shmeat

English

Alternative forms

• schmeat

Etymology

Blend of sheet +‎ meat. In 2013, the word was on the shortlist for Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year.

Noun

shmeat (uncountable)

1. (neologism) Animal meat grown artificially from a tissue culture.

   Synonyms: cultured meat, clean meat

   • 2008 May 20, Ketzel Levine, “Lab-Grown Meat a Reality, But Who Will Eat It?”, in NPR‎^[3], archived from the original on 2023-11-04:

     His work involves turning formless, textureless patches of the stuff into mass-produced form — like meat sheets, or what one might affectionately call "shmeat." […] So, to recap the opinions on the state of shmeat: It's animal-friendly but bad for the environment; we have the how-to, but not the how-come; unleashing unknown technologies is fodder for nightmares.

   • 2013 August 5, Catherine Mayer, “Meet ’Schmeat’: Say Hello to the Stem-Cell Hamburger”, in Time‎^[4], New York, N.Y.: Time Inc., →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2023-12-24:

     The ambitions for schmeat are huge, but the taste evidently falls short of a standard burger. The problem is a "technical bottleneck," Post (whose name rhymes with cost) told the audience at the Riverside Studios in West London.

   • 2013 December 1, James Palmer, “Schmeat: Where Did That Come From?”, in The Times‎^[5], London: News UK, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 25 December 2022:

     It's now an OED word of the year, though at a cost of £250,000 a burger, we won't be seeing easy schmeat any time soon[.]

   • 2015, Stuart A. Kallen, Running Dry: The Global Water Crisis, Minneapolis, M.N.: Twenty-First Century Books, →ISBN, page 28:

     Lab meat — known as in vitro meat, cultured meat, or shmeat — was first produced by Dutch scientists in 2012. The shmeat beefburger is made from the muscle cells of cows, treated with a protein that promotes tissue growth.

Further reading

• Paul McFedries (1996–2024) “shmeat”, in Word Spy, Logophilia Limited.
• cultured meat on Wikipedia.Wikipedia