I just heard about cultivated meat for the first time today and I don’t understand how it’s made.
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In very simple terms, muscle tissue that is alive does not know if it is connected to a whole organism that is alive or not.
So if you take living muscle tissue and keep it supplied with nutrients, it can keep growing. You can also keep stimulating it repeatedly with electrical charges so that it still contracts got also that it has a similar texture to meat that is grown on the animal.
In very basic terms, cells are cells. They can’t tell the difference between a petri dish and an animal’s leg. They can’t tell where they are. So if you put them in an environment where they can survive and thrive they’ll grow.
It’s quite a bit more complicated than sticking the cells in a petri dish with a nutrient slurry and heating pad, but that’s the basic premise. You artificially recreate the environment that they normally grow in and they grow. No cow required (except to get the initial cells from in the first place).
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