Love it or hate it, the notion of producing meat in a test tube doesn’t seem to be going away.
When The Western Producer first started writing about cultured meat, I thought we were talking about the kinds of inventions that had been promised for decades but never seemed to materialize, like flying cars.
If I may digress for a moment, whatever happened to flying cars, anyway? I watched them zipping around on The Jetsons as a kid and couldn’t wait for the future. Instead, all we got were social media trolls, reality TV and really expensive phone plans.
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But back to the topic at hand. I never thought that lab meat was something we were going to see any time soon, but I was wrong.
Singapore recently granted regulatory approval for meat that isn’t produced the normal way.
Eat Just, the company from San Francisco that applied for the approval, plans to use its technology to produce chicken and sell it as nuggets, although it hasn’t said when it might start doing so.
The Singapore Food Agency says the company’s manufacturing oversight and safety testing processes were reviewed by an expert working group.
“It was found to be safe for consumption at the intended levels of use, and was allowed to be sold in Singapore as an ingredient in Eat Just’s nuggets product,” the agency said.
So, the genie is out of the bottle. Unless consumers in Singapore who eat these nuggets start growing second heads, I can’t see how we’re going to be able to stop this.
Proponents of lab meat say advantages include no antibiotic residue, less bacterial contamination and a gentler hand on the environmental, presumably by eliminating animal poop and using less water. And of course, people who sell this meat will be able to say, “no animals were hurt during the making of these nuggets.”
Scientists have raised concerns about the environmental impact of the manufacturing processes used to raise meat in a laboratory, but so far these worries haven’t seemed to resonate much with the public.
It’s no small thing that it’s Singapore that has been the first to approve this kind of meat. This is the place, after all, that severely punishes littering and doesn’t even allow chewing gum. A place this obsessed with cleanliness will likely not be ignored.
It really does look like the future has arrived, whether we like it or not.
