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Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab
- phs318u 10y agoMass production of economical, safe, "vat-grown" meats can't come soon enough.
- pm90 10y agoWonder what would happen to the tons of soybeans/corn currently raised as animal feed in that case though...
- angerbot 10y agoIt could perhaps be a) put to other uses or b) no longer grown in such large quantities and replaced by some other less harmful plan (speaking about corn in particular which is heavily subsidized and terrible for the soil it grows in).
- timthelion 10y agoIs that a problem or a good thing. We currently suffer from deforistation due to agriculture. If those feilds could be reforested that would be a good thing. Of course pure capitalism doesn't allow for that, but with a little government intervention (aka, buy up the unneeded feilds) or economic decay (feilds become abandoned due to their lack of value ;) ) then reforestation could occure. Or there could be solar panels put there, or the corn could end up producing the input to the vat. Or hemp could be grown there which could be used as a construction material, or ...
- ryandamm 10y agoProcessed into feedstock for the meat-vats. Roughly the same workflow as before, just streamlined. Even bioreactors that produce pharmaceutical products are running on carbon-based energy derived from agricultural output -- glucose gotta come from somewhere. Fixed nitrogen, amines, gotta come from somewhere.
- sethbannon 10y agoAfter not eating meat for over 20 years due to the environmental and ethical concerns over how it's conventionally been made, I was lucky enough to be at the tasting described in the WSJ article. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/@sethbannon/i-just-ate-meat-for-the-first-time-in-20-years-214d0f875568 https://medium.com/@sethbannon/i-just-ate-meat-for-the-first...
- netinstructions 10y agoCan you speak to the cost? The WSJ article says it currently costs $9,000 per pound to produce the "clean meat". Does that mean you ate something like a $900 chicken? (Assuming you had a small sample)
- sethbannon 10y agoThe costs are still too high for commercial viability but they're dropping rapidly. In 2013, the first cultured burger cost $330,000 to make. Just under a year ago, Memphis Meats was at $18,000/lb of clean beef produced. Now they're at $9,000/lb. This is before any sort of efficiencies from scale, and before many steps of the process have been anywhere near fully optimized. They expect their costs to reach 2 cents/g by 2021, which would be cost competitive.
- yourapostasy 10y ago2 cents per gram translates to $9.07 per pound of Memphis Meats' cost. Assuming they skip the distributors (unlikely) and sell straight to retailers, it will be easily double that at the retail level, $18.14 per pound. They are more likely to end up around the $25-30 per pound price point at retail once all is said and done. That's starting to wander into dry-aged beef ribeye territory at a higher-end version of common grocery chains, and sale pricing numbers at Whole Foods Market. It predictably starts out as a luxury good, but as others have noted, cell culture-based processes have historically scaled pretty effectively. So probably 2-3 more decades after that with continuous refinements will bring it down to a price point that even the middle class will look at, so that's pretty exciting it is getting so close. What is the regulatory outlook for these products? Will they be regulated as pharmaceutical (due to the bioreactor origin) or food, or is this an issue currently being negotiated and discussed with government? I imagine investors would strongly prefer a food regulatory treatment.
- whyenot 10y agoAt $9,000 per pound of meat, this is not going to be replacing real meat from animals anytime soon. Chickens are already highly efficient when it comes to converting feed into edible meat. I'm skeptical that cell culture will ever be able to come close to the same level of efficiency. Cell cultures need to be sterile, the sugars, growth factors, and other nutrients used need to be highly refined. These are not requirements that are likely to change in the foreseeable future.
- wjn0 10y agoCell culturing has a history of the requisite procedures being brought to scale when necessary (insulin production for one classic example). I'm not arguing that the scale is the same. Obviously, comparing a highly evolved animal literally designed for producing meat vs. the natural insulin production of a pig is completely different. But, the evidence says the procedures scale well, given enough time. Would this somehow be different?
- pm90 10y agoIs chicken really designed for producing meat? Speaking in exclusively in terms of resource consumption, it seems like a lot of resources would be wasted by the bird on a lot of necessary, but wasteful (from the point of producing meat) activities (e.g. moving?). I am not a biologist, so I am genuinely curious...
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoI read it to mean efficient as compared to other ways of producing protein rich food, not efficient in the strict sense with regard to conservation of energy.
- wjn0 10y agoIt's less a biological question, and more a question of the laws regarding meat production where you live. IIRC, in the US (just some states I believe), chickens for example don't need to have space to move at all, except maybe a few inches. We quite literally turn them into machines for producing meat, at scale. Further, the breeds of chickens used for meat are usually for meat, eggs for eggs, etc - at least at the industrial scale.
- pgnas 10y agoMore frankenfood. When will we learn ?
- eat_veggies 10y agoLearn what, exactly?
- lolwaaaat 10y agoWhen will we learn plant based foods are superior, is what you should be asking.
- readams 10y agoThough I'm a meat eater, I have a strong suspicion that the arrival of high-quality meat alternatives will cause a societal shift away from eating meat to the point where it would become rare. As it is, giving up meat is a huge decline in quality of life and its easy to rationalize meat consumption. It needs to be actually comparable in quality and the price needs to come way down though first. It's easy to imagine a future where the _best_ meat is actually grown in this way and is nonetheless cheaper than more environmentally friendly than raising animals. And of course, then it becomes possible to build meats that correspond to no actual animal
- markba 10y agoHow is it a huge decline in quality of life?
- imaginenore 10y agoWhen you stop doing what you like/love, it's a huge decline in quality of life.
- throwaway243546 10y agoThis argument only works if you assume that people who go vegan enjoys food less than they did before they went vegan. The reality is that most vegans report enjoying food much more. The reason for that is that they are forced to experiment with different flavors and get more creative, which expands their culinary horizons.
- henrikschroder 10y agoStockholm Syndrome is also a viable explanation.
- lolwaaaat 10y agoFor eating meat, possibly.
- downandout 10y agoFor those that can't get past the paywall... https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fstartup-to-serve-up-chicken-strips-cultivated-from-cells-in-lab-1489570202 https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Fa...
- Jaruzel 10y agoNice trick. Does this via-fb work on all WSJ articles?
- ada1981 10y agoHere's a javascript bookmarklet I just made that will break the WSJ paywall using this trick. javascript:(function()%7Bwindow.location %3D ("https%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com%2Fl.php%3Fu%3D" %2B encodeURI(window.location.href))%7D)()
- digikata 10y agoSo why are all the engineered meat startups targeting pretty common meats that are fairly low cost? Why not a something like tuna which is endangered and can sell at a really high cost per pound. Take the Tesla strategy and build for a high-end exotic market that can sustain a high-margin first then get into position for the wider, lower margin market.
- greglindahl 10y agoOne meat startup went into high-end leather: http://www.modernmeadow.com/ http://www.modernmeadow.com/ Another algae-to-make-food company went into high-end oils for cosmetics: http://www.solazyme.com/ http://www.solazyme.com/ (and some other industrial things, from what I see now)
- jimmywanger 10y agoAny high end cut of meat (dry aged ribeye, tuna belly) is orders of magnitude harder to make realistic than low end meat. With high end stuff, you're really catering to the connoisseur. And if you can tell the difference between a dry-aged ribeye and a wet-aged ribeye, think about making a lab grown substitute for that level of discernment. In fact, I read somewhere that the reason California rolls were invented was because somebody noticed that avocados have roughly the same fat content and mouthfeel as tuna belly, and was swapped in.
- 10y ago
- Animats 10y agoThere's also Beyond Meat, which is textured vegetable protein run through a complicated extruder with hot and cold sections. This gives it most of the appearance and physical properties of real meat, at least at the burger level. That's much simpler to make than growing meat from cells. Beyond Meat ought to be a low-price product, but it isn't.
- jimmywanger 10y agoIt's also not very convincing as a meat substitute, IMO. There's something about the texture that's off. This is regarding their chicken strips - maybe their burgers are better.
- shostack 10y agoNPR's "How I Built This" podcast had an interesting interview with the founder on how they got started and the challenges they've faced/face. [1] [1] https://play.google.com/music/m/Dj4goozcgwvlcixxhx2pekacws4?t=Live_Episode_Beyond_Meat_Ethan_Brown_-_How_I_Built_This https://play.google.com/music/m/Dj4goozcgwvlcixxhx2pekacws4?...
- lend000 10y agoI've fantasized about the Musk-esque projects I would take on if/when I have some money, and this is near the top of the list. Cultured animal products, without the cruelty or inefficiency of raising conscious, normal animals, has the potential to push humanity forward economically, morally, and healthfully (couldn't hurt to provide more nutritious options). I wish that there was more of a focus on milk, because milk production is arguably the most cruel of them all, and it also seems to be more feasible, considering it's a homogeneous liquid solution. Granted, synthetic milk is getting some attention, too: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/genetic-engineering-synthetic-milk-may-be-next-after-synthetic-meat-1471878 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/genetic-engineering-synthetic-milk-...
- eddy_chan 10y agoOne of the points missed here in the discussion thread is that over and above ethical/moral animal wellbeing concerns we need this as quickly as possible because antibiotic use in livestock is one of main contributors to antibiotic resistance.
- ganfortran 10y agoSo the selling point is that consumers can be lab rats right now?
- jlebrech 10y agowe've reached peak meat, it's impossible to feed the whole population meat past 10bn due to there not enough land, and if only grass fed meat/etc is consumed there is only enough land for 1bn.
- jlebrech 10y agowhy is there no brand of tofu marinated with actual chicken. there's no inbetween eating meat and not eating, there should be a "% meat" brand.
- xaldir 10y agoTo me it sound an over-engineered solution to a simple problem. We need less meat from better raised animals. We need to understand that animals are an essential part of a balanced agricultural system. We do not need more food-industry.
- jbb123 10y agoYou know what's a cheaper, better way to make chicken meat? A chicken.... This is a solution in need of problem
- spdionis 10y agoGiven all the discussion about vegans here, I dread the day when a high percentage or, god forbid, majority of the population start looking down on those dirty, pesky, meat-eaters that ruin the environment and "won't anyone please think of the poor animals?". Honestly artificial meat sounds like a repulsive idea an i'd never consider eating it regularly, maybe just taste as a curiosity. I like my steaks rare, I like the taste of the juice that's left by the blood in the steak. I like to see the red in the meat. Some vegans reading this will think I'm a horrible person. Others will think themselves better people than me because they are not enslaved by meat. Honestly, I find this much more repulsive than the way animals are treated in farms.