It's Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I was talking with today's speaker,

Isha Tatar, at Ted Monterey in 2021, and said to her, I'm philosophically a vegetarian, but I don't

practice. That is, I know it's so much better for humanity and creatures and the planet to not eat me,

but I can't quite quit it.

In her talk, Isha has an answer for that.

Diners in Singapore are eating chicken nuggets made from a chicken who is never killed.

How is this possible? Through the power of what I call cellular agriculture. For the past decade, I've been an advocate for growing meat in a lab. Here's how

it works. Rather than raise a whole chicken with beaks, feathers, sentience, we grow the meat

directly from muscle cells. We take a small

biopsy from a living animal and then extract the cells of interest. They're probably muscle

cells, but they could be fat or connective tissue as well. Now, muscle cells in particular love

to attach onto surfaces. It helps them grow and elongate into those long muscle fibers that we're so familiar with.

So we might provide a scaffolding material for those cells to adhere onto.

And then, of course, we have to feed the cell something.

So we put them in a liquid medium that provides all the nutrients that these cells need to grow and divide,

carbohydrates, amino acids, growth factors, and more.

Lastly, the cells on the scaffold in the medium all grow within a bioreactor,

which is kind of like a large stainless steel tank, looks a lot like brewing equipment,

and can be just as big as well.

And the bioreactor

really just provides that constant stable environment that those cells need to flourish in,

stable temperature, pressure, inflows, outflows, et cetera. And after those cells get a chance to

...