10 ms·

No-kill, lab-grown meat to go on sale for first time

113 points by jger15 6y ago

Tepix 6y ago
"but Eat Just said it would ultimately be cheaper" That would be amazing. Looking at the prices for vegetarian and vegan meat substitutes, I can't see it happening. : They are more expensive than meat. It appears that we need a lot more competition in these markets.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  If the technology works and is safe, it would be a good point to gently start boiling the frog with taxes. Cattle farming is not good for the environment.
  - galbar 6y ago
    Are you suggesting increasing the price for everyone? You'd remove the incentives to choose one over the other but less people will be able to eat. That's dangerous. More over, you'd remove the new tech's incentive to become cheaper. I think cheaper food is always better for everyone.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      The point is to make the nu-meat more attractive, so that it gets a head start. The adoption rate will be dependant on its image i.e. how many people eat it. Ideally it should scale a lot better than the real stuff.
  - ichbinwiederda 6y ago
    That would be cruel and unethical because it would be very regressive.
    - ryan_j_naughton 6y ago
      You're ignoring that the externality of meat consumption is massive environmental harm, which disproportionately affects the poor (at least in the case of climate change). Pricing in the negative externalities of meat is the best way to address this, which has a started goal of reducing the consumption of environmentally harmful meat. It enables meat that is sustainable to be priced competitively and to shift consumption, but we should be very honest -- the goal of any pigouvian tax is to reduce the consumption of the harmful product. Thus, meat should become more of a luxury, which means yes, it would be less accessible to the poor. But with billions becoming richer and demanding more meat consumption, the path we are on is entirely unsustainable.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      Only if the lab-grown meat had no prospect of becoming cheaper. Farming is expensive. The aim is only to nudge the scale rather than tax the farmed meat out of existence.
  - wlesieutre 6y ago
    The meat and dairy industries are heavily subsidized, so not even taxes. Take subsidies away and stop artificially underpricing it. If we want to make sure meat products stay available in large quantities to everyone so you can have bacon for breakfast, a sandwich with deli slices for lunch, and a burger for dinner every day, you can take that subsidy money and put it toward lab grown meat instead. Personally I'd like to see some of it redirected to vegetables though. Cheap meat and expensive vegetables isn't the ideal outcome even if it comes from the lab.
    - wincy 6y ago
      I’d be fine with this if we eliminate corn, wheat, and soy subsidies. As far as I’m concerned these products are poison and responsible for the American obesity epidemic.
      - mhh__ 6y ago
        [Citation needed]? For the soy at least. The issue is really eating processed crap off the shelves than the ingredients as per se, e.g. does any get obese from fresh pasta?
  - wincy 6y ago
    How do we know if it’s safe? What if in 20 years we realize we’ve given everyone mad cow disease or some other slow acting wasting disease because of lab grown meat? I would be extremely concerned about ingesting these products.
parsimo2010 6y ago
I will be interested to see how this scales over time. Most of the world doesn't really care if their meat is cruelty-free (not enough to pay extra for it), but I think they'll move to lab grown meat if it has other benefits. Conventional livestock farming takes a lot of work to ensure that the food supply is safe (sanitation and testing), and I assume that lab grown meat has a natural advantage in this area. I would love if lab grown meat had a guarantee of less bacteria so I could cook my meat less. I would also love it if lab grown meat had customizable texture and fat content. That's stuff I'd pay extra money to have. Once the premium products see wide distribution I assume that a cheaper grade will become available.
- tengbretson 6y ago
  > Most of the world doesn't really care if their meat is cruelty-free I don't think most of the world views animal husbandry as having inherent cruelty in the first place.
  - omginternets 6y ago
    Agree. This is a very West-coast American mentality. Frankly, the majority of the country doesn't see it that way, let alone the rest of the world. And one often finds that the relationship to food is different outside of the US. It's somehow less of a commodity and more of a meaningful tradition. You'll be hard-pressed to convince Frenchmen to let go of Limousin beef, for example, and in a manner that's markedly different from Texans defending their meat.
    - Majestic121 6y ago
      Vegetarianism is growing in other parts of the world, like France, and for much of the same reason as in the American West Coast. While you're right that there might be more attachment to 'traditional' and overall high quality meat, there's still a big movement for cruelty free meat as you can see by the impact of associations like L214 for example, or the fact that there was an increase of 25% for the vegetarian market in 2018
pmoriarty 6y ago
"The growth medium for the Singapore production line includes foetal bovine serum, which is extracted from foetal blood, but this is largely removed before consumption." As a vegetarian, I have to wonder who the target market for this is. Meat substitutes that don't use any animal cells whatsoever have existed for a long time, and many of them are pretty convincing, and even when they're not they often delicious in their own right. It's cheese that I find to be the last great frontier as far as substitutes go. There just isn't even a remotely passible substitute for many cheeses.
- dnissley 6y ago
  Most existing meat substitutes don't match the nutritional profile of meat very well (and even if they do, there are differences between how well animal proteins/fats are made use of by the body compared to plant proteins/fats) and overall are just incredibly processed foods with long ingredient lists full of questionable substances, so that's the draw for me personally.
- bun_at_work 6y ago
  The target market will be people who want to eat real meat. Not everyone is convinced that being vegetarian is an option for them, and they don't have to be so convinced with this option.
- dustinmoris 6y ago
  > It's cheese that I find to be the last great frontier as far as substitutes go. There just isn't even a remotely passible substitute for many cheeses. 99% vegetarian, 1% pescatarian here and I agree with your statement, but I'd add milk and eggs to that list. There is no substitute for eggs at the moment AFAIK and despite many probably pointing me to all the oat/nut/soy milk replacements none of them comes even close to real milk for me. I can tolerate a bit of oat milk with my coffee every now and then, but can't have a bowl of cereal with milk substitutes. Just doesn't taste right. Also I'm concerned about the much higher glucose intake from oat milks than real milk.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
OneGuy123 6y ago
This will be horrible. Natural meat gets tons of micronutrients through many different processes in the animal in it that this artifical meat never can unless they can 100% mimic an entire animal, which well, means that they would have to grow an entire animal... You cannot just "add some zinc here and there" and pretend that it's ok. This will lead to severe micronutrient deficiencies, just protein is far from enough. Anyone who says this is a good food product is an idiot, there is no nice way to say this. In fact the term idiot as a way to mild term for this kind of a person. To belive you can give & match all the required delicate balance of nutrients in lab grown meat compared to real meat is beyond stupid.
- User23 6y ago
  Would one or more of the downvoters be willing to actually answer these claims? I'm not a subject matter expert, but like everyone I have an interest in good nutrition. The micronutrient claim appears prima facie plausible. Even whole organism food like vegetables is poorer in micronutrients today than it was in generations past. To some extent this is already a problem with real meat, because almost nobody in the USA eats organ meat and it's particularly rich in micronutrients.
  - OneGuy123 6y ago
    They don't have any: it just goes to show you that people still think that all you need are carbs, protein and fats and you're good to go. This belief is what caused the food to get so depleted in all micronutrients in the 1st place: because people aren't aware how important they are -> they don't care about them -> no one enforces rules for food quality in the micronutrients department -> food quality goes to shit over time.
    - bun_at_work 6y ago
      What makes you think no one cares about micronutrients in food, or that no rules for food quality are enforced? White rice in the US is required by law to be enriched [1]. The FDA heavily regulates food in the US, leading to some of the highest quality food in the world. Perhaps you don't live in the US. If you do live in the US, I highly recommend taking some time to learn about the things you talk about in online forums. Spreading BS around isn't helpful for anyone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rice
bun_at_work 6y ago
I'm very hopeful that this becomes the norm. Even if it's hard to adopt for individuals, I imagine McDonalds would jump at the opportunity to use lab grown meat for their products, should it be actually cheaper. The benefits of this tech are potentially massive!
omginternets 6y ago
I sometimes get called a luddite, but I am honestly quite pessimistic about lab-grown meat. It seems like not that long ago we thought to "hack" unsaturated fats in order to give them a buttery texture. Fast-forward 20 years and it turns out biological systems are unimaginably complex, and trans-fats are quite probably inflammatory agents and carcinogens. There's always some risk in innovation, but it seems like synthetic nutrition is an absolute minefield. It's not just the raw complexity of the field, either. It's also that much of nutrition is junk science, even in the peer-reviewed literature. On a more conspirational note, I also can't help but to notice that the agro-dietary industry is a pretty low-margin business. It seems like driving up profit margins requires convincing people that existing foods are somehow unsuitable, and that "innovative" products are therefore needed. I think vegan and ecological sensibilities are being instrumentalized to this end. In any case: this anonymous internet stranger plans on skipping the lab-meat fad.
- st1x7 6y ago
  I get being sceptical. But "a different food technology turned out to be harmful so this one must be the same" - that's a bad argument.
  - basman 6y ago
    Also a bad argument: rephrasing GP's "We don't know enough to be sure this is safe" as "This is definitely unsafe".
    - allannienhuis 6y ago
      However, a sibling comment makes a really good point - that's exactly how we treat pharmaceuticals. We don't allow consumption (except in dire cases) until the product is proven safe (with a very conservative definition of proven safe). One could argue we should have the same approach with foods - the health food supplement industry has had a lot of criticism for not having enough controls. 'artificial food' of this sort seems like it should be in a similar category.
  - 6y ago
LinuxBender 6y ago
Is there a breakdown of the amino acid and nutrient profile of this material?
- astura 6y ago
  The breakdown of the amino acids and nutrition profile are the same as chicken because it's actually chicken, not a chicken substitute.
  - LinuxBender 6y ago
    Nice. Chicken is healthy. I was going to raise rabbits due to their ability to produce more protein than a cow (per year). If there is a document that details how I can safely grow chicken or rabbit cells myself, then I won't need to raise animals. My goal being to not depend on businesses. a.k.a. homesteading. I am open to creating my own home lab.
skyzyx 6y ago
I can’t help but think about that episode from “Better Off Ted“ where they do this exact same thing.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
billpg 6y ago
Cool. Maybe do milk next? Right now, we use unskilled labor (cows) to perform chemical reactions with biomass (grass) to produce milk. I find it surprising that we can't do the same but significantly cheaper and cleaner with vats. I'm not talking about plant substitutes like oat or almond extracts, I mean actual milk that's produced using the same process that cows perform internally.
- lm28469 6y ago
  > we use unskilled labor A machine that transforms grass to milk sounds extremely skilled to me.
alpple 6y ago
I think people confuse having state of the art knowledge of nutrition with knowing how all of nutrition works. There may be good arguements that this is safe, but history will decide that.
cpeterso 6y ago
> The cells used to start the process came from a cell bank and did not require the slaughter of a chicken because cells can be taken from biopsies of live animals. I wonder how many different chickens they sampled from the cell bank. Does their entire product trace back to a single "Eve" chicken sample from the cell bank? For comparison, I read (in "Diet for a New America", I believe) that one ground beef hamburger includes cells from about one thousand different cows. If they just need cell samples, I wonder how different the process would be to grow human meat in a lab. There might be a niche novelty market for "human burgers"!

113 points by jger15 6y ago

"but Eat Just said it would ultimately be cheaper" That would be amazing. Looking at the prices for vegetarian and vegan meat substitutes, I can't see it happening. : They are more expensive than meat. It appears that we need a lot more competition in these markets.

mhh__ 6y ago
If the technology works and is safe, it would be a good point to gently start boiling the frog with taxes. Cattle farming is not good for the environment.
- galbar 6y ago
  Are you suggesting increasing the price for everyone? You'd remove the incentives to choose one over the other but less people will be able to eat. That's dangerous. More over, you'd remove the new tech's incentive to become cheaper. I think cheaper food is always better for everyone.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    The point is to make the nu-meat more attractive, so that it gets a head start. The adoption rate will be dependant on its image i.e. how many people eat it. Ideally it should scale a lot better than the real stuff.
- ichbinwiederda 6y ago
  That would be cruel and unethical because it would be very regressive.
  - ryan_j_naughton 6y ago
    You're ignoring that the externality of meat consumption is massive environmental harm, which disproportionately affects the poor (at least in the case of climate change). Pricing in the negative externalities of meat is the best way to address this, which has a started goal of reducing the consumption of environmentally harmful meat. It enables meat that is sustainable to be priced competitively and to shift consumption, but we should be very honest -- the goal of any pigouvian tax is to reduce the consumption of the harmful product. Thus, meat should become more of a luxury, which means yes, it would be less accessible to the poor. But with billions becoming richer and demanding more meat consumption, the path we are on is entirely unsustainable.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Only if the lab-grown meat had no prospect of becoming cheaper. Farming is expensive. The aim is only to nudge the scale rather than tax the farmed meat out of existence.
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  The meat and dairy industries are heavily subsidized, so not even taxes. Take subsidies away and stop artificially underpricing it. If we want to make sure meat products stay available in large quantities to everyone so you can have bacon for breakfast, a sandwich with deli slices for lunch, and a burger for dinner every day, you can take that subsidy money and put it toward lab grown meat instead. Personally I'd like to see some of it redirected to vegetables though. Cheap meat and expensive vegetables isn't the ideal outcome even if it comes from the lab.
  - wincy 6y ago
    I’d be fine with this if we eliminate corn, wheat, and soy subsidies. As far as I’m concerned these products are poison and responsible for the American obesity epidemic.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      [Citation needed]? For the soy at least. The issue is really eating processed crap off the shelves than the ingredients as per se, e.g. does any get obese from fresh pasta?
- wincy 6y ago
  How do we know if it’s safe? What if in 20 years we realize we’ve given everyone mad cow disease or some other slow acting wasting disease because of lab grown meat? I would be extremely concerned about ingesting these products.

parsimo2010 6y ago

I will be interested to see how this scales over time. Most of the world doesn't really care if their meat is cruelty-free (not enough to pay extra for it), but I think they'll move to lab grown meat if it has other benefits. Conventional livestock farming takes a lot of work to ensure that the food supply is safe (sanitation and testing), and I assume that lab grown meat has a natural advantage in this area. I would love if lab grown meat had a guarantee of less bacteria so I could cook my meat less. I would also love it if lab grown meat had customizable texture and fat content. That's stuff I'd pay extra money to have. Once the premium products see wide distribution I assume that a cheaper grade will become available.

tengbretson 6y ago
> Most of the world doesn't really care if their meat is cruelty-free I don't think most of the world views animal husbandry as having inherent cruelty in the first place.
- omginternets 6y ago
  Agree. This is a very West-coast American mentality. Frankly, the majority of the country doesn't see it that way, let alone the rest of the world. And one often finds that the relationship to food is different outside of the US. It's somehow less of a commodity and more of a meaningful tradition. You'll be hard-pressed to convince Frenchmen to let go of Limousin beef, for example, and in a manner that's markedly different from Texans defending their meat.
  - Majestic121 6y ago
    Vegetarianism is growing in other parts of the world, like France, and for much of the same reason as in the American West Coast. While you're right that there might be more attachment to 'traditional' and overall high quality meat, there's still a big movement for cruelty free meat as you can see by the impact of associations like L214 for example, or the fact that there was an increase of 25% for the vegetarian market in 2018

pmoriarty 6y ago

"The growth medium for the Singapore production line includes foetal bovine serum, which is extracted from foetal blood, but this is largely removed before consumption." As a vegetarian, I have to wonder who the target market for this is. Meat substitutes that don't use any animal cells whatsoever have existed for a long time, and many of them are pretty convincing, and even when they're not they often delicious in their own right. It's cheese that I find to be the last great frontier as far as substitutes go. There just isn't even a remotely passible substitute for many cheeses.

dnissley 6y ago
Most existing meat substitutes don't match the nutritional profile of meat very well (and even if they do, there are differences between how well animal proteins/fats are made use of by the body compared to plant proteins/fats) and overall are just incredibly processed foods with long ingredient lists full of questionable substances, so that's the draw for me personally.
bun_at_work 6y ago
The target market will be people who want to eat real meat. Not everyone is convinced that being vegetarian is an option for them, and they don't have to be so convinced with this option.
dustinmoris 6y ago
> It's cheese that I find to be the last great frontier as far as substitutes go. There just isn't even a remotely passible substitute for many cheeses. 99% vegetarian, 1% pescatarian here and I agree with your statement, but I'd add milk and eggs to that list. There is no substitute for eggs at the moment AFAIK and despite many probably pointing me to all the oat/nut/soy milk replacements none of them comes even close to real milk for me. I can tolerate a bit of oat milk with my coffee every now and then, but can't have a bowl of cereal with milk substitutes. Just doesn't taste right. Also I'm concerned about the much higher glucose intake from oat milks than real milk.
- pmoriarty 6y ago

OneGuy123 6y ago

This will be horrible. Natural meat gets tons of micronutrients through many different processes in the animal in it that this artifical meat never can unless they can 100% mimic an entire animal, which well, means that they would have to grow an entire animal... You cannot just "add some zinc here and there" and pretend that it's ok. This will lead to severe micronutrient deficiencies, just protein is far from enough. Anyone who says this is a good food product is an idiot, there is no nice way to say this. In fact the term idiot as a way to mild term for this kind of a person. To belive you can give & match all the required delicate balance of nutrients in lab grown meat compared to real meat is beyond stupid.

User23 6y ago
Would one or more of the downvoters be willing to actually answer these claims? I'm not a subject matter expert, but like everyone I have an interest in good nutrition. The micronutrient claim appears prima facie plausible. Even whole organism food like vegetables is poorer in micronutrients today than it was in generations past. To some extent this is already a problem with real meat, because almost nobody in the USA eats organ meat and it's particularly rich in micronutrients.
- OneGuy123 6y ago
  They don't have any: it just goes to show you that people still think that all you need are carbs, protein and fats and you're good to go. This belief is what caused the food to get so depleted in all micronutrients in the 1st place: because people aren't aware how important they are -> they don't care about them -> no one enforces rules for food quality in the micronutrients department -> food quality goes to shit over time.
  - bun_at_work 6y ago
    What makes you think no one cares about micronutrients in food, or that no rules for food quality are enforced? White rice in the US is required by law to be enriched [1]. The FDA heavily regulates food in the US, leading to some of the highest quality food in the world. Perhaps you don't live in the US. If you do live in the US, I highly recommend taking some time to learn about the things you talk about in online forums. Spreading BS around isn't helpful for anyone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rice

bun_at_work 6y ago

I'm very hopeful that this becomes the norm. Even if it's hard to adopt for individuals, I imagine McDonalds would jump at the opportunity to use lab grown meat for their products, should it be actually cheaper. The benefits of this tech are potentially massive!

omginternets 6y ago

I sometimes get called a luddite, but I am honestly quite pessimistic about lab-grown meat. It seems like not that long ago we thought to "hack" unsaturated fats in order to give them a buttery texture. Fast-forward 20 years and it turns out biological systems are unimaginably complex, and trans-fats are quite probably inflammatory agents and carcinogens. There's always some risk in innovation, but it seems like synthetic nutrition is an absolute minefield. It's not just the raw complexity of the field, either. It's also that much of nutrition is junk science, even in the peer-reviewed literature. On a more conspirational note, I also can't help but to notice that the agro-dietary industry is a pretty low-margin business. It seems like driving up profit margins requires convincing people that existing foods are somehow unsuitable, and that "innovative" products are therefore needed. I think vegan and ecological sensibilities are being instrumentalized to this end. In any case: this anonymous internet stranger plans on skipping the lab-meat fad.

st1x7 6y ago
I get being sceptical. But "a different food technology turned out to be harmful so this one must be the same" - that's a bad argument.
- basman 6y ago
  Also a bad argument: rephrasing GP's "We don't know enough to be sure this is safe" as "This is definitely unsafe".
  - allannienhuis 6y ago
    However, a sibling comment makes a really good point - that's exactly how we treat pharmaceuticals. We don't allow consumption (except in dire cases) until the product is proven safe (with a very conservative definition of proven safe). One could argue we should have the same approach with foods - the health food supplement industry has had a lot of criticism for not having enough controls. 'artificial food' of this sort seems like it should be in a similar category.
- 6y ago

LinuxBender 6y ago

Is there a breakdown of the amino acid and nutrient profile of this material?

astura 6y ago
The breakdown of the amino acids and nutrition profile are the same as chicken because it's actually chicken, not a chicken substitute.
- LinuxBender 6y ago
  Nice. Chicken is healthy. I was going to raise rabbits due to their ability to produce more protein than a cow (per year). If there is a document that details how I can safely grow chicken or rabbit cells myself, then I won't need to raise animals. My goal being to not depend on businesses. a.k.a. homesteading. I am open to creating my own home lab.

skyzyx 6y ago

I can’t help but think about that episode from “Better Off Ted“ where they do this exact same thing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

billpg 6y ago

Cool. Maybe do milk next? Right now, we use unskilled labor (cows) to perform chemical reactions with biomass (grass) to produce milk. I find it surprising that we can't do the same but significantly cheaper and cleaner with vats. I'm not talking about plant substitutes like oat or almond extracts, I mean actual milk that's produced using the same process that cows perform internally.

lm28469 6y ago
> we use unskilled labor A machine that transforms grass to milk sounds extremely skilled to me.

alpple 6y ago

I think people confuse having state of the art knowledge of nutrition with knowing how all of nutrition works. There may be good arguements that this is safe, but history will decide that.

cpeterso 6y ago

> The cells used to start the process came from a cell bank and did not require the slaughter of a chicken because cells can be taken from biopsies of live animals. I wonder how many different chickens they sampled from the cell bank. Does their entire product trace back to a single "Eve" chicken sample from the cell bank? For comparison, I read (in "Diet for a New America", I believe) that one ground beef hamburger includes cells from about one thousand different cows. If they just need cell samples, I wonder how different the process would be to grow human meat in a lab. There might be a niche novelty market for "human burgers"!