People nowadays are becoming much more concerned with their health. Already, alternative meat products storm the market and get the headlines. Such is the case of the Impossible Whopper of Burger King, the “meatless Whopper” that uses the Impossible Burger (from Impossible Foods), a patty made up of soy and made to taste like meat. This burger made quite a commotion for some time in the market. However, much like its original whopper, it’s not that nutritious. Natural food cooked at home is, I believe, still the best.
Enter Lou Cooperhouse and his company BlueNalu.
His company, BlueNalu (a play on a Hawaiian term that means both ocean waves and mindfulness), is racing to bring to market what's known as cell-based seafood --- that is, seafood grown from cells in a lab, not harvested from the oceans.
...unlike Impossible Foods, BlueNalu is not creating a plant-based seafood alternative like vegan Toona or shrimpless shrimp. Instead, Cooperhouse and his team are extracting a needle biopsy's worth of muscle cells from a single fish, such as a Patagonian toothfish, orange roughy and mahi-mahi.
Those cells are then carefully cultivated and fed a proprietary custom blend of liquid vitamins, amino acids and sugars. Eventually, the cells will grow into broad sheets of whole muscle tissue that can be cut into filets and sold fresh, frozen or packaged into other types of seafood entrees.
But unlike today's wild-caught or farmed fish options, BlueNalu's version of seafood will have no head, no tail, no bones, no blood. It's finfish, just without the swimming and breathing part. It's seafood without the sea.
With this kind of technology, I believe it would be a great alternative for us as we can still eat seafood without the need to fish, and we can also conserve the Earth’s natural resources in this way. However, I still believe that natural food is the best, and we humans only need to take care of the natural environment, instead of thinking more and more alternatives.
More of this story at NPR.
(Image Credit: Caroline Attwood/ Unsplash)