It was a Saturday evening just before Christmas, and diners were sitting down at the swanky, avant-garde 1880 club in Singapore. But this was no ordinary meal out. The future of agriculture was on the menu.

For the first time anywhere in the world, a restaurant was legally permitted to serve “cultured meat”: chicken produced from cells in a lab, rather than raised on a farm. Singapore’s food regulator in December gave California-based alt-food company Eat Just the green light to sell the product commercially, and 1880 was the first customer.