Cultivated meat now includes pork products

Recently, Campbell’s fired Martin Bally, its former VP and Chief Information Security Officer, after a lawsuit revealed comments in which Bally claimed the company made soup for “poor people” using “bioengineered meat” and chicken from a “3-D printer,” among other offensive comments.

Campbell’s denied the use of such meat, of course, but it does exist… sort of. And it isn’t cheap.

A new dawn

Mission Barns, which makes lab-grown pork, is one of just a handful of US companies to receive clearance from the FDA, and the first to secure approval to sell cultivated pork fat. 

• Other approved companies include Believer Meats, Good Meat, and Upside Foods, which make cultivated chicken, and Wildtype, which makes cultivated salmon. 

Mission grew a fat sample from Dawn, a Yorkshire pig who lives in a sanctuary in upstate New York, in its bioreactors with nutrients that replicated a pig’s body, per The Grist.

The end result? Meatballs, bacon, and sausage that tastes a lot like pork. Grist reporter Matt Simon compared them to “Diet Meat,” akin to Diet Coke. Similar, but different — “a bit less meaty.” 

Why would anyone want this? 

We’ve talked about cultivated meat before, and how it would appeal to:

• Anyone who wants to eat meat without killing animals
• People looking for a more sustainable way to consume meat than traditional agriculture
• People who want to eat extinct animals, like woolly mammoths

But it’s been difficult for companies to manufacture at scale, so it definitely isn’t cheap and wouldn’t be in a can of soup. In fact, it’s only been made available at a few restaurants and one Berkeley, California, grocery store where an eight-pack of meatballs cost ~$14.

Other complications include political opposition, and the lack of widespread adoption means we still don’t exactly know what impact cultivated meat would have on the environment, and thus, how much more sustainable it is. 

BTW: This is Dawn, who apparently enjoys belly rubs.