Quotes from Yahoo News, February 18, 2024
Meat is a staple food for many Americans. Even with the emergence of various new plant-based substitutes, the demand for pork, beef and poultry does not seem to diminish.
A lot of animals have to die to produce all that meat. This also worsens some of the biggest challenges facing the world today, such as global warming, environmental damage, water scarcity and disease outbreaks.
Recent advances in science have enabled the development of products that could offer a solution to the environmental and ethical issues associated with conventional meat consumption: cultured meat. This is meat that is grown from animal cells in a laboratory, without requiring animal slaughter or land use.
Cultivated meat is the term for meat that is produced in a laboratory from animal cells, without involving the killing of animals. It has the same cellular structure and composition as conventional meat, but it does not come from an animal that has been bred and slaughtered. This is different from some of the plant-based alternatives that have recently emerged, which are made from plant proteins and other ingredients to mimic the taste and texture of meat.
The production of meat from cell cultures has attracted a lot of investment in recent years, and the industry achieved a significant breakthrough last year, when two companies received authorization to market cultured chicken to consumers for the first time. However, the goal of making cultivated meat widely available and affordable is still far from being realized. Several companies can produce it in small batches, but none of them have mastered the process of scaling it up in a cost-efficient way. Currently, cultured meat is not sold anywhere in the U.S.
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