Soon you can have it without the spikes REX/Shutterstock

Love sea urchin? Then grow your own fake version at home. Recently, we’ve seen big research labs growing hamburgers and meatballs, but now the Shojinmeat Project in Japan is teaching people how to do it themselves at home.

The project has attracted a wide swathe of people, including high school students culturing sea shells in their refrigerators, and a woman who works at a fish market by day and cultures sea urchin by night. Another group recently grew a small piece of foie gras that they split six ways. “The problem was that none of us were rich enough to know the taste of the real thing,” says Shojinmeat founder Yuki Hanyu. But it certainly wasn’t bad, he says: the foie gras had a lot of umami flavour with a little sweetness. “It definitely tasted like food.”

Culturing meat at home can be more environmentally friendly and doesn’t involve killing an animal. Whether it’s grown in a commercial laboratory or in someone’s home kitchen, culturing meat requires the same basic ingredients: some cells from the type of meat you want to grow, an edible structure for them to grow around, and something to nourish them with. The rest is improvisation. The Shojinmeat team was surprised to find that some cells grow well when a portion of their nutrients are provided by sports drinks.


“I think we’re really in an interesting time,” says Paul Mozdziak, a physiology professor at North Carolina State University. The success of the project will depend on how much support is provided, he says.

Shojinmeat have now released instructions on how to build a small bioreactor for culturing meat at home and has also published a cultured meat recipe online. It will probably be a while before cultured meat shows up in our grocery stores, but Shojinmeat is letting people explore that future now. “I would say the dream cultured meat for me would be a nice psoas major steak with exactly the same flavor profile [as the original],” says Mozdziak. “And then after that, we try dinosaur.”