Lab-Grown Beef and Chicken Will Soon Be in Your Local Grocery Store

Lab-Grown Beef and Chicken Will Soon Be in Your Local Grocery Store

Michael Snyder

Would you like to eat a slab of “beef” or “chicken” that has been artificially “grown” inside a giant vat filled with disgusting goo?  Personally, I will never eat any “beef” or “chicken” that scientists have cooked up in a lab somewhere.  In fact, I would rather crawl on my belly for a mile on a gravel road filled with razor-sharp glass shards than eat a single bite of lab-grown “meat”.  I am sure that many of you feel the same.  But it is coming anyway.  In fact, CNN is reporting that Americans will be able to try lab-grown chicken “soon”…

Soon, Americans are going to be able to try chicken that comes directly from chicken 

cells rather than, well, a chicken.On Wednesday, the USDA gave Upside Foods and 

Good Meat the green light to start producing and selling their lab-grown, or cultivated, 

chicken products in the United States.

If you are not familiar with “lab-grown meat”, the following is a pretty good summary…

In a nutshell, lab-grown meat — or cultivated or cell-based meat — is meat that is 

developed from animal cells and grown, with the help of nutrients like amino acids, 

in massive bioreactors.

This happens in a production facility that looks a lot like a brewery: When you picture it, 

don’t think of people in white coats and hairnets peering through microscopes into petri 

dishes, but instead people in white coats and hairnets wandering between giant vats.

It wasn’t supposed to be available to the public so quickly, but apparently some people have

 already had an opportunity to sample it at a restaurant in San Francisco…

We are being told that “lab-grown beef” is coming soon too, and it is being touted as an 

environmentally-friendly alternative to normal beef.

But according to one recent study, “lab-grown beef” is actually far worse for the environment…

Researchers at UC Davis have made a startling discovery that could change the way we 

view lab-grown meat.

As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, they found that the meat alternative’s 

environmental impact appears to be “orders of magnitude” higher than retail beef you 

can buy at the grocery store — itself already a very environmentally damaging foodstuff 

— at least based on current production methods.

If confirmed, the research could be damning: lab-grown meat, long seen as a greener 

alternative to meat products that don’t involve the slaughter of animals, could be more 

harmful to the environment than the products it’s trying to replace.

How ironic.

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