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CNN
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Cultured cell chicken is officially on the menu at Bar Crenn in San Francisco. But you can’t just walk in and order it.
About a week and a half ago, the US Department of Agriculture approved two brands, Upside Foods and Good Meat, to begin producing and selling their breeder chicken. Cultured or lab-grown meat is made from animal cells and grown in giant bioreactors using nutrients like amino acids. This takes place in a production facility that is very similar to a brewery.
On Saturday, cultured chicken tempura is on Bar Crenn’s menu, served with a burnt chilli aioli and garnished with vegetables and edible flowers. Chef Dominique Crenn removed meat from the restaurant’s menu in 2018 “because of the impact of factory farming on animals and the planet,” according to the restaurant’s website, but is happy to sell farmed chicken.
Upside Foods ran a competition on social media to see who gets to try the product at Bar Crenn, and winners can enter this weekend. You pay a symbolic dollar each to taste the chicken. Contest winners will also be able to tour Upside Food’s Engineering, Production and Innovation Center.
UPSIDE groceries
Ujpside Foods breeding chicken is on the menu at Bar Crenn.
There will be more opportunities to try farm chickens at Bar Crenn after Saturday, but not immediately.
According to Upside Foods, there will be monthly dinners featuring the product starting later this year. If you want to try it out, you can register in advance on the Bar Crenn website.
Good Meat also plans to initially serve its product in a restaurant, but a date has not yet been announced. It is working with chef and restaurateur José Andrés to bring the product to its China Chilcano restaurant in Washington, DC.
The Bar Crenn debut follows a series of approvals from the USDA and the Food and Drug Administration working together to regulate the burgeoning cultured meat industry.
In November, the FDA issued a “no questions asked” letter to Upside Foods, essentially stating that it had no other questions about the product’s safety and therefore considered it safe for consumption. Good Meat received a similar letter in March. Then, in June, both companies received USDA approval for their labels to say “cell cultured.”
And late last month, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service approved Upside Foods’ and Good Meat’s “grant-of-an-inspection” requests. Such requests “are approved following a rigorous process that includes an assessment of a company’s food safety system,” according to an FSIS spokesman. The grants gave both companies the green light to move forward with the sale.
Because cell-cultured meat is made from animal cells, it is not considered vegetarian by Upside Foods or Good Meat.
But it could be appealing to ethical or religious vegetarians because it can be made without harming animals (both companies tout the product as slaughter-free), or to those following a vegetarian diet for environmental reasons. According to experts, growing meat on a large scale could use far less land and water than conventional farming.
