Page 14 - National Poultry Newspaper

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IMAGINE if instead of raising a whole chicken for slaughter, it was pos- sible to pop a feather in a machine and grow a chicken nugget.
That’s basically what a San Francisco-based company says it has fig- ured out how to do.
It claims the process – from feather to nugget – takes about two days.
It also says it will make its first commercial sale of the product by the end of 2018.
You can see an example of the synthetic chicken nuggets in a video at you tube.com/watch?v=_GgP 6jo5DTM, as well as the chicken that provided the feather to grow them.
The company, Just, claims the chicken, Ian, is kicking back at a sanctu- ary in Northern Califor- nia, not far from the lab.
Recently, the company’s CEO and co-founder Tweeted: “Lay down your spears. 400,000 years ago, meat became part of the human diet, and through- out time, human beings have needed to kill the an- imal to enjoy their meat. First, with spears. Then, with industrial machines. Get ready for that para- digm to change.”
How does it taste?
A BBC reporter recently visited the company’s San Francisco headquarters and found the prototype chicken nuggets “impres- sive”.
“The skin was crisp and the meat flavoursome, al- though its internal texture was slightly softer than you would expect from a nugget at, say, McDon- alds or KFC,” the reporter said.
Why bother?
This kind of technology is nothing new, with the first lab-grown hamburg- er unveiled in 2013.
But that single patty cost $US300,000, and, although costs have fallen a long way since then, no company has yet scaled up to commer- cial production.
The Israel-based startup Future Meat Technologies aims to begin selling its first lab-grown products later this year at about $US363 a pound (it hopes to get under $US4.50 a pound within two years).
Aside from lab-grown meat, there’s also fake meat – these are lab-de- signed combinations of plant-based protein.
Although they bleed and sizzle and are much more advanced than your stand- ard chickpea slab, they’re still a way away from the
experience of eating meat. Fake meat has already made it from the lab to the
supermarkets.
The reason for the in-
terest in these non-meat protein products has to do with the enormous envi- ronmental cost of raising chickens, pigs and cows.
It’s estimated raising livestock for meat, eggs and milk generates 14.5 percent of global green- house emissions.
It’s also estimated the production of meat and seafood around the world will massively increase in coming decades, as the global population con- tinues to grow and more people adopt Western- style diets high in animal protein.
Lab-grown meat has been marketed as ‘clean meat’, and Just claims its product is more environ- mentally friendly than chicken.
“Preliminary analyses show significant reduc- tions in land use, water use, greenhouse gas emis- sions, and energy use,” the company said.
“With plants providing nutrients for animal cells to grow, we believe we can produce meat and sea- food that is over 10 times more efficient than the world’s highest-volume slaughterhouse.
“All this without confin- ing or slaughtering a single animal and with a frac- tion of the greenhouse gas emissions and water use.”
Some synthetic meat products are grown from cells placed in a stem cell serum that is commonly from the foetuses of dead cows.
Just says its chicken nug- gets are grown in a plant- based medium.
What if we just ate lentils?
However, culturing meat requires more energy than just growing plant-based meat substitutes like soy- beans and lentils.
It may also require more energy than raising other kinds of animals.
A 2017 study concluded that lab-grown beef re- quired much more energy than growing chickens.
It concluded the tech- nology was developing and the process could get more efficient, but sounded a note of caution about unchecked techno- optimism.
Others have also pointed out that livestock per- forms an important role in digesting grass, extracting nutrients and spreading
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Page 14 – National Poultry Newspaper, November 2018
www.poultrynews.com.au
Chicken nuggets lab-
grown from feathers
togoonsalebyendof
year, company says
Photo: abc.net.au
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