How Is Lab Grown Chicken Made?

The USDA recently gave the go-ahead for the production of cultivated meat, which is chicken that was grown in a lab. With this approval, companies can start selling chicken made from animal cells instead of chickens raised in factory farms and killed. But the industry still faces hurdles before Americans see it in their grocery stores. William Brangham reports.

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• Aman Nawaz: Almost 90% of Americans eat meat as part of their diet. But earlier this year, the Agriculture Department gave the go-ahead for what’s called “cultivated meat” to be made. That is chicken grown in a lab. With this approval, companies can start selling chicken made from animal cells instead of chickens raised in factory farms and killed. We get a taste of what the future might be like from William Brangham. William .
• Chef at Good Meat, Nate Park: We put a little allium glaze on it, which is just a mix of garlic and onions. Just add some color and flavor to the outside.
• William Brangham: Chef Nate Park is finishing off a dish at the Good Meat plant in Alameda, California, that looks like it came straight out of a science fiction movie.
• Nate Park: A lot of people have no idea what this is. These people might back off because they don’t know what it is. But I think it will be easy for everyone to get on board once they know what it is, that it’s just chicken, and that it tastes great.
• “Getting people used to the idea of cultivated chicken” is what Good Meat is all about, says William Brangham. It’s one of only two companies that the government now lets make it.
• Nate Park: We’re going to cut it up in front of you. We want you to know what’s coming your way.
• William Brangham: grilled, cut up, and served with sweet potato puree and heirloom beans I would have thought this was a great meal even if you hadn’t said anything.
• Nate Park: Well, thank you.
• William Brangham: It tastes, as the saying goes, like chicken.
• Nate Park: Its chicken.
• William Brangham: And delicious.
• Nate Park: Thank you.
• But before I ate it for lunch today, William Brangham: That chicken meat could only be seen here, in this bioprocessing lab, as tiny stem cells. Theyre all taken from real chickens without harming them. The cells are then fed, kept warm, and stirred all the time so that they can grow in these huge bioreactors. It’s all part of a long process meant to look like how real animals grow.
• Josh Tetrick, CEO of Eat Just: People have talked about raised meat for more than one hundred years.
• William Brangham: One of the founders and CEO of Eat Just is Josh Tetrick. Eat Just runs Good Meat. What is the rationale for cultivated meat? .
• First, we have to accept that people love meat, says Josh Tetrick. And it’s really hard to get people to stop eating meat and instead eat beans or something else plant-based, even though it would be better for them. How do you do that? I think the answer is that you make real meat that tastes and feels the same way people are used to, but you don’t have to kill billions of animals to do it. Because every animal has to be killed, you can’t feed everyone without that many animals.
• William Brangham: About a third of all the greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming the planet are caused by food production around the world. And making meat is the main cause of that effect, since most of the world’s forests and croplands are used to feed animals that we then eat.
• If we want to fix the climate problem, Josh Tetrick says we must switch from fossil fuels to clean energy. Also, we need to stop intensive animal farming, which takes up a third of the world’s land, and start using a completely different method.
• But not everyone is on board with this new plan, William Brangham Ned Spang from the University of California, Davis says that we can’t just assume that lab-grown meat is good for the setting.
• Ned Spang is an associate professor at the University of California, Davis, and he studies how food affects the environment. He says that even though no animals are being killed, a new report he helped write about cultured meat shows that it’s not nearly as environmentally friendly as many people would like.
• In terms of energy use or greenhouse gas emissions, Ned Spang and I found that farmed meat might have a bigger effect than conventional farming.
• William Brangham: And how is that possible?
• Ned Spang: The main reason is that these are still animal cells, which means they need to eat. Plus, we need to feed the cells in the same way that a cow does to build muscle: by giving them grass or corn. So we need to give them glucose for energy and amino acids to build proteins. And it takes a lot of resources to make the food that these cells need to grow into cultivated meat.
• William Brangham: Tetrick, on the other hand, says that as technology gets better, farmed meat could pollute much less and use a lot less land and water than regular meat. And he says that the way we do things now needs to change because it hurts animals and the environment.
• Josh Tetrick: Every day they eat food that no one would be proud of if they actually ate it.
• There are now a number of companies on the market that make plant-based meat substitutes, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Burgers. But cultivated meat will likely be a tougher sell. Based on a new poll from the Associated Press, half of adults in the U.S. S. say they probably won’t try it, and a lot of them say it sounds weird.
• We found that putting it on a plate, having them hang out with their friends, and having them eat the chicken was the best way to get someone to go from “That’s kind of weird” to “Okay, I’m cool with it.” Between the first and second parts, they say, “Okay, this is just chicken.”
• William Brigham: There aren’t many restaurants in the U.S. S. have served farm-raised chicken, such as China Chilcano in Washington, D.C. C.
• William Brangham: Take it right like this?
• Daniel Lugo, Head Chef, China Chilcano: Yes. Dont be afraid to get a little messy. No worries.
• William Brangham: That is delicious. This is a traditional Peruvian street food made by head chef Daniel Lugo. It is owned by famous chef Jose Andres. What did you think when Jose first told you that he wanted to try cooking with this special kind of chicken?
• Daniel Lugo: Well, I was really interested and excited at first. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised when I tried it and liked it.
• William Brangham: But it won’t be easy to get farmed meat into more restaurants and, eventually, grocery stores. Reports say that Good Meat is looking for ways to lower its rising costs of production. The company wanted to make up to 30 million pounds of meat every year in the future.
• Josh Tetrick: Yes, we are not even close to being able to scale up enough to solve this problem. And it was the same way with solar power thirty years ago. And we were in the same place 20 years ago with electric cars. And if you’re going to change the system in the end, you should start now because it will be a very, very hard, potentially decades-long process.
• William Brangham: This problem is now being tried out in labs like this one. For the “PBS NewsHour,” Im William Brangham in Alameda, California.

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How lab-grown chicken is made

FAQ

What is bioengineered meat made of?

Take a cow for example. Scientists will use a cow’s stem cells, the building blocks of muscle and other organs, to begin the process of creating the cultured meat. The cells are placed in petri dishes with amino acids and carbohydrates to help the muscle cells multiply and grow.

Are we eating cloned chicken?

Despite the FDA approval in principle of meat from cloned cattle, pigs, and goats, in practice, clones are not expected to enter the food supply, the FDA said. They are rare and expensive, and the US agriculture department estimates that most of about 600 cloned animals in the United States are used for breeding.