22 February 2020 | New Scientist | 39Lab-grown meat will be on our plates soon, but it won’t be what
you’re expecting, says Graham Lawton
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NTIL four years ago, stem-cell biologist
Sandhya Sriram had never eaten
seafood. Then she visited a shrimp
farm in Vietnam and realised she had to give
it a go – which was odd, given what she saw
there. The conditions were “disgusting”, she
says. The shrimp appeared to be growing in
sewage, and were drenched in antibiotics and
bleach to clean them before consumption.
“These are things that should never be
associated with food. That was my motivation.”
Sriram went home to Singapore, quit her
lab job and started a company called Shiok
Meats. With co-founder Ka Yi Ling, she set
about discovering how to grow shrimp muscle
tissue from stem cells – in other words, howto create shrimp meat without actual shrimp.
Shiok is now close to doing something that
has been talked about for decades but never
realised: putting lab-grown meat onto people’s
plates. Sriram says her company is on course
to launch its cultured shrimp meat (pictured
above) next year, an ambitious goal that would
put Shiok at the forefront of a food revolution
that could be a game changer for humanity.
It is also the first step towards an alternative
to an industry that has done terrible damage
to the environment, poses an existential threat
to human health and causes untold suffering
to billions of animals every year.
It is too soon to declare that the age of
cultured meat has arrived, but ascommercialisation nears, difficult questions
are being asked and there are many unknowns.
Will regulators approve it? Will consumers
eat it? Is it safe? And is it as environmentally
benign as proponents claim?
The dream of growing meat in a lab instead
of on a farm goes back 25 years. The first
patents were issued in 1995, and in the early
2000s, NASA funded research with the aim of
finding new ways to make nutritious food for
long-distance space travellers.
Things got more serious in 2013, when a
patty made from cow muscle fibres grown in a
lab was cooked and eaten at a press conference.
This was a “defining moment” for cultured
meat, says sociologist Neil Stephens at >