Singapore is the First in the World to produce Lab-grown Chicken

It has been a grueling journey among scientists to produce lab-grown Chicken or chicken meat produced without the actual Chicken. With the help of science and technology, Singapore innovators’ great minds are the first to make this seemingly impossible task possible.

Current Chicken Production

Chicken is considered as one of the staples in every meal across the globe. The current chicken production is so vast that it even poses a danger to one’s health. Chicken farms are probably the most productive way to breed and raise chickens. However, because of the demand for Chicken, chickens are in warehouses that pose many threats such as fire hazards, public health hazards (because of virus and bacteria), and even worker safety hazards.

However, you can consider all of these dangerous threats to go away because breeding chickens without actually raising chickens is now possible thanks to a group of innovators from Singapore.

The first lab-grown Chicken

This December 2020, the Singapore Food Agency has finally approved a lab-grown Chicken or cultured meat. This has been such a success that this chicken meat is now on the menu of 1880, a famous Singapore restaurant. Other countries are now following suit in the attempt to grow their lab-grown chicken meat. One such country is Israel, which is attempting the same feat. However, the restaurant that will be serving this is currently closed due to the ongoing pandemic.

What is Lab-Grown Meat

Many people are currently skeptical of lab-grown meat and its health hazards, especially since this is a novel way of growing poultry. From a physical and cellular standpoint, lab-grown meat is identical to Chicken from slaughtered animals. Their cells are made from live chicken cells, but instead of growing them in a poultry farm, scientists develop them from a cell-growth scaffold in a factory. This process is also different from plant-based meats, which use plant proteins to create products that taste like meat. In this process, the taste is similar, but it is entirely different on a cellular level.

However, why Chicken, you ask? The same approach can be applied to pork, beef, and other animal products. Yet, scientists have decided to use chickens in the pilot session instead, and they did so strategically. First, chickens are considered one of the animals raised to be slaughtered in the United States. This can lure Americans away from raising and killing livestock and consider producing lab-grown meat instead. Second, one of the biggest challenges for lab-grown meat is the texture of the meat itself. For someone who loves steak, consuming a lab-grown steak without the texture can be quite disappointing.

For lab-grown products to grow, one has to get cells from a live chicken, and they do not need to kill these chickens to produce the meat successfully. This can gain massive support from vegetarian people to consume lab-grown meat. The chicken cells are then submerged into a growth solution that allows the cells to multiply. Indeed, this is a huge step to boost food production sustainability and do away with livestock and poultry farming that poses health hazards with science and innovation.