Food startup Eat Just is cranking out their lab-grown chicken nuggets for an as-yet unnamed Singapore restaurant. This news follows the Sinapore Food Agency's approval of "cultured chicken" to be sold as an ingredient. Eat Just also makes Egg Just, a faux egg product made from mung beans. From Smithsonian:
[…] Cultured chicken is real meat—it just doesn't come from a slaughtered chicken. Eat Just scientists start with muscle cell biopsies from live chickens, and then they supply the samples with plant-based nutrients in a 300-gallon bioreactor to help the tissue grow.
"This is a historic moment in the food system," Josh Tetrick, Eat Just's chief executive, tells Mike Ives of the New York Times. "We've been eating meat for thousands of years, and every time we've eaten meat, we've had to kill an animal—until now."
In 2019, Eat Just revealed that each chicken nugget would cost $50 to make, Deena Shanker reported for Bloomberg last year. But the company has brought production costs down since then, and now the price will be on par with high-quality chicken that could be ordered at a restaurant, reports the Times.
Above image for illustration purposes only: McDonald's Chicken McNuggets, Evan-Amos (Public Domain)
