Can we change the way we eat? Can we reshape the way we “produce” meat, refrain from bringing harm to the animals?

That was the main questions behind the project made for the Przemiany (Transformations) Festival in the Copernicus Science Center in 2019, that year the Festival focused on food emergency. The project was made out of the need to show cellular agriculture meat, and for some reason none of the big cellular agriculture companies agreed to show their products during the festival.

That is why the alternative idea was proposed. I was invited to help in developing the cellular agriculture project, which resulted in creating Spinach-Chicken leaf. That was an idea of Stanisław Łoboziak who was a team leader and initiator of this project. We were working in an amazing interdisciplinary group: Katarzyna Proniewska-Mazurek, Mikołaj Dreger, Maksymilian Grabowski, Weronika Wojtyś.

The reason behind working on this project was ethical and ecological. The land is a critical resource, recent IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land stressed that. We rely on the land for food and for shelter, and a recent study shows that the mechanisms of climate change already in motion might put this critical resource under danger. The report erases any doubt about the urgent need to transform our food systems, which are estimated to cause between 19-29% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Crop and livestock production alone lead to 10-12% of all human-related GHG, according to the IPCC. 

During the project, I was responsible for cell cultures in second facility, which had to be rented because it had bigger incubators. I was also doing my own tests, with different decellularized scaffolds such as flowers and apple pulp.

High confluence of myoblasts on the surface of a flask.

Above: Cells in the incubator and close up of one of the flask with visible group of cells.