The restaurant that serves lab-grown meat – 06/18/2023 – Food

It looks like chicken, smells like chicken, and tastes like chicken.

I would never have guessed that the piece of meat in front of me didn’t come from a farm. But it was made in a lab on an industrial estate a few miles away.

I’m at Huber’s Butchery and Bistro in Singapore, the only restaurant in the world to offer what’s called “culture meat” on the menu.

Customer response has been “phenomenal,” according to the restaurant’s owner.

The creator of the meat, the Californian company Eat Just, guarantees that its product manages to be ethical, clean and ecological, without sacrificing flavor.

Billions of dollars are being invested in this sector, but there are big questions about its long-term viability.

Since the first lab-grown burger was unveiled in London in 2013, a creation that cost a staggering $330,000 (R$1.8 million), dozens of companies around the world have joined the race to commercialize meat grown in laboratory at reasonable prices.

So far, only Eat Just has managed to get its product approved for sale to the public after regulators in Singapore, the only country in the world that allows the sale of this type of meat, gave the green light to its chicken in December 2020.

But the product is far from being produced on a large scale.

Lab-grown chicken nuggets were briefly on the menu at a private club in 2021.

That partnership lasted a few months, and this year Huber’s began offering the general public a chicken sandwich and chicken noodle dish, albeit only once a week.

“Cultured meat is real meat, but you don’t have to slaughter an animal,” said Josh Tetrick, chief executive of Eat Just, who spoke to the BBC from San Francisco. “This way of eating makes sense for the future.”

Unlike plant-based substitutes, cultured meat is literally meat. The process involves extracting cells from an animal, which are fed nutrients such as proteins, sugars and fats.

The cells can then divide and grow, before being placed in a large steel bioreactor, which doubles as a fermentation tank.

After four to six weeks, the material is “harvested” from the bioreactor and some vegetable protein is added. It is then modeled, fired and 3D printed to obtain the required shape and texture.

The fried chicken strips on my plate with orecchiette pasta certainly tasted like regular chicken, albeit a bit processed.

Maybe the kind of chicken you’d get at a fast food restaurant.

“It’s meat, it’s perfect!” said Caterina, an Italian student who came here especially to try the lab-raised chicken.

Normally, for sustainability reasons, I wouldn’t eat meat, but Caterina assured me I would.

Your only objection? The chicken is served with pasta, which is not often the case in Italy.

Another customer in Singapore said he was surprised that the lab chicken tasted so much like real meat.

“It’s legit,” he said. “I wouldn’t know where it came from. My only concern would be the cost.”

The pasta dish with chicken I ordered cost US$13.70 (R$65.91 at current prices), but it is a big discount in relation to the cost of producing this meat.

Eat Just doesn’t say exactly how much it spends to make its chicken, but the company’s production capacity is currently 3 kg per week in Singapore.

When you compare that to the 4,000 to 5,000 kg of conventional chicken sold weekly at Huber’s alone, you get an idea of ​​the scale of the task facing the company.

Simply put, they will need to massively increase production to avoid losses on every serving of chicken.

Eat Just notes that it has already achieved a 90% reduction in costs since 2018. The company took me on a tour of its new multi-million dollar production facility in Singapore, which it expects to open in 2024.

The pair of 6,000-liter shiny steel bioreactors is certainly a sign that the intent is there, but it’s a tiny fraction of the millions of tons of chicken that need to be produced to match the current price of traditional chicken.

The industry begs for patience, but many scientists say they’ve seen enough.

“The narrative these companies present is very strong,” said Ricardo San Martín, co-director of the Alt: Meat Lab at the University of California (UC) Berkeley.

“But you have to contrast that discourse with science,” he added. “Do the math, look at every scientific article written by independent experts and you will see that the answer is clear.”

“Can you do this, at scale, at a reasonable cost? No. Can you talk about saving the world with this? Again, no. These companies need to be honest. This is wishful thinking.”

There is only doubt about the possibility of increasing production. There is also uncertainty about the industry’s green credentials, which have been questioned by scientists.

In theory, reducing reliance on land and livestock for meat production should reduce carbon emissions. But for now, the technology needed to create lab-grown meat requires so much energy that it negates any benefit.

A study by the University of California at Davis even estimated that the process produces between 4 and 25 times more carbon dioxide than regular meat. However, East Just calls this study “problematic”.

When asked by the BBC if the whole project could fail, Josh Tetrickz of Eat Just replied: “Of course”.

“Making meat this way is necessary and very uncertain,” he said.

“It’s not easy. It’s complicated. It’s not guaranteed and it might not work. But the other option for us would be to do nothing. So we decided to take a gamble and give it a try.”

Many investors decided to make the same bet. It is estimated that US$ 2.8 billion (R$ 13.47 billion) has been invested so far this year in the development of laboratory meat.

However, trying to make artificially grown meat more than a niche alternative for the wealthy in the developed world will depend on investment from private companies. And it might not be enough.

Governments, noted Tetrick, will need to invest “a significant amount of public money” in lab-grown meat if it is to compete with conventional meat.

“It’s like making the transition to renewable energy… It’s a lifetime project, maybe a lifetime project,” he said.

So far, no country other than Singapore has authorized the sale of artificially grown meat, let alone committed to any major investment.

According to Ricardo San Martín of UC Berkeley, public and private funding for lab meat companies will dry up if these companies don’t “look in the mirror” soon and present realistic forecasts to investors.

“Unless there is a clear path to success at some point in the future, investors and governments are not going to want to spend money on something that isn’t scientifically proven.”

This text was originally published here.