
Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015) - truth_sentinell
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34540193
======
VelNZ
I am really really excited about lab grown meat making it into the mass market
and ultimately becoming cheaper than traditional meat. The environmental
benefits will be insane; how much of the earth is currently devoted to either
raising animals or growing feed to feed animals? If we can centralise the
production of meat, suddenly we have huge swathes of land that, perhaps
naively, I hope can be reforested.

~~~
charlesdm
Am I the only one here who probably wouldn't buy artificial meat? I'm not a
massive meat eater, but when I go shopping, I tend to buy better quality stuff
without caring too much for the price. I'd give it a try, but would probably
still buy "the real deal".

> Suddenly we have huge swathes of land that, perhaps naively, I hope can be
> reforested.

Those plots would still be owned by farmers, and planting trees on them would
bring in close to zero revenue.

~~~
CamperBob2
You'll probably change your mind. If/when synthmeat becomes both economical
and palatable, it will rapidly become socially unacceptable to eat real meat.

~~~
grzm
I'm not sure about the social aspect of it, but I can see it becoming more of
a "real meat for special occasions or if you're rich enough". Demand for real
meat, especially for processed meat products, will drop.

~~~
snovv_crash
It will probably be similar to having real fur coats, vs faux fur. Distasteful
in some social groups, but other people still do it.

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xbmcuser
Ethical considerations won't take this far. Need it to become cheaper than
real meat the day that happens it will take off on its own. Meat or cattle
raising plays a big role in the worlds methane production decreasing that
would be huge achievement as with more people getting out of poverty every
year meat production and consumption is increasing.

~~~
x1798DE
I could see another angle in the meantime, which is exotic lab grown meats.
I'd be interested in trying bald eagle meat or polar bear or any number of
animal meats where it's either illegal or impractical to culture full animals.

Presumably you can also make meats that scale disproportionately with the size
of the animal, like sparrow burger or lobster steak.

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MrQuincle
Yes, or human.

~~~
joshschreuder
It's actually a fun question to ask people, whether they would eat a synthetic
meat that was designed to taste like human meat. You will perhaps
understandably get a lot of weird looks and squirms.

~~~
x1798DE
I'm not sure if you can call it "designed to taste like human meat" when it's
actually human meat that just wasn't produced in a human, though that's
another interesting breakdown.

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throwaway98237
As a vegan, I feel the day fast approaching when I must choose whether I'll
eat this "vegan" meat or not. Either way I'm rooting for them on behalf of the
environment and all the animals caught up in our current industrial food
system.

~~~
jekrb
I'm vegan too. My reason for being vegan is entirely on the basis of
sustainability. If lab meat is produced in a sustainable fashion then I'll be
all for eating it.

~~~
KitDuncan
I really doubt lab grown meat will ever be as sustainable, as a normal plant
based diet.

~~~
foota
I wouldn't be so sure, it takes a lot of water to grow food.

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mrob
I predict synthetic meat will be hugely successful simply because it avoids
all the gross parts of dead animals. No blood, no connective tissue, no risk
of abscesses or parasites, no worries about cross-contamination, the exact
same size every time. If I can buy a sterile and perfectly uniform slab of
synthetic muscle and marbled fat, to me that's a better product than natural
meat. I don't even care if it tastes slightly worse. Put some ketchup on it
and it'll be good enough.

"Inferior" technology very often wins because of convenience. People preferred
LCDs to CRTs long before they'd caught up with CRT image and motion quality.
Touch screen phones are more popular than those with physical keyboards. More
people use ballpoint pens than fountain pens despite the higher writing
pressure and lack of flexibility in ink choice. Synthetic meat can be the
ultimate convenient meat and that's enough to make up for a lot of other
flaws.

~~~
jonathanstrange
I'm not so sure. The problem is that any kind of processed real meat, like
almost all other processed food, tends to be absolutely horrible from a
culinary point of view and is often bad from a health-related point of view,
too.

It seems unlikely to me that lab-grown meat would fare better in that respect
than, say, processed compressed chicken remains that are sold as an ingredient
in a vast variety of processed food.

I also don't think that lab-grown meat will have substantially less potential
for biological contamination.

~~~
mrob
I'm confident contamination won't be an issue for consumers because AFAIK no
current or proposed synthetic meat has an immune system. This means it will
have to be grown in sterile conditions. Contamination will be a huge problem
for producers, but they'll have to figure out a solution because the cost of
losing whole batches would be too much if they don't.

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entee
It's unclear what methods they're using to make these burgers, but often you
need many animal-derived products to culture cells. Fetal bovine serum, growth
media, all of these have animal products in them. If they make an ethical
argument, then they'll have to solve that too. They might have, but it's not
clear in the article.

~~~
truth_sentinell
I saw in a documentary that with only a sample of the skin they can grow like
10k burguers, and the animal won't even notice, it's like an injection. I
don't remember the doc but it seems pretty ethical IMO.

~~~
_Wintermute
It's not just the initial cells, the growth medium contains a lot of animal
products - even culturing human cells for research uses lots of bovine
products.

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woofyman
Reminds me of Frederik Pohls "The Space Merchants" published 1952 where he
describes a huge mass of cultured chicken breast cells fed with algae

[http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002)

~~~
taneq
Interestingly, the original experiment that spawned these stories (Alexis
Carrel allegedly kept a culture of chicken heart alive for 20 years) was never
replicated, and it's suspected that fresh cells were added to the mass to keep
it going.

Attempts to replicate it lead to the discovery of the Hayflick Limit, which
observes that most animal cells can only divide a limited number of times
before dying.

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qyv
The ethical argument for the adoption of artificial beef is always brought out
during these stories. But they forget to mention that the lab grown meat only
contains lean meat cells and in order to make it taste good they need to add
animal fat. As in, fat from farmed and slaughtered animals.

~~~
stupidcar
Human fat. Just build the meat lab next to a liposuction clinic. Problem
solved.

In fact, if you build a burger joint there as well, you've got a perfect Fat
Cycle. People can go to the clinic to get their flab hoovered off, then head
into the restaurant and eat it all back in burger form.

~~~
hkhall
Thanks Tyler.

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rdlecler1
A US company called Modern Meadow is trying to do the same thing, but is
starting with a more commercially viable first product: leather. This seems
like a better way to develop the technology stack you need to crush the cost
so that you can make it available for food.

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SpikeDad
Sounds like a job for a Kickstarter. They'll make a lot of money, maybe create
some new science and then when they fail they can close up their shop without
a single repercussion.

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CyberDildonics
That's pretty good, but even if you buy now it will just be obsolete in a
week.

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jholman
This is year-old blogspam. bigthink.com spins every article out into nine
self-linked articles, and also leaves out all the interesting details. Also
they don't source the $11.36 figure, and all the other sources I've read give
prices to about 1 significant figure, not to four, so I suspect that's made
up.

If you're interested in this subject, read this WP piece from 18 months ago,
or this BBC piece that was the actual source for TFA from 13 months ago, both
of which contain more up-to-date facts than TFA.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/20/meet-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/20/meet-
the-future-of-meat-a-10-lab-grown-hamburger-that-tastes-as-good-as-the-real-
thing/)

[http://www.bbc.com/news/science-
environment-34540193](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34540193)

Or, for more background, here's the 3-year-old piece from Time that raised a
lot of discussion, and which gives the context for the price drop.

[http://science.time.com/2013/12/16/the-triple-whopper-
enviro...](http://science.time.com/2013/12/16/the-triple-whopper-
environmental-impact-of-global-meat-production/)

Or you could read this, from 6 months ago. Note that it looks like a bit of a
biased piece to me, but it appears to be directly sourced, rather than just
regurgitated. It also is specific about Mosa's price _targets_ , saying that
they think that $29.50/lb will be their launch price, and they speculate that
$3.60/lb seems like an achievable goal for later (currency not specified,
though probably they mean USD, but note that the company is not American).

[http://www.takepart.com/feature/2016/05/23/cultured-
beef](http://www.takepart.com/feature/2016/05/23/cultured-beef)

~~~
grzm
_" Also they don't source the $11.36 figure"_

And did I miss it, but are we to assume that's $11.36/lb? Some other unit?

~~~
greeneggs
Generally, random numbers like this come from unit conversion. My guess is
that it started at $100/kg.

$100 per kg = $11.34 per 1/4 lb burger

You get $11.36 per 1/4 lb if you use 2.2 lb = 1 kg, instead of the exact
conversion.

~~~
Declanomous
I assumed 1/4 lb burger, just because it's the common burger size that
provides the most favorable comparison. It's a bullshit comparison though. A
burger is more than just a patty, and upscale burgers (which they are
targeting with prices like that) rarely are just a 1/4 lb of meat. I initially
thought the $11.34 price was pretty good, because I eat $10 burgers all the
time, but a 1/3 or 1/2 pound burger made with this meat would cost about $50
in a restaurant.

The best argument for this burger is that the moral cost of killing a cow is
much higher than the added price of the artificial meat. I'd find that
argument pretty convincing, but I don't make enough money to be that moral.

~~~
dragonwriter
> a 1/3 or 1/2 pound burger made with this meat would cost about $50 in a
> restaurant.

More than that. A 1/2 burger would cost, using the 30% food cost rule of thumb
for restaurant pricing, nearly $80 assuming that everything other than the
patty had no food cost.

~~~
Declanomous
I didn't realize the rule of thumb was 30% for a restaurant. I've always
worked in retail, where a 100% markup is always a good rule of thumb.

~~~
dragonwriter
Restaurants aren't reselling packaged goods, they are also assembling from
raw, so there is both amortized cost of production equipment and labor costs
associated with production that retail lacks.

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untilHellbanned
Reverse sticker shock as clickbait, there's a new one.

