Slaughter-Free Turkey Comes to the Table by 2030

A recent feature published in tech industry outlet Technology Review focused on North Carolina State University professor and food biologist Paul Mozdziak and his mission to bring a slaughter-free turkey alternative to consumers by 2030. Advancements in cultured meat—or what food advocacy group Good Food Institute now calls “clean meat”—have primarily focused on beef cells grown in-vitro. However, Mozdziak’s project sets out to address the cruel turkey production industry by growing 20 trillion turkey nuggets from one pencil-eraser sized biopsy of cells. Mozdziak received a grant of $118,800 from New Harvest—a company which focuses on advancing cellular agriculture—to make his project scalable. “Years from now, when people are [in] the grocery store trying to decide if they want to buy traditional versus cultivated meat,” Mozdziak says, “I am 100-percent sure that cultured meat is going to be just as cheap, if not cheaper.” Mozdziak hopes that his efforts will substantially reduce the suffering of turkeys raised for food within an industry slaughters upwards of 46 million birds annually for Thanksgiving alone.