The First Table

Table

It was 7:04 p.m. on Dec. 19, 2020, in Singapore when an 11-year-old boy sat down to dinner and began to change how the world eats.

The boy’s year had already been upended by a pandemic. A virus had traveled the world, mutating from animal to human to human until the world closed its doors on him entirely.

But on this December evening, the boy opened the door to possibilities.

Videep joined his friends Jack and Kiah and his teacher from the United World College of South East Asia and did what no other human in 300,000 years had done: They ate meat that didn’t require killing an animal or tearing down a forest.

The friends sat at a table at the well-known Singaporean restaurant 1880, charcoal gray plates and small bamboo steamers laid out on the table before them. They opened their menus that, on one panel read “History made,” and took the first step toward change by ordering a comforting and familiar plate of chicken and waffles and a chicken bao on the side.

This was no ordinary chicken bao. No one had ever eaten meat like this before.

What did upending 300,000 years of human’s food history taste like?

“It just feels good to have chicken,” Videep said, “without feeling guilty.”

The chicken Videep ordered was the very first serving of GOOD Meat, a real, high-quality meat made from cells instead of animals that are raised and slaughtered. The meat is then curated and seasoned by award-winning chefs to transform it into the chicken dishes Videep and his friends devoured. For the first time in history, the meat came not from deforesting millions acres of our planet. Instead, the chicken bao came from a single cell, which will produce never-ending amounts of chicken.

This was GOOD Meat, and Videep had tasted the future of meat. It tasted like chicken.

Soon, other countries will join Singapore and grant regulatory approval to cultivated meat. Soon, you’ll get to taste your own version – perhaps a cultivated beef burger, a cultivated chicken tikka taco or a cultivated porkchop.

Soon, Videep’s chicken bao won’t seem so special anymore.