Representatives of the American company Memphis Meats said they were able to make the world's first chicken meat grown in laboratory conditions from animal cells. Employees of the organization also invited several guests to taste the resulting product in the form of chicken sticks. The tasters noted that their lunch tasted the same as regular chicken meat.
“It is unusual to understand that we have before us the first meat, which did not require the main thing - the raising of the animals themselves. This is a historic moment for the 'clean' meat movement,”says Memphis Meats co-founder and CEO Uma Valeti in a press release.
The specialists also announced that, in addition to chicken meat, they managed to grow duck meat in laboratory conditions. In February last year, the company also announced that the specialists had made meatballs grown in the laboratory. They were made by culturing cow muscle tissue under sterile conditions.
Memphis Meats notes that the company plans to cut production costs (while it is very high) in the next few years and start selling its products in 2021.
We add that Memphis Meats is one of many companies seeking to literally reduce people's dependence on meat (in its traditional sense). For example, a Dutch researcher Mark Post from the University of Maastricht created meat in the laboratory four years ago. One of the main goals of his work was to produce a product that was not only equally healthy, but also as tasty and appetizing as naturally grown meat.
Post and his colleagues collected cattle stem cell samples from the slaughterhouse. Each cell was “fed” in the laboratory and a cell culture was grown: at the final stage, a strip was obtained about three centimeters in length and one and a half centimeters in width. Stretching the cell culture into strips was necessary in order for the fibers to become tender. Each strip took several weeks to grow.
Then the resulting strips were combined, mixed with similarly cultured fat cells and chopped. One piece of meat consists of 5,000 of these elongated cell cultures. As a result, the scientists got a kind of hamburger cutlet.
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Over time, Post founded Mosa Meats to further develop its products.
Let us also recall other pioneers of the “food of the future” market: Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. The latter, by the way, has recently presented a “bloody” vegetarian cutlet, which tastes like meat. And they all hope to carve a niche in the market by offering products that essentially imitate meat.
Memphis Meats says they can produce beef or poultry in more efficient conditions (and without killing animals). However, other experts argue that lab-grown meat still requires fetal serum (which can only be obtained from unborn calves and chickens) to begin the rearing process.
In 2016, representatives of Memphis Meats in an interview with The Wall Street Journal reported that they intend to replace this whey in the future with a similar component that has a vegetable basis.
What is the advantage of such technologies? The researchers assure that the emissions of gases that cause the greenhouse effect will be reduced, and the territories allocated for pastures will be freed. And, perhaps, ideological disputes between meat-eaters and vegetarians will end.
