Lab-Grown Animal Fat Might Finally Change The Vegan Game

There’s a reason pork bacon is more appealing to self-proclaimed carnivores than turkey bacon.

Its extra fat leaves a buttery layer on the tongue that keeps you craving more. Plus, as many chefs would tell you, fat equals flavor. It’s this very component that makes plant-based substitutes, as far as they’ve come, still lacking.

So far, innovators have tried to come close to animal fat with ingredients like konjac jelly or the more popular coconut oil, which softens in a pan but melts too much, causing substitutes to taste greasier than their animal counterparts.

One San Francisco startup, Mission Barns, has a proposition: hybrid meat—or, more specifically, plant-based meat with a cultivated animal element, like fat. Yasmin Tayag of The Atlantic had a taste of the company’s lab-grown bacon and was astounded by its flavor, sizzle, texture, and “incomparable juiciness,” thanks to its animal-like marbling. 

The pig that lent this deliciousness to the bacon, in fact, is still alive. Her name is Dawn, and she’s still running free on a patch of land as we speak. All scientists did was extract some fat cells from her and grow them in a vat.

With the novelty of nearly-there, meaty substitutes heading to the butcher’s, Mission Barns hopes its cultivated pork fat will be the answer to buttering up all taste buds. Cultivated fat can be woven into any plant-based source, giving it a rich flavor and mouthfeel that the industry has been struggling to replicate.

“Animal fat is culinary magic,” Tayag details in the profile. Perhaps this is the secret ingredient to the food tech sector finally bringing home the bacon again.

Another plus is that it’s easier to grow animal fat in the lab than harvest full slabs of meat, making this solution much more attainable. With that said, companies like Mission Barns will have some challenges convincing certain eaters to give hybrid meat a go, since it’s neither fully plant-based nor lab-grown.

The good news for adventurous eaters is that cultivated animal fat might be here before you know it. As per The Atlantic, other firms like Belgium’s Peace of Meat, Berlin’s Cultimate Foods, and Singapore’s seafood-focused ImpacFat are already developing animal fat alternatives of their own.

In November, the Food and Drug Administration approved the production of lab-cultivated meats for the first time, making them less than a lean dream in the US. Mission Barns says it just needs to take care of its own regulatory approvals, and then it can finally launch its market-ready products in restaurants and grocery stores.

[via Futurism and The Atlantic, images via Mission Barns]