’Clean meat’: Is lab-grown chicken and duck halal?

Photo: Professor Mark Post shows the world's first lab-grown beef burger during a launch event in west London August 5, 2013. The meat in the burger has been made by knitting together around 20,000 strands of protein that has been cultured from cattle stem cells in Post's lab. REUTERS/David Parry/pool

San Francisco area start-up Memphis Meats revealed mid-March that it has developed lab-grown edible chicken and duck from stem cells of healthy animals. Doing the birds no harm, the company created meals with taste and texture comparable to the real thing. At their unveiling ceremony, they served samples of southern fried chicken and duck à l'orange.

Uma Valeti, cardiologist, CEO and Memphis Meats co-founder, declared, “Meat production has been essentially unchanged since we first domesticated farm animals 12,000 years ago. We think it’s long overdue for innovation.”

A company press release (pdf) explains, “Modern meat production creates big problems for the environment, animal welfare and human health. It is also inefficient.” The technology to create what the company calls “clean meat” eliminates feed, breeding, and slaughter, and brings enormous potential, as it is touted to be able to produce quality meat on one tenth of the land and water, and uses less than one half the energy to produce conventional meat. There are not the usual waste disposal problems nor threat to human health for the employees who produce the products.