

How In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives - MikeCapone
http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/bio/eight-ways-vitro-meat-will-change-our-lives

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colonelxc
Apparently it's all rainbows and sunshine from here on out. I really don't see
the meat industry dying out for a long time, and I have some doubts about how
easy it will be to be able to ship "in vitro kits" to food deprived nations.
Maybe someday, but not for decades is my guess. I'm curious as to how much the
materials that the cells grow in will cost, and how hard that will be to make.

One of the commenters put it well:

"In Vitro meat will do to pasture grown meat what margarine did to butter.
Despite nearly 50 years of food science, still the most economical way of
getting the wonderfully rich flavor of butter is to milk it out of cows.

In vitro meat will be fine for industralized meat products that just want the
approximate taste & texture of meat but anybody wanting a fine steak is still
going to get it from good old fashioned cows."

~~~
theblackbox
It's the "In-vitro kits" that really get me thinking. I wonder if they will be
as magnanimous as the author suspects or if they will simply be another tool
of third world oppression. Like with how GMO crops sometimes have a built in
dependency on a nutrition product sold by the same company, or how they can be
made infirtile so the farmer cannot reseed the same crop. It all seems like
another rift in the Socio-technological Divide, to me!

On a side note, what would in-vitro mean for Halal/Kosher meat? Anyone care to
speculate?

~~~
anamax
> another tool of third world oppression. Like with how GMO crops sometimes
> have a built in dependency on a nutrition product sold by the same company,
> or how they can be made infirtile so the farmer cannot reseed the same crop.

That's not oppression.

Those folks are perfectly free to continue to do as they've done for centuries
or to buy something else if they feel that the benefits are not worth the
costs.

There's nothing wrong with charging more. Customers are always free to buy
something else.

~~~
dan_the_welder
That is an incredibly naive viewpoint given how agribusiness behaves.

Their modified crops cross pollinate with standard strains and "become" the
modified strains. Then they sue the farmers for not paying the license fees.
They threaten to not supply farmers with GMO seed if they use normal seed for
their other crops.

Similarly they attempt to patent strains that have existed for centuries in
order to become sole providers. See the Basmati / Texmati rice case for just
one example [http://www.no-patents-on-
seeds.org/index.php?option=com_cont...](http://www.no-patents-on-
seeds.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=74&Itemid=42)

They have made every effort to remove other options from the farmers and are
creating monopolies through questionable business practices and IP abuse.

It's a dirty business all around and it's a clear indication that the patent
system is broken. Commodities are cheap, _because they are commodities_.
Simply because anyone can jump on in and have a go at producing them. That's
the free market at work, cheap and lots of it.

Contrast commodities with the protected patented good. Expensive and a limited
supply typically, since you can only get it from the IP owner or a licensee.
Why innovate if you don't have to and if you do, make sure it's patentable and
stretch it out.

If patents were fair and equitable all around then people would not be trying
so hard to turn commodities _back into_ patented goods.

It's not tenable and it is the cause of our current economic malaise. It's a
high tech world and the path to economic growth is blocked because as soon as
you computerize or mechanize, you run into a wall of intellectual property
that you can't get around without gobs of money for lawyers.

The software startup world was the wide open frontier ten years ago, a place
where you could make money with just an idea, but it's gradually getting the
life choked out of it by IP law.

Sorry, I did not initially mean for this to become a patent rant, but it is
connected to everything I have been thinking about for the last year or so and
it's really pissing me off how far it's tentacles go.

~~~
anamax
> Similarly they attempt to patent strains that have existed for centuries in
> order to become sole providers.

Oh really?

Since you didn't understand the article that you cited, I'll quote it "It
should be perfectly clear that what RiceTec patented was not the genome of
basmati rice or a genetically developed variety (RiceTec makes the point that
all its products are natural). It was simply a hybrid of basmati obtained from
cross-breeding with an US long rice variety."

RiceTec has a patent for its hybrid. That patent does not cover anything else,
such as pre-existing strains of Basmati.

The whole argument that what RiceTec has done is somehow wrong is "By
including basmati name into the patent definition, RiceTec could claim wide-
ranging rights over a traditional name, for which it did not acknowledge the
origin or the originality, let alone the copyright."

That's factually incorrect. Patents don't grant any protection for names.
Copyright and trademarks do.

I've got a patent for a method of branch prediction. No one thinks that said
patent gave me any rights over the term "branch prediction" (or even
"programmable branch prediction", a term which was arguably novel when I filed
the patent.)

------
nvasilak
This scares me to death.

There is no way that humanity has figured out all the complexity that billions
of years of evolution has created when it comes to animals eating each other.

Corporations are now coming up with new types of 'food' that they can sell for
much more profit than the things our species have been surviving on for
thousands of years. Take margarine for example - no cows to raise and milk,
therefore a much bigger profit margin than butter. They also tell us it's much
healthier too. But then studies like this come along
[http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/05/us/study-links-heart-
disea...](http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/05/us/study-links-heart-disease-to-
margarine.html) , and the whole french paradox, which indicate the opposite
may be true.

"When In-Vitro Meat (IVM) is cheaper than meat-on-the-hoof-or-claw, no one
will buy the undercut opponent." I seriously doubt it. Even though a grass
fed, dry aged steak is quite expensive, many people splurge because they are
delicious. Has the author heard of the organic movement growing 20% a year
over the past decade? People buying more expensive food because it's healthier
and tastes better, that defies logic.

The article claims that this IVM is also healthier for the planet, but it
neglects to mention where all the raw ingredients for the IVM will come from.
Mother nature already created the perfect way to stay healthy - plants get
energy from the sun to grow, animals eat plants, and excrete fertilizer to
grow new plants. This happened for millions of years before humans came along.
Unfortunately, our farms are no longer run using this perfect natural solution
(another issue entirely), but I don't see how IVM would solve this.

My favorite quote from the article: "We won't even choke to death because IVM
contains no malicious bones or gristle." It's amazing our species has survived
so long with so many malicious bones and evil gristle after us. Malicious
bones - I cant stop picturing zombies, haha.

~~~
Dove
Meh. Human beings haven't been eating domesticated cattle for all that long,
either. I mean, geologically speaking. If you're going to put some faith in
evolution, put it in our ability to adapt to available food sources. If we
were as brittle as needing to consciously micromanage nutrient input, I doubt
we'd have made it nearly this far.

Anyway, I don't see any particular reason to expect 'natural' food to be more
healthy. Most of nature, given its druthers, would like to kill you.

~~~
rsheridan6
>If you're going to put some faith in evolution, put it in our ability to
adapt to available food sources. If we were as brittle as needing to
consciously micromanage nutrient input, I doubt we'd have made it nearly this
far.

It depends on your definition of "need." You can obviously live to be old
enough to reproduce on extra value meals from McDonald's - people do - but
that doesn't mean its good for you.

>Anyway, I don't see any particular reason to expect 'natural' food to be more
healthy. Most of nature, given its druthers, would like to kill you.

Because we're adapted to it and we're messing with systems that are not well
understood. Some of this is obvious and well-known - for example, the link
between sugar consumption and diabetes.

~~~
Dove
> Because we're adapted to it and we're messing with systems that are not well
> understood.

Well, at least we try to understand them. Nature doesn't even do that. Bananas
--in any form--are new; a 10,000 year old irreproducible hybrid. Corn and
cattle have undergone extreme selection and no small amount of random
variation in that time. Nature produces viruses and parasites and mutations on
proteins and poisons, none of which have us in mind. And it does it much, much
faster than human evolution is going to be able to adapt to changing available
food sources. Our generations are long, and little things like cancer at the
end of life just don't hurt our offspring that much.

In a contest between engineered food -- whether cloned or GM -- and food
that's just been genetically drifting for a few thousand years, I'll take the
engineered food every time. Sure, the engineers are working with systems far
beyond their ken. I get that. But nature wouldn't be shy about doing even
relatively obviously dangerous things. Engineers might make sweeter apples and
we discover many years down the road that some protein interaction upsets some
delicate balance if you eat them with too many fish and it causes your teeth
to turn blue. But nature might decide to make an apple all cyanide and not
just the seeds.

Humans are pretty robust and adaptable. We can handle the random, arbitrary
garbage nature throws at us. We wouldn't be here if we couldn't. So I'm sure
the mistakes of a few engineers who trying very hard not to hurt us won't
amount to much of anything.

------
SwellJoe
This sounds like one of those "In The Year 2000" articles from Popular Science
in the '50s. It is hyperbolic beyond credulity, probably missing some
extremely important aspects of the central tenet of the story, and too light
on cited facts to take seriously.

I do think there will be major changes in the way meat for the majority of
meat eaters is produced in the future, but it won't be in three years, or even
ten. The changes _have_ to happen because meat production is simply too
resource intensive for an ever-growing population to keep on eating more and
more of the stuff without ever increasing environmental impact. But, they will
come extremely slowly, because peoples habits change extremely slowly. People
will choose "real" meat for a long time after cheaper in-vitro meats are
available.

If I ate meat, I would be somewhat suspicious of the new stuff, just as I'm
suspicious of most modern, and not so modern, lab-created food additives. As
with most artificial sweeteners, HFCS, hydrogenated fats, etc., I'm suspicious
of them as beacons for general poor quality when I see them on a label. I know
if the manufacturer chose the cheapest options for the sweeteners and fats,
they probably chose the cheapest garbage for the rest of the ingredients, too.
Much like soy in burgers indicated to people in the '70s and '80s that it was
a poor quality, cheap, food, in-vitro meats will probably go through a phase
of being thought second rate. And, of course, a few years on, we now know that
soy in some forms actually can be detrimental to health, particularly in men.

It will take a pretty brilliant marketing coup to overcome that kind of
resistance. Splenda and Nutri-Sweet both had very effective marketing that
seems to have countered any feelings of badness about them. Though what Nutri-
Sweet replaced (Saccharine) had such a bad reputation at the time that
anything probably would have been a shoe-in. It's not coincidence that Splenda
began to hit big just as questions about the safety of Nutri-Sweet/Aspartame
started to get mainstream attention. I'm not sure people will be convinced
about the unhealthiness of meat, since artificial meats aren't exactly
mainstream today, despite many of them being quite tasty (certainly tastier
than diet sodas) and reasonably healthful. This makes me think the desire for
healthier substitutes for meat isn't very high, and the awareness of most
folks of the environmental impact is even lower.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
No one will buy ranch raised meat when In-Vitro meat is so cheap? This guy has
_no_ business sense.

I raise chickens as a hobby. I don't even try to market or sell my product,
yet I have people asking me if they can buy eggs (no, I just give them away if
they ask) because they're willing to pay more for fresh eggs from chickens
living in natural surroundings than the "battery farmed" ones in supermarkets.

Premium products will _always_ command premium prices.

------
s3graham
Assuming I believe in this taking over the world, can anyone point to some
startups or larger public companies I should be following?

------
zitterbewegung
I think this article doesn't actually address the obvious question of the
stigma of actually eating in-vitro meat.

~~~
wisty
It does. It suggests that Europe will take it up before USA, for cultural
reasons. It might also be popular in the developing world.

Our food is already processed within an inch of it's life (then a good three
yards past it). Tour Spam will be grown in a vat, rather than fed hormones and
ground in a factory. Big deal.

You think PETA is unethical? Just wait for the smear campaigns that will crop
up when MegaCorp can actually make some money off scaring people out of living
meat.

~~~
patio11
_It suggests that Europe will take it up before USA, for cultural reasons._

This mystifies me. All you have to say is "genetically modified" and Europe
flips its proverbial wig. Aren't savvy English cattle farmers going to say
"Oh-my-Gaia this is Frankenfood! It is unnatural! It is _cloned_! It probably
has _DNA in it_! Phone your representative, this should be banned!"

(The reference to savvy farmers is an oblique reference to the fact that the
difference between GMO soybeans/corn/etc and non-GMO soybeans/corn/etc is that
a preference or requirement for non-GMO product shuts American-grown stuff out
of the market. What a handy coincidence.)

------
dan_the_welder
I encourage you to read "The Merchants War" by Fredrick Pohl

~~~
jacquesm
Which is a sequel to 'the space merchants'.

And I really wonder why that got you modded down, it's perfectly on-topic.

~~~
StrawberryFrog
It was modded down, probably because if you haven't read this book (which I
haven't), the suggestion is unsupported and means little - _why_ should I read
it?

~~~
jacquesm
The space merchants and the merchants war deal with a society that has
'overshot' in commerce, basically there are only two brands left. And one of
the central themes is 'chicken little', a vat grown pile of blubbering
cancerous chicken meat that gets 'sliced' off at the edges.

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nikils
This means now vegans can eat meat ?

~~~
jamesbritt
That would depend on why one was a vegan. Some do it for health, some for
various philosophical reasons.

For myself (vegetarian for philosophical reasons), if no plausibly sentient
being was harmed to create this stuff, I'd likely have no ethical reasons
against eating it.

~~~
dejb
> Some do it for health, some for various philosophical reasons.

I'd also add 'Yuck Factor' to that list. I'm not sure how IVM would effect
this.

~~~
jamesbritt
Some current fake meat has a notable Yuck Factor. :)

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moonpolysoft
This article reads like it was written by someone with an axe to grind against
traditional meat.

