Motherless Meats

Plant-based diets are still going strong in 2019, but in a strange new way. Rather than eating meat the traditional style, from an actual four-legged animal, fowl or fish that was “born,” raised, butchered and brought to your local supermarket for cooking and ultimately, consumption, there will be more lab-grown meats and related proteins that will change how you (and very likely self-proclaimed carnivores) experience food.

Here’s how it works: instead of killing the beast in question, you harvest a cell or two, then take the cells back to the lab and “breed” them on an enormous scale. Animal rights supporters and Environmentalists are ecstatic over the possibilities, such as elimination of ranches and slaughterhouses, and reduction of greenhouse gases and energy consumption, just to name a few.

Some have already jumped in on this new food trend, cannonball style.  Clara Food (egg whites), Finless Food (“fish” products), and Perfect Day (milk) are all trying their hand at lab-produced animal products.   And the food innovator Just is working with regulatory agencies to try to mass produce its first “real meat” product made from cells in 2019.

Of course, not everyone’s thrilled at this brave new world.  Given dairy sales are hurt by the success of faux milk, ranchers are launching campaigns to prevent these engineered proteins from being called “meat” at all.  And there hasn’t been a lot of feedback on the most important factor here, which is ultimately, “how does it taste?”

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