Beyond the impossible: Lab-grown meat hopes to lure skeptics of plant-based options
Winston Churchill foresaw the biggest food innovation of the 21st century back in 1931: “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”
Today that prospect nears, but is still so new it doesn’t have a widely agreed-upon name: cultured meat, clean meat, lab-grown meat, cultivated meat or, by its detractors, test tube meat.
All those terms denote meat grown from animal cells, rather than from a living, sentient animal. I’ll call it cultured meat, but regardless of name, it may start arriving at small scale in 2022 from companies such as Mosa Meat, Memphis Meats, Aleph Farms, and Meatable. It will be positioned as