Animal Products Without Animals

When Isha Datar forged her mark on cellular agriculture as a college student, her mentors reinforced her momentum by sending her constructive comments on her work. Those early mentoring relationships were crucial to Datar as she became a pioneer in the field, which produces animal products such as milk, meat, eggs, and more in a laboratory environment.

Today Datar is executive director of New York–based New Harvest, the public face of lab-made meat and other animal products. New Harvest funds public collaborative research that advances discoveries in cellular agriculture but doesn’t conduct research of its own or produce products. Instead, its three employees support a network of cellular agriculture research by developing a community of practice.

New Harvest’s efforts have led to the founding of more than a dozen new companies working to commercialize lab-grown animal products, including Memphis Meats, Clara Foods, Finless Foods, Hampton Creek, and Modern Meadow in the United States and SuperMeat in Israel. (None of the products are available to consumers yet.) Datar says lab-made milk products may be the first to hit the mainstream as they can go beyond the available plant-based products, like almond or rice milk, in taste and nutritional value.

New Harvest staffers also review and summarize research journal articles and scientific papers for a non-science audience, disseminating their work to broad academic audiences.