> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
> “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
Seeing all these sterile rooms, inox pipings, reactors, tanks make me feel weird. I'm vegetarian but I'd eat a local farm animal over this if I had to chose.
edit: to clarify, food for me is equal to traditions, know-hows, local, &c. not three dudes in hazmat suits populating a 60000 gallon tank of chicken soup. If you want cheap as fuck meat and have the choice between modern animal farming and that then by all means go for that. It just doesn't sit right with me.
It's so disconnected to everything I associate with good food, there already are alternatives, as nutritious, getting cheaper by the day, made from real thing we can grow with minimal post processing.
Not the kind that looks like sludge, but the kind that would be indistinguishable from a beef patty you buy at the store, not least because it would be a more efficient way of producing food at scale.
But also because some of that technology would also eventually be applied to the creation of human organs.
And I'd like to live in a world where the waiting list for an organ transplant is just a few hours for everybody.
> But also because some of that technology would also eventually be applied to the creation of human organs.
I'm not sure that this is true.
I mean, it might be in the sense that the technology for cultivating yeast could be applied to human organs.
But to my knowledge there's not much going on in lab-grown meat that could be applied to producing functioning organ tissue, let alone building the full organ in all its parts and making it compatible with the host.
> In a 2019 incident, an analysis of a line of cultivated chicken revealed that it had been contaminated with a small amount of rodent DNA, former employees said, which Upside executives confirmed for this story.
Ms. Chen said the DNA stemmed from a common medical-research technique that used treated rodent cells to help support the meat cells’ growth early in the cultivation process. The company immediately stopped using that technique, she said.
Can someone explain what this "common medical-research technique" would be? I'm having a hard time understanding how this is passed off as "contamination" when it sounds like the rodent cells were deliberately put in contact with the food being created.
The whole "lab-grown meat" thing always seemed like nonsense to me, at least techniques using cell cultures. Life is a no-rules arms race, which is why immune systems are a basic requirement, not an unnecessary luxury. Trying to build an organism out of tubes and pipes with industrial techniques seems utterly foolish to create such a low value/mass quantity product as food.
IMHO, any kind of successful and practical "lab grown meat" would probably look like some kind of engineered "minimal viable animal" (e.g. a chicken without the brain, and maybe missing a few other things, but recognizable as an animal with functioning organ systems).
We already use several processes that are similar to lab grown meat. Ie beer and cheese are a bunch of cells dumped into a growth medium. Hell bread rises because of yeasts in a growth medium.
So the “minimal organism” here is probably some kind of fast growing meat cell in a relatively sterile environment, alcohol production optional.
I've had similar thoughts. It seems to me that it's probably a lot easier to design some sort of 'minimum viable' animal that produces perfect chicken eggs instead of trying to produce some sort of tissue that can be made to resemble chicken breast, or more likely chicken nuggets.
The consumer will never have to see the unsightly 'meat' that will be very imperfect, so you don't have to invest in making it palatable to humans. It just has to produce eggs.
There's probably a lot of room to optimize egg product as it currently is.
I still fully support progress and research towards improving the world, which is precisely what lab grown meat is - but alternatives such as 'impossible' are still quite excellent substitutes as well.
Honestly, I think impossible meat is far, faaar better than pretty much any real meat - and I say that including a 'good steak' or (even better) home cooked steak in the southern US from a local butcher shop. Of course, that can still be good - but impossible meat is way better due to actually being uniformly smooth and much easier to marinate (if that's what you're going for).
Real meat has an enormous number of issues that make it sub par, such as health risks (unique disease sets, as well as the chronic-use red meat effects on health), random other tissues that affect quality (gristle, other tendons, etc), of course extremely inhumane processes for which it comes from, and the pretty insane costs associated with it (much of the writeups on this are very disingenuous and favor 'real' meat, despite the glaring amount of capital it takes to sustain these farms).
Ultimately I am really ready to move on from the past of eating real meat and I would love to see all facets of the world switch away from it.
I've been watching a YouTuber try to create animal cells in a pitri dish and it just gave me such an appreciation for how amazing multicellular life is. And just how mean our immune systems are.
You have to go through so much trouble to keep things totally sterile. Control the oxygen contact of the medium. Maintain these crazy exact temperatures, all for a thin smear of cells that couldn't do anything functional at all.
And here we are, millions of these helpless cells, ruining around ruling the would.
To the world of life we are these supermassive towering beings that are ecosystems to their own that emerged from the birthplace of life eons ago and cover the planet.
The universe is such a strange and wonderous place, and yet we're some of the most wonderous things in it.
> They expect hybrid products, often made with animal cells and other ingredients such as plant-based protein, to have a quicker, less costly path to market.
This is what I've always expected. Synthetic meat slurry added to conventional fakemeat vegetarian products, basically taking Impossible Burger's "synthetic heme" concept to the next level.
> Upside said in 2021 that it found a way to produce some meat without using animal components. But its first chicken filets won’t be made with that process, the company said, noting that it intends to phase out the use of animal components.
Wait, what does this mean? Like, the process needs constant refreshing with new animal meat? So it's not really cruelty-free?
> “If alternative proteins are not successful, the Paris climate agreement goals are probably impossible” to meet, said Bruce Friedrich, president of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for alternative proteins. Beef and dairy cattle, along with other farm animals, are a major source of methane, a greenhouse gas.
This isn't super relevant to the conversation here since there are very many alternative proteins that don't require inventing synthetic meat.
I'd think something like "lab-grown maple syrup" would be easier both to sell and (knowing nothing about how it would be produced) to produce. I love real maple syrup but can't justify paying $15 for a little vial of it. A 10-story building filled with layer upon layer of sap seeping from living wood cells is less disturbing of a vision than layers of pulsating flesh.
I'm not very knowledgeable about the subject so I ask myself... Why make things so difficult and try to produce meat? Why not just proteins or any nutrients in bulk in reactors? Is original structure and taste so important in these days where we can produce flavours and build structures afterwards rather easily?
Short answer: yes. If it weren't way more people would be vegetarians (or at least have way lower meat consumption). At this point I think it's the structure that's the hard part, it's important to people and we have a hard time reproducing it. Plus even if it's not the original structure it has to be something; nobody wants to drink meat slurry.
Personally I'm a fan of Impossible but I still have never tasted a good chicken-substitute.
Per pound of meat? That's easy: some dead cow, by far. Much worse for the environment. Massive factories are the best ways humans have found to be efficient and producing massive quantities of things. Everything else is less efficient. Inefficient means waste. Waste means bad for the environment.
Yes, we're bad at it still. Do you claim that humanity should never undertake new efforts? If you don't claim that, then you must accept that we're going to be worse at new things than things we've been doing for 10,000 years. It will get better.
It's also tough because nobody really wants this. I've asked around and none of the vegans, vegetarians, or meat eaters I know are even vaguely interested in this. Reactions range from "huh" to "I'll never eat fake meat." I wont eat it either, it's dehumanizing.
I want this. I'll eat it. I'd be willing to pay some amount more than the current cost of regular meat (including the pricier more ethically-raised meat).
Yahoo reports about a quarter of vegans say they would eat it.[0] MSU survey found that 35% of people overall would eat cultured meat[1], including a majority of people aged 18-40)[2].
It's not the majority of the population, but it's certainly not 0%, and certainly appears to be well into double-digit percentages.
People are price-sensitive, so if it costs more than regular meat it will have a tough time gaining significant marketshare, but there's very clearly a sizable portion of the population who do want this, anecdotal surveys of your friends notwithstanding.
To add the other side. Every single one of my friends are excited for lab grown meat. The potential for a cleaner and more ethical meat plus the potential for new and better/different tasting meat is a plus for everyone in my circle.
Interesting, I definitely know people who are looking forward to this. Some would be willing to pay a price premium for it, and others would wait until it is the same price or lower than regular meat.
If it ever actually comes to market there will be a huge marketing push to make it seem like or better than normal meat, and to reframe or make people not think about how the product is made. There's lots of things that are pretty gross when you think about them, but have been marketed and made palatable. I think they'll be able to create people who want the product by reframing what the product is, once they /have/ a product.
It's not 'lab grown meat', it's 'cruelty free meat' or 'eco steak.'
I'll add to your anecdotal evidence by saying I am a vegetarian and I am interested in this. So somebody does really want this, just not people "around" you.
Same here, I don't get why people are craving this but I accept that they do. And it's much better ethically than the current raise, abuse and slaughter process. Let's just hope it's also better environmentally.
I'm an occasional-meat kinda eater, and yeah, I'll just go all-veggie (with eggs and milk—you can pry those from my cold, dead fingers, I'll farm my own if that's the only way to get it) before eating this stuff. If I want to fill gaps in nutrition with shit from a lab, I can just start taking vitamins. I dunno, maybe if it were super-cheap—well under the cost of farmed meat, like, 20% the price—I might use it some just because hey, cheap protein, but otherwise, no.
Many people overlook the implications of choices. I realized this when I purchased the Just Eggs. I don't purchase 1 or 2 bottle per months, but it is good to have.
yeah it might be prime time to start a flank of church that includes eating real meat from free range beef cattle, no sarcasm, puns intended… plus imagine if we actually let the real cattle dwindle enough to the point where commercial or infrastructure failure would leave us with a sudden large gap in available meat, seems like sustainable local farming is the only wise solution, not more factory farms with even less cows
[+] [-] benzible|2 years ago|reply
> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
> “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lm28469|2 years ago|reply
edit: to clarify, food for me is equal to traditions, know-hows, local, &c. not three dudes in hazmat suits populating a 60000 gallon tank of chicken soup. If you want cheap as fuck meat and have the choice between modern animal farming and that then by all means go for that. It just doesn't sit right with me.
It's so disconnected to everything I associate with good food, there already are alternatives, as nutritious, getting cheaper by the day, made from real thing we can grow with minimal post processing.
[+] [-] DantesKite|2 years ago|reply
Not the kind that looks like sludge, but the kind that would be indistinguishable from a beef patty you buy at the store, not least because it would be a more efficient way of producing food at scale.
But also because some of that technology would also eventually be applied to the creation of human organs.
And I'd like to live in a world where the waiting list for an organ transplant is just a few hours for everybody.
[+] [-] pcthrowaway|2 years ago|reply
I'm not sure that this is true.
I mean, it might be in the sense that the technology for cultivating yeast could be applied to human organs.
But to my knowledge there's not much going on in lab-grown meat that could be applied to producing functioning organ tissue, let alone building the full organ in all its parts and making it compatible with the host.
[+] [-] gnicholas|2 years ago|reply
Ms. Chen said the DNA stemmed from a common medical-research technique that used treated rodent cells to help support the meat cells’ growth early in the cultivation process. The company immediately stopped using that technique, she said.
Can someone explain what this "common medical-research technique" would be? I'm having a hard time understanding how this is passed off as "contamination" when it sounds like the rodent cells were deliberately put in contact with the food being created.
[+] [-] tivert|2 years ago|reply
IMHO, any kind of successful and practical "lab grown meat" would probably look like some kind of engineered "minimal viable animal" (e.g. a chicken without the brain, and maybe missing a few other things, but recognizable as an animal with functioning organ systems).
[+] [-] Retric|2 years ago|reply
So the “minimal organism” here is probably some kind of fast growing meat cell in a relatively sterile environment, alcohol production optional.
[+] [-] Metacelsus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|2 years ago|reply
Or a tumor
[+] [-] tomjakubowski|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system#Beyond_ve...
[+] [-] AstralStorm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Teever|2 years ago|reply
The consumer will never have to see the unsightly 'meat' that will be very imperfect, so you don't have to invest in making it palatable to humans. It just has to produce eggs.
There's probably a lot of room to optimize egg product as it currently is.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] chaxor|2 years ago|reply
Ultimately I am really ready to move on from the past of eating real meat and I would love to see all facets of the world switch away from it.
[+] [-] bioemerl|2 years ago|reply
You have to go through so much trouble to keep things totally sterile. Control the oxygen contact of the medium. Maintain these crazy exact temperatures, all for a thin smear of cells that couldn't do anything functional at all.
And here we are, millions of these helpless cells, ruining around ruling the would.
To the world of life we are these supermassive towering beings that are ecosystems to their own that emerged from the birthplace of life eons ago and cover the planet.
The universe is such a strange and wonderous place, and yet we're some of the most wonderous things in it.
[+] [-] monkey_monkey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pxtl|2 years ago|reply
This is what I've always expected. Synthetic meat slurry added to conventional fakemeat vegetarian products, basically taking Impossible Burger's "synthetic heme" concept to the next level.
> Upside said in 2021 that it found a way to produce some meat without using animal components. But its first chicken filets won’t be made with that process, the company said, noting that it intends to phase out the use of animal components.
Wait, what does this mean? Like, the process needs constant refreshing with new animal meat? So it's not really cruelty-free?
> “If alternative proteins are not successful, the Paris climate agreement goals are probably impossible” to meet, said Bruce Friedrich, president of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for alternative proteins. Beef and dairy cattle, along with other farm animals, are a major source of methane, a greenhouse gas.
This isn't super relevant to the conversation here since there are very many alternative proteins that don't require inventing synthetic meat.
[+] [-] mcbits|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethanbond|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nuancebydefault|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonsDiscountGas|2 years ago|reply
Short answer: yes. If it weren't way more people would be vegetarians (or at least have way lower meat consumption). At this point I think it's the structure that's the hard part, it's important to people and we have a hard time reproducing it. Plus even if it's not the original structure it has to be something; nobody wants to drink meat slurry.
Personally I'm a fan of Impossible but I still have never tasted a good chicken-substitute.
[+] [-] softwaredoug|2 years ago|reply
Sounds gruesome, but maybe more realistic than lab grown meat?
[+] [-] rebolek|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _chu1|2 years ago|reply
> Massive factories to make fake meat that tastes like nothing
> Some dead cow
[+] [-] feoren|2 years ago|reply
Yes, we're bad at it still. Do you claim that humanity should never undertake new efforts? If you don't claim that, then you must accept that we're going to be worse at new things than things we've been doing for 10,000 years. It will get better.
[+] [-] RC_ITR|2 years ago|reply
I think your underestimating the scale of animal agriculture.
[+] [-] urfullofsht|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dekhn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ihatepython|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvdl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 64operator|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkbm|2 years ago|reply
Yahoo reports about a quarter of vegans say they would eat it.[0] MSU survey found that 35% of people overall would eat cultured meat[1], including a majority of people aged 18-40)[2].
It's not the majority of the population, but it's certainly not 0%, and certainly appears to be well into double-digit percentages.
People are price-sensitive, so if it costs more than regular meat it will have a tough time gaining significant marketshare, but there's very clearly a sizable portion of the population who do want this, anecdotal surveys of your friends notwithstanding.
[0] https://news.yahoo.com/most-vegans-support-lab-grown-1208550...
[1] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/michigan-state-university-poll...
[2] https://theconversation.com/would-you-eat-meat-from-a-lab-co...
[+] [-] gamerDude|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spcebar|2 years ago|reply
It's not 'lab grown meat', it's 'cruelty free meat' or 'eco steak.'
[+] [-] rcar1046|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barbazoo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yamtaddle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cute_boi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luxuryballs|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] 64operator|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] feoren|2 years ago|reply
"Anything gross is not worth doing"
"Humans should not try to make staple goods cheaper to produce, because millionaires"
- You, apparently?
[+] [-] ihatepython|2 years ago|reply
I think it makes more sense to use 'plankton' as a food source, for making nutritious green wafers. They can be called 'Soylent Green'.
This could also help to solve the over-population problem.
[+] [-] iszomer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sourcecodeplz|2 years ago|reply
What's the problem of eating a cow or hen that was nearing its natural death?