Stem cell meat from Singapore: how we will eat in the future

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Chicken meat from the laboratory - the future of our nutrition?

In Singapore, the company Eat Just regularly organizes dinners for test eating

Photo: Amrita Chandradas / DER SPIEGEL

Imagine for a moment that you could save the world with chicken nuggets.

You would just have to eat the nuggets.

You would bite down on real chicken, and yet no animal would have died for your meal.

It would have grown in the lab from a single chicken cell.

Imagine if there was suddenly enough meat from the laboratory to feed everyone in the world.

Hunger would be fought.

The soil on which the feed corn now grows, which makes the chickens fat and ready for slaughter, could be repurposed.

Maybe for a mixed forest that pulls CO₂ out of the air.

Factory farming as we know it today is no longer needed.

Of course you are right.

Where the words "solution" and "simple" are in one paragraph, you have to be careful in these complicated times of crisis.

But there is a place where this utopia is being worked on.

Where you can taste them, and that is crucial if the solution is to go through the stomach.

Where the chicken nugget that could save the world is already served on plates.

Welcome to Singapore.

Singapore is the first and so far only country in the world where meat grown in the laboratory can be marketed and consumed by the so-called end consumer.

The government has an interest in the technologies for the food of the future being invented at home.

Firstly, because it could be big business: Investors worldwide are investing billions of dollars in the new food sector.

Alternative proteins, including lab-grown meats, now account for two percent of the global meat market.

By 2035, their share could increase fivefold.

Tiny Singapore is also dependent on food imports.

90 percent come from abroad, there is almost no own agricultural land.

The government wants to change that by 2030, promoting start-ups that work on recipes for eggs without eggs

to research.

Intelligent roof garden systems, where the heads of lettuce grow like on a self-watering advertising column.

And then, especially, stem cell technology.

milk from stem cells.

Fish from stem cells.

Stem cell meat.

In short, the laboratory idea goes like this: Stem cells are taken from animals by biopsy, which are frozen in liquid nitrogen and thus preserved for several years.

To produce meat, these cells are multiplied in a bioreactor.

The technology isn't ready for mass production yet, but theoretically one could produce hundreds of tons of meat from a single harvest of cells.

The American Silicon Valley start-up Eat Just has moved a laboratory to Singapore.

It's working on chicken meat and wants to get it into supermarkets in the next few years.

On Thursdays, the company invites a group of selected test subjects to the chic Marriott Hotel in the heart of Singapore.

At the beginning of November, sitting at a long table to be served the future: investors, food technologists, entrepreneurs and I.

the dinner

At dinner, the room is darkened and a film about the climate crisis, broken floors, starving populations, rising sea levels is projected onto the walls.

Even the first three courses on the menu, all vegan, have names like doomsday movies.

»Forest Floor«, »Fields of Corn«, »Flooded Future«.

We learn how people raised birds over thousands of years to become the chicken we know today: one of the most important sources of protein for the world population.

There are 23 billion chickens on earth.

In order to fatten, slaughter, cool, freeze and transport them, the voice in the video tells us, large amounts of energy and space are used, and the climate crisis is fueled.

All because people want to continue to eat too much meat, although this is often no longer necessary today.

Finally the aisle is carried in, the chicken nugget from the lab everyone came for that night.

The waitress hands us the plates and introduces:

Maple Waffle, Crispy Cultured Chicken Bite, Hot Sauce

A fried piece of lab chicken

Eating technology has often had the potential to change culture and the lives of many throughout human history.

ferment fruit.

Baking bread.

iodine salt.

make fire.

breed animals.

The thing is, for a new food that makes sense in theory to work in practice, it has to be affordable, available in large quantities.

And above all: It has to taste good.

The taste.

The knife goes through the breading, then through the meat.

My first thought: It seems softer than normal chicken, you can almost pierce it with a fork.

I scrape off some of the breading to see the meat.

Looks lighter than ordinary chicken, almost whitish-gray.

First bite: Soft, I'm chewing on little substance, a bit stringy, reminds me of tofu.

Bit watery.

But: It definitely tastes like chicken, smells like it too.

The table neighbor says: There is still room for improvement.

The neighbor at the table says: If she had the choice, she would prefer a soy schnitzel to a stem cell meat schnitzel.

She likes that better.

I wonder: the way chicken nuggets are normally consumed, quickly, in lots, with your hands - would you really taste the difference at the takeaway?

I write on the note: five out of ten points.

That's not enough, everyone at the table agrees.

Innovation must bang.

Laboratory meat has to be better than cheap fast-food chicken.

What about the other points - price, availability, approval?

Off to the lab.

In the laboratory

Serene Chng slips on the white coat.

She's a biologist working for Shiok Meats, a Singapore company that wants to market stem cell-derived marine animals.

Your task is to search for the fittest of these cells, the ones that reproduce best.

Chng takes us through lab one, where stem cells are harvested from lobster, shrimp and squid and then examined.

“Here we find out what the cells like to eat.

How often do we have to feed them," says Chng, meaning the nutrient solutions, with carbohydrates, amino acids, minerals

that replace the blood that allows cells to grow in the animal organism.

"What you see here is just the beginning of a revolution."

It leads past microscopes, UV lamps, centrifuges and metabolic analysis devices.

The technology behind stem cell meat is borrowed from the development process of certain drugs and vaccines.

The corona vaccine from AstraZeneca, for example, is produced using a similar process.

Chng's colleague opens the lid of the cryotank, the stem cell bank.

Nitrogen vapors upwards from the container.

Inside, the most potent stem cells are stored deep-frozen at minus 80 degrees.

Any amount of squid meat can grow from one of these cells, says biologist Chng.

That happens next door, in large bioreactors made of stainless steel.

This is where the cells thrive.

I imagined whole squid and lobster growing in these machines.

But that's not true: Only muscle and fat cells are increased.

These grow like a kind of soup, getting thicker and thicker until the consistency resembles ground beef.

After about six to eight weeks, the cell soup is ripe and is enriched with plant fibers and processed into a meat paste in a process that Shiok Meats doesn't want to tell me.

from which the food is then made.

The finished product, such as the chicken nugget, is therefore not 100% meat.

Criticism of laboratory meat

Expand areaProduction Conditions

As promising as the “meat from the laboratory” technology sounds, the criticism of it is just as great.

On the one hand, this involves the

conditions: even producing laboratory meat requires a great deal of energy as soon as large quantities of it are produced.

If large parts of the world's population are to be fed on cultured meat, sprawling bioreactors, sophisticated machines and production facilities would be required.

Open areaSterility and hygiene

Sterility is extremely important in the production halls.

If a bacterium or virus gets into the cell cultures, it can paralyze the entire production.

Ensuring this form of

, especially in a future mass production, is likely to drive up the operating costs of laboratory meat even further.

Expand areaMedium

The term "cruelty-free meat" that the laboratory meat industry uses to advertise is often criticized.

First of all, as far as the

is concerned: the animal usually does not die, but it is nevertheless exposed to a high level of stress.

At the center of the criticism is the

– i.e. the alternative to animal blood – that the cultured cells need to grow in the reactor.

Fetal calf serum, which is obtained from the hearts of living calf fetuses, is often used for this purpose;

this is very expensive and time-consuming - and contradicts the approach of averting animal suffering through in-vitro meat.

There are now herbal alternatives.

Often obtained from soy, which in turn has been criticized for its environmentally harmful cultivation.

AreaPossible health risksexpand

When it comes to the

of cultured meat, there is little valid research.

So far, laboratory meat has hardly been consumed anywhere in the world.

However, far fewer antibiotics are likely to be used than in conventional animal husbandry.

When applying for authorization in the EU, the European Food Safety Authority will check whether the food is safe.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently ruled that a California company's laboratory meat was "just as safe as similar foods produced using other methods".

I have questions.

Shiok Meats founder Sandhya Sriram, stem cell researcher, replies, “Yes.

It's 100% meat.

Think of it like growing vegetables in a greenhouse instead of in nature.

The result is the same, but the way to get there is not natural, but technological.«

Can vegetarians eat this?

Sriram: »Especially vegetarians, who do without meat for animal welfare and because of the climate crisis, are very interested in laboratory meat.

Of flesh without cruelty."

Why another meat alternative – there are already burgers made from soy, mung beans and chickpeas?

Sriram: »The hope that the majority of people will soon eat vegetarian food is naïve.

Meat consumption is increasing.

The world population is growing.

Our approach is: leave people their meat and fish, but make it fit for the future.«

If stem cell meat is supposed to be the solution to so many problems, why can't I find it in the supermarket long ago?

Two terms come up again and again when dealing with the problems of laboratory meat.

scale and price.

The same applies to stem cell researcher Sriram: "We use very expensive technologies and devices from the pharmaceutical industry - and use them to produce the everyday product food."

It takes time to produce enough laboratory proteins to feed billions of people every day.

Larger, cheaper bioreactors.

Progress happens, but in small steps.

A few years ago, Sriram says, Shiok Meats shrimp meat cost $10,000 per kilogram.

The company has since reduced the price per kilo to $50.

It will be a while before meat from the bioreactor can even come close to being able to compete with meat from factory farming.

She believes the products can be competitive in the next ten years.

And there must be a corresponding approval.

For example in the EU, where the process could be difficult because the individual states vote on it and many are likely to protect their traditional livestock farming.

Asia could lead the way when it comes to laboratory meat approvals.

Many states are more open than Europe, says Sandhya Sriram.

Which could also be because hunger and climate catastrophes are already a huge problem there.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announces a new "red alert" every year.

More than a billion people in Asia had insufficient access to food in 2021;

Farmers harvest less, fishermen come back with less catch.

If forecasts are to be believed, the region's current population of 4.7 billion will increase by 600 million over the next three decades.

A new anti-hunger technology that can feed more people with fewer resources is good news.

Back to the dinner at the Singapore hotel.

After the chicken nugget, the chef of the evening comes into the room, he has prepared something else.

Another walk.

Again chicken from the laboratory, but this time: »the next generation«.

Satay skewers in peanut sauce.

Again the room smells of grilled chicken.

I loosen the meat from the wooden skewer, it gets stuck in some places.

This time the texture of the meat is firmer.

Could the world be saved with a chicken nugget or with a grilled chicken skewer?

Will people ever buy a food made like a coronavirus vaccine?

I dont know.

I take the last of the three satays off the plate.

Pull the chicken off the skewer with its teeth, grown as a cell soup in a stainless steel container.

It's soaked in marinade and peanut sauce.

Notes: I've had worse chicken before.

Seven out of ten points.

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