"We invented the cow 10,000 years ago. Lab-grown meat is just the next step"

At 8am Pacific Time on 4 November 2021, the world was invited to Emeryville, across the bay from San Francisco, to watch the cardiologist turned start-up founder and CEO Uma Valeti lift an enormous pair of scissors, each blade as long as his leg. “It’s not a dream any more,” Valeti enthused. “Let’s make some meat!”


At this, he sliced through a huge ribbon the colour of beef carpaccio; balloons and confetti rained down, and Upside Foods’ $50m facility for growing meat in a factory – culturing it from cells instead of cutting it from dead animals – was officially open. With typical Silicon Valley understatement, Upside Foods is calling it the Epic (the Engineering, Production and Innovation Centre). The 53,000 sq ft space is “a groundbreaking, world-changing cultivated meat facility”, according to Upside’s chief operating officer Amy Chen.

Livestream viewers were taken on a virtual tour of the “cultivation room”, a vast maze of snaking silver pipes. Masked technicians in blue gloves, white lab coats, hairnets and surgical overshoes inspected gauges and tweaked dials. The camera tracked a technician striding along a gangway through a field of shiny bioreactors: great cylinders with riveted portal windows like those in space rockets. A voiceover informed us that, at capacity, the Epic will produce 400,000 pounds of meat a year: “It will serve as an international model for cultivated meat production. In other words, this is just the beginning.”

Syl wrote:At first thought it sounds awful, if I want to eat meat, I want proper meat, it's what I have always known.

On second thought, if it tastes good, if it prevents the suffering and slaughter of millions of animals every year,  if it could perhaps feed people in countries where they can't cultivate animals for food easily, then why not?

Many things that were taken for granted a few short decades ago, would be unthinkable today.
Maybe in a few short decades from now, people will be disgusted at the thought of humans killing real live animals to eat.