Finless Food – Bluefin Growout: UMASS grads start up with test tube tuna

“Most people who follow food are aware that scientists and tech companies are trying to grow meat in labs. When they’ll see it and what it will look and taste like—those are …”

“…They are both environmentalists and either vegan or vegetarian, and they got to talking about overfishing and the antibiotic resistance, heavy-metal content, and ocean-pollution hazards of aquaculture. Not to mention the slave labor for Thai shrimp production. So there was a market opportunity. One night at a bar they wrote a plan on the back of a napkin for how they would experiment with fish cells—which cells, which growth media—and mapped out experiments to make scalable culturing possible…”

fake lobster at Zabar’s:

“When it comes to recreating fish fillets, Finless Foods has a secret ally available that meat simulators haven’t had the advantage of. The extremely advanced surimi industry in Japan pulverizes neutral-flavored whitefish flesh, usually Alaskan pollock, mixes it with salt, sugar, and MSG, and extrudes the resulting meal into imitation shrimp, crab, and lobster so convincing that, to take one notorious example, generations of Upper West Siders can take it for lobster in Zabar’s “lobster salad.” Wyrwas and Selden say they will use their regenerative-cell technology to make the fish base and then use the sophisticated production processes of surimi to make tasty, marketable simulacra.”