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Is Lab-Grown Meat Ready for the Dinner Table?

Cultured meat may be coming to a store near you soon!

Salman Hasan
Predict
4 min readDec 31, 2022

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Steak being cut
Photo by José Ignacio Pompé on Unsplash

Does anyone recall the $300,000 burger — where the meat was not from a slaughterhouse but grown in a lab? The cultured meat industry has come a long way from those sticker shock days. But, not yet to a grocery aisle nearby — at least not in most of the world! However, the day may not be too far! With multiple cultured meat start-ups racing to build affordable lab-meat patties and FDA tag of safety. That said, and beyond the novelty of it, why even bother??

Meat has long been a staple of many diets across the world. Some consider cooked meat as the original innovation that led to our civilizational progress. It’s widely consumed across the world and the demand is only growing! This growth in demand has led to industrial meat production — providing cheap meat for all. But at a huge cost to the environment and of course the mistreatment of the animals. Consider this — the share of global greenhouse gas emissions attributed to livestock is 14.5%.

With the global focus on reducing our carbon footprint and some sensibility around the ethical treatment of animals, there has been an interest in lab-grown meat. The idea, very simply, is to use animal cells to grow muscles and fat in vats in a lab that taste identical to the said animal…

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Salman Hasan
Salman Hasan

Written by Salman Hasan

Trained scientist; Business consultant; Armchair philosopher; I write on various topics including science, climate change, startups, and business.

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