Two companies receive USDA approval to sell lab-grown meat; food-safety oversight is the same as for natural meat

Chicken bites made from cell-cultured chicken (Photo from Eat Just via NBC)

The Department of Agriculture has given two new companies approval to sell artifically grown meat. Good Meat and Upside Foods "make what they call 'cultivated chicken'," reports Danielle Wiener-Bronner of CNN. "Good Meat, which is owned by plant-based egg substitute maker Eat Just, said that production is starting immediately. . . . Cultivated or lab-grown meat is grown in a giant vat, much like what you'd find at a beer brewery."

The new option may have potential customers wondering about food safety. Good Meat has been selling its cultivated chicken in Singapore since 2020. The USDA defined its oversight yesterday: "Cell-cultured meat and poultry food products are subject to the same Food Safety and Inspection Service's regulatory requirements and oversight authority as meat and poultry food products derived from the slaughter of amenable species."

It has taken several years, but cultured-meat developers have gained the capital for commercialization. "Investors have poured some $2 billion into the space in the last two years, according to Crunchbase data," Kate Rogers of NBC News reports. To investors and consumers, the technology has been marketed as a "more humane approach to eating meat," Wiener-Bronner explains. "Good Meat advertises it as 'meat without slaughter.' Supporters hope that cultured meat will help fight climate change by reducing the need for traditional animal agriculture, which emits greenhouse gases."

The next step is seeing how the public, especially chefs, respond. Good Meat "announced that it was partnering with chef and restaurateur José Andrés to bring the item to a Washington, D.C., restaurant," Wiener-Bronner reports. "As production ramps up, Good Meat may consider partnering with other restaurants or launching in retail . . . . Upside is planning to introduce its product ... at a San Francisco restaurant [and] plans to work with other restaurants and make its products available in supermarkets."

There is already pushback from "traditional meat producers, such as the U.S. Cattlemen's Association," reports Amelia Lucas of NBC. Americans will have to accept cultured meat as actual food, which is not guaranteed. Educating U.S. consumers takes time, but the product does have nutritional benefits. Lucas reports, "[It] has a high protein content and a diversified amino acid composition, no antibiotics and very low microbiological content, such as salmonella and E. coli."