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Article On Lab Grown Meat

Lab-grown meat is beginning to enter the market. In Singapore, a company called Eat Just gained approval to sell lab-grown chicken nuggets. While lab-grown meat could help address environmental and ethical issues with conventional meat production, it also raises questions about who will control the food supply and whether food diversity may decline if only certain cuts are economically viable to produce in labs. Careful consideration is needed to ensure the industry develops in a way that supports public and private interests as well as food diversity.

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37 views4 pages

Article On Lab Grown Meat

Lab-grown meat is beginning to enter the market. In Singapore, a company called Eat Just gained approval to sell lab-grown chicken nuggets. While lab-grown meat could help address environmental and ethical issues with conventional meat production, it also raises questions about who will control the food supply and whether food diversity may decline if only certain cuts are economically viable to produce in labs. Careful consideration is needed to ensure the industry develops in a way that supports public and private interests as well as food diversity.

Uploaded by

amandaongjiayi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Lab-grown meat is on the rise.

It’s time to
start asking tough questions

A nugget made from lab-grown chicken meat at a restaurant in Singapore. Photograph: Eat
Just/AFP/Getty Images

The salad looks relatively normal: fried chicken, leafy greens, red cabbage,
slices of mandarin, a mango-sesame dressing on the side. But this is no
ordinary salad. Getting hold of this particular lunchbox involved staking out a
hotel lobby and quick fingers on a delivery app. The prize? Not tickets to a K-
pop concert, but one of the world’s first servings of cell-cultured meat.

Our modest serving has been breaded and fried and tastes like a diced chicken
schnitzel. With some poking and prodding, the nugget reveals none of the long
muscle fibers you would expect to find in a chicken breast. This is perhaps
responsible for a slight hint of rubber-ball bounciness, but overall the texture
is impressively avian. We’d eat it again.

We have pescatarians, vegans, flexitarians, locavores and of course


vegetarians. But what’s the word for those of us who make the choice to eat
meat not raised on a farm or slaughtered in an abattoir, but grown in a lab?
Perhaps the “cytovore”, consumer of cells.

It sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. In Singapore, the US company Eat
Justgained approval to sell its nuggets of lab-grown chicken to consumers in
December 2020. Under the brand name “Good Meat”, Eat Just rolled out its
first products at an exclusive social club. Diners sample a bao with sesame
chicken and pickled cucumber and a maple waffle served with chicken
nuggets.

In April, Eat Just partnered with another restaurant to begin introducing its
chicken to a wider public via a delivery service. As well as the Asian chicken
salad, the Cantonese restaurant is also selling their novel meat in the form of
chicken dumpling and chicken fried rice. Demand has already been high – just
a few minutes after appearing online, the eight servings for the day were sold
out.

Cultured meat has made strides in the last few years, but production remains
small. Although the science of tissue culture has been around for more than
half a century, growing sufficient flesh to make an edible product at a
competitive price has been the major challenge. Good Meat’s meals are priced
at 23 Singapore dollars (about US$17) – certainly not a cheap portion.

The company is actively working to scale up supply and bring down costs, but
it’s clear that challenges remain. Consumer production requires using larger
quantities of expensive growth media and bioreactors adapted from the
pharmaceutical and biotech industries. These look like the giant steel vats you
might see on a brewery tour. The cells grown in these tanks are mixed with
other food products to obtain a desirable taste and consistency. This high level
of processing is certainly not likely to appeal to everyone.

Our lunch also came with a pair of 3D glasses. A QR code on the packaging led
to a YouTube video that can be viewed through the glasses, serving as an
introduction to Good Meat and the philosophy behind their products. In the
video we see images of burning rainforests fade to happy dinner table scenes
as we reduce the environmental impact of meat consumption. We see land
cleared for agriculture to feed animals for human consumption, with crops
that stress water supplies and use petrochemical fertilizers. We also learn
how the animals themselves, especially cows, contribute to greenhouse gases.

“Tank to table” eating would sidestep some of these problems, in addition to


its ethical advantages. But as the industry begins to scale up, there are other
questions that need careful consideration. What resources are laboratory-
made meats consuming? What is being “fed” to the bioreactors and where is
this feed coming from? What sort of energy consumption is involved in
keeping the reactors buzzing?

The broader economic and political effects of a substantial transition to lab-


grown meat would be significant. Here the world might learn from what is
already happening in Singapore. The small city-state is rapidly embracing in-
vitro meat as a solution to problems of land scarcity and food security.
Traditional forms of agriculture cannot meet the nation’s ambitious “30 by
30” policy goal (providing 30% of the population’s nutritional needs by 2030).

Lab-grown chicken at a media presentation in Singapore. Photograph: Nicholas


Yeo/AFP/Getty Images

But Singapore also aims to turn lab meat into a novel industry. Beyond Eat
Just, the government is providing funds for research and development for
many similar companies. Officials want to provide the kind of tech ecosystem
that will make the country a hub for future food. Singapore hopes to gain
expertise, intellectual property and capital. The few Singaporean farmers who
remain will need to reimagine themselves as entrepreneurs.

All this represents a significant opportunity. But it also raises concerns about
how the industry is likely to develop. When genetically modified foods (GMFs)
were introduced in the 1980s and 1990s, they caused a significant economic
shift within the food industry. Through the ownership of the intellectual
property in seeds, large companies such as Monsanto, Bayer, Dow, Dupont
and Syngenta came to exert significantly more economic power over
agriculture. Opponents of GMFs worried not only about the safety of these
crops, but also about monopolistic control over the world’s food supplies. The
entrepreneurial enthusiasm for lab-grown meat raises similar concerns. If Eat
Just or other lab-based meat companies end up providing a significant
proportion of our protein, their technologies will become increasingly critical
to the world’s food supplies. This means more control over what we eat and
what we pay for it.
Anti-GMF activists have also worried about the effects on the diversity of our
food. India is home to hundreds of varieties of “brinjal” and long resisted
Monsanto’s GM eggplant, concerned that it would outcompete local varieties,
leading to an impoverishment of diet and dishes. The meat we currently eat is
similarly diverse – depending on where you live, you might dine on anything
from frogs to buffalo, from snails to chickens and cows. We also variously eat
feet, necks, intestines, tails, blood, uteruses, and so on. Will all these be
produced in a lab too? Or will technological limitations and economies of scale
ensure that we only get chicken nuggets? Singapore is rightly proud of
its diverse food culture. What will happen to all of our favourite dishes (like
the local kway chap) that require the “other” parts of animals?

In the long run, perhaps the ethical and environmental benefits will outweigh
these social costs of lab meat. But now is also the right time to make sure that
the industry develops in ways that don’t result in monopoly ownership of the
food supply or the flattening of food culture. The investments that the
Singapore government is making should result not only in more private
ownership but in a “commons” of new food technologies, where some
resources are publicly owned and communities have a role in governing and
managing them. These investments should also be used to ensure as much
diversity as possible in lab-grown products.

We need a lab meat that serves public as well as private interests. These are
the stakes of becoming a cytovore.

• Hallam Stevens is an associate professor of history in the school of


humanities at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Yvonne
Ruperti is a lecturing instructor in baking and pastry arts at the Culinary
Institute of America’s Singapore campus

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