At Dutch Design Week, London-based food designer Leyu Li showcased three conceptual products that combine lab-grown meat with vegetables, called Broccopork, Mushchicken and Peaf.
The speculative project suggests how lab-grown meat might be cultivated on plant tissue, resulting in a range of hybrid meaty vegetables.
Leyu Li presented the designs as part of Future Farmers Market, an exhibition of imaginary food products that formed part of the Embassy of Food at Dutch Design Week.
The designer also posted a series of TikTok videos from the pseudonym account Meaty Aunties, promoting the products to an audience who don’t know whether they are real or not.
Her aim is to explore whether customers would be more open to buying cultivated meat – which is grown from real animal cells – if it came in the form of vegetables.
“People share their plant-based food reviews everywhere and anytime at TikTok,” she said. “These findings make me more curious about how people will react to cultivated meat products in the future.”
Cultivated meat has existed for some time, with the “world’s first lab-grown steak” created back in 2018. But it only became commercially available for the first time in 2020, when Singapore approved the sale of lab-grown chicken nuggets.
In November 2022, California-based Upside Foods became the first cultivated meat company to be granted approval by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“The supermarket shelves are filled with plant-based meat and cultivated meat is on the horizon,” said Li.
“What debates and dialogues will happen around lab-grown meat? How might in-vitro biotech change people’s daily lives and food culture?”
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