2021
The Medical Executive-Post
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Forget about inflation and the $85 dollar turkey this year.
Try a Test-Tube Turkey, Instead? That’ll Be $34,000
Last year, Paul Mozdziak gave thanks that people are finally paying attention to his big idea: he wants to grow turkey meat in 5,000-gallon tanks.
An increasing number of companies are trying to grow other kinds of meat in the lab, but Mozdziak happens to “find a lot of beauty in turkeys.” His approach uses stem cells from a biopsy of turkey breast, which are grown in a warm broth of glucose and amino acids to build up muscle fibers. The potential is huge: theoretically, a single stem cell could undergo 75 generations of division in three months, forming enough muscle to manufacture 20 trillion turkey nuggets.
But such such efficiencies are yet to be met. Currently, a turkey-sized lump of white meat would require around $34,000 worth of growth serum. At Target, you can pick up a respectable frozen bird for $20-25. But the latter are intensively farmed. If Mozdziak can scale up production, as well as tweaking fat and protein ratios to make his turkey tasty, he could even win over some vegetarians at Thanksgiving.
MIT Technology Review
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