Would you eat lab-grown meat? How meat made from cells is picking up steam

Lab-grown meat, also known as 'cultivated' meat, may soon be sold to the public in the U.S. after two companies received full approval from the government.

Lab-grown meat, also known as “cultivated” meat, may soon be sold to the public in the U.S. after two companies received full approval from the government.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, allowing the California-based companies to sell their products in restaurants.

It may be a while longer until Canada sees the same style of products, though — Health Canada told Global News in an email that it has not received any applications for lab-grown meat.

Nevertheless, one cultivated meat company, SCiFi Foods, hopes to be selling in Canada in a year’s time, although it has not submitted any applications yet. That’s according to co-founder and CEO Joshua March, who spoke about the new style of meat at a panel during Toronto’s Collision tech conference.

March said his company’s mission is to “electrify the cow,” meaning that the huge amount of methane produced from animal farms would be avoided and the main energy drain for cultivating meat would be electricity.

“We are producing essentially real meat,” March said Wednesday. “But the prime input becomes electricity.”

Those in favour of growing their meat in a lab point to the environmental costs of traditional farm-raised animals and food production, which Our World in Data found in 2019 contributes 31 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions from the food production process.

More broadly, food production is responsible for just over one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.