Will lab-grown meat ever make it onto supermarket shelves?

THE FIRST mouthful of “cultivated” meat is both remarkable and dull. In a homely kitchen at the California headquarters of Eat Just, a startup, a playing-card-sized slice of meat has been glazed and grilled. It is served with a sweet-potato puree, maitake mushrooms and some pickled peppers. The meal is remarkable because the meat was grown in a lab, rather than on an animal. It is mundane because the texture, taste, look and smell of the meat is almost identical to that of chicken. And that, of course, is the point.

The cultivated-meat business hopes that this experience will become more common. In June Eat Just and Upside Foods, another California startup, became the first two companies to win regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat in America. Eat Just also sells cultivated meat in in Singapore, which in 2020 became the first country to permit the sale of the stuff. A herd of rivals is stampeding after them. All told, around 160 firms are trying to bring cultivated meats to market.