You Can Now Buy Lab-Grown Foie Gras by Matt Reynolds
November 19, 2024
Introduction:
(Wired) AT AN UPSCALE sushi bar in New York last week, a smattering of media and policy types chowed down on a menu of sushi rolls, Peking duck tapas, and mushroom salad. But what made this menu unusual was the one ingredient that ran through the dishes—foie gras made from quail cells brewed in a bioreactor. The event, catered by the sushi chef Masa Takayama, was a launch party for Australian cultivated meat firm Vow, which will sell its foie gras at a handful of restaurants in Singapore and Hong Kong.
The meal was decadent—one course featured a mountain of black truffle—but that was mostly the point. Vow and its CEO, George Peppou, are angling cultivated meat as a luxury product—an unusual positioning for an industry where many founders are motivated by animal welfare and going toe-to-toe with mass-produced meat. But while growing meat in the lab still remains eye-wateringly expensive, Peppou is trying to turn the technology’s Achilles’ heel into his advantage.
I feel like the obituary has already been written for our industry,” he says. “But just because Californians can’t do something doesn’t mean something can’t be done.”
That something is making cultivated meat while turning a profit. The big challenge facing the industry—along with the bans and the lack of venture capital cash—is that it costs a lot to grow animal cells in bioreactors. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but one research paper with data provided by companies in 2021 put the cost of cultivated meat between $68 and $10,000 per pound, depending on production methods. A lot of startups say they have drastically cut production costs since their early experiments, but prices are still way higher than factory farmed chicken at around $2.67 per pound.
The two best-funded startups in the space—Eat Just and Upside Foods—have both brought out cultivated chicken products. But Peppou, who leans into his reputation in the industry as something of a provocateur, says that approach doesn’t make sense. “Making chicken was always a terrible idea,” he says.
This Pig’s Bacon Was Delicious. But She’s Alive and Well. By Matt Simon
November 20, 2025
Introduction:
(Grist) I’m eating Dawn the Yorkshire pig and she’s quite tasty. But don’t worry. She’s doing perfectly fine, traipsing around a sanctuary in upstate New York. (Word is that she appreciates belly rubs and sunshine.) I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense but of plants mixed with “cultivated” pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins — essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal’s fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.
I’ve been struggling to describe the experience, because cultivated meat short-circuits my brain — my mouth thinks I’m eating a real pork meatball, but my brain knows that it’s fundamentally different and that Dawn (that’s her pictured above) didn’t have to die for it. This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs. They simply taste a bit less meaty, at least to my tongue. Which is understandable, as the only animal product in this food is the bioreactor-grown fat.
Cultivated pork is the newest entrant in the effort to rethink meat. For years, plant-based offerings have been mimicking burgers, chicken, and fish with ever-more convincing blends of proteins and fats. Mission Barns is one of a handful of startups taking the next step: growing real animal fat outside the animal, then marrying it with plants to create hybrids that look, cook, and taste more like what consumers have always eaten, easing the environmental and ethical costs of industrial livestock. The company says it’s starting with pork because it’s a large market and products like bacon are fat-rich, but its technology is “cell-agnostic,” meaning it could create beef and chicken, too.
How to Explain Lab-Grown Meat Simply to People Who Aren’t Scientists By Seth Millstein
January 30, 2026
Introduction:
(Sentient) A new video from popular social media influencer Jimmy Donaldson — otherwise known as MrBeast — has brought cultivated meat back to the public’s attention.
Winston Churchill once wrote that in the future, “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” Churchill was arguably predicting and describing lab-grown meat — typically called cultivated or cell-cultured by the industry working on it.
Almost a century after Churchill made his prediction, the technology is here (even if the business side is struggling). The science of lab-grown meat has made striking advancements in the past century, resulting in a technology that has the potential to fundamentally change how humans eat and produce food.
But just how is lab-grown or cultivated meat actually made? Here (see link below) are the basics, explained simply, and a few common misconceptions, debunked.
