What if I told you that you could enjoy a juicy, mouth-watering, delicious ribeye steak without harming a single animal? Thanks to advances made in 3D “bioprinting,” this is actually a possibility. Aleph Farms, an Israeli food-tech startup, just created the world’s first slaughter-free ribeye steak. And it looks positively scrumptious.
We first heard about this impressive development over at Design Taxi. Turns out, Aleph Farms teamed up with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s biomedical engineering faculty to create the food item. The lab-grown steak is said to have all the qualities of the real deal, including texture and taste.
So how did they accomplish such a thing? Aleph Farms used a culture of live animal tissue. These living cells are then cloned, incubated, and cultivated in a lab setting. The four primary cells that make up the “meat” of the steak are muscle tissue, fat, blood, and support cells. Together, they create the “ink” used to print the steak. This magical process is also totally cruelty free.
Aleph Farms first forayed into the lab-grown meat business back in 2018. That’s when they debuted the world’s first slaughter-free steak. But the 3D bioprinting technology is a major step up. According to The Daily Mail, these new ribeye steaks could sell for around $50 when they hit dining areas as early as next year.
“With the realization of this milestone, we have broken the barriers to introducing new levels of variety into the cultivated meat cuts we can now produce,” Aleph Farms’ co-founder Shulamit Levenberg said in a statement.
These 3D printed steaks come during a time of increased awareness of the damaging effect the meat industry has on our environment. According to PETA, it takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef. In fact, scientists say that reducing meat and dairy intake is the biggest way to reduce your impact on Earth.
So yeah, there are plenty of reasons to be excited about Aleph Farms’ new 3D-printed steak. Not only does it sound delicious in all the right ways, but it could help save the planet. More of this, please.
