On this day in vegan history · December 19, 2020
The First Restaurant Meal of Lab-Grown Chicken
At a private club on the Singapore River, a plate of chicken bites made from cultured cells and mung bean protein went from lab curiosity to something a paying customer could order.
The facts
- Date
- December 19, 2020
- Location
- 1880, a private members' club in Robertson Quay, Singapore
- Price
- About $23 for the trio of dishes
- Regulatory approval
- Singapore Food Agency approved Eat Just's cultured chicken on December 1, 2020, the world's first such approval
On December 19, 2020, the members' club 1880 in Singapore's Robertson Quay served a trio of dishes built around Eat Just's cultured chicken: a bao bun, a maple waffle, and a phyllo puff pastry, styled after China, the United States, and Brazil, the world's three largest poultry producers. The chicken bites were roughly 70 percent cultured animal cells grown in a bioreactor and about 30 percent mung bean protein, and the meal cost about $23. It happened weeks after the Singapore Food Agency became the first food regulator anywhere to approve cultured meat for sale, on December 1, 2020, following Eat Just's roughly two-year effort to prove the product's safety and manufacturing consistency. Nobody at that table was eating a slaughtered animal, and for the first time anywhere, that was a restaurant order rather than a lab demo.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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This historic step, the first-ever commercial sale of cultured meat, moves us closer to a world where the majority of meat we eat will not require tearing down a single forest, displacing a single animal's habitat or using a single drop of antibiotics
Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, December 2020
Source: Green Queen -
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
A 12-year-old diner at 1880, December 2020
Source: Green Queen
Why it still matters
It turned cultured meat from a press-conference prototype into a product someone could actually order and pay for, giving every regulator and investor watching a real-world proof of concept rather than a promise.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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