00:00This piece of fried chicken was grown in a lab, and it is the only kitchen in the world allowed
00:05to serve it.
00:07It is cooked like any normal piece of chicken, except no animals were killed in the process.
00:13Instead, it was made from stem cells, taken from a live chicken and cultured in a lab.
00:19The biggest reaction we get is people just say, this tastes like chicken.
00:24And there is a surprise in the normalcy of it.
00:29Considering the growing challenge of feeding meat to the 8 billion people on this planet,
00:35this could be a food revolution.
00:37But can it develop fast enough to take over traditional livestock farming?
00:43We talked to American company Good Meat to find out how this chicken goes from lab to table.
00:51At 1880 Restaurant, the kitchen staff are busy prepping and lab-grown chicken is their star ingredient.
00:59Cooking with good meat is essentially the same as cooking with regular meat, since it truly is meat.
01:07Last November, Singapore became the first country in the world to approve lab-grown chicken.
01:12Think about how commonly held that assumption is.
01:15In order to eat fried chicken, in order to have a ribeye steak, in order to have a hamburger, real
01:20meat,
01:21we necessarily have to kill the cow or the pig or the chicken.
01:26It doesn't have to be the case.
01:27Ten years ago, Josh co-founded what has become the most popular plant-based egg brand, Just Egg.
01:33When that worked, he turned his attention to meat.
01:37Scientists start by collecting cells directly from chickens in a biopsy-like procedure.
01:43So they are what we call progenitor cells.
01:45They can proliferate for a long time and they can essentially become every cell type that you find in meat.
01:53We can make muscle cells, you can make fat cells, which provide a lot of flavor.
01:59The cells grow in a nutrient-rich broth inside a bioreactor.
02:04Imagine walking into a microbrewery and look all around, but instead of beer in those steel vessels, there's meat.
02:12It takes two to three weeks for the meat to grow into a piece that can be cooked.
02:16For now, good meat is only selling its chicken to restaurants like this one.
02:21We do do a breading on the chicken nugget.
02:24It really adds this nice lightness, a little bit of crispiness.
02:28For $23, curious customers can try it out.
02:32An iconic southern recipe of fried chicken and waffle.
02:35And a Chinese-inspired dish with bao bun and hoisin sauce.
02:41But food experts say the jury is still out on whether lab-grown meat will catch on.
02:47There's a lot of doubt about GM-produced foods.
02:51I have a feeling that lab-grown meat is going to suffer the same ethical, acceptability issues.
02:59And that's far from being their only hurdle.
03:02They've been working on gaining regulatory approval in the U.S. and Europe for over two years now.
03:07We had to generate a lot of data, you know, to discuss with the regulators to demonstrate that we are
03:14producing a product that is safe and of quality that meets the specifications that are expected for a meat product.
03:23The other challenge is scale.
03:25The U.S. alone consumes about 400 million pounds of chicken every week.
03:31Meanwhile, good meat is producing just a few thousand pounds every two weeks.
03:35That's a large gap to fill.
03:38Next on their list, Wagyu beef.
03:40They're already working closely with a farm in Japan and testing it in their laboratories.
03:47About 80 companies around the world are also trying to create similar products, like Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms, as
03:54good meat paves the way for everyone in the industry.
03:58Singapore provided an open door.
04:01We've got to walk through it and do the hard work.
04:03And if we're serious about pushing us to that world where we can eat meat without killing an animal, we
04:11have a lot of work to do.
