Lab-grown meat. Clean meat. Cultured meat. ‘In vitro’ meat. In the future, “meats” do not have to come directly from animals, but instead can be grown from animal cells in the labs. 

Production of cell-cultured meat involves retrieving a live animal’s adult muscle stem cells and setting them in a nutrient-rich liquid.  Proponents claim future techniques could allow these cells to make many burgers without collecting more cells from an animal. 

The base technology needed to produce laboratory meat is already there and appears promising. At the moment, there are a handful of global start-ups working on high-tech meat alternatives. Memphis Meats, Hampton Creek, Just, Finless Foods, SuperMeat (Israel), and Mosa Meat (The Netherlands)and Beyond Meat are a few of the companies working on it. Thanks to them, we may be witnessing the start of the next food revolution: cellular agriculture. 

How soon will we be eating a real meat burger made using technology, while leaving the animals alone?

Well, we already have proof that artificial burgers are possible — in 2013, the first lab-grown hamburger was cooked. The experiment took two years and cost as much as $325,000, financed by the Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The burger was created by Cultured Beef, a project of the Maastricht University in the Netherlands headed by Mark Post, a specialist in tissue engineering. The next steps were a cookbook and a fictitious restaurant with a “menu of in vitro dishes that may one day end up on your plate”. 

As the first lab-grown burger demonstrates, this technology is advancing, but the horizon of commercialising clean meet is still far from clear. One of the main questions now is whether these startups can get the funding, regulatory approval, and consumer acceptance necessary to market their products on a global scale? 

Cultured meat may have environmental and ethical appeal, but its success in the marketplace depends on far more than technological and economic viability. 

Kitchen and food waste can be dramatically reduced with 3-D printing. Every aspect of eating–from how food looks, to the nutrition it delivers, to the impact it makes on our environment–is being transformed by the 3-D printing industry. That includes, death-free meat. These vegan steaks being printed by Jet Eat are designed to emulate the appearance, texture, taste, and reaction to heat of actual beef.