Singapore's Cultivated Chicken

Ever since the first lab-grown burger – which cost a mere $330,000 to create – was unveiled in London in 2013, dozens of companies around the world have joined the race to bring affordable cultivated meat to the market. 

 

So far, only California, US-based Eat Just have managed to get their product approved for public sale after regulators in Singapore – the only country in the world to allow lab-grown meat to be sold – gave their chicken the green light in December 2020.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the only restaurant in the world to have so-called cultivated meat on the menu is Huber's Butchery and Bistro @ #22, Dempsey Road in the city-state. 

 

But things appear to have stalled since then. Cultivated chicken nuggets were briefly on the menu at a private members' club in 2021. 

 

That partnership was discontinued after a few months and this year Huber's have started offering a chicken sandwich and a chicken pasta dish to the general public – albeit only once a week with limited dining slots available. 

 

"Cultivated meat is real meat, but you don't have to slaughter an animal", says Josh Tetrick (right), chief executive of Eat Just, who spoke to the BBC from San Francisco in California, USA. "This way of eating makes sense for the future", he maintains. 

 

Unlike plant-based substitutes, cultivated meat is literally meat. The process involves extracting cells from an animal, which are then fed with nutrients such as proteins, sugars and fats. 

 

The cells are allowed to divide and grow, before being placed in a large steel bioreactor, which acts like a fermentation tank. 

 

After four to six weeks, the material is "harvested" from the bioreactor. Some vegetable protein is added, then it is moulded, cooked and 3-D printed to give it the necessary shape and texture. 

 

Feedback from customers has been "phenomenal", claims the restaurant's owner. 

 

Eat Just will not say exactly how much they spend on making their cultivated chicken, but at the moment the company's production capacity only yields 2kg (4.4lb) or 3kg per week in Singapore. 

 

When you compare that to the 4,000-5,000kg of conventional chicken sold weekly – at Huber's alone – it gives you a sense of the scale of the task ahead. Put simply, they will need to increase production enormously to avoid making a loss on each piece of chicken. 

 

The industry is urging for patience, but many scientists have already seen enough. 

 

"The narrative presented by these companies is very strong", says Ricardo San Martin, co-director of the Alt: Meat Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. 

 

"But that narrative must be contrasted with the science", he says. "Run the numbers, look at every scientific paper written by people who have no skin in the game, and you'll see the answer is clear". 

 

"Can you do this, at scale, at a reasonable cost? No. Can you talk about saving the world with this? Again, no. These companies have to be honest – it's wishful thinking", he says. 

 

Not only are there doubts about scaling up production, there is also uncertainty over the industry's green credentials, which have been questioned by scientists. 

 

In theory, reducing the world's reliance on land and livestock for meat production should reduce carbon emissions, but at the moment the advanced technology needed to create cultivated meat is so energy intensive that it cancels out any benefits. Already, one study even estimated that the process produces between 4 and 25 times as much carbon dioxide as regular beef. 

 

Eat Just’s Tetrick admits: "It's not straightforward. It's complicated. It's not guaranteed and it might not work out. But the other option for us is not to do anything. So, we decided to take a bet and go for it".