The Biggest Problem With Lab-Grown Chicken Is Growing the Chicken

Ten years ago, a Dutch scientist unveiled a $330,000 lab-grown hamburger made from cow cells grown in petri dishes. It took six weeks to culture the patty. A chef cooked it onstage as journalists watched. Reactions ranged from 'unpleasant' to 'beeflike.' The scientist expected supermarket sales in a decade. His company and others have since raised over $2 billion but have little to show, only recently making one pound of chicken monthly. Despite bold promises of mass production, low emissions, and better nutrition, commercial viability remains elusive. Bloomberg Business: The company [Upside Foods], in a letter from its attorney to Bloomberg Businessweek, says plans for scaling up have been an evolution saddled with 'realities and complexities of doing something that has never been done before. Innovation rarely happens in a straight and continuous line.'

The dream is moist, meaty flesh self-multiplying ad infinitum in high-tech, stainless steel cell-growing chambers. But according to internal company documentation and eight former employees, most of whom requested anonymity because they don't have permission to discuss confidential information, Upside at the moment is actually growing just minuscule numbers of chicken skin-type cells in small plastic bottles, then scraping them out gram by gram to compress and mold them into a single forkful of flesh. This labor-intensive chicken has higher levels of cholesterol and lead than the real thing, publicly available company documentation shows. Even if that sounds remotely desirable, some scientists say the whole energy-intensive endeavor may actually be worse for the environment, especially with chicken, which has the smallest carbon footprint of anything at the local butcher. All of which points to this question: Why exactly are we chasing lab-grown chicken?

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