| The future of meat? Ohayo Valley's Wagyu burgers start out as a small biopsy of muscle taken from a young cow. Cells from that sample, mostly muscle cells and fibroblasts (which can transform into fat cells as a cow grows), can then be cultivated in the lab, growing and dividing over and over again. Having a mix of muscle cells, fibroblasts, and mature fat cells in the final product is key for the flavor, Krieger says. Once the cells have proliferated enough, they're washed with salt water to clear out the broth they're grown in and stored in the fridge overnight. Then they can go into a burger as soon as the next day. Most of Ohayo's work is still happening at a small lab scale, Krieger said, so altogether it took about three weeks to grow all the cells for my slider, along with four others the team planned to serve at an event later that day. The burger on my plate was actually only about 20% lab-grown material, Krieger explained. The company's plan is to blend its cells with a base of plant-based meat (she wouldn't tell me much about this base, just that it's not Ohayo's recipe). Plants can help provide the structure for alternative meats, Krieger says. One other major benefit to this blending technique is financial: the lab-grown components are expensive, so mixing in plants can help keep costs down. My colleague Niall Firth wrote about this process of blending lab-grown and plant-based meat (and Ohayo Valley) in 2020. The world's first lab-grown burger, served at a conference in 2013, cost an estimated $330,000 to make. The field has come a long way since, with Singapore becoming the first country to allow commercial sales of lab-grown meat in 2020. And in November 2022, a company in the US passed one of the final hurdles from the Food and Drug Administration. All this context was swirling in my head as I picked up the lab-grown burger and took a bite. It was definitely different from beef, but maybe not in a bad way. To me, the lab-grown burger had a strong resemblance to the one from Impossible Foods. The texture was similar, which makes sense since it was mostly made from plants. Taste-wise, I thought the lab-grown meat may have been a bit closer to the beef burger, but I found myself wondering if I'd feel the same way if I didn't know which was which. Was my brain tricking me into thinking it tasted more like meat, since I knew that there were animal cells in it? I took bites of all three burgers again to try to figure it out. I'm still not sure. I still think there are a lot of unanswered questions about lab-grown meat, including whether companies will be able to produce it at commercial scale, how expensive it'll turn out to be, what the climate impacts will actually look like, and whether anyone will eat this in the first place. Overall, we could probably use more options that are better for the climate than beef is today. I know that beans and tofu and lentils exist, and I've got some great vegetarian recipes I turn to sometimes. But I'm just not ready to give up burgers altogether. And I'm not alone—the vast majority of the world's population still eats meat. As the pressure of climate change ratchets up, more people are looking for compromises: alternatives that can replicate, or at least approximate, the experience of eating meat. I'm interested to see whether lab-grown meat can do anything to sway us from the old-fashioned version. | 
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