In the summer of 2024, Britain became the first nation in Europe to approve the retail sale of lab-grown meat. Fast-forward to today and the first lab-grown meat product to be sold anywhere in Europe will soon be hitting store shelves—and it’s not made for people. It’s lab-grown meat formed into a dog treat.
Meatly is a London-based company that makes dog treats out of real meat, but the meat is “real” in the sense that it’s made from the cells of a chicken egg, which are then grown in a laboratory setting, and provided all the vitamins, minerals, and amino acids the cells need to grow into meat that, genetically, is essentially meat butchered from livestock only it’s grown in giant vats that would be immediately familiar to any beer or yogurt company. The treat itself isn’t 100 percent lab-grown meat, though. There are some plant-based ingredients mixed in to make the treats more nutritious and well-balanced.
Meatly says the cells from a single egg can be multiplied in a lab to create enough protein “to feed pets forever,” which is so vague a statement that it makes you appreciate when companies toss some bullshit facts and figures into ad copy that you have no way of verifying but at least it sounds and feels right. Meatly, you gotta work on your bullshitting.
Lab-grown meat, or cultivated meat as it is sometimes called, or even “no-kill” meat, is regarded as a vastly more ethical and environmentally friendly way of cultivating meat that contributes way fewer CO2 emissions than traditional farming practices and consumes 45 percent less energy.
According to the European Environment Agency, if a lab-grown meat company powers its facilities with renewable energy, the company can emit up to 92 percent less greenhouse gases, while using 95 percent less land and 70 percent less water than traditional beef farming.
It is kind of a big deal that lab-grown meat in any form is being sold, but it still has a ton of hurdles to clamber over before it can become a staple of human diets, especially in Europe. There isn’t a single European country that’s approved the sale of lab-grown meat for human consumption. So far, the UK is the only one allowing lab-grown meat for pets.
Singapore, Israel, and even the United States have already approved lab-grown meat for human consumption. Back in 2023, a lab-cultivated meat company in the United States called GOOD Meat received USDA approval to sell lab-grown chicken made from animal cells using a process similar to the one used by Meatly.
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