[1]: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...
Associated discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621288
GOOD claims that it already produces cultured meat without using bovine serum, in their Singapore facility. As we have no details on what they use instead of bovine serum, it's hard to assess the economic viability of what they're doing. But it also means that the entire counterargument focused on bovine serum costs is no longer relevant. And many required nutrients today are industrially grown in bacteria or algae (for example, most of the vitamins in a daily multivitamin).
And the hygiene portion was premised on using Class 8 clean rooms for production, i.e., the most hygienic clean rooms currently recognized. The difference in cost between a Class 5 clean room (the lowest level of recognized "clean room", and the one used by pharmaceutical production, nanotech production, medical device production, etc.) and a Class 8 clean room is like the difference between an integrated GPU and a 6090 TI Founder's Edition. The problem with assuming the absolute top-of-the-line equipment would be required is that this was the assumption that drove this entire portion of the counterargument, down to facility size, equipment requirements, etc., ignoring entirely how production actually occurs in the real world.
Though, complete sterilization of even a sealed closed environment is hard, and if using heat can require a lot of energy. Then I guess you'd need to pasteurize all nutrients as well.
Makes me wonder if a form of fermentation could be made to work with meet growth? It'd screw with cell density of the meet, but perhaps you could create an artificial symbiosis. The fermentation bacteria inhibit growth of bad bacteria, but wouldn't take too much of the overall energy from the meat cells.
Wow, that's a tricky problem.
It sounds like they're aware of a few obstacles.
And cheap, fairly low processed, easy to make non lab grown fake chicken can look and taste like the real thing enough to be accidentally switched with no one noticing.
It would make more sense to try to make red meat - but I guess that is much harder.
Even easier would be to identify the proteins that make up the taste of those meats, then use them in plant based meat replacement programs. Much of the satisfaction we get from meat seems to come from hemes, a class of proteins using iron to capture oxygen, and this is what makes meat red in the first place. There are also plant-based heme analogues. All of that is of course limited by consumer feelings.
There’s two different opportunities here — a suffering-free meat substitute and a meat substitute with a lower carbon footprint.
This can get us closer to the former, but it’s not obvious it gets us closer to the latter.
The common component to pretty much every process, product and comfort in our our society is energy utilization. Most people are not going to give anything up just because "the carbon footprint is bad/worse". So let's work on making it so the carbon footprint isn't even a factor.
Electricity generation takes up less than half of global energy consumption, I think the figure is 30-40%.
This means most fossil fuels are burned for purposes other than generating electricity, and even if 100% of electricity generation was carbon-free you would still have a ton of fossil fuel consumption, things like heating, transportation, etc.
Transitioning all of that energy consumption to electricity is a huge feat, AND you need a f-ton more electricity generation, transportation, and storage, and of course it needs to be carbon free otherwise the problem is just made worse by the inherent inefficiencies.
Beef and lamb are probably the least cruel, at least when they are fed grass outside (and where I live, they always are)
I understand that grain fed beef can be more cruel, depending on how long they are kept inside.
The efficiency of that is utterly terrible. That's also the reason why any form of bioenergy from crops has such huge landuse requirements. It is likely almost impossible to do any worse with any technological process.
“The key takeaway here is that with this landmark decision, we are now the first company with cultivated meat approvals in two countries – the US and Singapore,” Eat Just VP and head of global communications Andrew Noyes told AFN. “And we’re the only company in the world that has ever sold to consumers.”
In the US, the FDA regulates cell collection, banking, growth and differentiation for cultivated meat and poultry. Regulatory oversight then switches to the USDA once the cells are harvested and through the processing and labeling stages.
Overall, most of the EU enjoys a high quality of cheap food (yes, it increased quite a bit the last year...) and the food safety is actually higher.
Also I should really reread Transmetropolitan, its a great series.
There are plenty of better culture media options, I wonder why they're not using them.
> Asked about bovine serum, Noyes told AFN: “Today’s FDA clearance, which was years in the making, involved a chicken cell line that is produced with a very low level of animal-derived nutrients that are effectively removed through the harvesting and washing procedure. Like in Singapore, our team will be pursuing an amendment for serum-free media with the FDA.”
> He added: “GOOD Meat’s R&D operations have been free from animal-derived nutrients for over three years, and in January, we received the world’s first approval for serum-free media in Singapore, where we’ve been selling our cultivated chicken for more than two years. Moving to non-animal derived nutrients will not only lead to greater scalability and lower manufacturing costs, but also a more sustainable product.”
(I don't have strong feelings for or against cultivated meat)
I once worked in a plant that largely made hotdogs. Pink slime everywhere.
I wonder to what extent the patents expiring as mentioned in the article, have led to this push?
I understand what you're getting at, but the message seems less about describing the product in question and more about assigning a virtue to it. That can be great for marketing towards specific crowds, but I think we should aim for a factual, neutral term to describe it.
Between that and having several friends overseas who ate "natural" pork and now have intramuscular larvae for life, I'd agree that lab grown meat almost certainly sounds a lot cleaner.
I hope 2) will never happen.
And it's an invalid assumption that cultured meat won't ever have the same or similar structure. They'll figure out how to grow connective tissue, even blood vessels.
"Lab-grown" is a neutral term which lets non-vegans know they should avoid it.
I'm sick of the intentional confusion vegan products cause. Regulators need to come down on this hard.
But that is indeed an entirely sentimental or spiritual concept. FBS doesn't contribute to the suffering of animals because it is a side product that is actually discarded most of the time. At worst, buying FBS means making the main production chain slightly more profitable.
In any case, I don't believe "clean meat" means less animal suffering than "cultured meat". "Clean meat" is just as unscaleable as cultured meat (currently) because of demands on labor and land. You still need to kill an animal long before its natural death, and you raise that animal in the first place to kill it. So I don't follow that particular argument.
Of course they use freshly-squeezed aborted calves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum?useskin=vec...
It's just dehumanizing. Maybe that's the point of this industry.
Many people are repulsed by factory farming and go vegetarian or vegan, but would welcome meat flavors and textures that don't come at the cost of animal misery.
> and I've asked around
Considering the tone of the rest of your comment, I'm doubtful the question you asked of your friends was stated in a neutral way that wasn't just broadcasting your disgust at the idea.
"Hey Tom, instead of having a steak, would you rather eat twitching, gibbering barnyard-alien-maniamal hybrids grown in vats of nutrient-piss fluid goo?"
> lab grown franken-meat industry has gleefully stated culturing human meat is a goal
For sure there are people looking to grow skin and other organs for medical reasons, but I'd really like to see a reference to someone (much less the entire "franken-meat industry") claiming to grow human cells for consumption.
Can I ask why? Why is a bunch of cells grown in a clean-room environment more disgusting than a similar bunch harvested from free-range chicken potentially exposed to vastly more diseases?
I don't mean to be facetious, really, I don't. I'm neither vegetarian nor vegan, and am not pursuing any kind of agenda with this line of questioning. I just don't understand where the feeling of disgust comes from.
But I think it’s pretty silly to think that vegetarians are the target market for fake or cultured meat. Surely not.
If you’ve been vegetarian for a long time (life-long or for decades), then the distinctive texture of many meat products can be very off-putting. It’s not like anything you find in vegetable dishes (which is why fake and cultured meat products exist!), and if you’re not used to it, it can trigger you to gag as your brain sends signals that “this isn’t food as I know it”.
This isn’t usually a problem. If you’re a vegetarian, you don’t have any requirement to eat meat. Except some restaurants are now excitedly adopting fake (vegetable protein-based) meats as a “vegetarian” option. It must be convenient as they don’t have to invent new vegetable-centric dishes, but many vegetarians just can’t manage to eat them even if they try. I’ve been to a couple of work dinners lately where the vegetarian option was a fake (TVP-based) meat, and had to just eat the side salad because the main dish triggered my gag reflex.
I’m a life-long vegetarian and kind of wish I could eat meat, it would make life simpler. But I just can’t bring myself to chew or swallow it without plenty of water to wash it down. That said, I’m all for cultured meats as an option for meat-eaters. Go for it.
You might as well ask why have sex when you can just buy a fleshlight/dildo. (Don't you know how many diseases you're exposed to?)
As a vegetarian, I would say - continue to eat the animals than putting the animals through the dystopian hell that produces animal based nutrient solutions. I would also bet that most of the people looking forward for lab grown meat would be repulsed by what exactly they are eating if they understand the production process
Is this actually what's going on? And if there is any twitching, is there any brain involved, or is it external electrical stimulation used to develop the muscle tissue that will later be harvested?
> None of the people I know who eat meat are even vaguely interested in this either.
If you present it to them like you're presenting it here, and they don't bother to do any additional research, then it's no wonder why they're disinterested.
