Modern Meadow Inc. promises to print meat on a 3-D printer at some time in the future but first expects to be printing leather (calfskin) by the end of this year (2012). Anna Kamenetz  in her Aug. 15, 2012 (?) article for Fast Company’s Co.Exist website notes,

… Modern Meadow [MM] co-founder and CEO Andras Forgacs, explains, this new venture is, ahem, a natural outgrowth of that one [a company called Organovo, a startup specializing in 3-D printed, bioengineered organs founded by Andras’ father, Gabor Forgacs who’s co-founded MM with Andras]. “The idea struck us that if we can make medical-grade tissues that are good enough for drug companies, good enough for patients, then certainly we can find other applications for tissue engineering.” Forgacs does seem to understand how terrifying that sounds, which is why his startup has been relatively press-shy until the announcement this morning, and also why they’re starting with wearable, not edible, products. Still, he argues that cell culturing for food is as old as, well, culture itself:

…

“Whether you’re brewing beer or making yogurt, you’re really doing cell culture,” he [Andras Forgacs] says. In this case, though, the process involves biopsying a living animal (a relatively harmless procedure), isolating the desired cells, growing large numbers of them, and preparing them into cell aggregates–spheres of tens of thousands of cells. These aggregates can then become the raw material for more industrial processes. In the case of complete organs, that process is something like 3-D printing. For calfskin–the product that Modern Meadow intends to turn out by the end of the year–it would resemble something more like regular printing or weaving. The end result will be a hairless, pre-tanned, soft, smooth, chemical- and waste-free material in any color or pattern imaginable …

It’s not easy to find information about this company (they don’t seem to have a website) and, I gather from elsewhere in Kamenetz’s article, they’ve been media shy until now.

The US Dept. of Agriculture (USDA)  provides some information about a small business grant they gave to Modern Meadow for the 2012 fiscal year. From the Modern Meadow page on the USDA Research, Education & Economics Information System website, here are the project goals,

The objective of this proposal is to construct muscle tissues by a novel and versatile tissue engineering technology and to assess their texture and composition for use as minced meat. The patented “print-based” technology has several distinguishing features. It is scaffold-free – it does not rely on any artificial material to form the desired structure. The process to build a tissue construct utilizes the automated deposition of convenient multicellular units, suitable for rapid prototyping and high-throughput production. The method has solid scientific underpinning based on tissue self-assembly processes akin to those evident in early morphogenesis (i.e. tissue fusion, engulfment and cell sorting). The ultimate product that will be developed based on the proposed studies is an animal muscle strip that can be used as minced meat for the preparation of sausages, patties and nuggets. The two aims that will be pursued in this Phase I application are 1) to fabricate 3D cellular sheets composed of porcine cells and 2) to mature the cellular sheets into muscle tissue and measure its meat characteristics. The related technical objectives are 1) to determine the optimal cellular composition (type and ratio of muscle cells, fibroblasts and adipocytes) to produce “easy-to-handle” cellular sheets and 2) to find the most efficient stimulation method (mechanical, electrical or a combination of both) to achieve muscle formation with similar mechanical and biochemical properties to meat. The successful completion of the proposed project will provide the optimal parameters and conditions for engineering strips of mammalian muscle tissue ((2 x 1 x 0.5) cm3) with appropriate mechanical and biochemical properties to be used as minced lean meat. The building of larger pieces, that may need to be perfused and engineered around bio-printed blood vessels, would be carried out in Phase II.

If you’d told me about ‘vat’ or ‘printed’ meat five years ago I would have been horrified and suspicious. I’m somewhat less horrified today but still suspicious or perhaps I should call it, cautious.