COLORADO — What once was thought to be science fiction is now moving closer to our dinner plates. It’s still in the early phases, but lab-grown meat foods, like chicken nuggets, grown from animal cells are already in the works. There are now more than 150 companies working on proteins approved by regulatory agencies across the globe to sell as “cell-cultivated".
“We provide meat for the country,” said Garrett Balsick, owner of BK Ranch in Calhan. The Balsick’s ranching tradition goes back 5 generations. Demand for meat is expected to double by 2050, according to the USDA. With that size of growth, it’s not the competition that farmers like Garrett are worried about.Lab-grown meat also called cultivated or cell-based, is meat that is developed from animal cells and grown with the help of nutrients like amino acids, in massive bioreactors in a production facility.
"We don't have the same level of greenhouse gas emissions and we have zero methane because animals' small cells do not produce methane. It's the industrial process that we are shortening by saying two weeks to grow meat versus two months or two years and that's where the big opportunity to decrease greenhouse gas emissions comes from. Just a shorter period of production," said Uma Valeti, Founder and CEO of Upside Foods, in an interview with C-N-N.
“I feel like people need to know the process too. They need to know what was in that vat with those cells to help make it grow,” said Kacey Green, a Colorado rancher on the Western Slope.