While lab-grown beef might help offset carbon emissions and reduce animal cruelty, the rollout of cell-based fish protein, shellfish and other seafood could be an important innovation to protect the ocean’s incredible biodiversity.
Avant Meats has a unique approach to its lab-grown seafood business. Not content to just mass-produce lab-grown fish fillets, it has focused on developing prized delicacies, especially fish maw.
Fish maw, sometimes referred to as the swim bladder, is an organ that helps a fish control its buoyancy. It’s considered one of the “four treasures” of Chinese cuisine.
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“The texture is similar to the real fish maw before it’s cooked…It is sticky, it has gelatin,” says [chef Eddy] Leung. “But when you eat it, it doesn’t yet have the kind of stickiness the real ones do.”
Avant Meats also let us sample a cultivated fish fillet, derived from a grouper. As a former vegetarian, I’m still squeamish about eating living things. But I didn’t feel guilty about eating meat that was never actually a living, swimming fish. The fillet tasted like the real thing, but it still has a way to go. Instead of flaking like real fish, it had a starchier consistency, more like gnocchi.
