By James Packard
Lab-grown meat can now be sold in the U.S., but some Americans are still hesistant to buy or consume it.
The Department of Agriculture recently gave final approval for two companies to produce meat created without animal slaughter: GOOD Meat and Upside Foods.
These companies producing lab-grown meat — or cultivated meat, as it’s known in the industry — are making protein from cows, chicken, pigs and goats without harming or slaughtering any animals, not even using eggs or milk.
There’s been $2.8 billion in investment in this new field, according to industry group the Good Food Institute.
But what is cultivated meat exactly?
“Cultivated meat is simply making the real meat that we eat every day outside of an animal, so taking real animal cells directly from a chicken and producing food directly from it” said Eric Schulze with Upside Foods.
The notion of lab-grown meat may seem bizarre. But Cecilia Chang, deputy CEO of Mission Barns in Berkeley, California, says if you’ve eaten cheese, you’ve probably already eaten lab-grown animal products.
“A great example is rennet,” she said. “It’s an enzyme used in cheese making that I think originally we sourced from the intestines of pigs or cows or something like that. But now it’s recombinantly produced, which means we have a microbe that we train to produce rennet.”
Mission Barns makes bacon, sausages and meatballs using fat cells from pigs without harming any pigs.
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