Lou Cooperhouse, the former executive director of the Rutgers Food Innovation Center, is cooking up something special in his recently-formed company, BlueNalu: cell-based seafood. This new term designates seafood grown from cells in a lab, not harvested from oceans or farm raised. Cell-based seafood is created from a single needle’s worth of muscle cells from a single fish like orange roughy or mahi-mahi. These cells are then cultivated in BlueNalu’s labs where they grown into broad sheets of whole muscle tissue that can be cut into filets and sold fresh, packaged, or frozen, similar to seafood we buy today. However, cell-based fish will be lacking in a few areas: these fish will have no head, tail, bones, or blood.
A Sustainable and Healthy Option
Cooperhouse and a handful of similar start-ups outline two key benefits of cell-based seafood: environmental health and human health. This seafood is produced without commercial fishing or farm fishing. This helps protect the ocean’s depleted stock of fish and eliminates the animal welfare concerns and pollutants associated with farm fishing. Cell-based seafood is also free from contaminants like mercury since these fish don’t swim in oceans teaming with toxins and parasites. Even people who do not eat animals may consider cell-based seafood since these fish do not have brains, organs, or skin. A single cell is taken from a fish just once, and these starter fish can be returned to the ocean.
Coming Soon to a Whole Foods Near You?
Most likely, you won’t be able to buy cell-based seafood at your local grocery for the next 5-10 years. This is partly due to regulatory issues. In recent months, it was determined that the FDA would regulate cell-based seafood, but a myriad of details need to be worked out in terms of how products are inspected, evaluated, and labeled. Until recently the FDA didn’t know what to even call it. The FDA is required to use labels with common or usual names to help consumers make informed choices. It appears that both “cell-based seafood” and “cell-cultured seafood” meet the FDA regulations.
Top Takeaway
Finding alternative sources to meat is big business. In 2020, there were 70 companies around the world developing cell-cultured protein. Time will tell if cell-based seafood becomes a popular and scalable source of food.