FUTURE OF FOOD: Meat cultured from animal cells

The solution to climate change will be eating "meat" engineered and grown in a lab according to Uma Valeti, the co-founder of Upside Foods, a company that generates a foodstuff cultivated from cultured animal cells. 

According to NPR, "Now the company is awaiting a green light from the Food and Drug Administration to begin selling its first cultivated meat products, including a chicken fillet." 

Valeti, a cardiologist by trade, had his dream of growing meat in a facility after being inspired by seeing how human heart cells can be grown in a lab to help heart attack patients. He saw that human beings had learned how to grow human heart cells, and he could do the same thing with animals. Bill Gates heavily invested in Upside Foods to help it grow.

Valeti has entered a flourishing new startup space as there are over 80 companies working to create life with machines, cook it, and then feed it to humans. The company that made JUST Eggs, Eat Just, Inc, has a new division, Good Meat, also creating cultivated meat. That company will be serving dishes made of their foodstuff at COP27, or the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Vanenti said this experimental process is real even though "People said it was science fiction."

The company Sci-Fi Foods are making a "burger" that is half plant-based, similar to Beyond Burger, and half cultivated meat that they claim wil "be better for the planet."

It is Generation Z that has been gung ho on cultivated meat as 88 percent of the group said they want to eat the foodstuff to save the planet.

Valenti has been negotiating with the FDA for four years but believes he is really close this time and is getting his foodstuff product into the mouths of humans "in the very near future."

The process starts with a typical biopsy of an animal, and those cells are placed in tanks at his 70,000-square-foot facility where they are fed "nutrients they need to proliferate, including fats, sugar, amino acids, and vitamins." The meat isn't grown but is brewed and afterwards the tanks excrete a substance Valenti calls meat, 50,000 pounds of which he hopes to produce each year.

According to NPR, "We saw the cell bank where the animal cell samples are stored, the pipes that pump nutrients into the tanks, and finally the raw meat as it emerged from the production facility. The process had a futuristic vibe but by the end of the tour, it felt somehow ordinary to me — like a kind of hydroponic gardening."

"The acceleration in investment comes as more consumers connect the dots between what they eat and the environment," according to NPR.

NPR, who has been criticized for promoting pervasive misinformation and pushing pro-abortion propaganda, wrote food production is creating one-third of "human-induced greenhouse gas emissions" but brewing meat in tanks will be better for the environment than eating meat that grazed on land, where they also could have increased the methane by existing.

NPR also sourced "Preventing the Next Pandemic," a UN report from 2020 that said the way to prevent the next Covid pandemic was for humans to stop eating meat from "concentrated animal feeding operations."