Problems at Lab-Grown-Meat Startup

Joe Fassler wrote an interesting article in Wired about shenanigans in the world of unnecessarily complex and capital intensive artificial meat production. The article has the title Insiders Reveal Major Problems at Lab-Grown-Meat Startup Upside Foods, and offers some tasty revelations.

These include

ON JULY 1, five diners sat down at the counter of the Michelin-starred Bar Crenn in San Francisco for an unusual meal. They had won a competition to become the first customers in the US to eat cultivated meat—real animal cells grown in bioreactors instead of a living animal. For a nominal price of $1, they tucked into two pieces of a cultivated chicken fillet made by the California startup Upside Foods, one of only two companies cleared to sell cultivated meat in the US. “I thought it was delicious,” says Oscar Merino, one of the diners. “The taste and the texture was incredible.”

This sets the scene, but it turns out that all is not what it seems in the world of Frankenstein Meat Labs, because

former and current employees say the Emeryville plant tells a misleading story of how Upside’s chicken is made. In fact, sources say, the company’s flagship product—the juicy whole cuts of chicken served at Bar Crenn—are brewed, almost by hand, in tiny bottles. The huge bioreactors, those sources claim, simply aren’t capable of reliably brewing the sheets of tissue needed to form whole cuts of meat such as chicken fillets.

Insiders say that Upside’s meticulously crafted fillets are instead the result of a process that is more arduous and unwieldy than using bioreactors: Employees grow thin sheets of tissue in small plastic flasks called roller bottles and combine them to create a larger hunk of chicken, an approach that is expensive and requires many hours of labor to produce even a small amount of meat. According to former and current employees at Upside, this process happens in a laboratory that doesn’t feature in the factory tours Upside gives to journalists and members of the public.

Its almost as though if soya didn’t exist then somebody would have to invent it.