Sharas Clickz/Shiok Meats
UNTIL four years ago, stem-cell biologist Sandhya Sriram had never eaten seafood. Then she visited a shrimp farm in Vietnam and realised she had to give it a go – which was odd, given what she saw there. The conditions were “disgusting”, she says. The shrimp appeared to be growing in sewage, and were drenched in antibiotics and bleach to clean them before consumption. “These are things that should never be associated with food. That was my motivation.”
Sriram went home to Singapore, quit her lab job and started a company called Shiok Meats. With co-founder Ka Yi Ling, she set about discovering how to grow shrimp muscle tissue from stem cells – in other words, how to create shrimp meat without actual shrimp.
Shiok is now close to doing something that has been talked about for decades but never realised: putting lab-grown meat onto people’s plates. Sriram says her company is on course to launch its cultured shrimp meat next year, an ambitious goal that would put Shiok at the forefront of a food revolution that could be a game changer for humanity. It is also the first step towards an alternative to an industry that has done terrible damage to the environment, poses an existential threat to human health and causes untold suffering to billions of animals every year.
It is too soon to declare that the age of cultured meat has arrived, but as commercialisation nears, difficult questions are being asked and there are many unknowns. Will regulators approve it? Will consumers eat it? Is it safe? And is it as environmentally benign as proponents claim?
The dream…
