Critics dismiss it as unnatural ‘Frankenmeat’, but the San Francisco startups racing to take animal-free meat and fish to market think it’s wonder food. So how were the carp croquettes at the world’s first cultured fish tasting?
The broad avenues that lie south of Market Street in San Francisco are dotted with the headquarters of famous tech firms, from Uber and Airbnb to BitTorrent and Dropbox. Grand arts and civic buildings sit incongruously among office blocks, huddles of the city’s homeless and hip shared workspaces in which tech entrepreneurs and scientists plug away at their ideas to change the world. One such workspace houses Finless Foods, a company growing fish flesh in their laboratory, aiming to feed the 5,000 and then some without needing to kill a single animal. It was founded in 2016 by university buddies Mike Selden and Brian Wyrwas, bright-eyed biochemists in their mid-20s who are on a mission to save the oceans and bring affordable, contaminant-free fish to the masses.
Finless Foods is the first firm to enter the race to take cellular agriculture – meat grown outside of animals – to market with marine, as opposed to land animals. In 2013, the godfather of what is also known as cultured or in-vitro meat, Professor Mark Post from Maastricht University, unveiled the first ever cultured beefburger - no livestock required. It was dry and anaemic, but, says Post, “it showed it could be done.” Three years later, San Francisco startup Memphis Meats delivered a succulent beef meatball, following up this year with fried chicken and duck a l’orange. Meanwhile, Hampton Creek foods (also in San Francisco) are boldly promising they will be selling cultured poultry as soon as the end of next year.
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