If you love your chicken nuggets, or for those who prefer plant-based alternatives, researchers are jumping for joy after claiming a breakthrough in lab-grown meat.
The Japanese-led team have successfully grown 11g nugget-sized chunks of ‘chicken’.
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To make the meat chunks, researchers use fibres to give oxygen and nutrients to chicken muscle cells while they sit in a gel. In the gel, the meat grows up to 2cm long and 1cm thick.
A major hurdle for the team originally was to get enough nutrients into the muscle cells before they die off.
University of Tokyo Professor Shoji Takeuchi said, “Our system helped address this by providing internal perfusion, allowing us to support the growth of thicker, more consistent tissue.”
Researchers say this breakthrough paves the way for whole cuts of chicken, beef, pork and fish grown in the lab. One day, there might even be potential to produce functional organs.
It’s believed these lab-made meat products could be available sooner than you think, within the next five to ten years.
Takeuchi said at first, lab-grown meat will likely be more expensive than conventional chicken due to production costs.
“However, we are actively developing food-grade, scalable systems, and if successful, we expect the cost to decrease substantially over time,” he said.
A 2022 study from the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment looked at possible projections for cultivated meat production in the year 2030.
They found that lab-grown meat was nearly three times more efficient at turning crops into meat than livestock.
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