The United States becomes the second country, after Singapore, to pave the way for artificial meat on dinner plates, allowing the sale of lab-grown chicken meat by two companies for the first time on Wednesday.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has inspected and approved the infrastructure safety systems of Upside Foods and Good Meat, a spokesperson said.
The Federal Food Inspection Service (FSIS) has thus “issued three notices of compliance to establishments manufacturing […] products derived from animal cells,” he said in a statement, the third going to Joinn Biologics, a company that works with Good Meat.
Upside Foods and Good Meat had already obtained the green light from the United States Food Safety Agency (FDA) in November, while the Ministry of Agriculture had checked and approved the regularity of the labeling last week. of these products.
“This clearance will fundamentally change the way meat lands on our tables,” said Uma Valeti, CEO and Founder of Upside Foods, who also hailed “a giant step towards a more sustainable future” in a communicated.
Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, the company behind Good Meat, welcomed the fact that lab-grown meat is now “allowed for sale in the world’s leading power”.
His company was the first to receive approval to market artificial meat in Singapore in 2020.
Last May, Eat Just signed an agreement with an equipment manufacturer to develop giant tanks in which it hoped to produce chicken and beef on a large scale.
The products of the two companies will quickly be available in several restaurants, they assured.
The starred French chef Dominique Crenn has also placed an order with Upside Foods for her restaurant in San Francisco, in the wake of the announcement of the authorization.
Celebrity chef José Andrés is set to get him the first American batch from the Good Meat company, which will be served at one of his restaurants in the capital Washington.
Environmental impact
Many start-ups aim to produce and market so-called “laboratory” or artificial meat, to allow humans to consume animal protein with less impact on the environment than that of intensive farming, and without animal suffering. .
These products differ from plant-based substitutes, such as soy-based “steaks” and other ingredients that mimic the texture and flavor of meat without containing animal protein.
But laboratory meat remains very complicated and very expensive to produce for the moment. Other companies have therefore turned to the pet food market, a priori less difficult to satisfy than their owners.
Bond Pet Foods, a Colorado start-up, is creating animal protein from a microbial fermentation process to feed dogs without killing cows or chickens.
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.
Thanks to these nutrients, the cells grow as they would in the body of the animal and become muscle tissue and fat. The resulting product is then “harvested” from the vats and molded into certain predefined 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 at Davis, which has not yet been reviewed by other scientists, has shown that all phases of laboratory meat production require a lot of energy and emit a large amount of greenhouse gases.