Good news for all those refusing to rely on vegan diet to fight climate change! Upside Foods, a Berkeley food-tech company plans to produce 400,000 pounds of slaughter-free animal meat per year through cell-culturing!
The company has just moved into a 53,000 square-foot campus in Emeryville, California, and is officially the largest producer of cultured or lab-meat.
Lab-produced meat is literally grown out of cell cultures of animals, in vitro, without the need to kill animals. This technology is a win-win situation both for animals and for the environment since the greenhouse gas emissions with this kind of meat production are significantly lower.
What most vegans know is that traditional animal agriculture emits methane—a gas that is 80 times more dangerous than CO2. Therefore, cellular agriculture can be a major solution to this problem.
The animal cells are grown in brewery-like large tanks called bioreactors, where they are being supplied with the nutrients they need to grow into pure, bone- and tendon-free meat.
The $50 million-worth UPSIDE Foods’ Engineering, Production, and Innovation Center (EPIC) is packed with bioreactors which, for now, have the capacity to produce 50,000lbs of meat yearly.
This makes this Oakland facility—the first-ever of its kind ready for the commercial-scale production of cultured meat.
The sale of this kind of meat has not yet been greenlighted by the US authorities. However, Upside Foods and other cultivated-meat companies believe that the matter will be thoroughly discussed and the accompanying regulations established somewhere in the course of the next six months.
Needless to say, both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) have to set and agree upon the rules before cultured meats reach our restaurant tables or our homes.
