In North Carolina, two entrepreneurs hope to bring lab-grown oyster meat to raw bars and leave real oysters doing what they do best: filtering waterways so other species can thrive.
Dubbed Pearlita, Nikita Michelsen and Joey Peters say the startup is the first cultivated meat company to target the slurpable bivalve.
“Instead of harvesting and killing oysters from the sea we grow them, using cellular agriculture. Just as animals would, we are creating a mixture of nutrients to raise cells in a controlled environment free of disease or chemical contamination,” Peters, who is a marine biologist, says in a press statement.
A lab-grown option would also help keep actual oysters in waterways, where they are key to filtering water and making waterways habitable for other species.
“By using cell cultivation we are hoping to grow oysters efficiently, without adding any burden to wild populations, so that they can continue to perform their important ecosystems services – like carbon sequestration,” Michelsen adds.