It was a landmark moment in culinary history, and perhaps even human history: In May, a store in Singapore began selling lab-grown meat.
Visitors to Huber’s Butchery watched as the chef seared a fillet made from 3 percent chicken cells and 97 percent plant protein and served it in tacos with avocado, pico de gallo and cilantro.
In recent years, Singapore has emerged as the center of a utopian, or some would say dystopian, future. The city-state has spent tens of millions of dollars exploring new ways to produce food because it has very little land to farm and imports 90% of its food.
Singapore is eyeing urban and vertical farming, has approved insects for human consumption and has provided generous subsidies to startups that cultivate meat.
Singapore became the first country to approve the commercial sale of a product called cultured meat in 2020. Since then, other futuristic products have been given the green light, including a protein-rich powder synthesized from thin air and a lab-grown meat mixture that doesn’t require animal cells.
“Before Singapore, cultured meat was pure science fiction,” says Josh Tetrick, co-founder of Eat Just.
Therefore, any success of Singapore can have implications for the entire world.
But many experts say lab-grown meat has failed to live up to its promise of replacing conventional meat or helping to tackle climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from livestock farming.
A 100-gram package of cultured meat at Huber’s will cost about $5.30, which shows how expensive it is to produce.
“There are huge scaling issues between where we are and where we need to go, and there’s no guarantee that those issues will be solved,” Tetrick says.
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Partly because of this, funding for lab-grown meat startups is shrinking.
Before retail sales began, the only place to buy farmed meat in Singapore was at Huber’s. Since January 2023, Huber’s has been serving a sandwich with fries and greens, as well as a spring vegetable orecchiette. Both dishes cost almost $14 and are subsidized by Good Meat, a subsidiary of Eat Just.
It takes a small number of cages to raise the chicken served at Huber’s.
- They are then placed in bioreactors at a factory run by local company Esco Aster.
- The cages receive a nutritional mixture of amino acids, fats, vitamins and minerals to match the nutrients the chickens eat.
- Once enough cells have been cultured, they are harvested and treated with plant proteins at the Singapore Food Technology Innovation Centre.
Andre Huber, chief executive of Huber’s, said he wasn’t a fan of Good Meat’s initial offering of chicken nuggets. But 18 months later, in September 2022, when he tried the brand’s chicken breast, he found the texture to be “about 80 to 90 percent of the real thing.”
He added: “The flavour was just spot on. I mean it tasted like chicken, just like the real thing.”
But while Huber sold the cultured meat, he hasn’t served it in his restaurant in recent months because Good Meat stopped supplying it to his kitchen. The company said it was part of its normal cycle in Singapore, where it has always “made and stopped” production. Good Meat is currently suing the supplier and has not yet followed through on a plan to open Asia’s largest meat-packing plant in Singapore.
But the country remains an attractive market for other companies.
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Didier Toubia is the co-founder of Aleph Farms, which produces cultured steaks in Israel. He said the company decided to produce beef because, of all the different types of livestock farming, cattle have the greatest impact on land, water and climate. At the same time, rising temperatures in some areas are reducing the ability of cows to reproduce.
In January, Rehovot-based Aleph Farms received Israeli approval to sell the thinly sliced steaks. That same month, a rabbi certified the meat as kosher.
As Time magazine wrote, the dish tastes just like steak, but “without the guilt.”
Aleph Farms said it was also getting closer to getting approval to sell cultured meat in Singapore.
The world needs a “Plan B,” says Toubia.
He believes that cell-based meat could be part of the solution, which would limit the impact of animal agriculture on land, water and the climate. Aleph Farms is exploring the possibility of building plants in Singapore and Thailand.
Singapore is constantly worried about its future. The country’s main concern used to be water; now it’s food. The latest blow came during the pandemic when Malaysia, one of Singapore’s largest food suppliers, banned the export of chicken to the city-state.
For this reason, the Singapore government is focused on boosting the production of alternative proteins. In a competition for research grants, the Singapore Food Agency said it aims to reduce the cost of cultured meat from $120 per kilogram to $6-17 by the end of the decade.
Some alternative meat producers believe that by that time chicken could be sold for $30 per kilogram. One of them is Xiangliang Lin, CEO of Esco Aster.
But for that to happen, he says, there needs to be a massive public-private partnership like Gavi, the organization that makes vaccines cheap by buying them in bulk for developing countries.
Contract meat producer Esco Aster has received “very generous grants” from the Singapore government, according to chief executive Dominic Chen. Rents, he added, are “very, very cheap and essentially free.”
Dutch company Meatable, which hopes to sell products such as sausages, dumplings and pulled pork, plans to invest about $88 million in Singapore. Its co-founder Daan Luining said Meatable can now produce pork in four days. It usually takes eight months to raise a pig.
Luining was one of the researchers who produced a $325,000 lab-brewed hamburger in 2013. Reviews weren’t exactly kind: The meat was described as dry and tasteless, and at one point it was compared to “a pie with animal protein in it.”
Luining admits that 10 years ago he couldn’t have imagined how far things would come. People used to ask him if what he was doing made sense, but now many companies around the world are using different technologies to bring products to market. “It’s really come a long way,” he says.
Cover photo: Good Meat
Source: rb.ru
