Will lab-grown chicken ever be able to compete? A perilous, steep climb faces the industry.

Upside Foods cell cultivators (Photo by Carolyn Fong,
The Washington Post)

Plant-based meat had hype and money and then fizzled. Now, lab-grown chicken offers a different method for a more humane, environmentally conscious meat; however, the industry faces a steep climb to feed millions, reports Tim Carman of The Washington Post. "Proponents say cell-cultivated chicken, beef and the like could dramatically cut back the amount of land and water that goes into producing the meat that will feed a growing population along with its growing appetite for animal proteins. . . . Cultivated meat could eliminate the inhumane treatment of animals raised for food. . . They could even reduce the 7.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere every year by the livestock industry, representing 14.5 percent of all human-related greenhouse gas emissions."

What's the catch? "To date, the two companies approved in the United States to sell cultivated meat can grow only hundreds of thousands of pounds per year, a microscopic fraction of the hundreds of millions of metric tons of meat produced annually around the world," Carman reports. "In the near future, dozens of other tech companies hope to join Good Meat and Upside, but even if they do, critics and industry executives say it's no sure bet that cell-cultured meat can ever scale up and compete, in quantity or price, with traditional animal agriculture."

Industry obstacles include a financial and scientific balancing act, persuading the public to eat vat-grown meat and building a "never been done before" market to a competitive scale. Josh Tetrick, co-founder and chief executive of Eat Just, which includes the cell-cultivated division Good Meat, told Carman, "My want is sometime, hopefully before I die, where the majority of meat that is produced in a given day is cultivated, not slaughtered. I think that is a massive challenge. I think it's highly uncertain. I think that it requires tens of millions of dollars in capital. It will require innovative new approaches to production that we and other companies haven't thought of yet."

For now, there is precious little cell-cultured chicken available to purchase. "At Bar Crenn in San Francisco, once a month, chef Dominique Crenn features an approximately one-ounce portion of Upside chicken as part of her six-course, $150 tasting menu," Carman writes. "The Upside bird at Bar Crenn is composed of 99 percent chicken cells: It's a dense, meaty nugget. . . . The resulting chicken is undeniable: It tastes like the kind of bird that once was common in America before the poultry industry sacrificed flavor for rapid growth. It may be the most chicken-y chicken I've tasted in a long time."

Feeding the country is a big challenge no matter who "grows" the meat. "Whether Upside, Good Meat and other companies can fix the problems of industrial animal agriculture is an open question. For years, the cultivated-meat industry has been an object of great hope — and substantial doubt," Carman writes. "It's a tension that has played out between company executives who promise that the era of guilt-free meat is just around the corner and critics who say that the industry will never compete with large-scale animal agriculture."