CDM By CDM Staff
Upside Foods, a leader in the fake meat market, has failed to scale up its production to produce meaningful amounts of synthetic meat. Meanwhile, the company has been plagued with contamination issues, including rodent DNA found in one of its chicken cell lines and samples that contained 20 times more lead than conventional ground chicken.
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Story at a glance:
- Upside Foods, a leader in the fake meat market and one of two companies allowed to sell cultured meat in the U.S. has failed to scale up its production to produce meaningful amounts of synthetic meat.
- Plagued by contamination issues, Upside had problems with rodent DNA found in one of its chicken cell lines.
- While parading its expensive stainless-steel bioreactors for the press, Upside is actually growing only small amounts of fake meat bits inside small, single-use plastic bottles.
- Fake meat, presented as a solution to save the environment, may end up being worse for the planet than real meat.
- Lab-grown meat is often made using animal components, so it’s not really animal-free, and when Upside tested its fake meat for heavy metals, some samples contained 20 times more lead than conventional ground chicken.
Silicon Valley is banking on cultured meat taking off, providing animal-free “meat” to satisfy the carnivorous appetites of the world’s more than 8 billion people — most of whom eat meat.
But what started out with grandiose fanfare and backing from billionaire investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos is falling flat.
The dream of creating cultured “chicken” breasts or animal-free “beef” fillets is turning out to be nothing more than a fairy tale.
Upside Foods, a leader in the fake meat market and one of two companies allowed to sell cultured meat in the U.S. has resorted instead to “growing just minuscule numbers of chicken skin-type cells in small plastic bottles, then scraping them out gram by gram to compress and mold them into a single forkful of flesh.”
It’s not only unappetizing. Even if it succeeds, fake meat, presented as a solution to save the environment, may end up being worse for the planet than real meat, while presenting consumers with another highly processed food product that may further devastate human health.
What happens when Silicon Valley gets mixed up in food production?
Putting faith in Silicon Valley to produce wholesome food was the first mistake in the race to create cultured food.
While regenerative farmers raising grass-fed cows and free-range chickens work in concert with nature to provide food in the form humans have thrived on since the beginning of time, Silicon Valley does just the opposite.
In a process completely removed from nature, venture-backed startups are using precision fermentation based on genetically engineered microbes to create synthetic food products in a lab.
At Upside, which has received backing from Richard Branson, Kimbal Musk and even meat giants Tyson Foods and Cargill, stainless steel bioreactors are paraded as a measure of progress at media events, but it’s nothing more than careful public relations, or PR…
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