In Vitro Meat

According to the eminent seventeenth-century botanist John Parkinson, one of the plants that grew in the Garden of Eden was the vegetable lamb. Also known as the borametz, this creature resembled a young sheep in every important respect, except that it grew from a seed planted in the ground. Reports of it date back at least as far as Herodotus, and the fourteenth-century explorer John Mandeville claimed, in his notoriously unreliable Voyages and Travel , to have tasted one “although it were wonderful.” Only in the 1800s was the legend debunked, largely on the initiative of the British naturalist Henry Lee. (He convincingly speculated that borametz rumors began with the spread of the cotton plant, which to an untutored eye looked as woolly as a sheep.) Yet the dream of cultivating meat off the hoof, of growing muscle without the animal, was not so easily dismissed. In his 1931 book, Fifty Years Hence , no less a figure than Winston Churchill anticipated a time when “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” He didn’t live to see it happen. Half a century passed and vegetable meat remained as elusive as the Garden of Eden. But the technologies necessary for cultivation were evolving, quietly developing as researchers studied subjects as far afield as organ transplants and stem cells. Gradually a few laboratories, some of them funded to develop tastier astronaut cuisine for NASA, began growing potentially edible animal tissues in a bioreactor. Then everything changed again in 2008, when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) announced a prize of $1 million to the first person to produce “an in vitro chicken-meat product that has a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters and meat-eaters alike.” Almost overnight in vitro meat, or at least the idea of it, was headline news: The ancient dream, newly named, went prime time.