Synthetic Meat

Synthetic meat (also called synthmeat, cultured meat, or cultivated meat) is a type of artificially-created meat grown outside of living animals. Using advanced tissue engineering technology, stem cells taken from an animal biopsy can be grown into isolated muscle tissue, which can then be served as meat indistinguishable from animal-grown meat. Since the technology's maturation in the 2030s, it has replaced traditional animal husbandry as the main source of meat around the world, contributing to a massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and water usage.

The earliest synthmeat experiments were conducted in the early 2010s, at significant cost in time and money. For many years, textured vegetable proteins, or "soy meat" was the main meat substitution, but most meat consumers were unsatisfied with it. It wasn't until the mid-2020s that "lab-grown" meat started to become affordable, as better production methods and economies of scale drove down production costs from tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram, to less than ten. The economics of meat flipped entirely when synthmeat costs fell below animal-grown meat, and despite efforts by farmers around the world to lobby governments to ban synthmeat, it became the standard.

The typical piece of meat bought in a grocery store, market, or butcher today is synthmeat. Animal-grown meat, although virtually indistinguishable, is a miniscule industry primarily aimed at luxury and prestige markets. The collapse of the animal husbandry sector also led to a collapse in the crop sector, as a quarter of all food produced prior to widespread synthmeat adoption was used for animal feed. Unlike animal-grown meat, synthmeat is also accounted for differently by various dietary practices and religions. Jews and Muslims by and large consider most forms of synthmeat to be kosher and halal respectively, while Hindus still consider it to be meat.