TL9 Watch: Lab-grown meat, heh, grows apace.

The future’s coming:

A Dutch company that presented the world’s first lab-grown beef burger five years ago said Tuesday it has received funding to pursue its plans to make and sell artificially grown meat to restaurants from 2021. Mosa Meat said it raised 7.5 million euros ($8.8 million), mainly from M Ventures and Bell Food Group. M Ventures is an investment vehicle for German pharmaceuticals company Merck KGaA. Bell Food is a European meat processing company based in Switzerland.

Via, ultimately, Stephen Green, who goes on to note that this is something that gets you hamburger, not a ribeye. …True.  But lab-grown hamburger would still be highly useful for the food industry.  If I can get a good meatloaf out of this stuff, and for cheaper — it’s going to be a while before it’s cheaper, mind you — then I’d be willing to try it out.  Honestly, there are any number of dishes where you don’t need high-end cow, and if they can grow the stuff without filling it full of chemicals I’m not going to object to that, either.

And who knows?  It might even taste better than regular hamburger.  It’s always assumed that lab-grown stuff won’t, which is weird when you think of it.  I mean, consider all the ingredients that go into vanilla ice cream.  Which is more delicious? The finished product, or the individual ingredients, consumed separately and one-by-one?

4 thoughts on “TL9 Watch: Lab-grown meat, heh, grows apace.”

  1. Amazon is broken. It recommended four diamond rings and a pair of ear studs as appropriate purchases to accompany this post.

  2. I’d be apprehensive of the flavor – meat flavor depends on a number of variables (diet pre-slaughter, handling post-slaughter, etc). But if you’re burying it in seasoning and condiments, and it still has nutritional value (for some definition of “nutritional value” – we’re talking burgers, natch), then sure.

    And if it is able to deliver the relevant nutrients at a lower cost (and still edible), it definitely has value.

    I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

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