But after all that, what did it taste like?

A 12-year-old diner gave his opinion: “This chicken…, it’s just chicken, but it’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen or ever tasted. It’s definitely made me see how small things, like just changing the way we eat, can literally change our entire lives.”

His 11-year-old companion chimed in: “I’m speechless… It feels good to have chicken without feeling guilty.”

Shortly after the event, I caught up with Josh Tetrick, CEO and co-founder of San Francisco-based Eat Just, the company behind the culinary breakthrough. I was keen to know how it was all received.

“The response has been overwhelmingly positive,” Tetrick told me. “We fed over 40 people who bought and had chicken that didn’t require killing an animal, didn’t require tearing down a forest, didn’t require a drop of antibiotics.”

Having had more than his fair share of false starts and disappointments thanks to regulatory obstacles, Tetrick was understandably elated at getting this milestone over the line.

Yet, he keenly reiterated how this was just the beginning.

“What happened over the last handful of days [in Singapore] is an open door to do the real work now. It’s an open door to scale this thing up. It’s an open door to communicate to consumers. It’s an open door to help more animals,” Tetrick said.

The significance of taking cultured meat from remarkable meal to remarkably mainstream couldn’t be greater. The world now rears and slaughters 80 billion farmed animals every year for food. An estimated two-thirds of them enduring lives of misery on factory farms.

From Lab to Reality

That chicken supper in Singapore showed how human ingenuity offers the possibility to switch mass-meat production from factory farm to bioreactor. And in so doing, provide a decent environment to sustain future generations. Cultured meat uses a fraction of the land and emits far fewer greenhouse gases. A benchmark study has shown cultured meat to be 98 per cent lower in land use and 80-95 percent lower in greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventionally produced meat products.

Cultured meat is grown using cells harvested from a living animal using a harmless biopsy. They are then placed in a nutrient-rich soup in a process similar to beer or yoghurt. No GMO required.

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