For the first time in the roughly five years since a smattering of researchers and companies began talking about making real meat without slaughtering animals, one startup is letting people see how its sausage gets made.
Well, almost. On Monday evening, the startup, called New Age Meats, let a handful of journalists and potential investors taste its prototype product — a pork sausage made from many of the same ingredients in the kind of breakfast sausage you'd buy at the store, such as pork muscle and fat, spices, sausage, casing, and vegetable stock.
But unlike other breakfast sausages, this meat was made from animal cells, without killing any actual animals.
Creating this kind of meat been the primary objective of several startups ever since Dutch scientist Mark Post became the first person in the world to make a beef burger from cow cells in 2013. Since then, at least six companies have emerged with the aim of slashing food waste and emissions while reducing animal suffering and improving human health. All of them are working on transforming meat or fish cells into edible flesh.
At a brewery in San Francisco, New Age Meat's team cooked and doled out the first samples of its farm-free (also known as "cell-based" or "cultured") meat. Here's what it was like.
On Monday evening, New Age Meats co-founders Brian Spears and Andra Necula served three freshly-cooked pork sausage links made using fat and muscle cells generated from a single sample of a live pig named Jessie (after the street where their headquarters is located in San Francisco).
"This is the most product and the fastest production from any cultured meat startup we've seen so far," Gupta said.
As Spears, a chemical engineer by training, and Necula, a cell biologist, watched, the sausage sizzled in a pan with a little grapeseed oil. Slowly, it began to brown on each side like conventional sausage.
The room filled with the smell of breakfast meat. After a few minutes — just before the sausage casing began to blister — we dug into our bite-sized samples.
It tasted like meat. Then again, it is meat.
The texture was distinctly sausage-like. After I'd chewed my bite, I wasn't sure I would have been able to tell the difference between this pork sausage and any other. Perhaps it was a little drier, a little more crumbly? It was hard to tell from just one bite, but I was pretty sure there were no glaring differences.