It’s a favorite dish among sushi lovers around the world, but your unagi nigiri may not be coming from the sea anytime soon.
Instead, the eel could be grown in the laboratory.
Japanese eel, or unagi, is famous for its rich flavor, but demand is so high that wild populations are now threatened with extinction.
By growing the delicacy from embryonic cells, Israeli startup Forsea Foods says it could provide the meat commercially from 2024 without harming fish populations.
Roee Nir, CEO and co-founder of Forsea, says this will “provide the consumer with a genuine seafood experience without putting more pressure on aquatic life.”
It’s a staple dish for any sushi lover, but your unagi nigiri may not be coming from the sea anytime soon. Instead, the eel could be grown in the lab (pictured)
By growing this delicacy from embryonic cells, Israeli startup Forsea Foods says it could commercialize the meat from 2024 without harming fish populations.
Nir adds: “Forsea is a pioneer in fusing high-quality traditional Asian cuisine with innovative technology to create the world’s first cultured unagi.”
This is the first time eel has been created in a laboratory and could potentially tap into the thriving Japanese market for this expensive meat.
Forsea Foods partnered with executive chef Katsumi Kusomoto to create two traditional Japanese dishes using lab-grown meat.
Kusomoto created unagi kabayaki, grilled marinated eel over rice, and unagi nigiri, eel sushi.
These eel dishes were once a staple in restaurants across Japan, but environmental concerns have made them much less common.
Kusumoto says: “Unagi is a long-standing favorite in Japan; however, its timeless appeal is undermined by a growing awareness among the Japanese population of the need to adopt a more sustainable approach.”
In 2000, Japan consumed 160,000 tons of eel, but that figure has now dropped by 80 percent.
Overfishing and habitat destruction have decimated the wild eel population, and as of 2018, freshwater eels are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List.
Eels are also extremely difficult to raise in captivity, creating a shortage that has caused prices to skyrocket.
Market prices for a kilo of eel more than doubled, from £12.30 (¥2,300) to £29.68 (¥5,553) between 2010 and 2023, according to monthly and annual reports from the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market .
Meanwhile, prices in restaurants can reach up to £250 per kilo.
Forsea Foods has teamed up with executive chef Katsumi Kusomoto to create two traditional Japanese dishes (pictured) using lab-grown meat.
To continue offering this traditional delicacy without further harming wild populations, Forsea has created a method to grow eel meat in the laboratory.
Most lab-grown meat is created by producing proteins and fat cells separately and then combining them into a scaffold.
The scaffold gives the cells a structure and helps them acquire a shape and texture similar to that of natural meat.
However, this process is slow and requires the creation of an additional scaffold for the cells.
Meanwhile, Forsea claims to have created a method that doesn’t need a scaffold to recreate the texture of meat.
Instead, the company uses pluripotent stem cells to create “organoids,” essentially miniaturized versions of three-dimensional tissues.
These organoids are then allowed to self-organize into tissues containing fats and proteins.
While the eel encounter is currently a prototype, Forsea says it is now ready to scale this process and could be ready for commercial launch in 2025.
However, Forsea is not the first company to produce a seafood product from lab-grown cells.
In May of last year, scientists at Israel-based Steakholder Foods revealed the first 3D-printed fish fillet.
The cells were grown in a lab to recreate a grouper cut and printed in layers to create the familiar flaky texture.
However, it may be some time before you can taste lab-grown sushi or fish and chips, as the UK does not allow the sale of lab-grown meat.
In August, Israeli company Aleph Farms became the first to seek regulatory approval to sell lab-grown beef cuts, but it could take two years to receive a response.
The government has promised to speed up regulation that would make it easier to approve new foods, but more details of this proposal have yet to emerge.
Never mind the veggie burgers! Could lab-grown red meat save the environment?
Lab-grown meat will become more ubiquitous this decade, transforming from a niche concept to a common refrigerator staple.
In 2013, Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University (The Netherlands) presented the world’s first hamburger grown in the laboratory from cow muscle cells.
Now he’s pioneering a “kinder, cleaner” way of making beef with his company, Mosa Meat, which created the world’s first hamburger without slaughtering an animal.
The company extracts muscle cells from an animal, such as a beef cow, when the animal is under anesthesia.
The cooked Mosa Meat burger resembles conventionally made beef burgers. The company says it tastes “like meat”
The cells are then placed in a dish containing nutrients and natural growth factors and allowed to proliferate just as they would inside an animal, until there are billions of cells from a small sample.
These cells then form muscle cells, which naturally fuse to form primitive muscle fibers and edible tissue.
From a sample of one cow, the company can produce 800 million strands of muscle tissue, which is enough to produce 80,000 quarter-pounders.
Mosa Meat has also created cultured fat that it adds to its tissue to form the final product, which simply tastes “like meat,” the company says.
Professor Post believes this product will be so popular among animal welfare activists and burger fans that it will eventually displace plant-based substitutes, such as soy burgers, which are increasingly common in supermarkets in the Kingdom. United.
“New technologies, such as those developed in cellular agriculture, are part of the solution, as well as reducing food waste and changing consumer behaviour,” Professor Post told MailOnline.
‘A good example of a strong trend in consumer behavior is the increase in vegetarianism among the young generations to unprecedented numbers.
“This trend will most likely continue and spread to other age groups and eventually lead to the demise of plant-based meat substitutes.”
Mosa Meat received $55 million in 2021 to increase cultured meat production.
The funding will help expand the company’s current pilot production facility in the Dutch city of Maastricht and develop an industrial-sized production line.