The race to make cell-grown meats mainstream

ON 5 AUGUST 2013, CHEF RICHARD McGeown was in London, preparing to film a cooking segment on British television.

- Jenny Splitter

McGeown was searing a burger, something he’d done countless times before. But this time, an estimated billion people would be watching or reading about what was about to transpire. Because the round, pink mass McGeown was cooking was a $325 000 burger made from stem cells cultivated in a lab by scientists in the Netherlands.

‘It’s close to meat,’ said Hanni Rützler, a food trend researcher who tried the so-called in vitro patty. But, she noted, it lacked fat and juiciness. Perfection wasn’t the goal for Mark Post, the lead scientist behind the burger. ‘This is just to show we can do it.’

Futurists have imagined growing meat from cells for decades. In an essay containing his predictions for a world 50 years beyond its 1931 publication date (republished in the March 1932 issue of Popular Mechanics), Winston Churchill described a future where we ‘escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken’ in favor of a lab-grown breast or wing.

We’re still probably a decade away from lab-grown hot wings, but cultured chicken nuggets and burgers might be available in the next two years, says Kate Krueger, Ph.D., a cell biologist and the director of research for New Harvest, an organization that funds cultured meat research. Initially, those products will probably appear in restaurants, but eventually, they’ll hit grocery stores.

Still, chasing cultured meat is ‘a bet,’ concedes Josh Tetrick. The 39-year-old is the CEO and co-founder of Just, an eight-year-old San Francisco company that makes a plant-based mayonnaise and an egg scramble made from mung beans. Now, Tetrick is hellbent on proving that cultured proteins alone, not plant-based substitutes, have the unique ability to completely replace conventionally farmed meat in our diet.