Florida’s ban on cultivated meat is being challenged in federal court in a lawsuit that was filed yesterday. The case is being brought by the cultivated meat firm Upside Foods and the Institute of Justice (IJ), a nonprofit public interest law firm. Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed the legislation making …
Read More »Lab-Grown Meat for Pets Was Just Approved in the UK
In a laboratory in west London, Helder Cruz reaches into a fridge and takes out a small plastic tub. The container holds 280 grams of an off-white paste with the consistency of pâté. These are real chicken cells, taken from a fertilized chicken egg and painstakingly grown in the bioreactors …
Read More »Leading Lab-Grown Meat Company Cuts Dozens of Jobs
Cultivated meat firm Upside Foods has cut its workforce as the industry continues to struggle with bans from legislators and a significant downturn in venture capital funding. In an email sent to employees, Upside CEO Uma Valeti wrote that 26 people would leave the company and that executive and leadership …
Read More »Lab-Grown Meat Is on Shelves Now. But There’s a Catch
Cultivated meat is coming to a store near you. Well, not near you, exactly. Unless you live near Huber’s Butchery in Singapore. If you do happen to live there, then on May 16 you could be one of the first people in the world to buy cultivated meat directly from …
Read More »Sell Lab-Grown Meat in Alabama and You Could Go to Jail
Alabama has become the second US state to ban the sale of cultivated meat. The bill, signed into law by Governor Kay Ivey on May 7, will make it illegal for anyone to manufacture, sell, or distribute cultivated meat in Alabama. Anyone found guilty of violating the law will have …
Read More »I’m a Boy. Does Playing Female Characters in Video Games Make Me Gay?
I’m a guy “in real life,” but I’ve always played female characters in video games. More and more people say this means I’m either secretly gay/trans or a total creep. Am I allowed to just prefer it? —Gender Player Dear Player, It sounds like you have a lot of people …
Read More »States Are Lining Up to Outlaw Lab-Grown Meat
Unless Florida governor Ron DeSantis has an unexpected change of heart, it will soon be a crime to sell or make cultivated meat in the Sunshine State. A bill passed by the Florida House and Senate is now awaiting the signature of DeSantis, who has already indicated his opposition to …
Read More »The Leading Lab-Grown Meat Company Just Paused a Major Expansion
In September 2023, Upside Foods announced its plans to open a large cultivated-meat plant in Glenview, Illinois. The 187,000-square-foot plant was slated to have an initial capacity of millions of pounds of bioreactor-brewed meat per year, which would make it one of the largest planned factories in the nascent cultivated-meat …
Read More »You Can’t Buy Lab-Grown Meat Even If You Wanted To
July 2023 was a landmark moment for the cultivated meat industry. For the first time, meat brewed directly from chicken cells went on sale in two US restaurants after a pair of California startups got a green light from the US Department of Agriculture. The US had joined Singapore as …
Read More »The Murky Campaign to Discredit Lab-Grown Meat
A new public information campaign against cultivated—or “lab-grown”—meat is being run by a group with close links to a controversial public relations firm. The group has launched TV adverts and a website purportedly to educate the public about cultivated meat, but its approach—which draws on a PR playbook previously used …
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