From BBC
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Inside an anonymous building in Oxford, Riley Jackson is frying a steak. The perfectly red fillet cut sizzles in the pan, its juices releasing a meaty aroma. But this is no ordinary steak. It was grown in the lab next door.
What’s strangest of all is just how real it looks. The texture, when cut, is indistinguishable from the real thing.
“That’s our goal,” says Ms Jackson of Ivy Farm Technologies, the food tech start-up that created it. “We want it to be as close to a normal steak as possible.”
Lab-grown meat is already sold in many parts of the world and in a couple of years, pending being granted regulatory approval, it could also be sold in the UK too – in burgers, pies and sausages.
Unlike so-called vegetarian meat, which is already available in UK supermarkets – from fake bacon rashers made from pea protein to steaks made of soy, and dyed bright red to resemble the real thing – lab-grown meat is biologically real meat, grown from cow cells.
To some, this could be a smart technological fix for a growing environmental problem: the rise in planet-heating gases caused, in part, by the rapid and growing demand for meat.
But others argue that the environmental benefits of lab-grown meat, officially known as cultivated meat, have been oversold. Some critics say that more effort should instead be expended on reducing meat consumption, instead of looking to a technology fix.
Then there are questions around
