Meat cells grown on a scaffold of rice grains could represent the dawning of a new food group: plant-meat hybrids.
The new “meat rice” is a step forward in the cultivation of meat. Lab-grown meat has been heralded as a way to reduce animal cruelty and agricultural carbon emissions, but it’s proven difficult to bring to market at competitive prices. Growing meat is expensive and difficult to do at large scales; growing cells in large bioreactors presents challenges like how to keep all those cells oxygenated and avoid bacterial contamination. The resulting slurry-type meat product is fine for food products like chicken nuggets, but not for steaks or filets. So far, the only lab-grown meat approved for sale in the U.S. is chicken.
To overcome the production challenges, Jinkee Hong, a chemical engineer at Yonsei Univ. in South Korea, and his colleagues turned to a new scaffold for cell growth: rice. Rice is edible and mass-production friendly, according to Hong, and can be used in three-dimensional growth media, unlike many current scaffolds that only work to grow meat cells in flat sheets.
“By utilizing rice grains, we enable large-scale cultivation that can easily integrate into existing food bioprocesses,” Hong says.
The resulting product is a mix of...
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