Lab grown meat

Korean scientists have taken muscle and fat stem cells from cows and transplanted them into grains of rice. The end result is a new, high-protein food that should be cheap, environmentally friendly, and useful for famines, military or space travel.

Great strides are being made in the field of lab-grown meat, but its price remains a barrier to wide use. British startup Moolec has created what it claims is a less costly alternative, in the form of soya plants that produce pig-protein-rich beans.

Good Meat's cultured chicken has been on sale in Singapore since late 2020. Now, the company has announced that it's cleared all regulatory hurdles in the US and will offer its product at a Washington, DC restaurant in short order.

One of the challenges of creating lab-grown meat involves giving it a texture like that of the real thing. A new cell culture scaffold could help, as it's reportedly inexpensive, edible, and made of plant-based substances.

In the past two years, Israel's Steakholder Foods has brought us a lab-grown steak and lab-grown Wagyu beef morsels. Now, it has produced what it says are the world's first whole fillets of cultivated fish … grouper, to be precise.

Cultivated meat is shaping up as a viable alternative to traditional meat production. However, it’s missing one element crucial to flavor: fat. Now researchers have developed a way of creating fat with a texture and make-up similar to animal fat.

Although great strides are being made in the field of lab-grown meat, the stuff is still quite expensive to produce. A new 3D-printing ink could help, while also making use of agricultural waste that would otherwise be discarded.

Israeli cultured meat outfit Believer Meats, known formerly as Future Meat, is looking to play a pivotal role in the availability of lab-grown meat products, and a new facility under construction in the US should help these efforts along.

The FDA has given California company Upside Foods the green light for its lab-grown chicken, paving the way for it to reach market shelves next year, and making the US the second country in the world to allow legal sales of lab-grown meat products.

Although Wagyu beef is renowned for its rich marbling, it does still come from slaughtered cattle – a fact that doesn't sit well with many people. Steakholder Foods is developing an alternative, in the form of its 3D-printed Omakase Beef Morsels.

Microalgae is already being used as a fish-free alternative to the fish feed commonly used in aquaculture operations. Taking things a step further, scientists are now looking at using the plant-like organisms to replace the prawns eaten by humans.

In a typical poultry processing facility, much of the waste is simply dumped in a landfill or burned. Two new processes, however, make use of the feathers, blood and bones – plus one of them may ironically reduce the number of chickens slaughtered.