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meal with lab-grown chicken

“British start-up Meatly has received the green light from UK regulators for its lab-grown meat to be used in pet food, with plans to initially focus on dogs,” reports the London Telegraph:

The first batches of pet food which include its cultivated chicken are expected to appear on sale towards the end of the year after taste trials have been conducted among dogs.  It means the UK will be the first European country where lab-grown pet food is available for people to buy. Owen Ensor, Meatly’s chief executive and co-founder, said this followed a push from regulators and government to champion food innovation and speed up approval processes after Brexit, with the UK seizing on its “huge advantage”. He said: “The European Union has traditionally been a more conservative regulator [than the United Kingdom] and the US is getting embroiled in food politics – unnecessarily, in my opinion. So the UK can really step up here.

Meatly, which was founded in 2022, is the first company in the world to get authorisation for cultivated pet food, which uses meat grown from animal cells. Some other countries including Singapore have already approved cultivated meat for human consumption….Meatly is planning to licence its technology to other companies, which may then be able to use it to create meat for human consumption. Mr Ensor said the process to create this type of meat would be “very similar”…. Mr Ensor added: “There’s a real challenge for people who love animals so they want to get a pet but that requires killing other animals to feed those pets.”

On the other hand, Italy and Florida have banned the sale of lab-grown meat. Last year, Italy “banned the production of lab-grown meat in a bid to protect its powerful agricultural industry,” reported The Financial Times. “We are the first nation to ban it, with all due respect to the multinationals who hope to make monstrous profits” at the expense of “citizens’ jobs,” said Italy’s agriculture minister. A league of Italian farmers launched a campaign the previous year to ban cultivated meat. The Financial Times reported that “Italian agribusinesses had feared that future demand for cultivated meat among young Italians concerned about the environmental consequences of meat consumption could hit their bottom line.”

There’s nothing wrong with the taste of lab-grown meat. As Reason Magazine’s Emma Camp notes, “I’ve actually had lab-grown meat before, and it’s pretty good! Politicians [who want to ban lab-grown meat] are worried about competition for meat industry giants, not protecting Americans.”

If people are concerned about the environmental impact of consuming meat, they can also shift to consuming types of meat that don’t have as much effect on the environment. For example, guinea pigs are a much more efficient source of protein, per acre, than cattle, generating four times as much meat per acre. Guinea pigs also generate less greenhouse gas emissions per pound of meat. So they are an earth-friendly food.

In Peru, guinea pigs are often eaten with potatoes and salsa, or french fries. Guinea pig (called cuy in Peru) has been served whole on special occasions since Inca times. Eating insects — such as mealworms and locusts — rather than beef or pork also reduces greenhouse gas emissions and pollution: “Compared to cattle, weight for weight, insects emitted 80 times less methane — a gas with 25 times more impact on global temperature levels than carbon dioxide. And crickets produced 8-12 times less ammonia than pigs.”