In December 2020, Singaporean restaurant 1880 grabbed worldwide headlines by serving up the first commercially available cultured meat. This was also the first-time a country approved the sales of lab-grown meat, which many hoped would signify a shift in the way we ‘raise’ and consume animal-based food products. The lab-grown chicken produced by U.S.-based Eat Just wasn’t a new idea. Still, its acceptance on diners' plates, in restaurant critics write-ups, and the flood of new funding to other clean meat companies meant for the first time just about everyone was considering the just transition of food as an immediate possibility. Cell-based Meat Isn’t New Call it what you will: cell-based agriculture, cellular agriculture, cell-based meat, clean meat, cultured meat, labgrown meat, or cellular meat; the future of food will be lab-based — at least when it comes to animal products. It turns out cell-based meat isn’t a new phenomenon. In 1931 Winston Churchill penned his famous lines. “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. Synthetic food will, of course, also be used in the future. Nor need the pleasures of the table be banished…The new foods will from the outset be practically indistinguishable from natural products, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation.” — Fifty Years Hence Think what you will about Churchill, but when it came to the future of meat, he was a man ahead of his time theorizing the different methods in which one may go about accomplishing such a feat. Maybe a bit too ahead of his time. It wasn’t until 2013 that the first cultured hamburger was developed and taste-tested in Maastricht by Dutch researcher Mark Post at the cost of $280,400. Thankfully a lot has transpired in the last eight years. Costs have come down dramatically, with Future Meat expecting to drop below $2. Paired with the public interest and price decreases, more companies are investing in the clean meat revolution, leading restaurants like 1880 to seriously consider cultured meat as a stable menu option. Interest from Billionaires, Venture Capitalist, and the Agriculture Sector Maybe then, it’s not surprising that some of the biggest meat companies hitched their wagon to the cellularmeat train. Both Tyson Ventures and Cargill invested in Memphis Meats, a cell-based meat company, in 2018 alongside Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Then CEO of Tyson, Tom Hayes, said, “It’s another step toward giving today’s consumers what they want and feeding tomorrow’s consumers sustainably for years to come.” Hayes may have a point about tomorrow’s consumers. A 2019 study found that 65% of Americans would be willing to try clean meat. That was up from the 27% that Kadence International found in their 2018 study. With consumer confidence and willing investors, there’s been a boom in cell-based meat companies around the globe. In 2020 alone, more than $350 million was raised across the industry, with 70+ companies “focused on developing cultivated meat inputs, services, or end products.”
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