Post by bonnasuttadhar225588 on Feb 15, 2024 8:19:11 GMT
Can you imagine a way to eat meat without killing animals? This idea is becoming more and more real. Instead of raising livestock on farms, Uma Valeti, cardiologist and co-founder of Upside Foods, has taken his dream of “ growing ” meat to a production facility by growing animal cells. In a way, the concept of “cultured” meat could be attributed to Valeti. When he was working with heart attack patients at the Mayo Clinic more than 15 years ago, growing human heart cells in a laboratory, the idea of growing meat using a similar technique sparked in him. Eating meat without killing animals… is it possible? Uma Valeti's proposal of eating meat without killing animals is the result of years of experimentation by a team of biologists, biochemists and engineers to convert that concept into a ready-to-eat product. The company is currently waiting for the green light from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin selling its first cultured meat products, including a chicken tender. If achieved, Upside's production plant in Emeryville, California, will be able to begin producing more than 20 thousand kilos of cultured meat products per year.
Something that until a while ago seemed to be only science fiction. With a 70,000-square-foot facility, and following safety and health protocols, Upside Foods gave NPR a tour of its facilities made up of stainless steel, brewery-style tanks. This way you can even see the cell bank where the animal cell samples are stored, the pipes that pump nutrients to the tanks and, finally, the raw meat as Mali Email List it left the production facilities. Valeti noted that the glass walls of the facility are intentional, to emphasize transparency and "create a paradigm shift, people should be able to go through it [the process of growing meat], see it and believe it." laboratory-meat Meat farming market grows Although Upside Foods could be considered a pioneer in the industry, competition will increase once cultured meats enter the market, with more than 80 companies staking a future in this new industry. For example, Good Meat , part of Eat Just, Inc., announced that it will serve its cultured chicken at the COP-27 climate conference this week, after introducing its product in Singapore . Additionally, Sci-Fi Foods , founded by self-proclaimed "burger-obsessed foodies," aims to blend cultured beef with a plant-based recipe to produce a hybrid burger that they say will be better for the planet.
This acceleration in investment in "cultured" meat is due to the demand of consumers who are increasingly aware of the relationship between the food industry and damage to the environment. Since it is estimated that a third of all GHG emissions produced by humans come from food production and scientists warn that it is almost impossible to meet climate goals without switching to a more sustainable diet. However, compared to chicken meat, beef particularly has a higher environmental impact because it requires a lot of land to graze animals and is one of the main sources of methane emissions. Innovation in food Valeti's leap from cardiology to food innovation was inspired by the belief that there was a better way to put meat on the table. He pointed to an image that stuck in his head: "They were literally passing by at breakneck speed [hundreds of chickens hanging on a production line], they were upside down with blood everywhere." This scene not only made Valeti become a vegetarian, but also saw the urgent need to generate change. This convinced him that it was possible to develop a viable technique for growing meat from animal cells. “Once I had that idea in my head, it was almost impossible to get out,” Valeti recalls. This is how the journey of eating meat without killing animals began.