The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on November 16 that the lab-grown poultry, which takes living cells from chickens and grows them in a controlled environment to produce the meat, was safe for human consumption, and that it had “no further questions” about the product’s safety. This is the first “No Questions” letter from the FDA for lab-grown meat, poultry, or seafood. The voluntary premarket consultation is not an approval process, but it is an important first hurdle that the company needed to clear. In the United States, cultivated meat is regulated by both the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). UPSIDE Foods, the California company that produces the meat, will now work with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) to secure the remaining approvals that are required before the cultivated chicken can be available to consumers, according to a company release.
Lab Grown Chicken Will Be Served in Restaurants Before It’s Sold in Grocery Stores
The approval process may take months, and it’s likely that meat products will be found on menus through chef and restaurant partners of the company before it’s sold in grocery stores. Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn has already announced that she will serve Upside Foods’ cultivated chicken at her restaurant Atelier Crenn in San Francisco. “This is a watershed moment in the history of food,” said Uma Valeti, MD, CEO and Founder of UPSIDE Foods, in the press release. “We started UPSIDE amid a world full of skeptics, and today, we’ve made history again as the first company to receive a ‘No Questions’ letter from the FDA for cultivated meat,” he says. U.S. consumers will soon have the chance to eat delicious meat that’s grown directly from animal cells, said Dr. Valeti.
Lab-Grown Meat Is Meat Grown Animal Cells — Not a Meat Substitute
The FDA released a memo (PDF) detailing the agency’s review of the data and information provided by UPSIDE Foods to establish the safety of its cultivated chicken filet. The FDA also put out an UPSIDE-prepared 104-page document that provides detailed information regarding the safety of and production process for the company’s cultivated chicken filet. UPSIDE Foods grows meat, poultry, and seafood directly from animal cells. These products are not vegan or vegetarian — they are meat, made without the need to raise and slaughter billions of animals, according to the company. According to the company’s projections, once the production of the meat is scaled, the process will use less water and land than conventionally produced meat. And because it’s made in a controlled environment subject to high standards of testing for safety and quality control, it has the potential to help reduce the risk of harmful bacterial contamination.
How Is Lab-Grown Meat Made?
Once the cells are obtained, they are placed in a highly controlled environment and nourished using UPSIDE’s proprietary cell-culture medium, or cell feed, consisting of common compounds found in animal feed and human food, including amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, trace elements, salts, and vitamins. “These ingredients allow us to nourish the cells with the same type of nutrients they would get inside an animal’s body,” reads the company’s website. The main difference between feeding a live animal versus feeding the cells is the size of the components. Take chicken as an example — live chicken is fed corn, which is made up of carbohydrates and protein; the cells in the lab are “fed” carbohydrates and proteins directly, according to UPSIDE. The company has plans to eventually phase out the use of all animal components altogether. “We aim to bring animal component-free products to market as soon as possible,” states the website.
Will People Eat Lab-Grown Meat?
The introduction of lab-grown meat into the mainstream is likely to take a while — that may give people some time to get used to the idea. An Australian study published in September 2020 in Frontiers in Nutrition found that although Generation Z — people ages 18 to 25 — are concerned about animal welfare and the environment, 72 percent were not ready to accept lab-grown meat. If young emerging consumers aren’t willing to eat lab-grown meat, it could put the future of the industry under scrutiny, the authors concluded.
