Open Your Mind to Unicorn Meat
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The chef presents me with a nugget of raw meat, tinged yellowish gray, then takes it back and drops it in a pan. “Today, you’re going to be having our whole-muscle chicken filet,” Daniel Davila tells me, searing the morsel. He lets it rest, chars some tomatoes and scallions, and throws together a beurre-blanc sauce. “Kind of a classic,” Davila says.
Davila works for Upside Foods, a start-up disrupting the world of animal proteins from its base in Berkeley, California. After a few minutes, he places the dish before me. I inhale, smelling salt and sear. I cut the meat, the serrations on the knife shredding it into strings. I take a piece and squish it, observing it bounce back and dampen my hands. I put a small amount in my mouth, chew carefully, and taste, well, not much. It tastes like chicken.
Is it chicken? It is chicken more than it is anything else. To be specific, it is what happens when you take a chicken’s cells, place them in a vat filled with a slurry of nutrients and amino acids, let them multiply, wash them, chill them, shape them, and cook them. The companies that make this animal flesh call it “cultivated” or “cultured” meat; the more common adjective outside the industry is “lab grown.” (The cells that I ate came from eggs, not from birds, by the way—so consider your next question answered.)
This kind of meat is the future, or at least part of the future. Within the past decade, cultivated meat has gone from science-fictional to hyper-expensive to market-ready, fueled by billions of dollars of start-up spending. Chicken made by Upside Foods, which launched in 2015, is now available at the Michelin-starred Bar Crenn in San Francisco, and will be headed to more restaurants soon. Newfangled plant-based meat, cultivated meat’s cousin, has already made it to the kitchen table. Beyond Burgers are available in thousands of grocery stores. You can buy Impossible Whoppers at Burger King.
[Read: The coming obsolescence of animal meat]
At the moment, manufacturers want to make alternative meats that taste as good as their animal counterparts. In some cases, they want to make products that are indistinguishable from them. And for
