A Peculiar Recipe

It’s a cellular love story as old as time. Two gametes meet, and just like that, what was once two becomes a singular possibility of new life. Whether that life force is born to live and thrive or lie on the nearest dinner plate was decided by a food chain constructed long before the gloom of factory farming and global warming plagued the planet Earth.

On a planet as overpopulated and polluted as the one human's rule, factory farming has long been regarded as a necessary evil. According to The Humane League, as of 2020, there are roughly 1.6 billion animals confined within the 25,000 factory farms spread across the United States. However, with growing populations and sustained demand, the need for meat has become more significant than even the factory farms can supply.

Apart from halting meat production completely, the most efficient way to save the planet from crumbling under the effects of global warming is a solution that seems more fitting in a science fiction novel than reality, cultured, or lab-grown meat. A process that is so strange that a person could realistically eat a piece of poultry from the cell of the chicken it was grown from right in front of them.

Cultivated meat is in no way artificial or vegetarian. It’s genuine animal meat that was cultivated by scientists in a lab as opposed to being slaughtered on a farm. In a bioreactor (cultivator), the banked animal cells are grown at high densities and volumes. Like in the animal’s body, the cells are then fed a makeup of amino acids, glucose, vitamins, inorganic salts, then supplemented with proteins, and other growth factors. From a change in medium composition, a chicken breast could just as easily be changed into its heart or liver, leaving the door open to a world of possibilities that were once completely out of human reach.

As of 2019, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has declared that the meat consumption in the west is far too high. Further imposing the threat of climate change and global warming on the planet. According to the Good Food Institute, as of 2020, several leading cultivated meat companies are transitioning to the first wave of commercialized products following regulatory approval. Cultivated meat is a solution as strange as it’s process, but to protect the planet that all of life shares, it is essential.