Singaporeans love their meat dishes — from Hainanese chicken rice to nasi lemak, life just doesn’t seem complete without such local faves. However, there are growing concerns about the environmental and ethical issues of meat consumption.
A tech start-up, Eat Just, is bringing cultured – or lab-grown – chicken to Singapore after authorities gave the green light for it here.
Their meat is grown without the need of antibiotics or animal suffering, and will be rolled out to restaurants first.
Eat Just announced on Wed (2 Dec) that their cultured chicken meat was given approval by authorities to be sold in Singapore, reports Channel NewsAsia.
The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) said this could be the first time cultured meat is sold commercially anywhere, according to the CNA article.
Co-founder of Eat Just, Josh Tetrick, cited our country as a “leader in innovation”, especially in “building a healthier, safer food system”, for why they chose Singapore as a launchpad for Just Meat.
Eat Just’s initial analyses show that cultured meat requires significantly less land and water to produce, while keeping greenhouse emissions low.
Their hope is to produce meat 10x more efficient than the highest-volume slaughterhouse in the world, which occupies 1,000,000 sq ft.
All this will be done without confining or slaughtering a single animal.
The plan is to first roll out the meat in restaurants before offering it for the mass market.
For those concerned about cost, they’re expected to be priced around the range of “premium chicken” in restaurants for now.
But in the long term, Mr Tetrick hopes to bring prices below the chicken we can find in markets.
According to their website, Eat Just said they isolate cells via non-invasive and harmless methods to ensure their cultured meat is slaughter-free from the start.
This could involve obtaining a chicken’s cells from a feather.
They said the culture process can be compared to the brewing of beer or the production of yeast for bread.
This results in a clean meat that is high in protein and rich in minerals, while being low in saturated fat.
The cells are grown antibiotic-free with a plant-based nutrient recipe.
This makes us wonder if slaughter-free meat grown with plant-based nutrients would be considered vegetarian.
After all, Ian the chicken in their video is still alive and well at the end of Eat Just’s video.
Just Eat hopes to tackle both animal cruelty and climate change with their revolutionary cultured chicken meat.
Along with other meat alternatives, it’s unclear about how Singaporeans will react to this unconventional product and only time will tell.
But if their solution is more sustainable and prices are brought down, there might be more support for this just product in future.
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Featured image adapted from Eat Just.
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