The ‘clean meat’ revolution is coming

On 19 December last year, some chicken nuggets were sold in a restaurant called 1880, in Singapore. This doesn’t sound like a significant turning point in history, but it was. That small plate of chicken nuggets might well have been the start of a major industrial, social and cultural revolution — one the UK needs to prepare for.

That Singaporean chicken nugget was the first time in history that meat that did not come from a slaughtered animal had been sold commercially. It was genuine chicken meat, not a substitute, but it had been cultured from cells in a vat called a bioreactor. The cultured chicken meat was approved a few weeks earlier as fit for human consumption by the Singapore Food Agency, the first — and still the only — time a regulatory regime anywhere in the world has authorised for human consumption meat that did not come from animals.

The cultured meat revolution is also sometimes called ‘the protein transition’ and its advocates are confident that this transition will happen far quicker than almost anyone realises, in years not decades. They imagine that we could be the last generation to kill animals to eat, a huge milestone in millions of years of human evolution.

The technology is new, but the idea isn’t. In 1931, Winston Churchill wrote: ‘We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.’ Now Churchill’s vision is turning to reality, and astonishingly quickly. More than 30 start-ups around the world are focusing on producing all manner of different sorts of lab-made meat, including chicken, pork, beef, fish and even lobster and foie gras. One of my constituents, Mark Kotter, cofounded Meatable, a Dutch company which is on track to produce cultured pork for sale in 2023.