What it’s like to eat lab-grown meat from New Age Meats

Katie Canales/Business Insider

• Silicon Valley clean meat startup New Age Meats made history on Monday by letting journalists taste the first cultured pork sausage made in a lab.
• New Age Meats’ sausage is the first cell-based meat to be made using both fat and muscle cells, which could prove key to nailing the flavor of traditional meat.
• Here’s what the farm-free sausage was like.
  

On a Monday night at a brewery in San Francisco’s hipster Mission District, the co-founders of a startup called New Age Meats helped cook up samples of pork sausage made entirely out of cells grown from a live pig named Jessie.

As scientists-turned-entrepreneurs Brian Spears and Andra Necula watched, the sausage they’d spent the past two months making at a nearby lab began to sizzle. Slowly, its sides turned brown and, as the aroma of breakfast meat filled the room, samples were doled out to taste.

New Age Meats aims to make meat from animal cells without killing any actual animals. They are one of roughly half a dozen nascent companies aiming to create an alternative to factory farming. In so doing, they hope to reduce waste, improve health, and eliminate animal suffering.

New Age Meats’ sausage was the first in history to be made with fat and muscle cells — an important combination that could prove key for nailing the taste of “cell-based” or “cultured” (meaning simply: not from slaughter) meat. Here’s what it was like.