Right now, somewhere in a laboratory in California, the Netherlands or Japan, a technician is taking a few thousand skeletal muscle cells from a living animal, and placing them in an incubator in a nutrient-rich broth. The incubator will be warmed up to body temperature, causing the cells to start multiplying, doubling roughly every few days. Over the next few weeks, she will regularly replace the broth, removing cellular waste products, dead cells and restoring pH balance, similar to the way our bodies behave.

At a certain point she’ll change the nutrient balance, causing the cells to stop dividing, and fuse together into strands of living tissue. Those strands will then be extracted, and suspended in a gel around a spongy scaffold that floods them with new nutrients and mechanically exercises them to increase their size and protein content. A month from now, the final product, consisting of billions of cells, will be ready.

Edible animal flesh, grown outside the body of animals.

87 years ago, Winston Churchill said that “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” In 2014, a team of Dutch scientists made his prediction a reality when they unveiled the first ever lab-grown hamburger for a cost of $330,000. Today, a Bay Area startup says it can make a kilogram of beef for around $5,000, and there are at least seven other companies around the world aiming to commercialise not just lab grown beef, but chicken, duck, fish and turkey. A number of these new ‘clean meat’ companies are saying they’re going to have competitively priced products by 2020, and one of them says it will have chicken nuggets, foie gras or sausages on the market by the end of this year.

Let’s just stop, and think about that for a second.

The act of hunting, cultivating and eating meat is intimately interwoven with the story of human evolution. It’s central to so many of the key chapters: from the development of language, to the invention of fire, from the creation of agricultural societies, to the modern global livestock industry and its effects on climate change. And it has always meant the death of an animal.

Not any more.

We are now talking seriously as a species about a fundamental break from our relationship to meat within our lifetimes. That’s pretty awe-inspiring, and very, very weird.

It’s also not guaranteed. Breathless predictions from the Singularity University crowd notwithstanding, there are some massive hurdles to overcome before a consumer ready product hits the market. Biology, it turns out, is complicated. As Alex Danco (who writes the fabulous Snippets newsletter) points out, cells are much harder to work with than bits and bytes, because they strive to maintain balance. It’s difficult to get them to maintain a particular state for an extended period of time, because unlike in a steady state machine (like a computer) cells’ equilibria are constantly being pushed and pulled in every possible direction.

Cells are hard to grow and keep happy. Biological matter breaks down over time and most cells only make stuff for a limited period before they fail and get recycled. The usual Silicon Valley mantras don’t apply. You can’t just “move fast and break things.” The research and development requires hard science, and takes time.

However, cells have one crucial characteristic that offsets these disadvantages: they are inherently self-replicating. In Alex’s words, “imagine if your phone contained not only the hardware and software capability to run all your apps, but could also easily create brand new copies of itself through replication.” This is not magic. This is what cells are made to do. That means that in theory, a single turkey could feed an entire planet. Assuming unlimited nutrients and room to grow, a single cell can undergo 75 generations of division during three months. That means one cell could turn into enough muscle to manufacture over 20 trillion turkey nuggets.