By ED STANNARD
There may come a day when the chicken or beef at a fine restaurant or in the supermarket was created without slaughtering an animal.
That future is here at Bar Crenn in San Francisco, owned by three-star Michelin chef Dominique Crenn, which will take reservations for its first cultivated-meat dinners on Thursday.
It’s a partnership with UPSIDE Foods, one of two companies, along with GOOD Meat, that is creating chicken from stem cells, and follows the approval in June by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the companies to market cell-cultured chicken.
GOOD Meat has teamed up with chef José Andrés of World Central Kitchen and Huber’s Butchery in Singapore, which has been selling the product and serving it at its Huber’s Bistro.
It’s real meat, because it has the same DNA as the cow or chicken it came from, say researchers at the University of Connecticut. But they caution that it will take some time for cultivated, or cultured, meat to become a common item at the supermarket or on the menu because of the challenge of manufacturing it at a large scale.
They also say its promise in battling culture change may be exaggerated, a stance disputed by the CEO of UPSIDE Foods, Eric Schulze.
“At the current stage, the technology is not there yet, but we are developing the technology towards that direction so that we can solve the problem” of mass manufacturing the meat, said Yupeng Chen, associate professor of biomedical engineering at UConn.
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