Isha Dattar

We take a small biopsy from a living animal and then extract the cells of interest.

Muscle cells in particular love to attach onto surfaces.

It helps them grow and elongate into those long muscle fibers that we're so familiar with.

So we might provide a scaffolding material for those cells to adhere onto.

And then, of course, we have to feed the cells something.

So we put them in a liquid medium that provides all the nutrients that these cells need to grow and divide.

Lastly, the cells on the scaffold in the medium all grow within a bioreactor, which is kind of like a large stainless steel tank, looks a lot like brewing equipment and can be just as big as well.

And the bioreactor really just provides that constant, stable environment that those cells need to flourish in.

And after those cells get a chance to mature into muscle fibers, we might harvest the cells and the tissues and then turn them into a nugget.

Now, this wouldn't just be better for chickens and cows and pigs and the people who have to farm them and slaughter them.

This could be better for the whole world.

I mean, if this all works, it's our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a second chance at agriculture, to do things better and to learn from our mistakes.

So around the world, there are a lot of companies that are doing little tastings here and there of their cultivated meat product.

The product on the market in Singapore is made of 3% cells, 97% plant stuff.

And that's actually exciting.

Like that's actually a really great step forward.

It just feels like disappointment because it's been pitted against this expectation that was set way too high.

And that expectation is cool as a future forward, like, holy grail expectation of where we could be one day.

But that's also the hardest thing you could possibly do.

Yeah, it is incredibly hard to cultivate animal protein into these kind of 3D products.