Chicken.
And chicken.
This chicken though is a little bit different.
It was grown in a lab.
This year, the US became the second country in the world behind Singapore to make it legal
to sell and eat this stuff.
Some people are sceptical, others are excited.
But what I want to know is, how is it made?
And will we ever get to eat it here in Australia?
Lab grown chicken has cracked the US consumer market.
You’re making chicken in there?
Yeah.
It’s been heralded as the start of a new era and there’s little doubt it’s that.
So lab grown meat is meat that's grown in the laboratory, like by definition.
This is Mollie.
She works for Magic Valley, a cultured meat company in Melbourne.
So it's made from taking a really small skin sample from animals, so it's pain free, does
not harm the animal, the animals are fine afterwards.
And we take those skin cells, and we reprogram them into stem cells.
The stems cells are then put in a liquid food mixture, made up of amino acids, glucose and
other nutrients in huge metal tanks like these, where they can then be grown into all sorts
of things.
From muscle cells to fat, the stem cells are like the blueprint for building all of it.
How long does it take from the start of that process, all the way to making a dumpling
or a burger?
So essentially, when we start with the skin sample from an animal, so it takes about three
months to make an induced pluripotent stem cell line.
But once we have that cell line, we have that forever.
And it takes about three weeks to grow a paddy like a burger patty from that cell line.
How big does this sample need to be?
Like tiny, tiny, tiny.
Not slaughtering the animal is a big drawcard of lab-grown meat.
Once these companies have a stem cell line that they're happy with, they can theoretically
grow endless amounts of meat from it.
And because you don't need much of the animal to begin with, some people have been doing
pretty weird things in this space.
Another Australian lab-grown meat company, Vow, recently unleashed this upon the world.
The mammoth meatball!
Not in my wildest dreams did I expect to get the kind of reception that we managed to get
with the mammoth meatball.
That’s James, Vow’s Chief Scientific Officer.
The mammoth meatball was made by injecting synthesised mammoth DNA, which use some elephant
DNA to help fill in the gaps into sheep stem cells.
Cultured meat, we often talk about cultured meat as being something that doesn't involve
the killing of animal, the ultimate way to prove that is to create something from an
extinct animal, right?
Because the extinct animal is already dead, there's no way for you to kill that animal.
So that was really attractive to us.
But there's a catch.
None of this has been approved for human consumption in Australia, yet.
That's where the Food Standards authority comes in.
Hi, everybody.
I'm Glen Neal.
I'm the General Manager of our Risk Management Branch here at Food Standards Australia New
Zealand.
We make food standards for, for both countries.
Can you tell us a bit about that process?
How does something go from an idea, to in a restaurant or store shelves?
Yeah, great question.
So we, we get about somewhere in the region 20 to 30 applications a year, so not, not
a huge number.
And each one tends to take around 9 to 12 months.
So from start to finish, umm you know a good part of that time is us doing the scientific
investigation, and then, you know, we'll put it out to the public for four to six weeks.
All that yeah does tend to take a bit of time.
Another problem Glen's team at FSANZ has to work out is labelling.
At the moment, if you walk into the shops you'll see milk that comes from cows, alongside
milk that comes from oats, soy beans or rice.
Think about peanut butter, for example.
Oh yeah!
Peanut, peanut butter ain't butter.
It's, it’s, it’s peanuts plus oil, there's no butter in peanut butter.
Right?
If we're gonna get too pernickety about it, if I could use the word ‘pernickety’ probably not
too many Australian High School students would know what the word pernickety means.
If we're going to get too fussy about it, um you know, where do we go with hot dogs?
Do we allow hot dogs to be called hot dogs?
There's no, not too much dog hopefully in a hot dog so you know, is that, is that misleading
people as well?
What about a KitKat?
How far do we go here?
We're starting with cells from the animal um that, so it is it is real meat, real animal
meat. We're just only growing the bits that we want to eat.
It's important, I think that people understand what it is they're buying, that they make
an informed choice and they're not misled into thinking they're buying, for example,
a conventionally-raised meat product for example.
So there shouldn't be any confusion with the labelling of these products.
It might not be conventionally-raised but this meat is designed to have less impact
on the environment and use fewer resources, and that has huge appeal to lots of people.
There’s a, a sector of society who believe that animal agriculture is a, is a key source
of greenhouse gases and um they think that in order to defeat climate change or to bring
about slow climate change that we need to change the way we feed ourselves essentially.
But that could take a while.
For now, the only way to taste lab grown meat products is to either to be working at one
of these lab-grown meat companies or be pretty notable.
If you have a million dollars in your pocket?
Yeah, sure.
Come around!
Ooh that's a really good point.
How much does it cost to do one of these tastings?
This is Wendy.
Magic Valley’s Internal Chef and Researcher.
Nothing.
No, no.
So these are all invited guests so there's no cost to invited guests yep.
Okay, so you have to be part of like a special guest list at the moment to get to taste these?
VIP List, yes.
VIP List, yeah.
Um, does it cost you a lot of money to feed your VIP guests?
Like what's the cost of a, a serve of dumplings or a, or a burger patty?
At the start for research and development it was expensive, ah but at the moment the
cost of the patty is about $5 and we expect the cost will come down with more automation.
So far there's been one application received by the Food Standards authority from the folks
that made the mammoth meatball for cultured quail meat, not mammoth.
Our first product is going to be quail.
Why would you use this brand new technology to simply replicate something that you can
already buy today?
Consumers know exactly what chicken tastes like, so you have to make sure that you hit
it absolutely on the head.
Because if you don't, a consumer is going to say, "Yeah, look, it tastes pretty good,
but it tastes different".
And the second someone says the word "different", you're in trouble.
Now quail is a, a really nice species because it's not, it’s not something most consumers
can immediately think about, "Oh this doesn't taste like the quail ate yesterday".
And so quail sort of fits in this nice, that sort of ah, ah, happy medium of it's different,
but not too different.
We have received our first application, pretty exciting after reading about these things
for a number of years.
We're busy working our way through that at the moment, actually and we expect to get
to public consultation on that in the next couple of months.
So, that should be an interesting process and we look forward to seeing what everybody
has to say about that when we go out to consult.
So in Australia and New Zealand at least, it's possible that we might start to see lab-grown
meat on shelves sooner rather than later.