What’s the Best Way to Brew Meat?

Innovation is weird. One moment, you’re an early human spending half the day chewing raw, possibly tainted meat. The next, you’re sending your prehistoric carp back to the waiter because it “just wasn’t the same as last time.” Let’s talk about technological breakthroughs, and let’s do it through the lens of two stories that dropped, seemingly in sync, the other week. 

Big news in the world of archaeological geochemistry: Scientists in Israel recently discovered evidence that humans have been cooking food for at least 780,000 years. Pretty cool, given that we previously believed we’ve been doing so for a measly 170,000 years. And make no mistake, at the time this discovery was no less high-tech than mapping the genome or — and of equal importance — the invention of the scratch and sniff sticker.

But that was then, and this is now. Just the other day, the FDA gave the FDA-OK to the folks over at Upside Foods, a startup in the business of making lab-grown meat. If you’re not familiar, this is crazy stuff, all enabled by a process in which scientists brew actual animal meat cells in a lab for human consumption. If it all works out, this could be a “learn-to-cook-fish” moment for the species, as proponents of the stuff boast that it can help with everything from saving our air to preventing the next pandemic. 

And don’t get us started on what happens when the 3D-printing technicians start trading notes with the lab-grown meat scientists…

JOURNOS is produced by Brandon R. Reynolds and Stephen Jackson.