The lab-grown meat – which the company calls “clean meat” – is developed from self-reproducing cells taken from a chicken, with the purpose of creating a product that omnivores can’t distinguish from the real thing, but with a fraction of the considerable downsides of meat production, including environmental destruction and using agricultural land to grow animal feed rather than crops for human consumption.
To give some idea of how lab-grown chicken could revolutionise the industry, 61 billion chickens are killed and eaten every year around the world – more than a billion in the UK alone. The cost of breeding, hatching, rearing and slaughtering so many chickens could disappear overnight, while Memphis Meats says water and land use and harmful greenhouse gases would be slashed by 90%.