Lab grown meat

Australian food company Vow is working on lab-grown foie gras that not only takes the cruelty out of producing it, but also aims to make a distinctively tastier version. You can now sample it in select restaurants in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Scientists in Japan have created hybrid plant-animal cells, essentially making animal cells that can gain energy from sunlight like plants. The breakthrough could have major benefits for growing organs and tissues for transplant, or 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.