From peta.org
Lab-grown meat. Cultivated meat. Clean meat. Cultured meat. Cell-based meat. Nobody—including the industry itself—is sure what to call it.
It’s simulated muscle tissue created with a scaffolding of proteins and other materials supporting real animal cells. The companies developing these products aim to create foods that will satisfy the cravings of meat eaters without harming animals and with less environmental impact.
Lab-grown meat has been the next big thing in food since 2008, when PETA announced a $1 million prize for the first cultured chicken cells. Companies have been spending billions of dollars to create what they hope will be a smash hit—a new category that they say will be the way of the future.
Despite some regulatory unease—few places have approved lab-grown meat, and some have actually banned it—interest is global. So, what are the top lab-grown meats, and when are they going to be widely available?
The Top Lab-Grown Meats
Good Meat by Eat Just
It’s not known how many billions of dollars have been invested in lab-grown meat around the world, but it’s most likely that San Francisco’s Eat Just is the best funded.
With over $3 billion in investments (some of it for non-lab-grown upgrades for animal-abusing foods like their popular Just Egg), its Good Meat brand’s cultivated chicken is made using a proprietary process for cultivating animal cells in bioreactors—tanks where genetically modified microbes churn out proteins coded by animal DNA.
Eat Just has brought a product to market, a cultivated chicken available in Singapore, which one food critic called “actually pretty tasty.” So far, there has been only limited promotional distribution in the United States, with some test marketing underway.
Aleph Farms
Aleph Farms isn’t messing around: Their flagship product is a steak designed to simulate the experience of cooking and eating cow flesh.
Working with fertilized egg cells from a cow named Lucy, the company is developing a cultivated meat that promises more than 90% reductions in land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and pollution compared with flesh taken from dead animals.
Their Aleph Cuts brand of cultivated steaks was approved in Israel last year, although it is not yet widely available. (Maybe it will be available in space first!)
Wildtype
Not only does Wildtype already have a product on the market in the United States, but the company has broken out of the cultivated-cow-and-chicken-tissue box with a cultured salmon flesh designed to meet the exacting standards of raw dishes like sushi and sashimi.
Commercial fishers haul smart, social marine animals out of the ocean, often with industrial equipment that leaves them gasping for oxygen before they are killed by the weight of the other bodies on top of them. More fish are killed for food than any other kind of animal.
Instead, at its “fishery” in San Francisco, Wildtype grows salmon cells in vats. You can try it at a few select restaurants in the United States.
Umami Bioworks
This Singapore company cultivates flesh from marine animals who are favoured in Asian cuisines. Many kinds of sea life are ripped from their ocean homes only to suffocate to death on the deck of a boat while their loved ones are left wondering what just happened.
Umami’s technology combines 3D printing with cell culture to create simulated marine animal flesh that diners find appealing.
And it’s not limited to human diners: in 2023, Umami Bioworks announced a collaboration to create the planet’s first cat food with cultured fish cells in it.
Is Lab-Grown Meat Vegan?
Cultured meats occupy a new niche that did not exist when the concept of being vegan was articulated in 1944. It occupies a grey zone where animal tissue is grown without living, breathing animals suffering and dying.
Some of the inputs into lab-grown flesh can be animal-derived, including cow hormones or protein from fish or other animals. As for animal testing, lab-grown flesh is not required by U.S. law to be tested on animals, and all of the companies above have committed to not test on animals anywhere in the world, unless explicitly required by law, as part of PETA’s Eat Without Experiments program.
Today, workers in the meat, dairy, and egg industries breed and trap billions of animals, such as chickens and cows, and don’t give them a chance to live satisfying lives before sending them to be slaughtered in massive death factories. Fishers and hunters steal tens of billions more from their natural homes, making them suffer intense pain and destroying the ecosystems they are ripped from.
That’s why lab-grown meat is so promising. If these companies can scale efficiently and bring products to market comparable in taste and price to animal flesh, they will massively reduce suffering on this planet and contribute significantly to reducing the negative climate impacts of raising animals to kill and eat. Billions of animals will be spared painful existences and violent deaths.
