Imagine if instead of raising a whole chicken for slaughter, it was possible to pop a feather in a machine, and grow a chicken nugget.

That's basically what a San Francisco-based company says it has figured out how to do. It claims the process - from feather to nugget - takes about two days.

It also says it will make its first commercial sale of the product by the end of 2018.

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You can see an example of the synthetic chicken nugget in the video above, as well as the chicken that provided the feather to grow them. The company, Just, claims the chicken, Ian, is kicking back at a sanctuary in Northern California, not far from the lab.

On Wednesday, the company's CEO and co-founder tweeted: "Lay down your spears. 400,000 years ago, meat became part of the human diet, and throughout time, human beings have needed to kill the animal to enjoy their meat. First, with spears. Then, with industrial machines.

"Get ready for that paradigm to change."

How does it taste? Earlier this month, a BBC reporter visited the company's SF headquarters and found the prototype chicken nuggets "impressive".

"The skin was crisp and the meat flavoursome although its internal texture was slightly softer than you would expect from a nugget at, say, McDonalds or KFC," the reporter wrote.

Why bother?

This kind of technology is nothing new, with the first lab-grown hamburger unveiled in 2013.

But that single patty cost US$300,000, and, although costs have fallen a long way since then, no company has yet scaled up to commercial production.

The Israel-based startup Future Meat Technologies aims to begin selling its first lab-grown products later this year at about US$363 a pound (it hopes to get under US$4.50 a pound within two years).

Aside from lab-grown meat, there's also fake meat - these are lab-designed combinations of plant-based protein. Although they bleed and sizzle and are much more advanced than your standard chickpea slab, they're still a way away from the experience of eating meat.

Fake meat has already made it from the lab to the supermarkets.

The reason for the interest in these non-meat protein products has to do with the enormous environmental cost of raising cows, pigs and chickens.

It's estimated raising livestock for meat, eggs and milk generates 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse emissions.

It's also estimated the production of meat and seafood around the world will massively increase in coming decades, as the global population continues to grow and more people adopt Western-style diets high in animal protein.

Lab-grown meat has been marketed as 'clean meat', and Just claims its product is more environmentally friendly than chicken: "Preliminary analyses show significant reductions in land use, water use, Greenhouse Gas emissions, and energy use."

"With plants providing nutrients for animal cells to grow, we believe we can produce meat and seafood that is over 10x more efficient than the world's highest volume slaughterhouse.

"All this without confining or slaughtering a single animal and with a fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions and water use."

Some synthetic meat products are grown from cells placed in a stem cell serum that is commonly from the foetuses of dead cows.

Just says its chicken nuggets are grown in a plant-based medium.

... what if we just ate lentils

However, culturing meat requires more energy than just growing plant-based meat substitutes like soy beans and lentils. It may also require more energy than raising other kinds of animals. A 2017 study concluded that lab-grown beef required much more energy than growing chickens.

It concluded the technology was developing and the process could get more efficient, but sounded a note of caution about unchecked techno-optimism.

Others have also pointed out that livestock performs an important role in digesting grass, extracting nutrients, and spreading fertiliser as manure. If we got rid of the livestock these would have to be replaced with industrial equivalents.

A 2015 study warns lab-grown meat could just create a whole bunch of new problems: "From this perspective, large-scale cultivation of in vitro meat and other bioengineered products could represent a new phase of industrialization with inherently complex and challenging trade-offs."

On its website, Just argues: "We think it's unlikely that families in Alabama (or anywhere in the world) will consistently choose plant-based alternatives over chicken, beef, pork, and seafood."

"And when you're talking animal protein, higher unit volume and accordingly lower prices will necessarily mean industrialized animal production.

"There's no conventional way around this math."

Can it be sold in Australia?

The short answer is yes, but but each different lab-grown meat product will need to be tested by Australian health and safety authorities first.

The real question is what it would be called.

In Australia, meat is defined as "the whole or part of the carcass if slaughtered" of "any animal".

As QUT law lecturer Hope Johnson notes in this Conversation article, a key selling point of lab-grown meat is that nothing has been slaughtered, so lab-grown meat companies would not want to satisfy that legal definition of "meat".

The alternative is vague product names without the word meat - something like 'quorn', the meat substitute product made from soil mould.

Either way, farmers might push back. Earlier this year, Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack (leader of the Nationals) called out the linguistic trickery of 'plant-based mince'.

"Mince is mince, mince is meat," he declared.

"That's my interpretation of what mince is."