The Biggest Problem With Lab-Grown Chicken Is Growing the Chicken
Venture-backed startups such as Upside Foods have promised cultivated chicken as the solution to the meat problem. If only the solution made sense.
December 14, 2023 | Source: Bloomberg | by Deena Shanker and Priya Anand
Ten years ago at a press event in London, a Dutch scientist, a Chicago-based food writer and an Austrian researcher shared a single $330,000 beef patty. The burger was the world’s most serious attempt at lab-grown meat, made by taking cells from a cow and cultivating them in the lab. (There had previously been a goldfish-filets-for-astronauts experiment and frog steaks as “bioart.”) It had taken six weeks for Mark Post, the Dutch scientist and professor, to grow 20,000 muscle fibers in trays and vials. Once complete, these tiny ropes of muscle tissue were removed by hand and pressed into a single hamburger.
Onstage, Post unveiled the disk of pink flesh. A well-known chef seared the 5-ounce patty as an audience of journalists watched. The aroma was “subtle but unmistakably meaty,” according to the Washington Post. The taste “wasn’t unpleasant,” Josh Schonwald, author of The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food, later told NBC News, noting in another interview that the mouthfeel was beeflike. “It did have that kind of density that was familiar.”