Cultivated-meat companies are betting that they can grow meat in a lab to scale. Other experts aren’t so sure.
On the third floor of a nondescript office building in downtown Jersey City, Niya Gupta, the CEO of Fork & Good, leaned over a small paper bowl containing two pork dumplings. “It’s historic, right?” she said. “You’re going to be one of the first people in the world to ever eat this.”
![Pork without a pig? Pork](https://headtopics.com/images/2023/3/14/washingtonpost/pork-without-a-pig-a-new-jersey-factory-says-it-ha-pork-without-a-pig-a-new-jersey-factory-says-it-ha-1635693798285094920.webp)
We were in a bright, colorful test kitchen and I was preparing to take my first bite of a dumpling filled with pork that had been grown in a vat just across the hall. We had already wandered through the company’s headquarters: a cramped office space where engineers tapped away at open-plan desks, followed by several spacious, light-filled laboratories.
One lab was filled with shining metal vats hooked up to various tubes, pipes, and electrical power; molecular biologists moved among them, adjusting pressures and checking levels. These were the “bioreactors,” which were churning in nutrients to feed the cells and receiving a slim trickle of meat cells in return.
![Pork without a pig? Pork without a pig? ZHD2PJNJY3DDNTIDD3WUX6E2CE size normalized](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/ZHD2PJNJY3DDNTIDD3WUX6E2CE_size-normalized.jpg&w=540)
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