Imitation Game

Lab-grown meat is fast leaving the realm of science fiction and becoming reality, writes LARISSA DUBECKI. But as the technology evolves, will our tastes keep up?

- Larissa Dubecki

You’ve got to hand it to Winston Churchill. Not only did he (almost) single-handedly win World War II, he also predicted the invention of lab-grown meat. An unsung futurist, he wrote in 1931 that the world would develop the technology to divorce the production of meat from the slaughter of animals.

“We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately,” he opined in his essay “Fifty Years Hence”, pre-dating even the invention of Spam by a good six years. “The new foods will from the outset be practically indistinguishable from the natural products.”

The world is running almost four decades past Churchill’s deadline, and the artificial production of an excellent rib-eye or even a convincing chicken wing is still just a gleam in a scientist’s eye. But with the first commercial products anticipated to reach the market later this year, the era of lab-grown meat is nigh.

The first lab-grown burger patty was presented to the world in 2013. The rate of firsts being claimed has accelerated to the point that the whole movement feels like a major scientific breakthrough crossed with the fervour of a 19th-century gold rush.

In late 2017, Just, a San Francisco-based company, released a video of a group of people eating chicken nuggets as Ian, the chicken whose feather yielded the stem cells, strutted about unconcernedly. In September last year, Silicon Valley start-up New Age Meats invited a group of journalists to taste the world’s first cultured pork sausage containing both fat and muscle cells, which was hailed as a breakthrough in recreating the taste of real meat. In December, Israeli company Aleph Farms débuted the first lab-grown steak (don’t get too excited: while the texture was reportedly similar to conventional meat, the taste needed some improving).