Health Hotline Magazine | April 2024

Really the Future of Food? Meat Is Cultivated “

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By Lindsay Wilson

In July 2023, the first cultivated chicken was served in a Washington, D.C. restaurant, just a month after it was approved for commercial sale by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The restaurant, China Chilcano, owned by chef and restaurateur José Andrés, who is also on the board of directors of the company who makes the “chicken”, serves the cultivated meat in two-ounce portions as part of an exclusive tasting menu because of its limited availability. But what exactly is it? And is cultivated meat really the future of food?

A different kind of factory “farmed” meat Also called “protein analogues,” “animal cell-based meat,” and “in vitro meat,” in simple terms, cultivated meat is grown in large bioreactors from animal stem cells. The cells may come from cattle, chicken, or pigs, but all require a growth medium, which includes inputs like growth factors, hormones, amino acids, and nutrients to grow into what eventually becomes a lump of muscle that can be molded or printed (as in 3-D printing) into familiar forms of meat. The company that makes the aforementioned chicken lists these growth mediums on its website: glucose from corn and sugar; protein from soy, pea, wheat and yeast; fats from soybean oil and corn oil; fiber from corn and wheat; and vitamins from corn, yeast, and “fermentation.” Growth factor derived from calves (fetal bovine serum) is used to stimulate cell growth by some companies, but because it isn’t cost effective (currently, a liter costs a little more than $1,300) , some have turned to alternative growth factors, including one derived from fruit flies. “Precision fermentation” is used to produce ingredients that are necessary to improve the flavor, texture, aroma, and/or the nutritive value of cultivated meat. This can include things like flavoring agents, fats, vitamins, or coloring. What is precision fermentation? It is a form of genetic engineering, hiding behind more acceptable language to make it palatable to consumers. The Good Food Institute, a

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