Fish not born but printed soon on our plates? This is the project of an Israeli company specializing in culinary tech.
After beef, chicken and even laboratory-grown desserts, it’s now fish’s turn to attract the attention of scientists and go through the 3D printing box.
Freshly printed fish
While the environmental impact of animal breeding on all sides raises serious concerns, several scientists have thought about a less invasive solution, based in particular on cells cultured in the laboratory. The latest example, which focuses on fish for the first time, has emerged from Israel.
Steakholder Foods has indeed signed a partnership with Umami Meats, a company based in Singapore, to create fish fillets without having to dip into local reserves which are in an alarming state. The two groups worked together to achieve this goal.
Umami Meats thus provides the cells developed in the laboratory from muscle and fat. Steakholder Foods is then responsible for integrating these cells into a “biological ink”, used in a 3D printer specially designed for this purpose, to create said fish fillets.
Soon on our plates?
If the experiment has been successful overall, Umami Meats does not expect to sell the lab-grown fillets to Singaporean restaurants until next year. However, she hopes that, if lawmakers are in favor, these nets can also circulate in other countries such as the United States or Japan.
The teams of scientists working on the project must indeed find a way to develop these cells in large quantities. For the time being, their culture in the laboratory is far too expensive, and the 3D printed fish fillets are therefore an agglomerate of animal and plant cells.
The problem being that the scientists at Steakholder Foods and Umami Meats were the first to seriously address this problem with fish. They hope that over time, other solutions will begin to germinate, to lead to an increase in demand and therefore in the costs associated with the development of these products.
” We want consumers to have a choice based on how the product tastes and what it can do for the planet. And we want to remove the price from the equation said Mihir Pershad, General Manager of Umami Meats. It therefore remains to be seen whether the population is ready to take the bait of unborn fish, resulting from 3D printing.
Source : Reuters
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