To the editor: I was thrilled to learn an Israeli company, Future Meat Technologies, has slashed production costs for cultured meat and hopes to bring it to the United States in the next year-and-a-half. For those who don’t know, cultured meat is grown from cells, without slaughter. It’s better for the environment, public health and animal welfare. Future Meat Technologies can make a quarter-pound of cultivated chicken for a little less than $4. This is down from $7.50 just a few months ago. “We will launch a product in the U.S. market in the next 18 months that will have a commercially viable price,” company CEO Rom Kshuk told the Financial Times, suggesting this will be under $2.
In 1931 Winston Churchill was asked by The Strand Magazine to imagine the world 50 years hence. “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately,” he wrote. Churchill might have got his timing wrong, but a future where the meat on our plates has been cultured rather than butchered is finally coming into view.
A new wave of alternative meat start-ups in California, Europe and Israel is intent on disrupting the $1trn global meat industry. Today 77% of farmland worldwide is dedicated to raising and feeding livestock. Mike Selden of Finless Foods, a fishmeat-replacement start-up, envisions the day when meat production moves off the farm and into gigantic “1,000-litre bioreactors” that churn out new batches of cell-cultured products. It would be, as Jessica Glenza in The Guardian puts it, “like a brewery for meat”.