MEXICO CITY (appro). – The Food and Drug Administration of the United States (FDA, for its acronym in English) approved that the companies Upside Foods and Good Meat, of California, sell chicken made from animal cells.
After the United States Department of Agriculture requested an inspection of their products and the FDA declared them safe, these companies began offering meat grown in a laboratory in restaurants, later they will do so in supermarkets.
“Instead of all that land and all that water being used to feed all those animals being slaughtered, we can do it another way,” said Eat Just co-founder and CEO Josh Tetrik, who runs Good Meat.
Before, the company called Joinn Biologicx, which works with Good Meat, was licensed to make similar products.
The meat is grown in steel tanks with cells from a live animal, a fertilized egg, or a special bank of stored cells.
Upside Foods uses large sheets that are then molded into shapes like chicken cutlets and sausages. Good Meat, which already sells it in Singapore, turns the masses of chicken cells into cutlets, nuggets, shredded meat and satays.
Farmed chicken is much more expensive than meat from whole farmed birds and still cannot be produced on the scale of traditional meat, said Ricardo San Martín, director of the Alt Meat Lab at the University of California at Berkeley.
Upside Foods partnered with Crenn restaurant-bar in San Francisco to offer dishes with that meat, and Good Meat’s will be served at a Washington DC restaurant run by chef-owner José Andrés.
The businessmen assured that they are not meat substitutes, such as the Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat, made with vegetable proteins.
Around the world, around 150 companies are commercializing cell-based meat, not just chicken, but pork, lamb, fish and beef, which scientists say has the most impact on the environment.
