Kit Parker, bioengineering and applied physics professor at Harvard University, joined Boston Public Radio on Thursday to speak about the meat he's developing at an on-campus lab for human consumption which is made completely of animal cells.
"All meat that we eat is muscle cells," Parker said. "You can take stem cells and grow them up into muscles, and then take stem cells and grow them up into fat, which is really important because fat is where the flavor is."
Parker added that making sure the taste and texture of lab grown meat is consistent with meat from a living animal is essential to consumer satisfaction.
"We're working on live meat, or animal meat... so you can grow a steak in the lab," Parker said. "Taste and texture are the two big parameters that we're concerned with and I think we're the first to crack the nut on texture, and I think we'll be a reporting a breakthrough later this year on the fat engineering, so we can put the muscle and fat together."
Parker said he thinks the tissue-engineered meat could be available for public consumerism in a few years.
"Mass produced in your grocery store will be a couple of years. I've got to scale this up," he said. "It takes a while for [the cells] to grow, and you have to let these tissues grow and get big so going for thin pieces of meat, all those deli cuts, might be the low hanging fruit."
