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After 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 ta
by sethbannon 10y ago
After 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.
- sethbannon 10y agoYou're absolutely right on the pricing and go to market strategy. The regulatory frameworks are still up in the air. I know from having attending the 1st and 2nd Cultured Meat Symposiums in Maastricht that both the USDA and the FDA are looking at clean meat. While both agencies seem pretty open and friendly towards it, they unfortunately both think they should be the one to regulate it :-)
- fapjacks 10y agoThe FDA thinks it should be the one to regulate everything. There is a culture of sociopathy and fascism at the FDA.
- thevardanian 10y agoYou also have to factor in the fact that meat produced in this country is also heavily subsidized by the government.
- arikr 10y agoThat's awesome! Any source on the 2c/g by 2021 goal?
- sethbannon 10y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZQMdlNOMew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZQMdlNOMew
- arikr 10y agoThank you
- tomcam 10y ago> Just under a year ago, Memphis Meats was at $18,000/lb of clean beef produced. Now they're at $9,000/lb. That's a relief, because anything over $9,200/lb. causes me to consider having chicken one extra day a week.
- virtuabhi 10y agoAnother startup, Impossible Foods, is selling burgers (with let-animals-live beef) for $15. Their technique seems to be slightly different, mixing lab-made heme with vegan ingredients. https://www.impossiblefoods.com https://www.impossiblefoods.com https://nishi.momofuku.com/nishi/menu/lunch/ https://nishi.momofuku.com/nishi/menu/lunch/
- pm90 10y agoMaybe it is a very personal tendency, but I don't think I could ever not have more chicken, especially if I had fried chicken after 20 years... I applaud your self-control.
- nicholas73 10y agoI wish the tasting was done with simple preparations, so we can read about how it tastes compared to regular meat. After all, even pastured chicken tastes wildly better than conventional chicken.
- datamingle 10y agoAlso, seemed like the Chicken was fried. Everything tastes great when it is fried.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThat's definitely cheating. Then again, all kinds of people fry their chicken. A success story there is still meaningful if you're just eating it occasionally and always fried. You could mix it up with the seasonings if not the cooking method.
- ethbro 10y agoAlso, I'm not sure how many chicken nuggets are sold (some quick calcs say ~23 lbs of fast food chicken per capita per year). But even just being able to replace those would be a ethical boon.
- tluyben2 10y agoWell, a lot of people eat chicken fried; if this would fix environmental & animal torture issues then it still seems like a good plan.
- sprocket 10y ago> After all, even pastured chicken tastes wildly better than conventional chicken. As a farmer who used to raise pastured chicken, I was always happy to convert people to what real chicken is supposed to taste like.
- Waterluvian 10y agoIs the difference simply that the meat is meat from a well fed, exercised chicken vs. a force fed obese monstrosity? Kind of like eating me vs. eating an Olympian.
- kriro 10y agoWhy not simply buy lovingly raised animals (obviously more expensive) instead of quitting on meat. That way you'd signal to the market that there's more demand for that kind of meat. I mean if everyone was a vegetarian/vegan some pretty cool animals would probably be extinct soon.
- apendleton 10y agoOP mentioned ethical and environmental concerns. "lovingly raised meat" might address the former if your ethical concerns are about specific livestock conditions, but not if you think raising animals for human consumption is unethical, period. And it does nothing whatsoever to address the environmental concerns, which are considerable, and are a primary motivator for many people who reduce or eliminate meat (judging from the medium post, OP included).
- jlebrech 10y ago"lovingly raised" would mean you're buying the animal still alive?
- lessclue 10y ago"lovingly raised" to be slaughtered is an oxymoron.
- antisocial 10y agoYeah, I think he/she meant "humanely raised"
- mchmch 10y agohumane slaughter what is next humane rape?
- kweks 10y agoNot necessarily. Anyone who runs small farms or boutique cattle studs would disagree. All animals will die at some stage. If their life up to that point was in a caring and respectful environment, and they are humanely killed, what's the problem? We regularly sent our cattle to the abattoir, and it didn't stop them being happy cows that got hugs and shoulder scratches...
- dnautics 10y agoare you certain the meat was grown 100% animal free (outside of the stem cell line)? As far as I know, higher organism stem cell culture is still not possible without some amount of animal product in the growth medium. For Memphis Meat's burgers last year, for example, fetal bovine serum was used. As far as I looked, they don't make any outward claim of actually being animal-product free (they use cagey terms like "clean", which doesn't have a legal definition, or "from self-reproducing cells"). Fully animal-free meat is a laudable goal, but I wonder if a company that is being evasive about what their current product line is under the pressure of "demoing something, just anything" has the chops to solve the problem of removing all the animal derived products from the growth serum (this is NOT a trivial problem, and some very smart people are working on it because of its arguably less frivolous application towards safe in vitro organ growth for transplantation). Moreover, an important question is how many replication cycles the animal stem cells use - unless they're hybridized with tumor cells, they will eventually run into the hayflick limit, at which point you'll have kill another animal to obtain more stem cells.
- novaleaf 10y agoon a related note, I was actually quite hopefull/impressed when the bad-press about a 50% soy subway chicken came out a few weeks ago. That's a huge win for sustainability! Of course it was too awesome to be true, turns out the test was faulty and it's actually less than 1% soy.