18 ms·
Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)
- qyv 10y agoThe ethical argument for the adoption of artificial beef is always brought out during these stories. But they forget to mention that the lab grown meat only contains lean meat cells and in order to make it taste good they need to add animal fat. As in, fat from farmed and slaughtered animals.
- pen2l 10y agoShouldn't creating artificial fat be easier than creating artificial meat? (I confess I have the impression that it would be easier based on a mere hunch... fat just seems less "complicated")
- iaw 10y agoWith zero knowledge on the subject my guess would be that they've focused on the protein structure and not the fat structures in their efforts. I suspect there are a lot of similarly shaped fat structures that taste differently which makes it seem like a similar but different problem. In short, my guess would be that they need to focus on that after they solve this problem. The value of the meat is probably higher than that of the fat though so the ordering makes sense.
- tootie 10y agoCan't you use plant fat?
- xyzzy123 10y agoYep, or just cook in butter.
- tootie 10y agoWell, that's animal fat. Which is his complaint that this will still require raising cows.
- dan1234 10y agoTraditional butter is made by churning milk, so while a cow is still required, it doesn't need to be slaughtered to make the burger. I wonder if it would be possible to cook it in soy butter?
- jholman 10y agoGiven that soy butter is marketed as similar to peanut butter, and has about 1/3 the fat of butter, I'm gonna go with "probably not and what were you thinking?" (I mean, sure, it's possible to cook your lean beef in peanut butter, so fine, technically "yes it's possible")
- tootie 10y agoI know it's culinary heresy, but unless you're eating it raw (like spread on a piece of baguette) it doesn't matter much what kind of fat you cook with in most preparations. If you were to take 99% lean ground beef right now and soak it with a few spoons of olive oil or canola, it would probably be pretty rich and moist.
- 6502nerdface 10y ago
- nooyurrsdey 10y agodo you think there will be a way to replace actual animal fat over time with another source? Is it cost holding it back or is it scientifically infeasible?
- stupidcar 10y agoHuman fat. Just build the meat lab next to a liposuction clinic. Problem solved. In fact, if you build a burger joint there as well, you've got a perfect Fat Cycle. People can go to the clinic to get their flab hoovered off, then head into the restaurant and eat it all back in burger form.
- hkhall 10y agoThanks Tyler.
- trentmb 10y agoAt least its fat neutral
- ordinary 10y agoA couple of days ago, I got a DVD-R in my mailbox. When I looked at was on it, it appeared to be a list of conspiracy theory videos. The file names of several of these alleged that aborted fetuses (human) were used in the meat industry, by McDonalds specifically. I decided not to watch them.
- untilHellbanned 10y agoReverse sticker shock as clickbait, there's a new one.
- entee 10y agoIt's unclear what methods they're using to make these burgers, but often you need many animal-derived products to culture cells. Fetal bovine serum, growth media, all of these have animal products in them. If they make an ethical argument, then they'll have to solve that too. They might have, but it's not clear in the article.
- truth_sentinell 10y agoI saw in a documentary that with only a sample of the skin they can grow like 10k burguers, and the animal won't even notice, it's like an injection. I don't remember the doc but it seems pretty ethical IMO.
- _Wintermute 10y agoIt's not just the initial cells, the growth medium contains a lot of animal products - even culturing human cells for research uses lots of bovine products.
- VelNZ 10y agoI am really really excited about lab grown meat making it into the mass market and ultimately becoming cheaper than traditional meat. The environmental benefits will be insane; how much of the earth is currently devoted to either raising animals or growing feed to feed animals? If we can centralise the production of meat, suddenly we have huge swathes of land that, perhaps naively, I hope can be reforested.
- dilemma 10y ago>If we can centralise the production of meat Sounds like a huge disease risk.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoYou should tour a factory farming operation. Lab grown meat could be as safe as vaccine production; both done in controlled, sterile environments. EDIT: Seriously though, don't do the tour if you ever want to eat meat again. Doubly so for walking a slaughterhouse floor. There are some things you cannot unsee.
- bronson 10y agoI can't upvote this enough. If you're worried about disease, you do not want to see where your meat comes from. There's no way lab meat could ever come close to this scale of filth. (not talking about $50/lb locally slaughtered meat of course)
- dilemma 10y agoI don't doubt that the factory is going to be a grim sight. I was more thinking about the centralization aspect, which would cause massive damage if the lab covering an entire state or country was contaminated.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoMy point was that they're both centralized, but you have far more control over a lab setting (http://i.imgur.com/KW1LrLg.jpg http://i.imgur.com/KW1LrLg.jpg) than something like this: http://i.imgur.com/SDUbUBQ.jpg http://i.imgur.com/SDUbUBQ.jpg
- xbmcuser 10y agoEthical considerations won't take this far. Need it to become cheaper than real meat the day that happens it will take off on its own. Meat or cattle raising plays a big role in the worlds methane production decreasing that would be huge achievement as with more people getting out of poverty every year meat production and consumption is increasing.
- x1798DE 10y agoI could see another angle in the meantime, which is exotic lab grown meats. I'd be interested in trying bald eagle meat or polar bear or any number of animal meats where it's either illegal or impractical to culture full animals. Presumably you can also make meats that scale disproportionately with the size of the animal, like sparrow burger or lobster steak.
- MrQuincle 10y agoYes, or human.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- joshschreuder 10y agoIt's actually a fun question to ask people, whether they would eat a synthetic meat that was designed to taste like human meat. You will perhaps understandably get a lot of weird looks and squirms.
- x1798DE 10y agoI'm not sure if you can call it "designed to taste like human meat" when it's actually human meat that just wasn't produced in a human, though that's another interesting breakdown.
- Dove 10y agoI see another advantage: it may be safe to do things with lab-grown meat that aren't safe with farm-grown. Tuna without overfishing concerns. Swordfish without the mercury. Chicken that can be served medium rare. Or ground beef for that matter. On top of that, this approach to meat offers extreme customizability. Imitating what comes out of a cow in terms of fat, protein, flavor, is where they've got to start. And the first cars had fake horse heads. Eventually they can optimize for health or taste in a way nature can't. Fois gras times ten. If this approach becomes truly economical, I would expect it to destroy traditional meat the way cars destroyed horse-drawn carriages: through sheer superiority of performance options.
- throwaway98237 10y agoAs a vegan, I feel the day fast approaching when I must choose whether I'll eat this "vegan" meat or not. Either way I'm rooting for them on behalf of the environment and all the animals caught up in our current industrial food system.
- jekrb 10y agoI'm vegan too. My reason for being vegan is entirely on the basis of sustainability. If lab meat is produced in a sustainable fashion then I'll be all for eating it.
- thret 10y agoEconomies of scale. I think the product will become financially viable faster if it has wide-spread vegan support.
- throwaway98237 10y agoOne would only be on-board with that assuming they were on board with the whole of the product. So first you'd need to make the argument as to why a vegan should be behind this product, besides "more people can afford it if all vegans buy it." Also, that only works if it has competition, otherwise, if it were that popular and there were no competition the producer would have good reason to raise the price knowing the market could bear it.
- 10y ago
- jholman 10y agoThis is year-old blogspam. bigthink.com spins every article out into nine self-linked articles, and also leaves out all the interesting details. Also they don't source the $11.36 figure, and all the other sources I've read give prices to about 1 significant figure, not to four, so I suspect that's made up. If you're interested in this subject, read this WP piece from 18 months ago, or this BBC piece that was the actual source for TFA from 13 months ago, both of which contain more up-to-date facts than TFA. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/20/meet-the-future-of-meat-a-10-lab-grown-hamburger-that-tastes-as-good-as-the-real-thing/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/20/meet-... http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34540193 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34540193 Or, for more background, here's the 3-year-old piece from Time that raised a lot of discussion, and which gives the context for the price drop. http://science.time.com/2013/12/16/the-triple-whopper-environmental-impact-of-global-meat-production/ http://science.time.com/2013/12/16/the-triple-whopper-enviro... Or you could read this, from 6 months ago. Note that it looks like a bit of a biased piece to me, but it appears to be directly sourced, rather than just regurgitated. It also is specific about Mosa's price targets, saying that they think that $29.50/lb will be their launch price, and they speculate that $3.60/lb seems like an achievable goal for later (currency not specified, though probably they mean USD, but note that the company is not American). http://www.takepart.com/feature/2016/05/23/cultured-beef http://www.takepart.com/feature/2016/05/23/cultured-beef
- grzm 10y ago"Also they don't source the $11.36 figure" And did I miss it, but are we to assume that's $11.36/lb? Some other unit?
- greeneggs 10y agoGenerally, random numbers like this come from unit conversion. My guess is that it started at $100/kg. $100 per kg = $11.34 per 1/4 lb burger You get $11.36 per 1/4 lb if you use 2.2 lb = 1 kg, instead of the exact conversion.
- 10y ago
- CyberDildonics 10y agoThat's pretty good, but even if you buy now it will just be obsolete in a week.
- woofyman 10y agoReminds me of Frederik Pohls "The Space Merchants" published 1952 where he describes a huge mass of cultured chicken breast cells fed with algae http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002
- taneq 10y agoInterestingly, the original experiment that spawned these stories (Alexis Carrel allegedly kept a culture of chicken heart alive for 20 years) was never replicated, and it's suspected that fresh cells were added to the mass to keep it going. Attempts to replicate it lead to the discovery of the Hayflick Limit, which observes that most animal cells can only divide a limited number of times before dying.
- mrob 10y agoI predict synthetic meat will be hugely successful simply because it avoids all the gross parts of dead animals. No blood, no connective tissue, no risk of abscesses or parasites, no worries about cross-contamination, the exact same size every time. If I can buy a sterile and perfectly uniform slab of synthetic muscle and marbled fat, to me that's a better product than natural meat. I don't even care if it tastes slightly worse. Put some ketchup on it and it'll be good enough. "Inferior" technology very often wins because of convenience. People preferred LCDs to CRTs long before they'd caught up with CRT image and motion quality. Touch screen phones are more popular than those with physical keyboards. More people use ballpoint pens than fountain pens despite the higher writing pressure and lack of flexibility in ink choice. Synthetic meat can be the ultimate convenient meat and that's enough to make up for a lot of other flaws.
- jonathanstrange 10y agoI'm not so sure. The problem is that any kind of processed real meat, like almost all other processed food, tends to be absolutely horrible from a culinary point of view and is often bad from a health-related point of view, too. It seems unlikely to me that lab-grown meat would fare better in that respect than, say, processed compressed chicken remains that are sold as an ingredient in a vast variety of processed food. I also don't think that lab-grown meat will have substantially less potential for biological contamination.
- onion2k 10y agoThe problem is that any kind of processed real meat... The aim of this is that it doesn't produce something that needs processing though. The aim is to produce something that is identical to just plain, real meat. There's no cooking or preparation involved - the only difference is that instead of being grown in a cow it's grown in a vat.
- mrob 10y agoI'm confident contamination won't be an issue for consumers because AFAIK no current or proposed synthetic meat has an immune system. This means it will have to be grown in sterile conditions. Contamination will be a huge problem for producers, but they'll have to figure out a solution because the cost of losing whole batches would be too much if they don't.
- rdlecler1 10y agoA US company called Modern Meadow is trying to do the same thing, but is starting with a more commercially viable first product: leather. This seems like a better way to develop the technology stack you need to crush the cost so that you can make it available for food.
- SpikeDad 10y agoSounds like a job for a Kickstarter. They'll make a lot of money, maybe create some new science and then when they fail they can close up their shop without a single repercussion.