On Dec. 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu abandoned his busy political schedule and the ongoing crisis at the Knesset for a somewhat unusual visit. He took a trip to the city of Rehovot for a grand tour of the Aleph Farms plant, which produces cultivated meat. Aleph Farms co-founder and CEO Didier Toubia, the government’s animal rights adviser Tal Gilboa and The Good Food Institute Israel’s managing director Nir Goldstein accompanied Netanyahu. The plant has its own chef resident, Amir Ilan. After touring the facilities, Netanyahu was invited to taste a few dishes of Aleph Farms' cultivated meat, becoming the first head of state around the globe to bite into a steak cultivated outside of a cow. "It’s delicious and guilt-free. I can’t taste the difference," stated the prime minister emotionally.

Indeed, he did not hide his personal interest in the project and its vision. "Meat is a major part of pollution in the world. In order to have a cut of regular meat, one needs a cow and to use so much pasturage with waste, pollution and investment of energy. … Now it will take a little time until this morsel will be profitable and not cost so much, but it will happen," he said.

But Netanyahu went further than that. He said that he will direct Government Secretary Tzachi Braverman to appoint a special person to bring together all of the Israeli plants and startups engaged in cultivated meat and meat substitutes, turning this industry into a national priority. "Israel will be a major power in alternative meat, alternative protein," said the prime minister.

External relations manager at Aleph Farms Yoav Reisler told Al-Monitor that the plant was established in 2017 in collaboration between the food-tech incubator "The Kitchen Hub" (founded by Israeli dairy company Strauss) and professor Shulamit Levenberg of the Technion Institute of Technology. Levenberg heads Technion’s Stem Cell and Tissue Engineering Laboratory and is the dean of Technion’s biomedical engineering department.