MIT's Technology Review is far behind the curve on synthetic meat development. Fake rubber chicken debuted on climate denial conference menus a decade before Beyond Beef left the lab, witness this strapping specimen conferring with late Unification Church Science Editor S.Fred Singer:
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| RUBBER CHICKEN LITTLE : LONG A FAVORITE HEARTLAND CONFERENCE ENTREE |
Lab-grown meat
Instead of killing animals for food, why not manufacture beef or chicken in a laboratory vat? That’s the humane idea behind “lab-grown meat.”
The problem, though, is making the stuff at a large scale. Take Upside Foods. The startup, based in Berkeley, California, had raised more than half a billion dollars and was showing off rows of big, gleaming steel bioreactors.
But journalists soon learned that Upside was a bird in borrowed feathers. Its big tanks weren’t working; it was growing chicken skin cells in much smaller plastic laboratory flasks.
Thin layers of cells were then being manually scooped up and pressed into chicken pieces. In other words, Upside was using lots of labor, plastic, and energy to make hardly any meat.
Samir Qurashi, a former employee, told the Wall Street Journal he knows why Upside puffed up the potential of lab-grown food. “It’s the ‘fake it till you make it’ principle,” he said.
And even though lab-grown chicken has FDA approval, there’s doubt whether lab meat will ever compete with the real thing. Chicken goes for (59 cents to) $4.99 a pound at the supermarket. Upside still isn’t saying how much the lab version costs to make, but a few bites of it sell for $45 at a Michelin-starred restaurant in San Francisco.
