Israel Approves World's First Cultivated Beef Steaks
An Israeli company has received approval from health officials to sell the world's first steaks made from cultivated beef cells, officials said. The move follows approval of lab-grown chicken in the US last year.
Aleph Farms, of Rehovot, Israel, was granted the approval by the Israeli Health Ministry in December, the company said in a news release. The move was announced on January 17 by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called the development "a global breakthrough."
The firm said it planned to introduce a cultivated "Petit Steak" to diners in Israel. The beef will be grown from cells derived from a fertilized egg from a Black Angus cow named Lucy, who lives on a California farm.
Regulators must still approve the company's labels and conduct a final inspection, said Yoav Reisler, of Aleph Farms. After that, it could take months before the product is served to diners.
Aleph Farms joins Upside Foods and Good Meat, two California-based firms that got the go-ahead to sell cultivated chicken in the US in June. More than 150 companies in the world are trying to develop cultivated, or "cell-cultured," meat, also known as lab-grown meat.
Proponents say that creating meat from cells will drastically reduce harm to animals and avoid the environmental impacts of conventional meat production. But the industry faces obstacles that include high costs and the challenge of producing enough meat at a large enough scale to make production affordable and profitable.
Cultivated meat is grown in large steel tanks using cells that come from a living animal, a fertilized egg or a special bank of stored cells. The original cells are combined with special nutrients to help them grow into masses or sheets of meat that can be shaped into familiar foods such as cutlets or steaks.
