Dr Justine Butler, Senior Researcher at Viva! Health, goes back to the laboratory to see if cultured meat can end factory farming

A few years ago, I visited a meat cell-culture laboratory in Holland with Viva! founder Juliet Gellatley. Having worked as a molecular biologist, the laboratory environment was familiar to me. But as a long-term vegan, and having not eaten meat for almost 40 years, the pink mushy cells growing in a Petri dish may as well have been from another planet!

At first, it looked like science fiction – meat grown in a laboratory. But cultured ‘lab’ meat is now a very real prospect. In December 2020, ‘chicken bites’, produced by the US company Eat Just, passed safety reviews and were launched in a Singapore restaurant retailing at around £13 for a set meal. Eat Just’s chief executive, Josh Tetrick, says the plan is to make the product available in other restaurants in Singapore next year and in retail stores by late 2022.

The last few years have seen technology advance and some reports suggest that by 2025, lab meat may make up around 10% of all alternative protein sources, along with plant-based sources and mycoprotein (such as Quorn).