Dozens of firms are developing cultivated chicken, beef and pork in an effort to reduce the impact of industrial livestock production on the environment and provide drug-free and cruelty-free meat.
And now the San Francisco-based company Eat Just will start offering lab-grown chicken meat in Singapore, after getting regulatory approval on Wednesday from the Singapore Food Agency.
Currently, about 130 million chickens are slaughtered every day for their meat. By weight, 60 percent of the mammals on Earth are livestock, 36 percent are humans and 4 percent are wild, says Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
Livestock accounts for about 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions each year — roughly equivalent to the combined emissions of cars, trucks, planes and ships, says The New York Times. Per gram of protein, cattle production has more of an impact than pork, chicken or eggs, mainly because cattle belch methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Activists say chicken consumption is a key factor behind Amazon deforestation, says the Financial Times.
Lab-grown chicken is made of genuine chicken cells, but it’s grown on a cell-growth scaffold in a factory instead of in a live animal, says Vox.
The approach differs from plant-based meats like the Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat, which use plant proteins to create products that taste like meat, says Vox. Plant-based meat often tastes very similar to the meat products it replaces, but it isn't identical on a cellular level.
The lab-grown approach can be used for beef, pork, and other animal products, but chickens are the most appealing place to start, says Vox.
First, chickens represent most of the animals raised and killed for their meat in the United States, and they're raised in "particularly appalling conditions," says Vox. Second, the biggest challenge for lab-grown meat so far has been getting the structure of the meat right: Lab-grown products don’t as yet have the texture of tissue produced in an animal. That would make a lab-grown steak disappointing, but it’s less of a limitation for many chicken products — such as the chicken nuggets to be available in Singapore.
A city state of 5.7 million people, Singapore currently produces only about 10 percent of its food. But it has ambitious plans to increase local production over the next decade by supporting high-tech farming and new means of food production, says Reuters.