As you all know, I’ve never been very worried about the advent of lab-grown meat, grown from stem cells and animal cultures, displacing and totally replacing real meat from animals on ranches. There’s an elegance to nature that the food techies don’t grasp. Although they claim to be believers in science, they dismiss, ignore, and may not even be aware of, the billions of years of natural selection leading up to the steak on your plate, the burger on your grill, and the chicken in your oven. They’ve been iterating for 5 to 10 years trying to get pseudo-chicken to grow in a petri dish, making mistakes and advancements. They forget that nature has been iterating for billions of years. And so it was with delight, and a total lack of surprise, that I read the recent Wired piece detailing the latest mishaps of a startup called Upside Foods, promising to create entire cohesive slabs of chicken meat in the lab. Insiders at the company reveal the sorry state of the business. Rather than mass-producing tons of perfect lab-grown chicken meat in the enormous bioreactors that all the slick promo material showed, workers are reduced to growing translucent sheets of chicken meat in 2L soda bottles and painstakingly gluing them together to form somewhat cohesive cuts of chicken. The entire process takes much longer than is financially feasible, and they can still only make a tiny amount each day. When they do try to use the bioreactors, most of the batches become contaminated with pathogens and have to be incinerated and destroyed. This is, of course, because fake lab-grown meat, grown in a vacuum under conditions of excessive sterility, doesn’t perform like meat growing on living, breathing chickens. Chickens have immune systems and endogenous antioxidant pathways. The lab-grown meat has none of that, and so it’s defenseless against simple pathogens that an actual animal would mop up and take care of without any issue. As I've said many times before, don't worry about lab meat coming to take away your grass-fed steaks. It's never going to happen. Are you still worried about lab grown meat? Do you think it'll happen? Let me know in the comment section of New and Noteworthy. | 
