If you avoid meat to cut down on animal cruelty, carbon emissions or both, your options are a lot better than they were a decade ago, which is to say they’re … fine. For people who can afford to pay a premium, veggie burgers and nuggets from the likes of Beyond Meat Inc. and Impossible Foods Inc. are a much tastier option than the average imitation-meat entrees of the past. What they aren’t, though, is meat—and many such products are so packed with salt and saturated fat that they probably shouldn’t be a staple of most diets. There is, however, another option on the way for those in search of better guilt-free protein: growing meat from cells in a lab, without raising any living animals for slaughter. Yes, really.
Thank the biotech revolution. Under the right conditions, animal cells can be grown in a petri dish, or even at scale in factories full of stainless-steel drums. For decades, companies such as Pfizer Inc. and Johnson & Johnson have cultured large volumes of cells to produce vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and other biotherapeutics. Now the idea is that we might as well eat these cells, too.
