Up next: Lab-grown meat

File this under “Uh, waiter? There’s a chicken wing in my petri dish.”

Just as we’re trying to get our collective heads around the notion of milk made from oats, and sausages and burgers that don’t contain any meat, scientists are busily concocting lab-grown “cultured” meat by nourishing animal cells in a lab, coaxing them to grow into future steak, sausage, chicken nuggets and more. The same principles are also being applied to seafood.

Cultured meat raises hope on a number of fronts, including the potential to ease world hunger and spare countless animals that would otherwise be raised for industrial agriculture, and it bodes well for the environment, as it generates less greenhouse-gas emissions and uses less land and water than commercial meat production does.

Consumers hoping to try lab-grown meat will have to be patient because cultured meat products are not yet widely commercially available. Vegetarians should note that unlike meat imitators such as Impossible Meat and Beyond Meat products, lab-grown meat is not plant-based but is, in fact, meat.