Lab-Grown Meat Is Here

Laboratory-grown meat is now available for human consumption for the first time, having been recently approved by the relevant government agency in Singapore.  This is a huge deal for environmentalists, who point out quite correctly that the destruction of Earth’s rainforests to make way for the production of beef is as deleterious to the stability of our planet’s climate as the consumption of fossil fuels.

This article presents the work of a privately held company, Eat Just, founded in 2011, that has been working feverishly on lab-grown chicken nuggets since its inception, ultimately to become a substitute for the 130 million chickens that are slaughtered every day of the year.

The product is made in a bioreactor in which cells from biopsies of live animals are combined with plant-based ingredients. The entire nutrition used to grow the products comes from these plants, and so, in this way, it’s not altogether different from the plant-based meat products, e.g., Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, that have been around for several years.

In addition to its impact on the environment, it’s far better for the human diet than slaughtered animals, in that in contains no hormones or antibiotics.