Source: Darius Williams / dariuscooks.com
The booming cultivated meat industry is taking aim at the growing environmental challenges of traditional agriculture.
Doug Grant is the CEO of Atlantic Fish Co., a start-up developing lab-grown fish in North Carolina in partnership with NC State’s Food Innovation Lab.
“This is not a plant-based replica,” Grant said. “It’s just real meat or seafood, made in a totally different way.”
Atlantic Fish Co. is in the early stages of production, but aims to create flaky white fish fillets from animal cells to make seafood more sustainable as climate change continues to threaten ocean ecosystems.
“It’s much more ethical and has a much lower carbon footprint, while still providing folks with that real authentic seafood that they know and love,” Grant said.
Trevor Ham, who received his doctorate from Duke, is the company’s Chief Strategy Officer and has been refining the company’s process for growing fish cells at a lab at NC State.
“We know everything that cells have touched, so we can know with a much higher degree of confidence than naturally-caught seafood that it’s not contaminated,” Ham said. “It doesn’t have viruses or bacteria, heavy metals, or antibiotics in it. And if we know what we want the micro and macro nutrients to be, we have a lot of knobs that we can turn to adjust that.”
To grow fish in a lab, scientists isolate fish stem cells that can develop into the parts of the fish people eat: muscle, fat, and connective tissue. The cells are fed a solution containing proteins to signal them to divide and generate more cells. Scientists then structure the tissue into the shape and texture of fish meat.
“The demand for seafood is growing and we can’t make more ocean, so we need to find a new way to do it,” Grant said.
