Mission Barns
Mission Barns bacon is really bacon
A Californian startup wants us to be able to eat all the ham we want. From the real. Not turkey meat, not an imitation made from soy and hydrogenated oils. Real ham, from a real pig. What the company doesn’t understand is why it is necessary to kill the pig to obtain it.
Ham from , a California-based startup, It’s really ham pork, it’s true, it’s apparently tasty. And it came from a pig named Dawnwho lives on a farm in New York State.
Sim, Dawn is alive — even though we can eat ham, meatballs, sausages or bacon made from its meat in a restaurant in San Francisco, on the other side of the United States. These products are grown in the laboratory.
A Mission Barns is not the first company presenting meat made in a laboratory, not even the first to claim that its product has “a taste indistinguishable from the real thing”. But in the case of the Californian startup, his flesh is not “indistinguishable the real one”; is true.
How does the company, which wants to revolutionize the meat industry and the way people eat and, at the same time, reduce environmental impact, give us the ham on the plate without killing (in this case) the nut?
The process does not begin in a slaughterhouse. It starts with a single animal, our friend Dawn, a Yorkshire pig, whom Mission Barns staff remove a tiny sample of adipose tissue — basically a biopsy, explains .
This fat sample is then placed in a bioreactor and fed with a mixture of plant-based sugars, proteins and vitamins. Over the course of two weeks, fat cells grow as they would inside a pig TRUE – but without a pig.
When the fat is ready, Mission Barns mix it with vegetable protein to create a hybrid product that, on a cellular scale, is real meatbut it doesn’t try to pass itself off as a pork loin chop. In the language of the sector, it is a “unstructured” product. The simplest way to explain this is to contrast a pork chop with minced pork.
Mission Barnes
Dawn, the Yorkshire pig who once fed ham, meatballs, bacon and sausages — and is still alive
A pork chop is something very specific. Minced pork can be almost anything. Can be shaped into a hamburger. It can serve as a base for meatballs. It can be turned into sausage.
Mission Barns’ lab-grown pork fat comes much closer to minced pork: is designed to be transformed into foods that do not depend on anatomically recognizable parts of the animal — with ham at the top of the list.
As Matt explains Simoneditor of who had the opportunity to taste it, “Mission Barns pork meatballs are a little like Diet Coke is still Coca-Cola, just slightly different“.
“I have had difficulty describing this experience, because cultured meat leaves me confused. My mouth thinks I’m eating a real pork meatball, but my brain knows it’s something differentand that Dawn didn’t have to die for it”, says Simon.
In March, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US food and drug regulator, gave Mission Barns the green light to put its cultured pork on sale.
No one knows whether consumers will ever fully accept lab-grown meat. But what Today it still sounds like science fiction it could soon become another culinary tool in any chef’s arsenal. Without having to sacrifice the animal.
