What will it take to make you seriously consider lab-grown meat?

And you can call yourself a Deagan (death-free meat only)!

Lab-Grown Chicken is Here, What to Know

• The USDA has given the final OK for chicken fully grown in a lab.
• Made from cultured cells, the meat is actually chicken just not one hatched from an egg.
• The new cultivated chicken is not likely to be available at grocery stores any time soon.

People who have given up meat to keep their carbon footprints low may no longer have to choose between the environment and a juicy piece of chicken.

The United States Department of Agriculture has given two companies approval to sell lab-grown chicken.

Lab-grown, otherwise known as cell-cultivated, meat is made by growing animal cells in stainless steel tanks in labs. The idea is to create an alternative to agriculturally raised meat, but one that is, in fact, animal and not plant-based. The two companies, Upside Foods and Good Meat had been competing to be the first to be approved to produce lab-grown meat.

As of June 2023, both companies have been given the okay by the USDA.

But is lab-grown chicken the same as traditional chicken? Here’s what to know.

Upside’s lab-grown chicken is formed into chicken cutlet or sausage shapes, while Good Meat turns chicken cells into cutlets, nuggets, shredded meat, and satays.

After the cells are selected, they are mixed with a broth mixture made up of amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, salts, and vitamins and placed into the tanks.

Everything one needs to have chicken, including muscle and connective tissue, grows inside the tank creating sheets. The entire process takes about three weeks for the sheets of poultry cells to fully form, which are then turned into specific food shapes.


“The most common response we get is, ‘Oh, it tastes like chicken,’” Amy Chen, Upside’s chief operating officer, told the Associated Press.

University of Colorado Boulder’s Environmental Center, “Animal agriculture produces 65% of the world’s nitrous oxide emissions which has a global warming impact 296 times greater than carbon dioxide.”

Additionally, some people may balk at eating traditional chicken due to concerns about animal welfare or industrial farming practices.

“There are two different narratives here,” said Ricardo San Martin, PhD, director of Alternative Meats Lab at UC Berkeley. “One is science-based and one is from a start-up perspective. It is in our best interest that something like lab-grown meat could be part of our work. We did an analysis to know if [production of lab-grown meat] is feasible at scale, and that’s where we encountered problems because the science and technology tell us that we are very far away from making anything commercial.”

San Martin says that it is impossible to even make a dent in the poultry industry with lab-grown chicken, as the number of chickens killed every year for consumption is 9 billion. The cost of lab-grown chicken is already expensive for the small-scale batches that it can produce. Nine billion is, at the moment, nothing short of impossible.

“[Lab-grown chicken] won’t affect a thing at all in the chicken industry. It’s not a question of whether or not you can eat it safely or produce it. It’s a narrative that is a business narrative, but it’s not a real-world narrative based on science and based on capital cost. This is going to be a very niche market for the elite who would like to try this in expensive restaurants, but we are far away from feeding the world,” he said.

 

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