The early meat products will most likely be fish, however. Perhaps it’s only fitting that the last animals hunted for food on a mass scale, could be among the first grown synthetically for a consumer market. One player in the field, Finless Foods, believes they can get their product to market as soon as 2019 by developing synthetic fish fillets ‘in a brewery-like environment’. The most likely candidate is the much-valued bluefin tuna, a fish the company’s CEO Mike Selden believes can be price competitive before 2020.
Even more impressive than the original concept behind the technology are improvements in price performance since. While Post’s original hamburger cost \$325,000 to create in 2013, just three years later US-based Memphis Meats produced the first cultured meatball for \$1000. While that might sound like a lot, it represented a significant fall in price, with a quarter-pounder of meat now costing less than 2 per cent of Post’s original patty. But it didn’t stop there: a year earlier Post, now at Mosa Meats, had already claimed the process he initially pioneered could produce beef in a laboratory for \$80 a kilo, meaning that a burger using cultured meat could cost as little as \$12 – a more than 99 per cent fall in cost from just four years earlier. And all in the absence of truly industrialscale production.
172
n e w t r av e l l e r s