For decades the challenge of creating artificial meat has occupied scientists, tech entrepreneurs and food aficionados. Billions has been spent trying to produce laboratory-grown burgers, steaks and bacon that satisfy carnivores while limiting the environmental damage of industrial farming. Now it is the turn of the chicken nugget.
The American fast-food chain KFC says it is building the world’s first lab-grown chicken nuggets, joining an increasing menu of artificial meats.
The skill with which foods are being recreated in the lab has meant that people are already accustomed to eating vegetarian burgers that “bleed” like real meat. Fake beef that has much the same flavour and texture as the real thing has been produced by Silicon Valley companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.
Last month an investment fund set up by Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, led a $3.5 million funding round for a biotech start-up called Biomilq that is attempting to reproduce human breast milk.
KFC is looking to join in on the action by producing chicken nuggets from animal cells alone. It will rely on 3D printing technology to “print” the food.
The company says that its “biomeat” will remove the additives used in traditional farming, “creating a cleaner final product”, and cut down on energy consumption and harm to animals. However, the product is based on animal tissues so is not vegetarian.
KFC has partnered with 3D Bioprinting Solutions, a biotech laboratory founded by Russia’s largest private medical company, Invitro, for the project. The Russian lab creates 3D printers that are able to produce tissue and organ-based products. In 2018 one of its printers was used to print human cartilage tissue on the International Space Station. The two companies say that the cell-based chicken meat will be as “close as possible” to standard chicken nuggets, with a product likely to be ready by the autumn.
3D printing creates a product by adding material layer by layer. Designers produce a blueprint of what they want to make then send this to the 3D printer with the raw materials.
The process is still long and expensive, however, and for a decade companies have been claiming that they can reproduce meat from 3D printing, without achieving much commercial success.
In KFC’s case, scientists will take stem cells from a chicken through a biopsy and let the cells multiply into clusters. Once these cells have multiplied to sufficient numbers they will be put into a bio-cartridge alongside other plant-based ingredients to help with texture and taste. Instead of the ink used in a traditional printer, the designers use a “bio-ink” of live cells. The printer lays down layer after layer of cells to grow a small piece of muscle tissue. This is then processed and seasoned for the “signature KFC taste”.
In 1931 Winston Churchill wrote an essay called Fifty Years Hence about inventions that he felt would soon arrive. Alongside predictions of growing babies in glass jars, he envisaged scientists growing chunks of meat.
“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,” he wrote.
The Times