What if there was a way to eat meat without farming and killing billions of animals per year, contributing to the climate crisis and risking high cholesterol levels?

“Cultivated meat is real meat grown directly from animal cells,” Uma Valeti, founder and CEO of Upside Foods, said via email. “These products are not vegan, vegetarian or plant-based – they are real meat, made without the animal.”

“The process of making cultivated meat is similar to brewing beer, but instead of growing yeast or microbes, we grow animal cells,” Valeti added.

Scientists start by taking a small cell sample from livestock animals such as a cow or chicken, then identify cells that can multiply.

“From there, we put these cells in a clean and controlled environment and feed them with essential nutrients they need to replicate naturally,” Valeti said. “In essence, we can re-create the conditions that naturally exist inside an animal’s body.”

“It’s meat without slaughter,” Christiana Musk, founder of Flourishink, said at the Life Itself conference, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN. Flourishink is a platform for curating and catalyzing conversations on the future of food.

Progressing from lab production to making products in commercial facilities, some companies are moving away from the term “lab-grown meat,” said a spokesperson for Mosa Meat, a Netherlands-based food technology company. Instead, these companies refer to it as cultivated meat, cultured meat, cell-based or cell-grown meat, or non-slaughter meat.