Meat without the Animal

From a story on NPR titled Lab-Grown Meat a Reality, But Who Will Eat It?

Though the idea of growing animal parts in a lab rather than on a farm has been around for a century, it has never seemed like a good time to talk about man-made meat. But the concept has had some famous proponents, including Winston Churchill in his 1932 essay "Fifty Years Hence": "We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."

Churchill was likely inspired by the work of Alexis Carrel, who at the time of Churchill's comment had been keeping alive a cultured piece of chicken heart tissue for 20 years. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist kept his experiment small, but it fed many an imagination, including that of author Frederik Pohl.

Pohl wrote the 1952 sci-fi novel The Space Merchants, in which tissue-cultured meat gets a starring if inglorious role — it's the starter ingredient for an ever-growing lumpen food source known affectionately as Chicken Little.

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Vladimir Mironov, a biologist at the Medical University of South Carolina, is among a handful of scientists culturing meat from animal tissue. His work involves turning formless, textureless patches of the stuff into mass-produced form — like meat sheets, or what one might affectionately call "shmeat."

"I personally believe that this [is the] inescapable future," he says.

But standing between Mironov and shmeat right now are production models, production facilities, venture capital — and consumer demand.