The Lab Grown 'GOOD Meat' Company Has a Murky Past, and They're Extremely Sensitive About It...
thenationalpulse.com
On March 21, GOOD Meat, the lab-grown, “cultivated” meat division of Eat Just Inc., announced that it had received an important preliminary approval from the FDA to bring one of its alternative meat products to market in the US. The approval, in the form of a “no questions” letter, means that the FDA has accepted the company’s claim that its first product, cultivated chicken, is safe to eat. The evaluation process involved a detailed submission from GOOD Meat about the safety and production process for the product, including assurances about its nutritional content and purity.
The letter comes two years after GOOD Meat received its first approval, from the government of Singapore, and served its chicken product to the public for the very first time, at upmarket Singapore restaurant called 1880. It has since been sold in a variety of locations in the city-state, from street stalls to the prestigious Huber’s Butchery. At present, GOOD Meat remains the only producer of lab-grown meat in the world not only to have the necessary approvals to sell its products to consumers, but also to have done so. Although Upside Foods secured FDA approval before GOOD Meat, it has yet to feed any paying customers.
GOOD Meat is now working with the US Department of Agriculture to secure the final necessary approvals, before serving its cultivated chicken at a restaurant in Washington DC, with the help of chef José Andrés, who also happens to be a member of the company’s Board of Directors.
“Since Singapore approved GOOD Meat for sale, we knew this moment was next. I am so proud to bring this new way of making meat to my country and to do it with a hero of mine, Chef José Andrés,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of GOOD Meat and Eat Just, in response to the FDA approval.
“The future of our planet depends on how we feed ourselves,” added Andrés. “And we have a responsibility to look beyond the horizon for smarter, sustainable ways to eat. GOOD Meat is doing just that, pushing the boundary on innovative new solutions, and I’m excited for everyone to taste the result.”
Despite the fanfare for this supposed “food of the future,” and the fact that consumers in the US are probably going to be eating it very soon, there remain serious questions to be answered. Not only about the product, but also the man who produced it: Josh Tetrick.
Can eating lab-grown meat – which is essentially a form of deliberately grown cancer – actually give you cancer? How can you convince the public that it won’t, when nobody has ever eaten it before? And is a man with a troubled business history – a history he’s done his best to hide – the right person to do it?
Lab-grown meat, meat that is produced in a bioreactor in a high-tech manufacturing facility rather than on a traditional farm, is widely touted as a “food of the future”, along with so-called “plant-based meats” and new alternative protein sources like insects and algae.
The promise of lab-grown meat is almost too good to be true: all of the benefits of meat – the taste, the texture, and the nutritional profile – without any of the downsides. That means no raising and slaughtering of animals and, even more importantly, claims of a significantly reduced carbon footprint versus traditional agriculture. Agriculture is widely portrayed as one of the principal culprits in the deepening “climate crisis,” with predictions of looming catastrophe if we don’t transform animal farming soon. By “transform”, of course, many simply mean “get rid of altogether”.
Huge amounts of money have already been poured into lab-grown meat, on the promise of an imminent transformation of meat production and consumption. The so-called “Big Three” players – Eat Just, Believer Meat and Upside Foods – have raised $1.2 billion between them in venture funding, and counting.
These new companies have the backing of organizations like the World Economic Forum, which has proposed a “Planetary Health Diet” built around plant-based and alternative protein sources, as well as the UN and governments – including now the US government, and the governments of the UK, France, the Netherlands and Singapore.
Activist celebrities have been at the forefront of this revolution in food production, providing vocal support, as well as financing, for the new technology. In 2021, for instance, Leonardo DiCaprio bought an unspecified stake in two lab-grown meat companies, Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms, after an earlier investment in Beyond Meat, one of the leading producers of so-called “plant-based meat”.
In a press release to accompany his investment in lab-grown meat, DiCaprio said, “One of the most impactful ways to combat the climate crisis is to transform our food system. Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms offer new ways to satisfy the world’s demand for beef, while solving some of the most pressing issues of current industrial beef production.”
With the enormous weight of such individual and institutional backing, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the success of lab-grown meat is all-but-guaranteed. But lab-grown meat faces at least two serious, related, problems that are intrinsic to what it is and the way it is produced. If these problems cannot be resolved, the product may just as easily fail to sell, regardless of how much money has been invested in it.
Manufacturers of lab-grown meat like to say that their product is indistinguishable from real meat. It isn’t a copy, nor replica, nor approximation of real meat: it is real meat. But this isn’t true. In actual fact, lab-grown meat cells differ from typical animal cells in at least one fundamental regard: they will replicate eternally if placed under the right conditions. As a result, they are functionally indistinguishable from cancer. They are cancer. As you might imagine, this brings with it image and safety concerns that are likely to prove very hard to shake.
Cells that replicate eternally are known in the medical business as “immortalized cell lines”. The first immortalized human cell line was produced from cancer cells taken from a woman called Henrietta Lacks in 1951, at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore. The sample was taken from Lacks without her informed consent, and her treatment is held up today as a test case of failed medical ethics, alongside other injustices like the Tuskegee experiments. Despite the ethical controversy that still surrounds their use, the HeLa line of cells, as it is known, has been responsible for a number of scientific and medical breakthroughs. Immortalized human cells taken from aborted fetal tissue were used to develop a number of the COVID-19 shots. Cells may already be cancerous, or cancerous growth may be induced in them via the application of radiation or substances such as enzymes like telomerase, or by genetic modification.
The Lab Grown 'GOOD Meat' Company Has a Murky Past, and They're Extremely Sensitive About It...
On March 21, GOOD Meat, the lab-grown, “cultivated” meat division of Eat Just Inc., announced that it had received an important preliminary approval from the FDA to bring one of its alternative meat products to market in the US. The approval, in the form of a “no questions” letter, means that...
thenationalpulse.com
On March 21, GOOD Meat, the lab-grown, “cultivated” meat division of Eat Just Inc., announced that it had received an important preliminary approval from the FDA to bring one of its alternative meat products to market in the US. The approval, in the form of a “no questions” letter, means that the FDA has accepted the company’s claim that its first product, cultivated chicken, is safe to eat. The evaluation process involved a detailed submission from GOOD Meat about the safety and production process for the product, including assurances about its nutritional content and purity.
The letter comes two years after GOOD Meat received its first approval, from the government of Singapore, and served its chicken product to the public for the very first time, at upmarket Singapore restaurant called 1880. It has since been sold in a variety of locations in the city-state, from street stalls to the prestigious Huber’s Butchery. At present, GOOD Meat remains the only producer of lab-grown meat in the world not only to have the necessary approvals to sell its products to consumers, but also to have done so. Although Upside Foods secured FDA approval before GOOD Meat, it has yet to feed any paying customers.
GOOD Meat is now working with the US Department of Agriculture to secure the final necessary approvals, before serving its cultivated chicken at a restaurant in Washington DC, with the help of chef José Andrés, who also happens to be a member of the company’s Board of Directors.
“Since Singapore approved GOOD Meat for sale, we knew this moment was next. I am so proud to bring this new way of making meat to my country and to do it with a hero of mine, Chef José Andrés,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of GOOD Meat and Eat Just, in response to the FDA approval.
“The future of our planet depends on how we feed ourselves,” added Andrés. “And we have a responsibility to look beyond the horizon for smarter, sustainable ways to eat. GOOD Meat is doing just that, pushing the boundary on innovative new solutions, and I’m excited for everyone to taste the result.”
Despite the fanfare for this supposed “food of the future,” and the fact that consumers in the US are probably going to be eating it very soon, there remain serious questions to be answered. Not only about the product, but also the man who produced it: Josh Tetrick.
Can eating lab-grown meat – which is essentially a form of deliberately grown cancer – actually give you cancer? How can you convince the public that it won’t, when nobody has ever eaten it before? And is a man with a troubled business history – a history he’s done his best to hide – the right person to do it?
THE CRUELTY-FREE FOOD OF THE FUTURE?
Lab-grown meat, meat that is produced in a bioreactor in a high-tech manufacturing facility rather than on a traditional farm, is widely touted as a “food of the future”, along with so-called “plant-based meats” and new alternative protein sources like insects and algae.
The promise of lab-grown meat is almost too good to be true: all of the benefits of meat – the taste, the texture, and the nutritional profile – without any of the downsides. That means no raising and slaughtering of animals and, even more importantly, claims of a significantly reduced carbon footprint versus traditional agriculture. Agriculture is widely portrayed as one of the principal culprits in the deepening “climate crisis,” with predictions of looming catastrophe if we don’t transform animal farming soon. By “transform”, of course, many simply mean “get rid of altogether”.
Huge amounts of money have already been poured into lab-grown meat, on the promise of an imminent transformation of meat production and consumption. The so-called “Big Three” players – Eat Just, Believer Meat and Upside Foods – have raised $1.2 billion between them in venture funding, and counting.
These new companies have the backing of organizations like the World Economic Forum, which has proposed a “Planetary Health Diet” built around plant-based and alternative protein sources, as well as the UN and governments – including now the US government, and the governments of the UK, France, the Netherlands and Singapore.
Activist celebrities have been at the forefront of this revolution in food production, providing vocal support, as well as financing, for the new technology. In 2021, for instance, Leonardo DiCaprio bought an unspecified stake in two lab-grown meat companies, Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms, after an earlier investment in Beyond Meat, one of the leading producers of so-called “plant-based meat”.
In a press release to accompany his investment in lab-grown meat, DiCaprio said, “One of the most impactful ways to combat the climate crisis is to transform our food system. Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms offer new ways to satisfy the world’s demand for beef, while solving some of the most pressing issues of current industrial beef production.”
With the enormous weight of such individual and institutional backing, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the success of lab-grown meat is all-but-guaranteed. But lab-grown meat faces at least two serious, related, problems that are intrinsic to what it is and the way it is produced. If these problems cannot be resolved, the product may just as easily fail to sell, regardless of how much money has been invested in it.
Manufacturers of lab-grown meat like to say that their product is indistinguishable from real meat. It isn’t a copy, nor replica, nor approximation of real meat: it is real meat. But this isn’t true. In actual fact, lab-grown meat cells differ from typical animal cells in at least one fundamental regard: they will replicate eternally if placed under the right conditions. As a result, they are functionally indistinguishable from cancer. They are cancer. As you might imagine, this brings with it image and safety concerns that are likely to prove very hard to shake.
Cells that replicate eternally are known in the medical business as “immortalized cell lines”. The first immortalized human cell line was produced from cancer cells taken from a woman called Henrietta Lacks in 1951, at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore. The sample was taken from Lacks without her informed consent, and her treatment is held up today as a test case of failed medical ethics, alongside other injustices like the Tuskegee experiments. Despite the ethical controversy that still surrounds their use, the HeLa line of cells, as it is known, has been responsible for a number of scientific and medical breakthroughs. Immortalized human cells taken from aborted fetal tissue were used to develop a number of the COVID-19 shots. Cells may already be cancerous, or cancerous growth may be induced in them via the application of radiation or substances such as enzymes like telomerase, or by genetic modification.
