High production costs, regulation: Obstacles keeping lab-grown meat off our plates

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Image: ABC News

The thought I had when the $100 chicken nugget hit my expectant tongue was the one cartoon villains have when they entrap a foreign critter and roast him over a spit: It tastes like chicken.

[Editor’s note: Olga Khazan is a staff writer for the Atlantic.]

That’s because it was chicken—albeit chicken that had never laid an egg….This chicken began life as a primordial mush in a bioreactor….This meat was what most of the world calls “lab grown,” but what Just, the company that makes the nugget, and other Silicon Valley start-ups want me to call “cultured meat” or “cell-based” meat, or better yet, “clean meat.”

Regardless of what you call it, Just and others say it’s coming….Before that happens…there would need to be 25 to 100 culturing facilities just to fulfill America’s demand for meat. These companies are also searching for a way to reduce the cost of the “media”—the vitamin slush the cells incubate in—potentially by reusing it. Finally….they need the U.S. government to figure out a way to regulate the product, so people can rest assured that it’s not going to make them ill.

Read full, original article: The Coming Obsolescence of Animal Meat

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