Food for Thought: There Will Be Blood

Lab-grown meat still requires slaughterhouse products.

- By Tom Philpott

LAB MEAT—flesh grown in massive tanks instead of in the bodies of sentient animals—offers the promise of having our steak and eating it guilt-free, too. No vast amounts of water-polluting chemicals to grow feed crops; no low-paid slaughterhouse workers; no climate-warming gases from cow burps; and no billions of animals slaughtered each year to satisfy our carnivory.

Once a staple only of science fiction, the stuff is poised to land on your dinner plate this year, at least according to boosters of the cultivated-meat industry (to use its preferred name). In Singapore— the only nation to approve lab meat for sale—you can already go to the JW Marriott South Beach hotel and order steamed chicken dumplings made with “real meat without slaughter” in the form of chicken cells grown by a US-based company called Eat Just. And other cell-meat startups vow to bring product to market in 2022, pending regulatory approval.

A variety of obstacles stand in the way. The biggest involves something much less appetizing than chicken dumplings: the blood of unborn cow fetuses, extracted from their mothers after slaughter.