10 ms·
SuperMeat raises $3M for lab-grown chicken
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sethbannon 9y agoFor the interested in the clean meat (aka lab grown meat) space, there was a recent cover story in Inc on the industry leader Memphis Meats that's well worth a read: https://www.inc.com/magazine/201711/jeff-bercovici/memphis-meats-lab-grown-meat-startup.html https://www.inc.com/magazine/201711/jeff-bercovici/memphis-m...
- julianh95 9y agoThis is fantastic! Hopefully they take off like Impossible Foods did with their faux beef burger that is akin to the real thing.
- ebbv 9y agoI hope this works and provides cheap, clean ways to have chicken nuggets. But that's a long way off because we don't even have a way of doing it cheaply or cleanly right now, let alone have a product that people actually want to eat that is also cheap and clean. In the mean time, I think this is the wrong way to try to solve the issue. Raising a few chickens is not a big deal. I live in rural Michigan, many of my neighbors have chickens with no real environmental impact and not much cost at all. All of the problems come from industrialized livestock practices. If we simply outlawed those practices, and/or put huge taxes and tariffs on the products the issue would solve itself (in that the monetary cost of meat would reflect its real costs, and consumption would drop accordingly.)
- neaden 9y agoThe problem is that people like eating lots of chicken and will not be happy about suddenly paying more, whether it is through taxes or increased cost from regulations. In the US alone we killed 9 billion chickens a year, or about 28 chickens per person. Some of that meat is exported, but at the end of the day I think this is a problem that can only be addressed by working with the demand.
- ebbv 9y agoThey won't like it but tough beans. People don't like a lot of things we have to change for the better of society. Not doing things because people won't like them is why so many things are screwed up right now.
- neaden 9y agoBut we exist in a democracy. Outside of the Supreme Court we don't really have a good way of making unpopular things happen. Congress is not going to pass a meat tax anytime soon, neither party is close to supporting it.
- ebbv 9y agoWell I know this is gonna sound absolutely bonkers but; our leaders could actually lead for a change... I know it's an insane thought but it has been done in the past to great effect.
- dfabulich 9y agoThere's a really good video about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
- ebbv 9y agoIt's cool how people think CGP Grey is a scholar on so many topics just because he sounds calm and confident when he talks. It's like a stick figure hypno toad.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> people think CGP Grey is a scholar on so many topics just because he sounds calm and confident His "Rules for Rulers" video is an excellent summary of The Dictator's Handbook [1], itself a summary of well-regarded selectorate theory [2]. I have yet to watch a CPG Grey video which does not honestly separate fact from opinion, and ensure the former is well sourced. His delivery is excellent. But that, alone, is not substitute for well-written and -researched material. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845 https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory
- everdev 9y agoAs a vegetarian, I'm really excited for lab grown meat. The choice is primarily ethical for me and if we can give people high protein foods they enjoy with confining or killing animals on a massive scale, I see it as a huge win.
- luisramalho 9y agoTotally agree, plus animals are extremely inefficient meat producers.
- drb91 9y agoEr, compared to what? Animals may not be an energy efficient food, but they are the only way to get meat.
- akgerber 9y agoEating non-animal foods and producing meat (muscle) inside your body.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jriot 9y agoIt is far more efficient to eat animals and produce muscle. There aren't many world renowned athletes who are vegan for obvious reasons.
- marcc 9y agoWill you elaborate on the obvious reasons? Pretend they aren't obvious to me. I'm interested in reading more about athletic advantages gained from consuming meat. Is there a reason that other sources of protein aren't giving the same benefit?
- sebringj 9y ago"I've been a fan cannibalism for all my life but was never able to participate fully in it, for legal reasons. Maybe they'll start growing human meat and I can finally be myself without having to murder people!" That hypothetical could happen if they start perfecting musculature scaffolding as a very odd side effect. Sorry, just sayin.
- tartuffe78 9y agoArthur C. Clarke has a short story that touches on this idea "The Food of the Gods"
- plopz 9y agoJust be careful to avoid Kuru.
- drspacemonkey 9y agoI was under the impression that kuru was a prion disease that comes from eating brain matter. Was I wrong about that?
- Jemmeh 9y agoI'm pretty sure I've actually seen fake human meat in some documentary at some point. I'd google it but at work I'd probably be put on a very special list.
- burke 9y agoI wonder whether it would carry an increased risk of disease transmission. Could a factory worker with influenza infect "human meat" and transmit it to consumers in a way that wouldn't be possible with non-human animal tissue? This is probably a big part of the reason we have such a strong gut aversion to cannibalism.
- Mizza 9y agoI think humanity should be spending about 5 to 6 orders of magnitude more money on investment in this space. It's seriously one of the most important, if not the most important, challenge that we currently face as a species. Does anybody have any more information about the company's specific technology here? I've done some research into this space, and the big blocker at the moment is the use of Fetal Bovine Serum which is used to "grow" the meat. FBS is exactly what it sounds like, so it's not a huge victory to make lab grown meat if it requires liquid-cow-baby to actually grow. A plant-based FBS replacement would be the holy grail for this industry. Some companies have claimed to have done it but nobody has actually publicly demonstrated it yet. If there are any investors out there looking to make an impactful investment in this space, please invest heavily into solving the FBS problem. EDIT: From SuperMeat's FAQ: > Does clean meat contain animal products? > One of SuperMeat's purposes is to produce meat products without having to resort to ongoing animal use. SuperMeat has developed a unique technology that will make that happen, without having to use animal serum or other animal ingredients. So, they are claiming to have solved the serum problem, which is good. Others have also made this claim, but so far nobody has had a public demonstration, let alone actually create a commercial product, so this is still vapourware. Still, I wish them luck.
- greggeter 9y agoWe need to just start growing and harvesting bugs for basic protein. These lab meats do not contain all of the same nutrients and to repeat another commenter, what measures must be taken to extract everything that's in meat to begin with?
- greggeter 9y agoAs long as I will be allowed to continue buying/raising natural meat, let the LabMeat wars begin!
- mikestew 9y agoI don't know why companies didn't start with chicken in the first place. A lab-grown steak? Yeah, good luck competing against the real thing (and as a vegetarian, I hope they do). But chicken? I grew up on chicken before factory farming, and then as an adult wondered why I didn't like chicken much anymore. It occurred to me that factory farming has bred all the taste out of it, in exchange for other features. (And I'm open to the idea that my tastes just changed, and chicken is just as delicious as it always was.) In summary, in the case of chicken it might not be as hard to beat the "real thing". (Though in my book, the "real thing" picks through grass for its food and spends its days running around a barnyard. That might be hard to compete with.)
- tlb 9y agoI tried an Impossible Burger last week, and it was very good. I could not distinguish it from good beef. It's plant protein with heme, a sort of lab-grown blood. A few places in the Bay Area now serve them. Worth trying. I think fake meat is having an electric car moment, where there is suddenly a product every bit as good as the previous technology, just more expensive. When the price comes down, real meat will seem gratuitously cruel and unsustainable.
- xkcd-sucks 9y agoIs there any indication that the "lab-grown" tissue is really produced without animal products? Most mammalian cell culture requires "serum," the non-cellular fraction of blood from a similar critter which contains a pretty complex mixture of growth factors, hormones etc. plus other proteiny things like collagen. Serum-free cell culture is tricky in well characterized cell lines, and "meat" is tissue culture from cells which is tricky in itself, at production scale which is also tricky by itself. For context, pharma companies manufacturing biologics at scale do use animal serum in cultures despite animal products being a vector for contamination issues which have literally killed successful pharma companies. Also, cell culture requires antibiotics much more than animal farming requires antibiotics, so don't expect "ethical" tissue culture groups to voluntarily minimize antibiotic usage any more than farmers do tl;dr cells grown in labs like to eat animal products and other things that people consider unethical Edit: If you can grow realistic muscle tissue at feeding-people scale you've accomplished something much bigger than "ethical meat." If you're just producing animal cells-- basically textureless slime-- it would be more ethical to process existing waste meat into a palatable form aka rebranding "pink slime" as "recycled meat" or something.
- omarforgotpwd 9y agoEveryone is focusing on the "ethical" issue of killing animals but in fact I think this issue does not matter to the majority of the global meat market. Instead I think the ecological factors (greenhouse gas emissions from meat production) and economic factors (could theoretically be cheaper, easier to manage, and more efficient than a farm) will be the primary drivers here. Also, funny to imagine someone walking into a16z with just a piece of chicken and walking out with a $3 million check.