in California, basically," he said.

Consumers may also be squeamish at the prospect of eating meat that was never technically alive.

An Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research poll found half of U.S. adults said they are unlikely to try meat grown from cells, with most saying it "just sounds weird."

Half said they don't think it'd be safe.

Chris Bryson, the founder and CEO of plant-based meat company New School Foods, said at the panel Wednesday that producers have to "dig deeper" to find why consumers aren't adopting meat alternatives.

"Fundamentally, what we're trying to create is behaviour change," he said. "And that's really hard."

He thinks the key to adoption is to create a product that is better than meat in every way possible, from taste to price to texture and how it cooks.

March still sees cultivated meat as the future, though, especially as the price of meat has gone up and seems like it will continue to do so as there becomes less arable land to host cows due to more extreme weather, pointing to drought conditions in the Midwest for the last five years.

His product, for now, has at least one customer -- he said he eats his company's cultivated meat almost every week and SCiFi has done more than 100 lab tastings.

"It's fun."

-- with files from The Associated Press.