Lab-Grown Meat

How do you eat chicken that hasn’t been slaughtered? Carefully, according to government regulations. I’m Amy E. Feldman.

Not quite vegetarian but not hunted or slaughtered either, Good Meat is the second product in a growing class of lab-grown meat that just got through the first hurdle to get lab-grown meat onto US dinner plates.  Lab-grown meat is animal meat that is grown in a lab using starter animal cells. Per US regulations, the US Food and Drug Administration had to be part of the pre-market evaluation, which just determined that it has no further questions about the food’s safety.

So now Good Meat must meet other FDA requirements including facility registration for the cell culture portion, and inspection by the USDA of the manufacturing establishment and the end product.  So there’s still a good ways to go before you can start looking in the lab grown section of the meat department in your local supermarket, but it is on its way.