- What if you didn't need to kill
a chicken to get the meat?
Well, you don't.
Take a few cells from a chicken,
put them in a bioreactor,
let them divide and multiply
just like they would in a chicken's body
and voila,
a chicken nugget.
Why do this?
Because humans kill a lot
of these delicious flightless birds every year.
About 50 billion.
And the way these chickens are raised along the way
isn't exactly energy efficient
or great for the workers.
So, yeah, cellular-based chicken meat.
- It's a concept that I think sometimes
is difficult to even grasp
the idea that we don't have to kill another animal
to produce real meat.
- Though you may have heard
of lab grown or cell-cultured meat for a while,
this isn't some theoretical chemistry experiment.
The government of Singapore just approved
the sale of cell-cultured chicken.
And this restaurant is the first place
to offer it to diners.
But will people be willing
to scrap thousands of years of culinary tradition?
This is Hard Reset,
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
These are bioreactors,
sealed containers that have
the perfect conditions inside for microorganisms
to be fruitful and multiply.
For brewers, the result is beer.
For companies like Just,
the result is chicken,
specifically chicken breast meat
since those are the cells they've selected
and cultured.
- We're not trying to make a whole animal.
You're only focusing on growing
the edible parts.
And instead of growing those parts
inside of the animal,
you're growing them using a cultured process.
- This is Vitor.
He's one of the scientists at Eat Just
who is making this technology a reality,
like serious lab coat and microscope stuff.
Science.
- But I think that a lot of times
people have this connotation
that this is still a little bit of Frankenstein,
that it's synthetic food
when in fact it's not.
Understand that we're trying
to do exactly what happens
in the natural development of an animal,
growing a tissue the same way,
but we don't need the animal anymore.
- Killing chickens isn't a big deal
to most folks.
And I get that.
It's tasty.
Juicy meat that you can roast,
grill, or fry.
You can see why
it's the most consumed animal protein in the world.
Chickens are as smart as dolphins
and smarter than the average four year old human.
They're just not cute.
So we build entire factories
dedicated to killing them.
Imagine doing that with kittens or labradoodles.
If there's a true alternative,
maybe that moral calculus changes.
And that may be part of why there's an explosion
of venture capital being spent
on cell-cultured startups.
But none of this money or science really matters
unless the chicken tastes like chicken.
And as a chicken aficionado,
I wanted to sample it.
Sadly, it's only been approved in Singapore,
a country with a rich history
of making delicious chicken.
- The form that we're working with
is this chicken bite that is breaded and deep fried.
- This is Chef Kaimana.
He's one of the first cooks to use this product.
- The texture is tender and crispy on the outside.
It's soft and juicy on the inside.
- Basically, it tastes like chicken
because it is chicken,
unlike most meat substitutes,
which use plants that have been processed
to emulate the taste or texture of meat.
And let's be honest,
they usually just taste like a reminder
that you'd rather be eating real meat.
- I believe that the plant-based meat industry
is helping people to make change in their daily lives.
However, I think the advantage
of creating good clean meat
is that we don't need to sacrifice
the textures that we are accustomed to.
- As a kid, my favorite fast food
was absolutely McDonald's Chicken McNuggets.
So there's a big irony in that now
I'm serving the world's most sought after
and anticipated chicken nugget in the world.
- There's a reason why
we don't eat raw chicken these days
because many times it has salmonella,
it has a lot of fecal matter
that happens during the cross-contamination
during the slaughtering process.
So because we are decoupling all of that
in this new production system,
our product is very sterile.
We don't use antibiotics in any stage of production.
- Tasty meat, grown sustainably
with no weird antibiotics.
What's not to love?
Well, right now, the price.
It's expensive for a small portion,
but it could be affordable
in as soon as three to five years.
- In order to make this happen
and to feed the world,
you need to produce this in larger tanks
and a higher number of bioreactors.
And once that happens,
the cost will go down
and be at the price parity to conventional meat.
- And what happens if they truly scale?
I mean, picture a scenario
where people only ate cell-cultured chicken meat.
Don't worry.
It wouldn't be all chicken nuggets.
You could culture meat from any part of the chicken,
light meat, dark meat,
lean, fatty, whatever.
3D printing could give chicken
any number of textures,
shapes,
or even bones.
You want a chicken rib-eye?
You can have it.
You'd really just need to get your head around
the fact that you're eating lab grown meat,
and you'd have to ditch a product
that you've grown accustomed to.
Luckily, Chef Kaimana has some experience with that
when he was promoting Just's vegetable-based mayonnaise
in a place where people have
pretty deep brand loyalty to their mayo.
- Hawaii is one of those places
that you can only use one brand of mayonnaise.
If you stray from that one brand of mayonnaise,
your food truck,
your restaurant is doomed to failure.
It was an uphill battle from day one
to really educate people
on how making such a simple change
in their everyday lives
could not only impact their health,
but impact the environment
starting with a small switch.
- Convincing people to change
their brand of mayonnaise might seem silly,
but it's a perfect example
of how hard it can be
to get people to do something
they're not used to.
And in a world taken over by lab grown chicken,
we would lose the primal satisfaction
of being directly connected to our food source.
And that might be weird, at least at first,
but you know what's really weird?
Eating chicken raised
in less than awesome factory farms
which yield lots of pollution
and require tons of water.
Anything is weird
unless it's what you're used to.
Maybe we should get used to something
that would require less murder
and be better for our planet.
- I love that food connects us
as a human race.
This can be a connector.
While it might not be available tomorrow
or next week
or even next year,
we have to start somewhere.
I think it is the start of something magical.
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