> 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.
As someone who has given a lot of tours through a brewery and wineries, a good amount of people are in fact disappointed by the abundance of stainless steel tanks.
Yes. Years ago I was involved with a controversy on Wikipedia over Skyy Vodka. Skyy had dumped a PR piece into Wikipedia, and that was flagged. So I did some cleanup. It turned out that Skyy Vodka was just a marketing company. Production was outsourced to Frank-Lin Distillers Products in San Jose. Frank-Lin makes most of the low-end booze on the West Coast. It's a big operation. Many stainless steel tanks. Their own railroad siding, where tank cars of industrial ethanol come in. The ethanol was from a company called MGP Ingredients, formerly Midwest Grain Products, formerly Midwest Solvents, in Illinois. MGP also supplied ethanol for fuel use.
Frank-Lin takes industrial ethanol, city water, and flavoring, and makes a large number of alcohol-based products. They make over a thousand brands, but there are only a hundred or so different recipes, they admit. Each brand has its own label, and many have their own bottles. A few years back, they moved to Fairfield, CA, to be next to the bottle factory.
The Skyy Vodka article was updated accordingly. Skyy marketing was not happy.
This is fascinating and bizarre. Any idea what those people expect or would prefer to see? Ancient wooden tubs, and people in quaint medieval costumes stomping grapes with their bare feet?
This is an odd argument. I'd bet the environmental impact of a battery farm chicken is less than a free-roaming chicken, in terms of hectares of land use, feed (less energy expended from movement), water use.
So if you are vegetarian for environmental reasons and had to eat a chicken, you should go with the battery-farmed one.
You would go with the (arguably mythical) happy chicken if you were vegetarian for moral reasons.
Arguing that the impact of free roaming chickens is higher than a battery farm tells me you haven't seen one or the other. Roaming chicken have a positive impact in the environment by spreading their manure over the land (where does this negative impact for anything that moves and eats comes from?) whereas chicken batteries stink for miles and produce a huge amount of sludge that contains heavy metals that is hard to process.
It really isn't. They have ethical problems with factory farming. They eat a specific diet to reduce environmental impact. There is nothing contradictory in those statements.
My takeaway was that it would only increase the environmental impact if their actual diet stays the same, in other words they ate the same # of chickens but only from free-range, local farms.
Given the same amount of money, I'm assuming they mean buy less chicken (but from non-factory sources) and spend the remainder on other foods with less environmental impact.
It's actually ecologically and ethically better to have "barn" chickens, which live in massive steel sheds on trays with roosting boxes and perches about 50cm high, miles and miles of racking.
They're free to move about at least in their "bay" and have the company of other hens that can wander about too. Sure, they don't get the marketing feelgood "sun on their backs and wind in their feathers", but they also don't get raptors, foxes, or rats.
You can get rescue hens and they're just about savvy enough to figure out - after you've lost one or two - that predators are a thing, and you'll get an egg every couple of days per hen. They'll eat all the bugs in your garden (and most of the herbs, and the tops of your carrots) and shit everywhere.
Free range chicken exist (or sometimes a slightly less free version of this, let's not split hairs). Their meat and eggs are more expensive. I don't know if they are economically feasible large scale though.
Because this is HN, where someone is sure to nitpick and/or take my next statement to logical extremes, I must be very careful about how I word this. I will regret it, but here I go:
I like eating chicken. I know lots of tasty recipes. I understand this involves killing the animal. Yes, I don't do it myself, but I could if I wanted -- I'm not squeamish. But factory chicken make me uneasy, it seems well past the inhumane line, almost like an extermination camp for chicken. I think free range chicken are happier, for whatever degree of "happiness" their tiny bird brains can understand. I like thinking that the chicken I eat lived a happy if short life trampling on actual grass and all that "breeze in their feathers" stuff. Yes, in the end it still involves killing them, but I think it's way better.
Your statement makes perfect sense to me. I think the folks who believe that quality of life is meaningless for non-human animals are the crazy ones. I don't know how someone could spend any amount of time with animals, wild or domestic, and not realize that many have a great depth of experience and emotion.
Indeed if they had a happy life where they did not need to suppress their instincts too much (roaming, scratching the ground, picking with their becks for tiny life in the soil) and getting killed in an instance, why would you feel bad about the killing&eating parts?
Killing a chicken is hard, I have done that many times and I it never get easier. After all it is a living thing and you feel it is distressed, angry and in fear. I know people that are impervious to that but I am not and understand why you would feel bad about eating animals.
I don't have a good answer for how I feel about killing and animals that were raised to have a good life. I get away with not having an answer to this question and defaulting to vegetarianism in two ways:
1) If I avoid all meat I cannot be held ethically accountable for it's provenance when, for example, a company's marketing department lies to you or the FDA does not sufficiently protect certain terms of art like "free range" which imply a lack of cruelty that wouldn't pass muster if I saw the treatment with my own eyes
2) If I am vegetarian, I will support vegetarian options, and I create support for companies and businesses that are unambiguously dedicated to reducing cruelty/suffering
Personally vegetarian for the same reason. Obviously I'd encourage people to be vegetarian if they can, but choosing options that avoid cruelty at personal expense or inconvenience is laudable.
it’s not useless, it’s just not that conclusive. Im pretty confident in saying a significant majority of animals raised for slaughter worldwide are done so in conditions commonly described as “factory farms”. We can quibble about the definitions all we want, but this is the dominant mode of raising animals for slaughter, that is clear to me
There is no reason at all to believe that the dozens of definitions that study used for "factory farm" fits the few ones stated on that wikipedia link. And there is no overwhelming problem that applies to all of the few definitions on your wikipedia link either.
As your wikipedia link shows, people commonly describe as "factory farm" anything from places where animals go indoor in the winter all the way to places where the animals have no space to move. Or places that create a lot of sessile animals are placed. Or places where animals are gathered to eat. Or places engineered to be comfortable for animals that don't move a lot.
And that is only if you stay within the reasonable people. Almost everybody with an impulsion to talk about this subject uses unreasonable definitions. How is a single name that applies to all that still meaningful?
Fine, let’s say “factory farming” is not a useful term. Do you have any suggestions for how we should talk about / classify modern farming practices? I genuinely appreciate this discussion
In a capitalist world where a small number of individuals possess significant wealth, the idea of free chicken is nothing but a myth. For the majority of people, money is the top priority and they will invariably choose it over any other option.
> Nothing wrong with eating a chicken or a pig who had a good life on an open field for me
Why vegetarian then? It's easy enough to buy meat that was raised on a local farm. Get a chest freezer, reach out to a local 4H club, and buy the whole animal. They'll butcher and vac-seal it for you. You could buy some kid's highschool project.
I live an hour from SF and I get much of my meat this way. It's surprisingly inexpensive. There are agricultural communities close enough to every urban environment to make it worth the drive.
What I find weird about lab grown meat is that it runs into all sorts of problems like how the cells have a lack of immune system so entire batches can be ruined by one errant germ.
I think we’re going backwards by trying to replace the natural bio reactor of the body with steal and piping. It’s all too labour intensive. To make this work we’ll need to genetically engineer an animal that has only the parts we’re interested in. Including skin to replace the steel bio reactors.
Cows due to generations of selective breeding are already remarkably close to this.
The milk most people drink is proceeded in facilities that look much the same, because whole batches of it are ruined by a single germ, since it has no immune system either.
We also have to pasteurize it. Or we don't, and germs from cows are hundreds of times more likely to make us sick, despite generations of selective breeding.
> The milk most people drink is proceeded in facilities that look much the same, because whole batches of it are ruined by a single germ, since it has no immune system either.
But you're not growing milk in those facilities, only storing and processing it. That's an important distinction, because it means with milk it's totally fine to deal with those "single germs" with long-understood sterilization techniques.
If you try to sterilize your "lab grown meat" cultures to deal with the germs, you're going to destroy your "meat" too.
Well, sterilizing the meat is the same as cooking it. The problem is keeping it sterile while it's growing/brewing. It can be done, as has been with breweries, but it is os not an easy task.
To make this analogy complete you’d have to compare current milk production to some fictional milk that would require far less human processing and facility investment.
I understand you’re saying the challenges lab grown meat faces arent insurmountable, but short of some outside influence (statutory interference?) I don’t see how it can compete with traditional cattle on the cost perspective
Cattle production, especially large scale for more efficient meat production (ie. chickens and pigs in very small spaces) is already somewhat outlawed.
Yeah, me too. It wouldn't help much, of course, but it's a popular way to do something.
At 380 ppm anything that doesn't either directly alter reflectivity of the atmosphere or drastically lower CO2 in the atmosphere is just not going to work.
I recall a very old sci-fi story in which bored scientists at a remote space outpost, well, some of them really missed milk. So they decided to try to produce it. But then that needed some kind of circulatory system to support the udder, and that required a filtration system, and an oxygenation system, and a way to get nutrition into the circulatory system ...
They ended up building a kind of exploded steel cow, all pipes and vats and such. It seems we are heading in this direction.
I have often wondered what it would be like to start with a cow, then engineer it to be anencephalic, then start paring away "features" or moving them around. Skip the legs, but do have networks of heart-like cells providing a contractile rhythm for the muscles, and so on.
I recall another article on the subject that said lab meat needed purified amino acids as food for the culture, and that many amino acids just aren't sold in the necessary quantities. A cow, on the other hand, needs only grass because it has extensive equipment to generate those amino acids from grass, called a digestive system.
There are ways to produce them by breaking down soy protein or pea protein (plain old acid hydrolysis, perhaps microwave enhanced - plus filtration; less cleanly enzymatically too), but it's another expensive step... And then you need to scale this process up.
Preference doesn’t come into it. My point is effectively that I can’t see how the current process will be scaled up to be economical enough for widespread adoption.
No they're not. Cow milk, fresh from the udder spoils in something like 16 hours. Most people cannot tolerate the milk, even if you're lactose tolerant, and it has various hormones in it that if you drink it long term would, uh, let's just say one would be able to notice the difference in your body in the swimming pool, especially if you're male.
To fix this it is processed in food factories that you can describe as squeaky clean massive installations of ceramic tiles and shining steel.
Raw milk is generally better tolerated than homogenized/pasteurized milk. However, in the early 1900s, as supply chains lengthened and the travel time for largely un-refrigerated milk from cow to table increased to days, we found that milk was a primary source of food-borne infections. The absolute risk was still low, but the relative risk was high. Thus, pasteurization became common and in most places, mandatory.
People have drunk raw milk for millennia and have not suffered from hormone-related effects..including people on dairy-centric diets. If you're talking specifically about rbGH, it's very easy to find milk free of it, which I would recommend anyway - I'd hazard a guess that's more common. It’s disputed that it has any ill effects, but I’m totally on board with not risking it.
Everything else aside, powerlifters aren’t recommending crazy diets like gallon-of-milk-a-day (GOMAD) and bodybuilders aren’t paying out the nose for human breast milk because milk has estrogenizing effects.
How do you propose they fix the milk in processing? Are you saying they are removing hormones from milk before bottling? I need some data about all these things you are claiming.
When you heat proteins they become unstable. Long chains become unstable first. So when you heat suddenly or not that high long chains break, but proteins still remain proteins, they just have a very high chance of losing their function.
Sorry, I’m comparing a cows body with its heart and skin to keep out pathogens and immune system to protect it and mouth to ingest nutrients, vs a steel bioreactor with steel skin and piped nutrients and a clean room/disinfectant for an immune system.
Other industrially processed foods don’t live in the uncanny valley of meat. I know garden burgers and the like are produced in basically a lab but I still enjoy them. Impossible burgers and Tofurky skeeve me out.
Seems like it's a cute way of saying that it's a material and superficial way of life (like religious ceremony). Which might be true for some people. I've been a vegitarian since I was YOUTH CREW (lol) but I've kept doing it for my own reasons. Most people have no idea...
What I notice though is that people get attached to their diets and act offended when you don't eat something that they consider to be some core part of their life style(barbeque, steak, meaty burritos, sushi, vegan fake meat). Some people can and do get butt-hurt when they find out I don't eat meat and then want to play "gotcha" reindeer games.
They feel unnatural and unconventional and is something a large part of the population will be unable to relate to.
Food is a very cultural thing.
We've also been educated to buy and prepare our own meals from the most natural/unprocessed ingredients as possible and avoid heavily industrialized/preprocess ingredients for health reasons.
Lab grown meat is the opposite of both of that.
I am just playing Devil's advocate here. I understand the appeal and potential environmental benefits as well.
I wouldn’t be so sure that most of the population could relate to the horrors of factory farms and slaughter houses—where basically all meat they’re buying comes from no matter how many alleged free roam grass fed consumers claim to exist on social media.
That’s why there are laws to keep them from seeing it. Which might be why so many HNers think animals grow up in sunshine and rainbows and it’s the sterile lab that's icky.
While this technology is becoming mainstream, those of us that are okay with it should understand there is something fundamentally "icky" for some people. Which is difficult to debate rationally.
This is partly the fault of Sci-fi, bio-engineering is rarely shown as a positive in TV and Film.
This will be mostly solved with time, eventually it may become economically unviable to buy "field meat" (not sure what the term will be), and it will become a lot more accepted when they see the people around them enjoying it without severe consequences.
Yes you're making my point, you either need to abuse live animals or make it in industrial scale factories.
Whereas alternatives can be made at home from raw ingredients and minimum processing, today, cheaper than meat, just as nutritious, without the need of anything more technological than a stove
Sure, but we can’t meet everyone’s nutritional needs by cooking raw ingredients at home. We need these solutions, if you can afford alternatives then go for it. But we should be promoting all solutions .
It is an abuse. Animal abuse is rampant in the practice of factory farming, and a visit to such facilities would make it clear just how much these animals suffer. Therefore, it is important for consumers to avoid being misled by labels such as "happy cows" on meat products and to be mindful of the ethical implications of their choices.
Great grandparent comment said roughly "You can make chicken meat at home with just a chicken and a knife." While factory farming may be abusive, that is not what this discussion thread is about.
Are you saying you eat tofu made this way? Or are saying you are eating commercially made tofu, but feel better about it because the tofu could also be made in a rustic manner?
I'm on the opposite side, I'm omnivorous and try to eat less meat for ethical & environmental reasons and I really want lab meat to become mainstream, for the obvious ethical reasons, but also hoping that we could use less resources and especially land and give it back to natural ecosystems.
As another vegetarian, I'd much prefer to eat lab grown meat than real meat for both ethical and environmental reasons.
Food I already eat is produced in factories, including things like Quorn or Beyond Meat, and I don't find it off-putting whatsoever. For health reasons, I try to ensure the majority of my diet is home cooked plant-based whole foods, but that's only because the current evidence is diets based on "ultra processed food" are harmful. However, it doesn't seem to be at all clear yet on what specifically makes processed food diets harmful in aggregate, so I can't currently make an educated decision on whether one type of processed food is healthier than another. I just treat anything processed as junk food to be enjoyed occasionally, and the same would be true for me if we had viable lab grown meat.
By comparison, I find those occasional tiny maggots in farm-grown strawberries much more off-putting, but strawberries taste so good that I do my best to just focus on the free protein.
This is the first comment I've seen in this thread that would actually buy/consume this product. As a meat eater, I am incredibly opposed to this product.
I’m surprised by the amount of negativity. Personally I eat meat but feel guilty about doing so because of animal cruelty. If someone is actually able to produce lab-grown meat that tastes the same and has the same nutritional value, I’ll switch in a heartbeat.
I don’t care at all whether the food I eat is “natural”. I don’t even care whether the ingredients are authentic, if there isn’t a health hazard; my reaction to the article’s mention of rodent DNA contamination is “who cares”. So of course I’ve tried plant-based meat alternatives, but found that they don’t taste right, while also being higher-calorie. My layman’s hope is that lab-grown meat will be able to replicate the taste more accurately. I realize that there’s no guarantee it will, even if they do succeed at producing something edible that’s made of animal cells (but has a very different structure). But it might.
I'm pretty much a carnivore whenever given a choice. I find the Impossible line of beef replacement perfectly edible and usable in any dish where cooked ground beef would otherwise work. (I don't think I'd enjoy it as mett, but it's fine for anything else.)
Impossible's only problem for me is the price makes it impossible for them to succeed in the market. Their product tastes fine; it's not enough better than $3/lb ground beef for people to pick it.
So rather keep and kill animals than having a modern industrial food production? Try looking into modern brewing, dairy production, etc. That's just how it looks.
No, more like instead of pushing the thing further and further every day, scale down, go back to the basic, respect nature, do sustainable things like we've been doing for literal millions of years.
I don't want to live in a future in which all we have left is your 6x6cm of Google chicken and your 2x6 Amazon bacon stripe
"Going back to the basic" _also_ means a drastically decreased life expectancy, dying of avoidable sicknesses and generally a dull, short and miserable life. You can't retain all the benefits of modern society and only "go back" on all the drawbacks.
But this is no either/or situation, a future as you describe it is avoidable, and lab-grown meat does not automatically lead to Google Chicken or Amazon Bacon.
> "Going back to the basic" _also_ means a drastically decreased life expectancy, dying of avoidable sicknesses and generally a dull, short and miserable life.
By having a bit less of mass scale animal abusing factories ? I fail to see the correlation
I can't believe in let's say 200 years from now humans will still consume animals - if our species survives that is. I'm sure this will be looked upon as very barbaric to breed real animals and eat them.
If we survive 200 years from now we will either not really know what happened during this time because most people will be illiterate or we will be growing food by using the vast amounts of almost free energy we have figured out how to produce. I don't really see any other situations happening.
Hunger is not a production problem but a distribution problem. It isn't profitable to sell things to people with no money so rather than do that we discard it, turn it into something else or whatever it takes to keep the prices up in the producing countries. Do you have a fix for capitalism and the profit motive? If not, obese 'rich' people and starving 'poor' people is what we get.
It is not possible for us to “go back to the way things were” at the scale at which we consume meat and animal products today. Even if it were possible, I highly doubt it would be any more sustainable or environmentally friendly, and none of the arguments you’re making seem consistent with environmental vegetarianism.
Consider that without modern efficiency gains there would be significantly fewer people alive today, and that you might not be in the “extra” portion that we do have now. Is that a fair trade off? If we dropped all further advancements in the name of tradition I’d say that’s equivalent to giving up as a species.
Lab Grown Meat has a marketing problem above all. The lab that grows meat is not drastically different from the facilities that produce modern milk, cheese or other products, but the marketing of these respective products suggest that medieval farmers are hand-milking happy cows to produce them.
This is due to the fact that at this stage, this meat is academia-driven and not marketing-driven.
And due in part to laws in many states prohibiting photographing inside meat production facilities (the so-called Ag-Gag laws.) I think a side by side comparison with photos/videos would be highly favorable to the lab grown meat folks.
>food for me is equal to traditions, know-hows, local
There's not much less things that I care about when talking about food. I care about taste, texture, nutritional value, availability of ingredients or ease of preparation. If some Italian-Mexican-Japanese fusion scores better on that then I'll very happily eat it too.
1) If you're going through so much time and expense to simulate meat, why not just change your diet to something more akin to "primary sources" - i.e. vegetables, or other food that is better than meat in your desired criteria (land use, water use, etc)? That is more naturally grown and more appealing?
2) By the time you spend so much money/energy/biochemical processes to simulate the real meat, is what you get just as energy intensive/unhealthy as the original?
I’m not sure I see what’s more appealing about how animals are raised and slaughtered and processed for consumption. It’s top to bottom an inhumane industrialized process replete with torture, filth, antibiotics, radiation, disease, and people in hazmat suits and steel vats (which strangely people find disturbing). It’s not like some sort of pastoral children’s story where sally the pig has a grand life and at the end of it is gently, if undescribed way, becomes a wonderful pork chop for family dinner.
I’d rather eat scientifically produced animal matter (SPAM) because :
1) I know the meat isn’t capable of suffering
2) I know the meat is grown in highly controlled circumstances
3) by having a centralized lab regulators can easily inspect end to end food quality and handling
4) by being sterile end to end I know when I get it I won’t contract salmonella, ecoli, trichinoses, etc
5) if it made it through to my table the economics of the market and all the “ewww science” and appeal to nature fallacy hurdles means it’ll taste really really good.
Im not arguing eating more vegetables isn’t a good idea. But that argument exists regardless of SPAM, and hasn’t compelled much of a change in diet. I’d rather not see animals born to suffer than just shake carrots in peoples faces telling them eat veggies and hope they listen.
Anything you can make in a shed is going to be far far far less resource intensive and therefore better for the environment than something that takes a multi-billion-dollar factory.
This is untrue for the meat packing industry today. One cow going into a modern slaughterhouse is more efficiently processed then even the most meticulous native American tribemember could ever have achieved.
Efficiency is all that matters if resource utilisation is your metric.
Right, but even your hypothetical tribe member is going to be many orders of magnitude more efficient than a billion dollar factory trying to grow a postage-stamp-sized piece of fake meat.
The ground they stand on has an opportunity cost. The feed, vet, and butcher all cost money. And it takes years to raise one. So all told, there is a cost, which is why the supermarket does not give away meat for free.
You're conflating vegetarianism with veganism. You being a vegetarian is largely irrelevant because being a vegetarian isn't a vegan, and veganism is focused on ethics, which is something commenters who are neither vegetarians nor vegans are likely to understand the nuance of.
You'd probably never drink coffee or beer again if you saw how it was made. Come to think of it, you'd probably never eat any kind of processed food if hygiene is unacceptable.
He didn’t conflate anything. He said “I’m vegetarian.” You are the one who is making ethical assumptions on his behalf. He can state he is a vegetarian and then state another opinion without an arrogant and condescending vegan looking down on him from up high.
He said nothing about vegans. He is only talking about himself. You are making assumptions about what point you think he is trying to make, and/or belittling his own personal ethical stance on things, just because he is vegetarian. What you are doing is wrong.
But you are correct that I’m projecting a bit. This is because as a vegetarian, I’ve seen so much vegan arrogance, condescension, and outright aggression toward vegetarians that I am indeed particularly sensitive to it. So if I see it I call it out. In my experience, an average vegan has more hostility toward a lifelong vegetarian than they have toward a lifelong meat-eater (granted that most vegans hold no hostility at all— so this would be a smaller subset of vegans that do hold hostility— a great many can be seen on any random Facebook vegan group).
As a meat-eater I agree with you in spirit, though imho that doesn't invalidate what the original poster said.
"I don't eat meat for environmental reasons, but would prefer traditional farm-animal-meat to this" is a valid opinion. It is also easy to confuse with "I don't eat any animal products for ethical reasons, but still find eating real meat better than this", which would be much more surprising and interesting, but is not something expressed here. It's important to note the difference, though let's avoid judgements to avoid descending in a flamewar
I think you're making a lot of assumptions here. If you believe ethics drives you to be vegan, that's respectable, you do you, but it's not the only way to act on ethics.
There are many, many reasons to be ethically-motivated but not go all the way to 100% veganism. Some of them include:
* Having beliefs that are more socially compatible and being able to attend a wide spectrum of social events and enjoy them with others allows one to exert greater influence on others (especially if you believe that e.g. 10 people reducing meat intake by 25% is better than 1 person reducing by 100%). There's a good chance that hard vegans don't get invited to a lot of things, and are effectively locked out of a lot of opportunities to exert influence.
* If you are pragmatic and believe the world is highly unlikely to stop eating meat altogether but can reduce meat intake to a point where peoples' appetites are satisfied but factory farming isn't necessary
* If your ethical reasons are largely carbon-motivated, in which case going 90% vegan (time-wise OR portion-wise) is scientifically, mathematically, close enough to 100% that environmental concerns become a non-issue
* If your body's physiology cannot cope with a vegan diet but can cope with a 90% vegan diet
There are lots of other reasons, and while veganism is respectable, I disagree that black-and-white thinking is the only way to approach ethics.
I don't disagree with some of the points raised, however the point still remains: his vegetarianism is largely irrelevant to the conversation at hand.
It's no more relevant than someone who designs PC cases chiming in on chip architecture whilst leaning on the fact they have something to do with computers in an abstract way, somehow giving their opinion credence.
It's a misdirection to prop up this idea that lab-grown meat is wrong because it's unnatural and they're a vegetarian. Well, cancer treatments are unnatural, sterile and hygienic hospitals too, as are most things in life. Is the world better off for medical progress even though Christian Scientists et al who hold no real medical qualifications disagree? Yup.
This puritanical angle is bizarre, and doesn't make the point he thinks it does, whilst giving others who aren't vegans or vegetarians a pithy soundbite of "this vegetarian wouldn't even eat this shit", which once it's been repeated a few times, very quickly becomes "vegan".
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.
That’s not true. A lot of it is applicable, and a lot of lab grown meat comes from lab grown organ growing (an active area of research). From the process of initiating stem cell differentiation and growth to the creation of the scaffolding matrices, the difference between growing lab meat and growing, say, a heart, isn’t wildly divergent. The heart has more precision in its structure and function, but the material and processes are very similar. Other organs are more complex for certain. I’d note that people with injuries or burns also benefit from being able to grow muscles (aka meat) as well as skin.
> 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.
Ms. Chen is likely referring to the use of feeder cells or feeder layers, which are often used in cell culture to support the growth and differentiation of the target cells. Feeder cells are typically derived from rodents like mice or rats and provide essential growth factors, cell-to-cell signaling, and a supportive environment for the target cells.
In the case mentioned, rodent feeder cells were likely used to support the growth of chicken cells during the early stages of the cultivation process. The contamination with rodent DNA could have occurred due to the close proximity of the rodent feeder cells to the chicken cells being cultured.
That said, having some rodent dna isn’t the same thing as eating rodents or allowing rodents to roll around in the meat or whatever. As long as it’s fit for human consumption, and you’re down with eating scientifically produced animal matter (SPAM), I don’t see an issue tbh.
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.
> 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.
"Similar" is not the same. In all those cases you cite, you're using non-animal cells that are very close to wild to modify existing food in relatively minor ways.
If "meat" was bacterial sludge or yeast blocks, it would be a lot more practical to grow in a lab, but it's not. Meat is things like chicken muscle cells, which are not evolved to grow outside the support of a complex organism.
If your definition of food extends to everything, then yes. In all of these products (and lab grown meat) you take low-value starter materials and make them food through microbial processes. Without yeast we wouldn't really be eating wheat to the same extent as we do (except unleavened bread...)
> In all of these products (and lab grown meat) you take low-value starter materials and make them food through microbial processes.
You are missing the key point. Not all "microbial processes" are the same: they can have massively different characteristics. Lab grown meat 1) uses exceedingly fragile microbes and 2) makes extensive modifications to the food (complete transformation). Making beer 3) uses much more robust microbes and 4) makes less extensive modifications to the food (i.e. metabolize a fraction of the carbs into a microbially-toxic substance called alcohol).
If your understanding can't make these significant distinctions, it's too fuzzy to be very good.
The assumption that these cells cannot be hardy assumes a great deal about this process. It’s lab grown meat not just lab grown beef.
From the perspective of human health we can use non mammalian cells for meat such as fish, reptile, or even invertebrates. That greatly changed the risks from things like viral or bacterial infection.
There’s a massive tradeoff in terms of the need for an immune system vs antibiotics vs near perfect sterilization. Avoiding contamination is extremely difficult but if possible solves many problems.
> The assumption that these cells cannot be hardy assumes a great deal about this process. It’s lab grown meat not just lab grown beef.
IIRC, none of the issues are specific to beef cells. They're issues with growing animal cells in a bioreactor.
> From the perspective of human health we can use non mammalian cells for meat such as fish, reptile, or even invertebrates. That greatly changed the risks from things like viral or bacterial infection.
Maybe for viral infection, but that would definitely not solve any issues for bacterial infections.
> Avoiding contamination is extremely difficult but if possible solves many problems.
Just like perfectly secure, bug-free code is extremely difficult but if possible solves many problems. But we all know how viable that is (e.g. you can manage it at a small scale at great expensive, but good luck trying it at a large scale).
> They're issues with growing animal cells in a bioreactor.
There’s major differences in growing different cells in a bioreactor. At the extreme end some cell lines are almost as hardy as bacteria.
> bug-free code
Producing some bug free code isn’t difficult, always producing bug free code is impossible. Similarly, a sterilization first approach is likely to occasionally fail but not every batch would fail.
It's more that, since you need blood, muscle tissue, and fat, (and probably more stuff) you need something to support their growth, you can't just create an homogeneous mass.
The GP is quite unimaginative to think you would need an entire animal for supporting those, but "some kind of fast growing meat cell" is wrong too.
> The GP is quite unimaginative to think you would need an entire animal for supporting those, but "some kind of fast growing meat cell" is wrong too.
What you described is actually pretty close to what I had in mind. I think you'd need something close to an "entire animal," since animals don't typically have lots of extra organs and systems they don't actually need.
If you start with muscle tissue and "add back in" all the stuff you'd need to grow it as a passive lump that just gets fed, I think you'd come pretty close to an entire animal: heart, lungs, and circulatory system; bones and bone marrow; kidneys; a digestive system and liver (because do you really want to feed it exotic growth factors); a rump of a nervous system; etc.
My point was more that these growth mediums don’t result in harmful bacteria like salmonella.
Also, Beer is more about eating the byproduct used by these cells to minimize competition. Cheeses have more variety with some using use aromatic molds or bacterial enzymes, but others just use Rennet.
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.
Dudes nuts. Engineered/Infected himself with a virus that changed his intestines to make them produce lactose for a few months. Is working up to build a bunch of neurons trained to perform a task.
> 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.
> This isn't super relevant to the conversation here since there are very many alternative proteins that don't require inventing synthetic meat.
If you look at our diets over the last millenium or so there was much less meat in the median person's diet. Much closer to "meat once a week or less". Meat alternatives aren't really about what we need nutritionally, it's about offering something people will voluntarily choose instead of meat when given the choice. Through that lens, synthetic meat is worth pursuing even if plant-based "meat" continues getting better and hashbrowns continue to exist.
Maybe they’re referring to FBS in media. Much of cell biology research has used cow blood as an easy way to nurture cells, and early lab grown meat continued to use that as a starting point. The switch to a more ethical alternative is underway.
I'm curious what the legal restrictions are here. I would imagine if a hamburger from a fast food restaurant could replace half of its meat with plant protein that I may not really notice if no one tells me. At the same time, the price differential is probably going to be very small that I would absolutely go for the pure meat option every time if its just within a dollar difference.
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.
We can keep using trees, but this particular use of trees is already energy-intensive, materially intensive (thousands of miles of plastic tubes), sensitive to the weather each year, and geographically limited.
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.
Sorry, but you are wrong. Massive factories means a lot of waste. Dead cow means a lot of usable stuff. Meat, bones, skin, everything is usable. Even cow's waste can be used as a fertilizer. Massive factory? That means massive amount of mined ore and wasted energy. What does a cow need? Zero ore and some grass.
You are 100% wrong. Our meat production system essentially is a massive system of factories (aka factory farms), with tons of pollution and animal-torture along the way. Cow burps are a major source of methane (https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/) which contributes to climate change. Animal waste is used as fertilizer but we produce so much we still end up poisoning nearby land (https://foodprint.org/issues/what-happens-to-animal-waste/). Feeding cows takes a ton of energy in the form of food because you need to grow an entire cow, most of that energy just ends up wasted (cows are not big batteries).
Along the same lines, people here are underestimating the scale of lab grown meat production. IIRC it'd have to be something like 40,000 factories costing close to $2T to build, and even then it would take decades to build them all. And the meat would be very expensive.
A lake of shit overflowing and poisoning the water table won't make the skies foggy. Granted, I am talking about rural things, that 26 story building probably has its own unique issues.
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.
Meat is resource intensive and certainly more resource intensive than eating vegetables directly. Meat is so inefficient that we grow most of our crops to feed meat, for example.
Why is this difference presumably not an ethical concern for you, but it is with lab-grown meat?
Differentiating on energy intensiveness sounds like an empirical claim, so I'm going to ask about the empirics.
You can't eat grass, and most ungulates can. If you're concerned about your personal footprint, it's not hard (in the US) to buy locally-raised, small-farm grass-fed beef.
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
Couldn't you say this about nearly everything? Energy green or non, non-meat foodstuffs, medicines, education, mail? Let's cut all subsidies across the board.
It appears to be currently made using more equipment, with less scale, and to top it all off they still use animal cell lines! It’s nowhere near ready.
Probably just like vertical farming, it uses vastly more energy than traditional farming.
Maybe Elon would be interested in this tech for food production on Mars where it might make more sense. If it requires a lot of equipment maintenance, it might not even be good on Mars since spare parts are hard to manufacture there.
> Probably just like vertical farming, it uses vastly more energy than traditional farming.
That's an unfounded assumption - vertical vegetable farming uses more energy than traditional vegetable farming (with a trade-off of less land).
However, farming animals also uses more energy than farmi9 vegetables. So it's possible that lab grown meat won't use more energy than farm grown meat, and will come with enough other benefits - less water and land use, less cruelty, less antibiotics, less risk of cross transmission of disease - that even if there is an increase in energy use, the trade-off will be worth it.
Farming animals doesn't use more energy than farming vegetables. You use a truly staggering amount of petrochemicals making fertiliser, spreading fertiliser, cultivating fields, planting seeds, harvesting crops, and all the rest of it.
Even if you grow silage crops specifically for feeding livestock it's not nearly so much faff and you use a relatively small amount of fertiliser and fuel.
It definitely uses more energy per calorie produced by a factor of 3 to 10. (Otherwise meat and cheese would cost roughly as much as rice or maize or bread or pasta.)
> 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.”