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Bioengineer 3D-Prints Vegan Steaks

Every day we get a little bit closer to having food replicators like in Star Trek. We can already make a pretty convincing fake hamburger, but a steak is a little more complicated. Not too complicated for science, though.

Spanish startup company NovaMeat, headed by CEO Giuseppe Scionti, has developed a way to efficiently produce vegan steaks with that authentic, hearty steak texture. A burger is ground beef, so anything can be lumped together to make a facsimile of one, whereas a steak is a single, uninterrupted piece, so it’s a little harder to fake. Scionti, an impressive bioengineer himself, has used a 3D printer to link plant protein nanofibers into a structure that almost perfectly replicates that of animal proteins. It cuts and feels like a steak, but has all the nutritional value of its veggie components.

Scionti was careful to choose the components of his steaks, because he didn’t want to choose something that had its own heavy environmental impact. “I tried not to choose, for example, avocado or quinoa, as increasing the demand for foods that need to imported would have a detrimental impact on the environment,” he told Business Insider. Best of all, these vegan steaks are dirt cheap to produce. The collective value of the peas, seaweed, and rice that goes into one of these things is about $3 for one four-ounce steak. That’s supermarket bargain day prices.

Scionti says that the nutrition and texture are perfect, but he still has some research to do on taste and appearance. If he can get this right, we can drastically reduce the environmental impact of the world’s cattle industries.

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