THURSDAY, June 22, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Americans could soon be eating “lab-grown” chicken at upscale restaurants after the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved products made by two companies on Wednesday.
Upside Foods and Good Meat, both based in California, will be the first in the United States to sell meat that is cultivated in a laboratory rather than from slaughtered animals. The meat is still actually meat, coming from animal cells, fertilized eggs, or stored cells.
“Instead of all of that land and all of that water that’s used to feed all of these animals that are slaughtered, we can do it in a different way,” Josh Tetrick, cofounder and chief executive of Eat Just, which operates Good Meat, told the Associated Press.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had already determined the products were safe to eat, the AP reported. Singapore was the first country to begin allowing cultivated meat. The meat is grown in steel tanks, coming out in large sheets and then cut into expected shapes.
The meat is made by taking the chicken cells and combining them with a broth of amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, salts, vitamins, and other elements cells need to grow, the AP reported. The cells grow in tanks, taking about three weeks to mature. More than 150 companies from around the world are working on creating chicken, pork, beef, and lamb from cells, the AP said.
Still, it is unlikely consumers will see cultivated meat in grocery stores soon because it cannot be produced on a large scale yet and is expensive, Ricardo San Martin, director of the Alt:Meat Lab at University of California, Berkeley, told the AP.
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