Fat cells bring the flavor to lab-grown meat

As a teenager, Nanette Boyle competed in national meat-judging competitions with the National FFA Organization, once known as the Future Farmers of America. Now a chemical engineer at the Colorado School of Mines, she never thought she’d use those meat-judging skills again. But her laboratory recently branched into cultivated meat, reminding her of a lesson she learned from her extracurriculars: fat is flavor. “Most of the flavor profile of the meat is due to the fat and the marbling,” Boyle says. That’s why she—and many others working to improve lab-grown meat—consider growing superlative fat cells to be key to the final product. The phrase “lab-grown meat” suggests that scientists are growing a slab of tissue in a dish. But no one has figured out a way to do that economically . “It’s not going to be straightforward to get 100% cultivated meat products on the market at price parity with