In an intimate cocktail bar in downtown San Francisco owned by celebrity chef Dominique Crenn on July 1, a select group of consumers became the first Americans to receive a taste of the future.
The meal itself was a simple one – chicken fried in a tempura batter, served with a burnt chili aioli, edible flowers, and greens – but this was no ordinary piece of chicken. To begin with, no animal had been slaughtered in the process.
Over the past eight years, the biotech company that produced the chicken, UPSIDE Foods, has been steadily honing the process of taking chicken cells, growing them into large sheets in steel bioreactors, and then forming them into shapes which can range from cutlets to nuggets.
Read more on Forbes.com.