Mmm, Tastes Like Chicken

Good Meat’s cultured bird will satisfy stomachs without ruffling any feathers. Co-founder and CEO Josh Tetrick tells us why.

- Hannah Choo

IT’S HARD TO salivate over the idea of lab-grown – sorry, cultured – chicken. It’s chicken that has never clucked nor laid an egg, but instead begins life with cell isolation, meaning that the cells are sourced through methods such as through a cell bank or biopsy of a real bird. These cells are then cultured and tossed into a bioreactor, fed with a proprietary mix of proteins, amino acids, minerals and other nutrients, before they achieve enough ‘meat’ to be harvested. This is all done in San Francisco inside a lab at Good Meat. It falls under the Eat Just, Inc brand, which earned its reputation through plant-based eggs and mayonnaise.

Singapore is the first country to welcome this novel ‘chicken’ with open arms, and even as someone who considers a relationship with food a strength, eating protein fresh from a lab seemed like a bad idea. But I went for it anyway, and the thought I had when a piece of it hit my unwilling tongue was, tastes like chicken. I was immediately reminded of that scene from The Lion King (1994), when Timon and Pumbaa introduced bugs to Simba, except that this wasn’t slimy. This was an adventure better than bugs, and knowing that I was eating chicken at no cost to Earth felt satisfying. This was guilt-free meat.

Like conventional chicken, it does not have much taste and it has the same nutritional composition, but unlike it, cultured chicken does not have the same bite. Think of it as a love child of a meaty tofu (