It will be animal cells differentiated into muscle tissues on collagen scaffolds initially. The technology comes from attempts to grow functional organs (ie, liver) that are biocompatible in the body serum proper. If there aren't health effects from transplantation within the animal type you can probably eat the animal tissues just fine. It's the same thing. It's meat. It's just without the animal suffering. And hopefully it'll eventually be cheaper than growing animals too.
When this technology finally gets there, and I see no reason to think it won't eventually, it will change the world so dramatically. The amount of land and water we won't need to raise animals or food for animals it's staggering. The amount of meat the world consumes will double by the end of the century (will it? I made that up). As the world gets richer, people eat more meat. Combine that with a rising population and the amount of land we need for livestock dwarfs the remaining agricultural land we'll need (again, I made that up, but it could be true.)
We could rewild huge parts of the Earth, returning the habitat to nature.
Probably not without radically changing how we grow plants for human consumption, assuming we still eat plants and don't move to an all-meat diet.
Looking over the data for the area I farm, according to government figures, 36% of the cropland is used for animal food. Most farmers here grow a rotation of soybeans, corn, edible beans, and wheat. The edible beans and wheat are intended for direct human consumption. I couldn't find an exact breakdown for soybean use, but on my farm ~60% of the soybeans are intended for direct human consumption and ~40% for animal consumption. I imagine that is not atypical. Corn is primarily intended for animal consumption.
A little back of the napkin math and you get somewhere around 35% of the output after a four year rotation on my farm being intended for animal consumption, which is effectively what the real world data also shows.
The rotation is important to maintaining soil health and keeping disease at bay. I don't see that going away, save further technical advancement, so you'd probably just see the corn shift to something like biofuels if animals weren't eating it to maintain the rotation to grow the human food.
I think you're overestimating that, probably because of vegan propaganda.
Eg. A lot of the water you use for animals turns into milk or pee (or sweat?), and goes back to the cycle of water.
I doubt it, considering the demographic problems and the end of globalization, we’re likely to see about two billion people starve in most of our lifetimes, mostly in East Asia. It’s going to be a rough ride.
"Meat", at best. Yes, muscle cells in a matrix. The problem will be getting the rest of the structure to be there, and to grow properly, such as connective tissues and fats, and to get the same amounts of minerals and other nutrients into the "meat" as an animal does. Meat, as a food, is much more than a clump of muscle cells.
Then there are the costs to do this properly (packaging the correct nutrients in bioavailable forms, for one), which will likely be much greater than simply letting a cow loose in a pasture to do what it does. This is to say nothing of the long-term testing that should be done on any such product — whether it promotes cancer, leads to misfolded proteins, thereby jetting new and interesting prions into the population, etc. The 20th century was marked by morally-unmoored technocrats allowed to run wild; why is the 21st century doubling down on this?
> The problem will be getting the rest of the structure to be there
I would guess if they can handle real actual meat, they can handle fat and nutrients which would seemingly be the easy part. If not would it be any different than today's vegetarians which just take supplements?
> letting a cow loose in a pasture to do what it does.
Are most cows pasture raised? I think most are raised on feed farms; I think antibiotics and hormones play a role in at least some, but perhaps most? They also emit C02 which we'll eventually have to pay for. And more generally animal farming is a (the?) primary source of new diseases already. I wouldn't expect "lab" grown meat to do any worse there, but perhaps better. Still, it is something new and new always carries some risk. But
> The 20th century was marked by morally-unmoored technocrats allowed to run wild; why is the 21st century doubling down on this?
It was also marked by dramatic increases in quality and quantity of life.
If I understood your comment correctly (I'm sorry if I didn't) - isn't it grown in essentially sterile conditions, so lack of immune system isn't an issue as I must imagine it shouldn't be able to communicate any transmissible diseases?
"And hopefully it'll eventually be cheaper than growing animals too."
Just as simply planting a tree and letting the sun provide the energy for it's growth will always beat those "synthetic trees" people like to hype from time to time, I can expect to never see a synthetic process that is more cost effective to create "meat" than simply letting nature do it's thing. Down here in Brazil you basically give the animals it's vaccines and let them graze for a few years, you can't beat that. And btw, I'll rather starve than eat anything syntesized that can be made, cheaper and for sure tastier, naturally.
What about something like lab diamonds? You can give nature billions of years to "do it's thing" or we can produce the same result in a lab in a matter of weeks without any suffering and at a fraction of the cost. Synthetic processes can be quite efficient and it sounds like you're discarding them completely which is a little shortsighted.
Analogy aside, just because the process has been evolutionarily optimized it doesn't mean it's the most efficient way of doing it. There's a lot of other evolutionary pressure where energy is expended in ways that don't benefit obtaining the arbitrary end product.
Say synthetic wood as your example, I would be willing to bet that a dedicated system that extracts CO2 for the carbon and combines it with water to make cellulose could be made more efficient than any type of photosynthesis. You can sell carbon credits and oxygen on top of that too.
There down in Brazil, rainforest are being cut down at alarming rate in service to animal agriculture. It will be easier to preserve the Brazilian rainforests if there was some other way to grow meat that didn't involve huge grazing pastures for animals.
The problem with growing whole animal for meat, suffering aside, is that it's extremely inefficient. Most of the energy an animal consumes is used to sustain its organism — which, for the purpose of food, is a waste.
> Just as simply planting a tree and letting the sun provide the energy for it's growth will always beat those "synthetic trees" people like to hype from time to time, I can expect to never see a synthetic process that is more cost effective to create "meat" than simply letting nature do it's thing.
Evidence? Do you have any background in the field? It's easy as a layperson to imagine that not having to support the life of the entire organism and just growing the meat directly could absolutely be less energy intensive.
Is that how chickens are raised in big farms here in Brazil too? It's funny how I hear some people say they'll never eat lab meat and it will never taste as good as meat from an animal, and then they sit there drinking their Coke or their Pepsi because they don't like fruit juice.
Soon it will only be cheaper if you're completely discounting the price paid to the ecosystem. In fact with a full accounting I'd wager it's already cheaper.
How many unique species that evolved over tens of millions of years have been lost forever, in the last 50 years alone, due to clear-cutting in Brazil?
How much clean water and topsoil has been polluted and washed away?
How much carbon has been released? How much suffering from butchered animals?
I really don't know how one can be so flippant about this.
1) your externalizing the VAST environmental costs from grazing: methane production, vast amounts of land dedicated to grazing, plus likely there is still farming/crops to feed them over winter. Googling leads to (accuracy undetermined) that 41% of land is dedicated in the US to meat production.
2) you are assuming (because you externalize / push onto the future generations the cost) that grazing is the most efficient means for meat tissue production. I doubt it is. If artificial meat can beat cows wandering around eating grass for three years by a substantial margin, which I think is theoretically possible, then grazing will be a niche production.
This technology is desperately needed for climate change mitigation, on the scale of electrification of consumer transport. It's not just the methane and farming, it's also all that land that could be used as carbon sinks and biodiversity.
The big issue is that the world wants meat. If we can reduce the carbon footprint by 1/10th, which I think is possible, then it will be a very good think for a sustainable human race.
What makes you think a human optimized process specifically designed to be simpler/faster/tastier than slaughter won't be? The whole reason it's getting research and work done on it is for the reasons you claim are important, so how are you reaching the conclusion that it's somehow worse?
> Down here in Brazil you basically give the animals it's vaccines and let them graze for a few years
Let me fix this for you:
> Down here in Brazil you basically destroy a million square kilometers of old growth rainforest, give the animals it's vaccines, and let them graze for a few years
For context, the life of an average herbivore in the wild consists of living with no shelter in harsh weather while having to fear every sound. And it typically ends by being ripped to pieces by a predator and eaten alive while the brain still has some residual oxygen and awareness.
The typical farmed animal experience where you are sheltered, vaccinated against common illnesses, provided food and slaughtered after being knocked out with electricity is surely boring, but hardly encompasses more suffering.
I'm not sure I buy your argument. For example, pigs have an average lifespan of 15-20 years but in a farm setting are slaughtered at 6 months old. Also I suspect a pig is more adapted to its natural environment than living in a confined shelter (often less than a square metre). In fact, in the UK, less than 1 in 20 pigs are allowed to go outside - hardly a good life! This is just pigs.
Regardless of how one would like to spin it, industrial scale animal production means farming animals with the intent to match market prices or you go out of business. That means the production goes by the minimal animal welfare required by law.
Whether one believes conditions are torturous or not that bad, is beside the point, which is that they wouldn’t even exist if we didn’t spawn them. So what we do is we rip new life into the universe by force for that life to suffer to some degree, its’ life’s only meaning being to be processed for food. There was nothing, now there is. Somehow human kind has decided ethical discussion need not concern animals.
I have no qualms eating meat (I eat more than my doctor says I should).
Your comment seems pretty disingenuous though. You're comparing life in the wild to that on a small family farm. Factory farms, especially those that produce poultry, are far more horrifying. There is also a growing body of evidence suggesting that many of the drugs (antibiotics and hormones in particular) that we pump our farm animals full of are actively detrimental to their daily comfort.
It sounds to me like your statement was crafted as a defense of your dietary choices rather than an objective assessment of animal wellbeing.
Of course none of this arguing really means anything without some scientific data to back this up. I'd like to see a comparison of cortisol levels and other stress indicators in wild vs factory chickens.
I eat meat, but I think it's fair to say bringing living/feeling/thinking things into existence for the express purpose of being killed and consumed is grim. This feels particularly true if the circumstances they're raised in are horrific, which seems to be pretty common in factory farms.
In any case, nature might be crueler to living things than we are, but I still think becoming less cruel is worth the effort.
I think that's hard to say. But I also think "the alternative" to farmed life is somewhat ignored by vegans/peta activists.
On the one hand, as you say, death is more painful by the claws/teeth of a predator; that is certain. But life itself with little shelter (but usualy some) is the natural state of afairs for most mammals. To say that that is suffering is to say that life itself is suffering, which I think is counterintuitive as suffering is evolutionarily a means of preasuring an animal to escape from the suffering. Not to say that isn't possible. It's hard to say if the natural resiliance (assuming it exists) that mammals have to little shelter and food carries over to say being croweded into small enclosures.
If anyone has any (scientific) articles on this topic I would be interested.
Funny, I largely agree with you, on the other hand, if I had to choose between being "free range" or factory fed, I'd still rather take the free range option. Or as one of the other commenters put it, I'd rather be homeless and all that entails than live as somebody's slave and get food and a bed.
Animals aren't people though. I think it's important to avoid unnecessary suffering or cruelty, but it's also important to be able to eat them.
Nature's basically a real-life horror film for anything not at the tippy-top of the chain in an area, every hour of every day. Which means most things that aren't humans. But, farming doesn't really help with that, especially industrial farming.
You're either constantly at risk from hordes of relentless and effective slasher-murder-cannibals (to put it in human-focused horror movie terms—they're not really cannibals when it's one species eating another, of course) and will very probably be killed and eaten by one before you can die of other "natural causes", and every moment you're not on high alert is a moment you're more likely than normal to abruptly be murdered, or you're in one of those movies where aliens or vampires or something are farming you for whatever reason, typically in such horrible conditions that you really might prefer to take your chances with the super-murderers out in the wild.
It's all very pretty to look at when you're at the top but IMO Lovecraft's works, or films like The Thing, really capture the underlying reality of what life is, fundamentally. Incomprehensible, brutally savage, and horrifying, mostly. One of those things you kinda have to try not to think about too much (which is one of the ways it's all a bit Lovecraftian—not healthy to contemplate actual-reality, rather than our illusions about it, in this case).
Scenario: Humanity is partly enslaved by a superior alien species that holds us as cattle, breeds us, kills most of our male offspring etc. — you know, the things we do to our cettle.
Would you rather:
A) live this life that can be ended for your meat at any point
B) hide in the hostile and foreign wilderness of their planet
Sure one might argue that cows are to stupid to understand their fate, but that alien species might argue the same. Also: even the simplest animal suffers when you take their offspring away. Or you might argue that option A is totally acceptable if the aliens are just good enough at keeping us happy.
I have yet to find a rational argument why it should be acceptable to industrially breed and herd other living beings that doesn't boil down to "because we are stronger, smarter or because we can do it", which is not a universal rational argument, unless you argue the aliens are right to herd us as well.
I personally look forward to the day where our technology is advanced enough that wild animals no longer have to live in constant fear of being ripped to shreds. IMO, no one, not even wild animals, should have to live in fear of that.
Also, by extension, predators shouldn’t have to face starvation, and prey should have their population controlled in a humane way.
These are problems that can’t be solved today, or likely any time soon. But I don’t buy the argument that “just because it happens in nature, it’s right”. I think Mother Nature provides effective solutions to these problems, but I also believe they aren’t the optimal solutions. We can and should do better.
As I understand your post, an explicit version of your argument would be something like "the level of suffering that nature intends for animals far exceeds the level of suffering experienced by animals farmed for meat, so farming animals for meat provides them with a better life than they deserve."
When assessing arguments like this I find it useful to substitute animals for a hypothetical population of hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals. If an island populated by such people were discovered, and they turned out to generally live nasty, brutish and short lives for some reason, would that justify farming them for meat?
The answer is clearly no. If you were to ever encounter a hominid of any cognitive ability who was being farmed for meat, you would be horrified and would report the situation to law enforcement. That individual's treatment by the operators of the farm would qualify as brutal regardless of how much people of the same background tend to suffer out in the world.
I don't think there is a valid reason to treat hypothetical hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals differently from actual nonhuman mammals.
According to Our world in data wild terrestrial mammals make up 2% of the total number of mammals (in biomass so it is not exactly headcount, but also includes predators and rodents not strictly herbivores), while cattle, pigs, goats and sheep are >50%. So when looking at suffering you may want to take scale into account.
I’m not going to try to argue about which experience is worse because that’s difficult to quantify and I don’t actually think it achieves a lot.
If we can agree that ignoring nature, factory farmed animals don’t lead what we would call a fulfilling life, how can we justify bringing trillions of them into existence if we have alternatives? We don‘t have to go too deep into utilitarian rhetoric here, maybe it is better than nature, maybe if you follow that line of reasoning it wouldn’t be right to let animals suffer in nature or have children either. Anyway, I haven’t been able to justify eating meat to myself for as long as I was able to think along these lines.
This is an absurdly biased view. Factory farms are horrific and even pasture raised animals are treated like property and killed well before their natural lives are up.
When we think about human suffering we don’t immediately go and compare it to the Neolithic period. I’m not arguing that animals are human, but it’s a false comparison. The correct comparison would be to compare it to if we didn’t do this. It just means there wouldn’t be factory farms and cows wouldn’t exist in the quantity (and evolutionary state) that they do now.
Maybe not up to human standards, but plenty of animals seek and find shelter as part of their normal life.
> having to fear every sound
Do you think animals fear their own species' mating calls? Or the rain and the breeze? How do you know what animals feel? If you are going to project the human emotion of "fear" onto them, you considered that they might feel humanlike emotions of elation, joy, and satisfaction as well?
> And it typically ends by being ripped to pieces by a predator and eaten alive while the brain still has some residual oxygen and awareness.
Human death, including death by common age-related ailments, is often painful and drawn out.
> sheltered, vaccinated against common illnesses, provided food
"Sheltered" in a coup filled with feces and "vaccinated" so that they do not succumb to the myre of illness in which they live. "Fed" via pellets of the cheapest food that the farm could buy while still sustaining them enough to develop tissue that is desirable for us to eat.
> being knocked out with electricity
I doubt that slaughter at factory farm is often as efficient, quick, and humane as you imagine.
> hardly encompasses more suffering.
Have you ever been, or been close to anyone, who was locked in jail or a psychiatric ward for a long period of time? The mental anguish of captivity is often described as worse than physical suffering.
You may want to look into the life of factory farmed pigs, for example, before you conclude which life is worse than the other. I would certainly prefer to be a wild pig over a factory farmed one.
> It's meat. It's just without the animal suffering
Are you sure about the no suffering part. Currently this meat is grown using a growth medium most often extracted from a pregnant mare using a technique called bloodletting which is often extremely painful for the animal.
EDIT: I think I’m actually wrong about the pregnant mare. Animal suffering through bloodletting from pregnant mares was a recent scandal where I’m from and I must have conflated it in my mind. I was actually thinking about FBS which is extracted from a slaughtered pregnant cow. So my point still stands.
Yeah I’m going to let other folks experiment with that for 10 or so years and see where it goes. I’m sure the meat is fine, it’s just a matter of not contaminating it during the process that I’m concerned about. The FDA is really poor at enforcing the health and safety aspects of manufacturing and processing. They simply don’t have enough inspectors and the inspectors don’t fine big offenders enough
If you put cattle on farmland, and utilize regenerative agriculture techniques, it costs a bit more, because yields aren't artificially boosted while destroying the topsoil. In return you actually capture carbon into the grasses from the atmosphere. That would normally just rot, but the herbivores digest it and make it bioavailable for the fungi and bacteria in the soil, where the carbon accumulates.
The herbivores are key component of sustainable agriculture, you can't do it without them. Lab grown meat is an interesting, energy intensive step in the wrong direction.
I think we can all agree that there are problems with factory farming, and grain finishing livestock.
>In return you actually capture carbon into the grasses from the atmosphere. That would normally just rot, but the herbivores digest it and make it bioavailable for the fungi and bacteria in the soil, where the carbon accumulates
I'm not entirely convinced by this argument. A lot of the ecological arguments against meat-eating is because cattle grazing requires huge swaths of land. Current practices generate this land via deforestation (I don't have statistics on how much land is generated via deforestation, but we can at least conclude that it's A Thing That Happens^{tm})[^1]. While certainly, grass captures some carbon, I'm going to guess that it's far less than a rainforest ecosystem of the same area, especially since the rainforest isn't being actively consumed. There's also the biodiversity of a forest environment.
Yes we agree, only not on the "a bit more" cost. The cost is significantly more - even if imported from a much cheaper country. Also the request is huge compared to what sustainable agriculture can sustain - let's not forget that the farmers of yore weren't eating beef with each meal, while nowadays it's a matter of status for many.
What you're describing is a fantasy. There simply is not enough natural grassland out there for the entire human race to grow enough meat to eat this way. That's why the Amazon is being chopped down to make more land for grazing.
Lab grown meat is a step in a direction that allows us to not use so much land for livestock.
I've seen this argument get eaten, partialy digested, spit back up, then go through 3 compartments of a stomach and it still doesn't make sense when you actually think about it.
If the intent is actual sustainability, then they have to be given their full 20 years to live. The cattle themselves act as carbon sinks too and have to be part of the whole ecosystem, not only exposed to one part of it. If you're constantly slaughtering them and replacing them, it's not doing much. It just sounds nice.
>it costs a bit more
"A bit" is an understatement.
>The herbivores are key component of sustainable agriculture, you can't do it without them.
You can't. But you have to do it without eating the vast majority of them.
The Myth of Regenerative Ranching:
>[...]
>If regenerative agriculture were to challenge the mainstream food system, it would run into some hard physical limits. Converting the beef industry, at current levels of demand, entirely to a grass- and crop-forage feeding system would require increasing the total size of American beef herds by 23 million cows, or 30 percent, according to a recent article in the respected science journal Environmental Research Letters. And that increase, were it even possible, would have monumental consequences for both greenhouse gas outputs and land use. But there simply isn’t enough land in the U.S. for that many grazers. At best, beef production would have to decrease by 39 percent and potentially as much as 73 percent. Framed that way, grass-fed grazing, especially if scaled, doesn’t seem likely to regenerate many ecosystems—indeed, it would likely require deforestation, as is the case in Brazil, where the clear-cutting of the Amazon is driven both by soy plantations for feedlot and factory farm animal feed and by the need for grazing space for grass-fed cattle. And as the Environmental Research Letters article argued, even temporary overgrazing can lead to long-term and perhaps irreversible ecological degradation.
>[...]
>Actually making animal agriculture less ecologically disruptive would mean taking animals’ ecological value as a bedrock principle against and over their value as commodities. That means treating commodity production, not land, as “marginal”: Commodities could be extracted only if doing so didn’t disturb the ecological, social, and cultural value of the landscape. In other words, in most such systems, animals would more than likely play a minor support role for primarily plant agriculture. And that, in turn, would almost certainly mean far fewer grazers entering the commercial food system, and at a much higher price point. Point Reyes, for example, might feature free-ranging elk managed by an Indigenous best practice–driven conservation agency, not dairy cattle grazed by private ranches. This kind of truly eco-friendly meat production would produce even less meat than the current grab bag of practices loosely labeled “regenerative.”
It's the USDA that will regulate the actual manufacturing and processing, not the FDA. As the article mentions that process hasn't started yet. It's hopefully quicker/easier than the FDA safety approvals however.
It’s gross but we use heat to make it safe to eat. The contamination does not migrate into the meat for the most part just the outsides. With lab grown you could potentially contaminate an inner surface or induce some other contamination that’s not exposed to heat from a grill.
Anyway after a decade or so we will probably know what the risks are and of contamination of that nature is likely or possible in the process. Seems like lab grown hot dogs might be a good place to start for example.
That's antisocial behavior as we've all learned recently. If you don't eat the fake meat, you'll just spread your clear love for animal cruelty to those around you, even if that's just conjecture.
Anyway, snark aside, I'm curious how this goes because while I'm not apologetic for my place on the food chain, carbon emissions from animal farming are problematic and the price that real meat should cost if we raise them humanely is pretty exorbitant. It will be hilarious to see cattle rustling become a capital offense again.
Without being apologetic, it is still worthwhile to consider your responsibility as a moral agent for causing suffering; especially so when it is unnecessary.
97%[0] of cows are finished on feedlots, i.e. get a substantial amount of calories from corn and other feed. Other animals like pigs are exclusively fed feed. Animal factory farming already consumes a terrifying amount of resources, using up a lot of the plant agriculture that we do.
Culturing meat is entirely about minimizing resource and land usage, and curbing the serious environmental impacts of the beef industry, which is of course truly infamous for methane emissions and deforestation.
David Humbird's 2021 paper "Scale-up economics for cultured meat"[1] is a pretty damning study of the problems with lab-grown meat. His core conclusion: "Capital- and operating-cost analyses of conceptual cell-mass production facilities indicate economics that would likely preclude the affordability of their products as food."
Does anyone know if the problems that Humbird describes have somehow been solved?
I think the approach of this paper is akin to estimating the cost of Microsoft's BHAG ("a PC on every desk") based on the costs of building mainframe computers in 1970.
Here's the key leap of questionable logic (IMO):
> The capital cost of a conceptual bulk animal cell-culture process is developed from the bare-equipment costs of its most important items. From this purchased equipment cost, a total capital investment (TCI) is obtained through the application of cost escalation factors, which are understood to be rather high for biopharmaceutical cell-culture processes
The idea that at scale, it's going to cost $0.75M for a 1m^3 culturing chamber seems crazy to me. I'd guess these are expensive right now because they are specialist equipment (they are manufactured to the ASME bioprocessing standard, which was created for bioprocessing in a pharma/research context), and when they begin being mass-produced I'd estimate they will come down in cost by two orders of magnitude.
(For context, a ~400gal brewery fermentation vessel made of stainless steel can be purchased for about $5k, made in China. It's about 2x for a "made in USA" vessel. These bioreactor vessels are a bit more complex than the standard jacketed fermenters used by brewers, but eyeballing the schematics they do not seem more complex than a steam-jacketed mash tun, for example.)
At high scale, most of the cost is the bioreactors, the rest of the plant, and buildings. I can't find any real working for the capital costs beyond the bioreactors, but given the extremely pessimistic estimate there, I am skeptical about the broader plant estimates too.
TLDR; if you treat this as a pharma process, you will get pharma prices. If you treat this as a food process like beer (which also has sterility requirements, contamination risks, and clean-room cell line propagation requirements to overcome when manufacturing at scale) then the prices will be much lower. I treat this paper as a pessimistic worst-case scenario, and assume that process innovation will allow substantially lower prices.
The fundamental question is whether food-grade fermentation/culturing processes like those used in beer or yoghurt can suffice; for example it seems to me entirely plausible that we could lower the equipment quality requirements substantially, and still obtain a satisfactory safety profile by discarding contaminated batches. Not a cost-effective option for extremely expensive pharmacological products like vaccines, but potentially viable for simple food products like cultured meat.
> The fundamental question is whether food-grade fermentation/culturing processes like those used in beer or yoghurt can suffice
Analyzing probable cost of fake meat production by comparison with existing cultured food manufacturing is sensible, but fake meat has some differentiating aspects to be accounted for.
A prime difference between these fermentation processes and a hypothetical cultured meat system is that the single cells involved in making beer and yogurt are simpler, much faster breading species than the multicellular lines which develop into complex animal tissue. Another difference is that whereas fermentation involves partial digestion of a portion of the growth medium by the fermenting microbes, creating a volume of artificial meat would require synthesizing cell dense tissue to fill the entire volume. So with artificial meat you need more growth and the growth will be slower, factors which both expand the opportunities for contamination. So preventing contamination will be more important and more challenging with lab meat than with these fermentation products.
I agree with your assessment that the source paper is exceedingly pessimistic about the costs. There is no physical reason why cultured meat production couldn't eventually be cheaper than natural meat production, the hurdles are only technological.
Hard pass. Let's see some long-term (10 years) test data first (e.g., how does it effect things like muscle growth/retention, fat growth/loss, cell function, cancer promotion/prevention etc).
I'd put this stuff on the same level as any mass-produced junk (HFCS, seed oils, etc) that has already been proven to be harmful to humans long-term as a cautious default.
Not outright dismissing this (I will read it because I'd like to be better informed and wrap my head around his stance) but that his main offering is debate training and not targeted health guidance/planning, it seems highly suspect.
The problem with all processed oils is that all the fiber and the rest have been striped away, leaving only the extremely calorie dense oil. Processed oil like that takes up so little space in the stomach that's not filling, making it easy to eat too much food overall. At least in the US, this is compounded by so many processed foods having added oil as a primary ingredient or a cheap filler.
The healthiest way to ingest seed oils is undoubtedly to eat some seeds.
Yep, and funny enough, if you plot seed oil consumption along with total calorie consumption and obesity, the answer is obvious. We just eat too much, and cooking oils' 9cal/gram really sneak up on people who don't pay attention.
no one is going to read that blog post and its the same level of quackery as the blog posts that say seed oil is killing our health.
"nick is a fomer student of Human Nutritional Science and Linguistics at the University of Manitoba, and he currently works as a nutrition science communicator, creating in-depth blog articles"
Not sure why you shared this. maybe you should share actual research or anectdotal evidence by someone who is actually responsible for someone else's health and has yoe.
Maybe some folks will enjoy this as a food product.
It's not clear to me that there's a real upside to this though, for folks who don't mind killing and eating birds.
Research I have seen (you can see it too: [1]) indicates that chicken, dairy, and legumes are all about as low-impact as it gets when it comes to protein sources for humans.
As other folks have mentioned, scaling up the meat lab causes a lot of headaches because the lab meat doesn't come with its own immune system the way a chicken or a cow does. Headaches in the form of increased operating costs and energy inputs.
Those things don't convert cereal grains into the protein that humans need. Poultry, eggs, cheeses are good ways to do that. Crops can't just be substituted for each other.
Whether it's oxen in a slaughterhouse, deer pierced by a hunters' arrows, or herds that die off because their grazing lands get taken for crops, animal lives are sacrificed so that more humans can live.
Everything you eat requires killing. We are only weird about killing for meat because as conscious life we are biased towards conscious life. Meanwhile, we don't blink an eye if we take down an entire field of corn, or even take town an entire forest to grow that field of midwestern corn, because its unconcious life and not valued by our moral principles.
The secret is to just treat things with respect. You can be respectful of the animals you raise up, you can respect the land you sow. Unfortunately this world lacks a lot of that common respect towards life these days, but maybe this thinking will change in the future and we can live in a more balanced way.
Polling my own bubble, I'm dubious about lab meat.
Across the board, it seems that people want lab grown meat for others. Vegans want omnivores to eat it. Omnivores think it'd be good for vegans.
Meanwhile, any mass market product is likely to be some sort of processed meat product. Sausage, mince chicken nugget or somesuch. These aren't generally premium products, so you need to go really low for price competitiveness.
It's cool. Don't get me wrong. I like technology. It just seems like a solution looking for a problem to me.
If we priced externalities at their true societal cost, the problem of animal farming becomes clear very quickly. Reducing carbon emissions from animal agriculture is one of the bigger targets for helping reduce climate change. I don't think telling people to just not eat meat will work, so lab-grown meat seems like a promising solution to explore.
Doesn’t lab grown meat need a lot of growth serum, which is currently extracted from pregnant animals? So as it stands it is not a solution to help reduce climate change (nor animal suffering). For that we’d need a more sustainable way of producing these serums. I’m not aware of any methods which are proven to work at scale.
I think one must keep in mind that the conceptual idea of eating cultured meat is one thing, and the practical economic reality is another.
If a cultured meat "chik'n nugget" is cheaper than a mechanically-reconstituted-real-chicken-meat nugget, and the quality is the same, lots of people will buy the cheaper cultured option.
The same logic applies for basically every fast food product, and also every Costco-bulk meat product.
There are some people that care deeply about the quality and sourcing of the meat they consume, and cultured meat is probably not for them. For most other meat eaters, price (assuming parity on quality with the equivalent low-cost option) is going to be the prime determinant.
I don't see the economic realities stacking up. The price of cheap, processed meat products is pretty low... and not all of the price is ingredients. It's a long way to the bottom.
Meanwhile, the higher end ethical consumers... it's hard to predict their consumer preferences/choices. I suppose some vegans want meat and some omnivores want to be vegan... but as I said, I'm dubious about these groups' real size.
This won't get to $1 per kg overnight. There probably needs to be adequate demand all along the continuum to fuel volume price reductions.
I also think it's naive to assume that environmental (eg energy/carbon savings) benefits will materialize. Its equally naive to assume eco consumers will buy the story otherwise, over the long term.
The main bull case seems to rely on overwhelming cost advantage. Where's the reason to think this will happen.?
My bubble mostly doesn't care. I would say my bubble isn't particularly naturalist or organic leaning so that might be it. I will definitely eat lab grown meat, especially for something like ground beef or chicken nuggets or sausage.
It seems a lot of people don't know or don't care where their food comes from, and to the extent they do know or care, they'd like the source to minimize harm.
If this alternative way of meat production can taste about the same and cost about the same, then I think people who like the taste of meat will be buy it.
Some vegans and vegetarians don't want it because they don't like the taste of animal meat, whether it came from a live animal or lab.
A lot of [well intentioned] arguments focus on lab grown meats as a "cheap" protein but I think if you want mass market adoption it should go in the other direction, like electric cars.
What if lab-grown meat can create flavor profiles that rival wagyu? What if protein and micronutrient ratios can be tweaked to give athletes an advantage over athletes that eat animal meat?
If we frame it as a "cheap sustainable alternative" some people will always scoff at it, but if instead it starts off as an exclusive delicacy the public will want it that much more.
I am an avid carnivore that hopes to consume only lab grown meat in the future. I've met many people like me. You may be underestimating the size of this group.
That said, like many others in these comments, I'll be waiting at least 10 years to understand the long term effects, if any.
> Meat eaters primary issue with vegan cuisine is that it does not include meat.
In my extended group of acquaintances, the distaste for typical vegan food isn't that it doesn't have meat, it's that it tries to pretend that it does and ends up being kinda gross as a result.
> Some hope that lab-grown meat could reduce the carbon footprint of the food industry.
Some hope. What are the facts?
I am sceptical that a lab process can be more efficient than a biological process. And being less efficient would it not use more energy, resources, and release more carbon?
The energy for biological processes is often largely solar, for lab processes often largely from fossil fuels.
I also don't have any data, but my gut feeling is the opposite. There's a lot of waste[1] in growing a whole animal (skin, bones, organs, unused muscles, etc), not to mention the time and space required. It seems to me that growing only the "good parts" would be far more efficient, but you feel the opposite. It's impossible to know who's right. I wonder what the efficiency will be like in the future, I think that's the make-or-break factor here.
[1] Waste purely from the perspective of growing human food. I understand many parts of the animal are actually used for other purposes.
> [1] Waste purely from the perspective of growing human food. I understand many parts of the animal are actually used for other purposes.
That's pretty important. If we replace the high margin steak part of the animal with lab grown equivalents, what is the plan for all the things we've learned to make with the rest of the cow?
An obvious difference is that animals require extraordinary amounts of land to live on and lots of food that needs land to be planted on which necessitates a very significant amount of deforestation, something that will not be needed for a lab
> Producing meat in the lab “will never be done with anything remotely like the economics you need for food,” Pat Brown, founder of the plant-based meat company Impossible Foods, told the Post last year.
Whether correct or not, this kind of reporting always seems silly to me. You're not interviewing an impartial expert on the subject, you're getting a quote from a direct competitor. Of course, they're going to say something along these lines. This important nuance will be lost on most readers.
Readit News
We could rewild huge parts of the Earth, returning the habitat to nature.
Probably not without radically changing how we grow plants for human consumption, assuming we still eat plants and don't move to an all-meat diet.
Looking over the data for the area I farm, according to government figures, 36% of the cropland is used for animal food. Most farmers here grow a rotation of soybeans, corn, edible beans, and wheat. The edible beans and wheat are intended for direct human consumption. I couldn't find an exact breakdown for soybean use, but on my farm ~60% of the soybeans are intended for direct human consumption and ~40% for animal consumption. I imagine that is not atypical. Corn is primarily intended for animal consumption.
A little back of the napkin math and you get somewhere around 35% of the output after a four year rotation on my farm being intended for animal consumption, which is effectively what the real world data also shows.
The rotation is important to maintaining soil health and keeping disease at bay. I don't see that going away, save further technical advancement, so you'd probably just see the corn shift to something like biofuels if animals weren't eating it to maintain the rotation to grow the human food.
Living in central Berlin (Mitte), one of the most expensive parts of the city, it feels the opposite is happening.
Everything here is vegan or vegetarian at least.
Even a steak place next door to where I live has vegan plates.
On that note: it made me sad that all the dramatic changes you listed omitted the suffering of animals.
I don't like posting videos but this one goes through several points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g
They said the same thing about plant based meat - and it hasn't because it's more expensive.
Then there are the costs to do this properly (packaging the correct nutrients in bioavailable forms, for one), which will likely be much greater than simply letting a cow loose in a pasture to do what it does. This is to say nothing of the long-term testing that should be done on any such product — whether it promotes cancer, leads to misfolded proteins, thereby jetting new and interesting prions into the population, etc. The 20th century was marked by morally-unmoored technocrats allowed to run wild; why is the 21st century doubling down on this?
I would guess if they can handle real actual meat, they can handle fat and nutrients which would seemingly be the easy part. If not would it be any different than today's vegetarians which just take supplements?
> letting a cow loose in a pasture to do what it does.
Are most cows pasture raised? I think most are raised on feed farms; I think antibiotics and hormones play a role in at least some, but perhaps most? They also emit C02 which we'll eventually have to pay for. And more generally animal farming is a (the?) primary source of new diseases already. I wouldn't expect "lab" grown meat to do any worse there, but perhaps better. Still, it is something new and new always carries some risk. But
> The 20th century was marked by morally-unmoored technocrats allowed to run wild; why is the 21st century doubling down on this?
It was also marked by dramatic increases in quality and quantity of life.
Dead Comment
Surely the meat we all eat is dead along with the immune system and then cooked.
Is there some aspect of the immune system that remains active and providing protection to an animal, or parts of an animal after it’s slaughtered?
Just as simply planting a tree and letting the sun provide the energy for it's growth will always beat those "synthetic trees" people like to hype from time to time, I can expect to never see a synthetic process that is more cost effective to create "meat" than simply letting nature do it's thing. Down here in Brazil you basically give the animals it's vaccines and let them graze for a few years, you can't beat that. And btw, I'll rather starve than eat anything syntesized that can be made, cheaper and for sure tastier, naturally.
Say synthetic wood as your example, I would be willing to bet that a dedicated system that extracts CO2 for the carbon and combines it with water to make cellulose could be made more efficient than any type of photosynthesis. You can sell carbon credits and oxygen on top of that too.
Evidence? Do you have any background in the field? It's easy as a layperson to imagine that not having to support the life of the entire organism and just growing the meat directly could absolutely be less energy intensive.
How many unique species that evolved over tens of millions of years have been lost forever, in the last 50 years alone, due to clear-cutting in Brazil?
How much clean water and topsoil has been polluted and washed away?
How much carbon has been released? How much suffering from butchered animals?
I really don't know how one can be so flippant about this.
2) you are assuming (because you externalize / push onto the future generations the cost) that grazing is the most efficient means for meat tissue production. I doubt it is. If artificial meat can beat cows wandering around eating grass for three years by a substantial margin, which I think is theoretically possible, then grazing will be a niche production.
This technology is desperately needed for climate change mitigation, on the scale of electrification of consumer transport. It's not just the methane and farming, it's also all that land that could be used as carbon sinks and biodiversity.
https://www.arespectfullife.com/2018/08/05/41-of-u-s-land-is...
The big issue is that the world wants meat. If we can reduce the carbon footprint by 1/10th, which I think is possible, then it will be a very good think for a sustainable human race.
Deleted Comment
Let me fix this for you:
> Down here in Brazil you basically destroy a million square kilometers of old growth rainforest, give the animals it's vaccines, and let them graze for a few years
The typical farmed animal experience where you are sheltered, vaccinated against common illnesses, provided food and slaughtered after being knocked out with electricity is surely boring, but hardly encompasses more suffering.
Whether one believes conditions are torturous or not that bad, is beside the point, which is that they wouldn’t even exist if we didn’t spawn them. So what we do is we rip new life into the universe by force for that life to suffer to some degree, its’ life’s only meaning being to be processed for food. There was nothing, now there is. Somehow human kind has decided ethical discussion need not concern animals.
Also, there's a lot of homeless people that would live better as my slaves, but you'd probably still rather see them free.
Your comment seems pretty disingenuous though. You're comparing life in the wild to that on a small family farm. Factory farms, especially those that produce poultry, are far more horrifying. There is also a growing body of evidence suggesting that many of the drugs (antibiotics and hormones in particular) that we pump our farm animals full of are actively detrimental to their daily comfort.
It sounds to me like your statement was crafted as a defense of your dietary choices rather than an objective assessment of animal wellbeing.
Of course none of this arguing really means anything without some scientific data to back this up. I'd like to see a comparison of cortisol levels and other stress indicators in wild vs factory chickens.
In any case, nature might be crueler to living things than we are, but I still think becoming less cruel is worth the effort.
I think that's hard to say. But I also think "the alternative" to farmed life is somewhat ignored by vegans/peta activists.
On the one hand, as you say, death is more painful by the claws/teeth of a predator; that is certain. But life itself with little shelter (but usualy some) is the natural state of afairs for most mammals. To say that that is suffering is to say that life itself is suffering, which I think is counterintuitive as suffering is evolutionarily a means of preasuring an animal to escape from the suffering. Not to say that isn't possible. It's hard to say if the natural resiliance (assuming it exists) that mammals have to little shelter and food carries over to say being croweded into small enclosures.
If anyone has any (scientific) articles on this topic I would be interested.
Animals aren't people though. I think it's important to avoid unnecessary suffering or cruelty, but it's also important to be able to eat them.
You're either constantly at risk from hordes of relentless and effective slasher-murder-cannibals (to put it in human-focused horror movie terms—they're not really cannibals when it's one species eating another, of course) and will very probably be killed and eaten by one before you can die of other "natural causes", and every moment you're not on high alert is a moment you're more likely than normal to abruptly be murdered, or you're in one of those movies where aliens or vampires or something are farming you for whatever reason, typically in such horrible conditions that you really might prefer to take your chances with the super-murderers out in the wild.
It's all very pretty to look at when you're at the top but IMO Lovecraft's works, or films like The Thing, really capture the underlying reality of what life is, fundamentally. Incomprehensible, brutally savage, and horrifying, mostly. One of those things you kinda have to try not to think about too much (which is one of the ways it's all a bit Lovecraftian—not healthy to contemplate actual-reality, rather than our illusions about it, in this case).
Would you rather:
A) live this life that can be ended for your meat at any point
B) hide in the hostile and foreign wilderness of their planet
Sure one might argue that cows are to stupid to understand their fate, but that alien species might argue the same. Also: even the simplest animal suffers when you take their offspring away. Or you might argue that option A is totally acceptable if the aliens are just good enough at keeping us happy.
I have yet to find a rational argument why it should be acceptable to industrially breed and herd other living beings that doesn't boil down to "because we are stronger, smarter or because we can do it", which is not a universal rational argument, unless you argue the aliens are right to herd us as well.
Also, by extension, predators shouldn’t have to face starvation, and prey should have their population controlled in a humane way.
These are problems that can’t be solved today, or likely any time soon. But I don’t buy the argument that “just because it happens in nature, it’s right”. I think Mother Nature provides effective solutions to these problems, but I also believe they aren’t the optimal solutions. We can and should do better.
When assessing arguments like this I find it useful to substitute animals for a hypothetical population of hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals. If an island populated by such people were discovered, and they turned out to generally live nasty, brutish and short lives for some reason, would that justify farming them for meat?
The answer is clearly no. If you were to ever encounter a hominid of any cognitive ability who was being farmed for meat, you would be horrified and would report the situation to law enforcement. That individual's treatment by the operators of the farm would qualify as brutal regardless of how much people of the same background tend to suffer out in the world.
I don't think there is a valid reason to treat hypothetical hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals differently from actual nonhuman mammals.
If we can agree that ignoring nature, factory farmed animals don’t lead what we would call a fulfilling life, how can we justify bringing trillions of them into existence if we have alternatives? We don‘t have to go too deep into utilitarian rhetoric here, maybe it is better than nature, maybe if you follow that line of reasoning it wouldn’t be right to let animals suffer in nature or have children either. Anyway, I haven’t been able to justify eating meat to myself for as long as I was able to think along these lines.
Maybe not up to human standards, but plenty of animals seek and find shelter as part of their normal life.
> having to fear every sound
Do you think animals fear their own species' mating calls? Or the rain and the breeze? How do you know what animals feel? If you are going to project the human emotion of "fear" onto them, you considered that they might feel humanlike emotions of elation, joy, and satisfaction as well?
> And it typically ends by being ripped to pieces by a predator and eaten alive while the brain still has some residual oxygen and awareness.
Human death, including death by common age-related ailments, is often painful and drawn out.
> sheltered, vaccinated against common illnesses, provided food
"Sheltered" in a coup filled with feces and "vaccinated" so that they do not succumb to the myre of illness in which they live. "Fed" via pellets of the cheapest food that the farm could buy while still sustaining them enough to develop tissue that is desirable for us to eat.
> being knocked out with electricity
I doubt that slaughter at factory farm is often as efficient, quick, and humane as you imagine.
> hardly encompasses more suffering.
Have you ever been, or been close to anyone, who was locked in jail or a psychiatric ward for a long period of time? The mental anguish of captivity is often described as worse than physical suffering.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0qf7CYEhxSFPAcdSw1JJMY
Dead Comment
Are you sure about the no suffering part. Currently this meat is grown using a growth medium most often extracted from a pregnant mare using a technique called bloodletting which is often extremely painful for the animal.
EDIT: I think I’m actually wrong about the pregnant mare. Animal suffering through bloodletting from pregnant mares was a recent scandal where I’m from and I must have conflated it in my mind. I was actually thinking about FBS which is extracted from a slaughtered pregnant cow. So my point still stands.
I’m quite skeptical about this. How do they obtain and culture chicken cells from a horse?
The technique is called a "biopsy" and while it does hurt, the animals recover pretty quickly from it. Branding is far more painful.
The herbivores are key component of sustainable agriculture, you can't do it without them. Lab grown meat is an interesting, energy intensive step in the wrong direction.
I think we can all agree that there are problems with factory farming, and grain finishing livestock.
I'm not entirely convinced by this argument. A lot of the ecological arguments against meat-eating is because cattle grazing requires huge swaths of land. Current practices generate this land via deforestation (I don't have statistics on how much land is generated via deforestation, but we can at least conclude that it's A Thing That Happens^{tm})[^1]. While certainly, grass captures some carbon, I'm going to guess that it's far less than a rainforest ecosystem of the same area, especially since the rainforest isn't being actively consumed. There's also the biodiversity of a forest environment.
[^1]: https://archive.ph/4pRMd <- WP article
Lab grown meat is a step in a direction that allows us to not use so much land for livestock.
If the intent is actual sustainability, then they have to be given their full 20 years to live. The cattle themselves act as carbon sinks too and have to be part of the whole ecosystem, not only exposed to one part of it. If you're constantly slaughtering them and replacing them, it's not doing much. It just sounds nice.
>it costs a bit more
"A bit" is an understatement.
>The herbivores are key component of sustainable agriculture, you can't do it without them.
You can't. But you have to do it without eating the vast majority of them.
The Myth of Regenerative Ranching:
>[...]
>If regenerative agriculture were to challenge the mainstream food system, it would run into some hard physical limits. Converting the beef industry, at current levels of demand, entirely to a grass- and crop-forage feeding system would require increasing the total size of American beef herds by 23 million cows, or 30 percent, according to a recent article in the respected science journal Environmental Research Letters. And that increase, were it even possible, would have monumental consequences for both greenhouse gas outputs and land use. But there simply isn’t enough land in the U.S. for that many grazers. At best, beef production would have to decrease by 39 percent and potentially as much as 73 percent. Framed that way, grass-fed grazing, especially if scaled, doesn’t seem likely to regenerate many ecosystems—indeed, it would likely require deforestation, as is the case in Brazil, where the clear-cutting of the Amazon is driven both by soy plantations for feedlot and factory farm animal feed and by the need for grazing space for grass-fed cattle. And as the Environmental Research Letters article argued, even temporary overgrazing can lead to long-term and perhaps irreversible ecological degradation.
>[...]
>Actually making animal agriculture less ecologically disruptive would mean taking animals’ ecological value as a bedrock principle against and over their value as commodities. That means treating commodity production, not land, as “marginal”: Commodities could be extracted only if doing so didn’t disturb the ecological, social, and cultural value of the landscape. In other words, in most such systems, animals would more than likely play a minor support role for primarily plant agriculture. And that, in turn, would almost certainly mean far fewer grazers entering the commercial food system, and at a much higher price point. Point Reyes, for example, might feature free-ranging elk managed by an Indigenous best practice–driven conservation agency, not dairy cattle grazed by private ranches. This kind of truly eco-friendly meat production would produce even less meat than the current grab bag of practices loosely labeled “regenerative.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/163735/myth-regenerative-ran...
Let's just say, the large intestine doesn't exactly stay pristine in the process, and I doubt they clean everything like you think they do.
Anyway, snark aside, I'm curious how this goes because while I'm not apologetic for my place on the food chain, carbon emissions from animal farming are problematic and the price that real meat should cost if we raise them humanely is pretty exorbitant. It will be hilarious to see cattle rustling become a capital offense again.
[0] https://littlecreekmontana.shop/blogs/ranch-blog/food-for-th...
Culturing meat is entirely about minimizing resource and land usage, and curbing the serious environmental impacts of the beef industry, which is of course truly infamous for methane emissions and deforestation.
Does anyone know if the problems that Humbird describes have somehow been solved?
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bit.27848
Here's the key leap of questionable logic (IMO):
> The capital cost of a conceptual bulk animal cell-culture process is developed from the bare-equipment costs of its most important items. From this purchased equipment cost, a total capital investment (TCI) is obtained through the application of cost escalation factors, which are understood to be rather high for biopharmaceutical cell-culture processes
The idea that at scale, it's going to cost $0.75M for a 1m^3 culturing chamber seems crazy to me. I'd guess these are expensive right now because they are specialist equipment (they are manufactured to the ASME bioprocessing standard, which was created for bioprocessing in a pharma/research context), and when they begin being mass-produced I'd estimate they will come down in cost by two orders of magnitude.
(For context, a ~400gal brewery fermentation vessel made of stainless steel can be purchased for about $5k, made in China. It's about 2x for a "made in USA" vessel. These bioreactor vessels are a bit more complex than the standard jacketed fermenters used by brewers, but eyeballing the schematics they do not seem more complex than a steam-jacketed mash tun, for example.)
At high scale, most of the cost is the bioreactors, the rest of the plant, and buildings. I can't find any real working for the capital costs beyond the bioreactors, but given the extremely pessimistic estimate there, I am skeptical about the broader plant estimates too.
TLDR; if you treat this as a pharma process, you will get pharma prices. If you treat this as a food process like beer (which also has sterility requirements, contamination risks, and clean-room cell line propagation requirements to overcome when manufacturing at scale) then the prices will be much lower. I treat this paper as a pessimistic worst-case scenario, and assume that process innovation will allow substantially lower prices.
The fundamental question is whether food-grade fermentation/culturing processes like those used in beer or yoghurt can suffice; for example it seems to me entirely plausible that we could lower the equipment quality requirements substantially, and still obtain a satisfactory safety profile by discarding contaminated batches. Not a cost-effective option for extremely expensive pharmacological products like vaccines, but potentially viable for simple food products like cultured meat.
Analyzing probable cost of fake meat production by comparison with existing cultured food manufacturing is sensible, but fake meat has some differentiating aspects to be accounted for.
A prime difference between these fermentation processes and a hypothetical cultured meat system is that the single cells involved in making beer and yogurt are simpler, much faster breading species than the multicellular lines which develop into complex animal tissue. Another difference is that whereas fermentation involves partial digestion of a portion of the growth medium by the fermenting microbes, creating a volume of artificial meat would require synthesizing cell dense tissue to fill the entire volume. So with artificial meat you need more growth and the growth will be slower, factors which both expand the opportunities for contamination. So preventing contamination will be more important and more challenging with lab meat than with these fermentation products.
I agree with your assessment that the source paper is exceedingly pessimistic about the costs. There is no physical reason why cultured meat production couldn't eventually be cheaper than natural meat production, the hurdles are only technological.
edit: spelling
I'd put this stuff on the same level as any mass-produced junk (HFCS, seed oils, etc) that has already been proven to be harmful to humans long-term as a cautious default.
https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-...
They improve health outcomes when put to the test, especially when replacing saturated fat.
Not outright dismissing this (I will read it because I'd like to be better informed and wrap my head around his stance) but that his main offering is debate training and not targeted health guidance/planning, it seems highly suspect.
The healthiest way to ingest seed oils is undoubtedly to eat some seeds.
"nick is a fomer student of Human Nutritional Science and Linguistics at the University of Manitoba, and he currently works as a nutrition science communicator, creating in-depth blog articles"
Not sure why you shared this. maybe you should share actual research or anectdotal evidence by someone who is actually responsible for someone else's health and has yoe.
It's not clear to me that there's a real upside to this though, for folks who don't mind killing and eating birds.
Research I have seen (you can see it too: [1]) indicates that chicken, dairy, and legumes are all about as low-impact as it gets when it comes to protein sources for humans.
As other folks have mentioned, scaling up the meat lab causes a lot of headaches because the lab meat doesn't come with its own immune system the way a chicken or a cow does. Headaches in the form of increased operating costs and energy inputs.
[1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-015-0931-6
Nuts, Peas, Beans and Tofu come out ahead of fish, eggs, chicken, pork, cheese, shrimp and beef (the worst):
https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat#:~:....
The secret is to just treat things with respect. You can be respectful of the animals you raise up, you can respect the land you sow. Unfortunately this world lacks a lot of that common respect towards life these days, but maybe this thinking will change in the future and we can live in a more balanced way.
Across the board, it seems that people want lab grown meat for others. Vegans want omnivores to eat it. Omnivores think it'd be good for vegans.
Meanwhile, any mass market product is likely to be some sort of processed meat product. Sausage, mince chicken nugget or somesuch. These aren't generally premium products, so you need to go really low for price competitiveness.
It's cool. Don't get me wrong. I like technology. It just seems like a solution looking for a problem to me.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
If a cultured meat "chik'n nugget" is cheaper than a mechanically-reconstituted-real-chicken-meat nugget, and the quality is the same, lots of people will buy the cheaper cultured option.
The same logic applies for basically every fast food product, and also every Costco-bulk meat product.
There are some people that care deeply about the quality and sourcing of the meat they consume, and cultured meat is probably not for them. For most other meat eaters, price (assuming parity on quality with the equivalent low-cost option) is going to be the prime determinant.
I don't see the economic realities stacking up. The price of cheap, processed meat products is pretty low... and not all of the price is ingredients. It's a long way to the bottom.
Meanwhile, the higher end ethical consumers... it's hard to predict their consumer preferences/choices. I suppose some vegans want meat and some omnivores want to be vegan... but as I said, I'm dubious about these groups' real size.
This won't get to $1 per kg overnight. There probably needs to be adequate demand all along the continuum to fuel volume price reductions.
I also think it's naive to assume that environmental (eg energy/carbon savings) benefits will materialize. Its equally naive to assume eco consumers will buy the story otherwise, over the long term.
The main bull case seems to rely on overwhelming cost advantage. Where's the reason to think this will happen.?
If this alternative way of meat production can taste about the same and cost about the same, then I think people who like the taste of meat will be buy it.
Some vegans and vegetarians don't want it because they don't like the taste of animal meat, whether it came from a live animal or lab.
What if lab-grown meat can create flavor profiles that rival wagyu? What if protein and micronutrient ratios can be tweaked to give athletes an advantage over athletes that eat animal meat?
If we frame it as a "cheap sustainable alternative" some people will always scoff at it, but if instead it starts off as an exclusive delicacy the public will want it that much more.
That said, like many others in these comments, I'll be waiting at least 10 years to understand the long term effects, if any.
Vegans primary objection to eating meat is that it is murder.
Meat eaters primary issue with vegan cuisine is that it does not include meat.
Hope this helps!
In my extended group of acquaintances, the distaste for typical vegan food isn't that it doesn't have meat, it's that it tries to pretend that it does and ends up being kinda gross as a result.
> Some hope that lab-grown meat could reduce the carbon footprint of the food industry.
Some hope. What are the facts?
I am sceptical that a lab process can be more efficient than a biological process. And being less efficient would it not use more energy, resources, and release more carbon?
The energy for biological processes is often largely solar, for lab processes often largely from fossil fuels.
I have no data, does anyone?
[1] Waste purely from the perspective of growing human food. I understand many parts of the animal are actually used for other purposes.
That's pretty important. If we replace the high margin steak part of the animal with lab grown equivalents, what is the plan for all the things we've learned to make with the rest of the cow?
Will use more GRID energy, but require significantly less arable land per unit. (And thus probably less fossil fuels, because agriculture uses a lot).
Useful parts, which will have to be replaced right along with replacing the profitable steak parts.
Whether correct or not, this kind of reporting always seems silly to me. You're not interviewing an impartial expert on the subject, you're getting a quote from a direct competitor. Of course, they're going to say something along these lines. This important nuance will be lost on most readers.