Mission Barns wants you to eat as much bacon as you want. The real stuff. Not turkey bacon, not some bacon simulacrum made from soy and hydrogenated oils. Real bacon from a real pig. They just don’t understand why you have to kill a pig to get it.
Mission Barns is a California-based startup specializing in lab-grown pork. Their latest creation is lab-grown pork fat that they hope will revolutionize the meat industry, how people eat, and reduce environmental damage.
The process doesn’t start with a slaughterhouse. It begins with a single pig named Dawn, a Yorkshire pig in upstate New York. Workers take a tiny sample of her fatty tissue, essentially a biopsy, then feed it a mix of plant sugars, proteins, and vitamins inside a cultivator. Over the next two weeks, the fat cells grow as they would inside of an actual pig, but not in a pig.
We May Soon Be Able to Eat Bacon Without Killing Pigs
Once the fat is ready, Mission Barns mixes it with plant protein to create a hybrid product that’s real meat on a cellular level but not trying to masquerade as a center-cut pork chop. In the verbiage of the industry, it’s “unstructured.” The easiest way to explain that is by contrasting a pork chop with ground pork.
A pork chop is a specific thing. Ground pork can be anything. You can shape it into a patty. You can use it as the base of a meatball. You can turn it into a sausage. Mission Barns’ lab-grown pork fat is much closer to ground pork. It’s designed to be turned into foods that don’t rely on anatomically accurate pig parts, bacon chief among them.
Publications like Mother Jones and Grist got to sample some of this lab-grown bacon. Grist described lab-grown pork meatballs as “diet meat,” in the same way that Diet Coke is still Coke, just slightly different.
The FDA gave Mission Barns the green light to sell and cultivate fat in the US back in March, making it only the third company to clear that hurdle. As is often the case with the lab-grown meat industry, scale is one of the most significant problems that needs to be solved. Right now, a pack of eight lab-grown Mission Barns meatballs goes for $13.99.
Pricey until you remember that before Impossible and Beyond Burgers were available at major grocery chains across the United States, and even in Whoppers at some Burger King locations, a single plant-based burger cost a king’s ransom.
There’s no telling whether Americans will ever fully embrace lab-grown meat. Still, there is a foreseeable path toward potentially turning what currently sounds like a process of pure science fiction into just another culinary tool in a chef’s arsenal.
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