The United States authorizes the marketing of chicken meat grown in laboratories

Chicken made from scratch. The United States becomes the second country, after Singapore, to pave the way for artificial meat on the plates. It is grown in the laboratory by two companies.

The United States Department of Agriculture has inspected and approved the infrastructure safety systems of Upside Foods and Good Meat. “This authorization will fundamentally change the way meat lands on our tables”, affirmed the CEO and founder of Upside Foods. The latter greeted “a giant step towards a more sustainable future” in a press release.

Expensive meat to produce

Many start-ups aim to produce and market such a product, to allow humans to consume animal protein with less impact on the environment than intensive farming, and without animal suffering. But laboratory meat remains very complicated and very expensive to produce for the moment.

The manufacture of artificial chicken meat consists of culturing cells extracted from an animal or from fertilized chicken eggs in bioreactors and feeding them with nutrients similar to those ingested by real animals: proteins, fats, sugar , minerals and vitamins. The cells then grow as they would in the animal’s body and become muscle tissue and fat. The resulting product is then “harvested” and molded into certain pre-defined shapes, such as that of a chicken fillet.

However, questions persist about the real environmental impact of this alternative, in particular its energy consumption and health safety. A recent study from the University of California, which has not yet been examined by other scientists, has shown that all phases of laboratory meat production require a lot of energy and emit a large amount of gas. Greenhouse effect.