Although I'm not sure about saving the planet, it probably has a better chance of being mass-adopted than the "plant-based" stuff. Fie on faux meaty goodness.*
From Der Spiegel, January 6:
Eggs, chicken and fish from the laboratory: Singapore is the first country in the world to approve the sale of meat produced from stem cells. Will it be enough to feed the world?
Just imagine for a moment that you could save the world with chicken nuggets. All you would have to do is just eat them. Your teeth would sink into real meat, yet no animal would have lost its life for your meal. It will have been grown in the laboratory from a single chicken cell. Imagine that there would suddenly be enough meat from the laboratory to feed everybody in the world. Hunger would be a thing of the past. The land now used to grow corn for animal feed could be repurposed, perhaps even for a forest that could draw CO2 out of our atmosphere. Industrial livestock farming would no longer be needed.
To be sure, solutions that sound so simple should be approached with caution. But there is a place where the utopia described above isn’t as far away as it might sound. Where such laboratory chicken can be tasted and where the nuggets are being served up on real plates. That place is Singapore.
Singapore is the first and, thus far, the only country in the world where meat grown in laboratories can be marketed to and eaten by consumers. The government is hopeful that the country can become home to the technologies behind the food of the future. It is likely, after all, to become an extremely profitable industry, with investors around the world already injecting billions of dollars into the new food sector. Alternative sources of protein, including lab-grown meat, currently make up 2 percent of the global meat market. By 2035, that share is expected to be five times as high. And now that food prices have skyrocketed due to the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, adding to the hunger and environmental crises already afflicting the world, some experts believe that meat grown from stem cells could develop into a technological revolution.
Beyond that, Singapore is also dependent on food imports, with 90 percent coming from abroad. The country has hardly any of its own farmland. The government wants to change the situation by 2030 and is funding startups that might be able to help, such as one that is looking into ways to produce a replacement for eggs, and another that produces intelligent rooftop garden systems where heads of lettuce grow on self-watering, vertical columns. Much of the focus, though, is on stem cell technologies aimed at producing things like milk, fish and meat from stem cells....
Next Up, Kosher Pork (but is it halal?)
In January 2020 we looked at "Can Plant-Based "Pork" Sell In Muslim South Asia?".
Another question is what about lab-grown meat based on stem cells?
To date there has been no formal determination by Muslim jurists such as those at Al-Azhar University but the questions are coming into focus, and trust me, we are watching.
See, if interested:
The U.S. National Library of Medicine: "Cultured Meat in Islamic Perspective", December 2018
And Green Queen: "Q&A w/ CellAgri Founder Ahmed Khan: Can Cell-Based Meat Be Halal?", May 2021. And that's for beef. For pork? It will be an uphill climb for the marketers.
And of course there is more than one route to mass adoption:
"Companies Are Betting on Lab-Grown Meat, but None Know How to Get You to Eat It":
The dream of any right-thinking change agent is to mandate that people use your product.
If that approach is not feasible the fallback is to tax the competition
Here at Totalitarian Marketing Group we supply strategies for the power-mad while making life easier for the top 0.0000001%. TMG, when nudge just isn't fast enough....
