While lab-grown beef might help offset carbon emissions and reduce animal cruelty, the rollout of cell-based fish protein, shellfish and other seafood could be an important innovation to protect the ocean’s incredible biodiversity.

Avant Meats has a unique approach to its lab-grown seafood business. Not content to just mass-produce lab-grown fish fillets, it has focused on developing prized delicacies, especially fish maw. 

Fish maw, sometimes referred to as the swim bladder, is an organ that helps a fish control its buoyancy. It’s considered one of the “four treasures” of Chinese cuisine. 

“The texture is similar to the real fish maw before it’s cooked…It is sticky, it has gelatin,” says [chef Eddy] Leung. “But when you eat it, it doesn’t yet have the kind of stickiness the real ones do.”

Avant Meats also let us sample a cultivated fish fillet, derived from a grouper. As a former vegetarian, I’m still squeamish about eating living things. But I didn’t feel guilty about eating meat that was never actually a living, swimming fish. The fillet tasted like the real thing, but it still has a way to go. Instead of flaking like real fish, it had a starchier consistency, more like gnocchi.

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