Food and Drug Administration for the first time cleared a lab-grown meat product developed by a start-up ‘Upside Foods’ as safe for human consumption.
Upside Foods will soon be able to sell chicken made from real animal cells grown in bioreactors.
Lab grown chicken looks, cooks, and tastes like chicken.
It’s cultivated, by taking a small sample of healthy chicken cells, then placed it in a nutrient-rich environment and allow it to grow into pure clean meat.
The process starts by taking a sample of primary cells from a chicken or fertilized egg. From this sample, Upside team selects ideal cells for developing a commercial cell line. The winning cells are chosen based on their ability to produce high-quality meat and grow predictably and consistently. This process is called immortalization. Once a cell line is established, they are able to draw from it for years – if not decades – to come, reducing the need to take additional cell samples from animals.
Once they have cell line established and are ready to begin making meat from those small samples. To make UPSIDE chicken meat, it needs to nourish the cells. It has developed a proprietary cell-culture medium, or cell feed, that’s optimized for their cells’ needs and consists mostly of common compounds found in animal feed and human food, including amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, trace elements, salts, and vitamins. A primary difference between feeding a live animal versus feeding our cells is the size of the feed components. (For instance, while a live chicken is fed corn – which is made up of carbohydrates and protein – UpSide feed cells the microscopic carbohydrates and proteins directly, along with other components to facilitate cell growth.
It places the cells and cell feed into a vessel called a cultivator. The cultivator maintains the right temperature and oxygen levels for the cells to grow and multiply. The cells start in small cultivators, and it gradually scale them up to larger ones as the volume of tissues increases.
After about three weeks in cultivators, the tissue is ready for harvest. UpSide then removes the tissue from the cultivators and separate out any remaining cell feed. When removed from the cultivators, the color is slightly paler but otherwise similar to that of raw chicken. The tissue takes the shape of the cultivator in which it was grown (but just like with conventional meat). Once harvested, the meat is ready to be inspected, prepared, packed, served, and enjoyed!