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Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

266 points by zuhayeer 6y ago

1MachineElf 6y ago
My girlfriend and I have both spent years working in Sushi restaurants, and judging by those pictures alone, this "salmon" falls short of our fat requirement. I.e., it's kind of lean looking. We'd try it even at the high price point, but only if they come up with a fatty "salmon belly" edition.
- canucker2016 6y ago
  I would have expected that lack of colouring as well for lab-grown salmon meat. Wild salmon meat gets its pink shade from eating krill/shrimp according to https://qz.com/358811/heres-why-your-farmed-salmon-has-color-added-to-it/ https://qz.com/358811/heres-why-your-farmed-salmon-has-color... Farmed salmon doesn't get enough krill/shrimp so the farmers have to add colouring to the farmed-salmon diet to get something close to the colour of wild salmon. see previous qz.com link. At least you won't have to worry about microplastics in the lab-grown salmon meat. see https://www.ecowatch.com/are-microplastics-in-your-salmon-filet-1882083719.html https://www.ecowatch.com/are-microplastics-in-your-salmon-fi...
  - 1MachineElf 6y ago
    I understand that wild salmon and farmed salmon are vastly different in appearance, texture, taste, smell, and provenance. Wild is considered to be the healthiest by a lot of measures. Yes, I even remember the "microplastics in your fish" submissions here on HN. I've mentioned that I've worked at sushi bars, including ones offering wild-caught salmon, even with pamphlets at the counters advertising the virtues of wild caught over farm-raised. You are preaching to the choir here. :) >I would have expected that lack of colouring as well for lab-grown salmon meat. In my comment, I wasn't referring to lack of coloring. I was referring to lack of fat. In fact, more fat means less color overall, and I'm saying that's desirable. Why? Because in my experience, wild-caught salmon sushi doesn't sell as well, even in areas where patrons have higher than average disposable income and higher than average health consciousness. This is the same issue you often see with grass-fed steaks vs. industrial steaks. Grass-fed steak is healthier for you by a lot of measures, and depending on your pallette, tastes better. I love my grass-fed steak. (I love my BeyondMeat and Impossible Burgers too.) But many people find it to be too "gamy" and that includes the handful of chefs I know. They aren't putting it on menus. Most people are unaware that "grass-fed" beef is actually "finished" on grain instead of grass in order to offset what would be and even more gamy taste than they're getting. Now, I'm not saying that wild-caught salmon is gamy, but it does have a distinct taste, and is comparatively lean. Farmed salmon is like that dramatically marbled USDA prime steak. It's practically a different fish, it's a less healthy fish, and arguably a less ethical fish too, but it's what people most often choose. Imagine two ham and cheese sandwiches, but only one has mayo. Even people who think they don't want fattening mayo still prefer the sandwich with mayo. There are more analogies I could give with butter or lard or beef tallow. I don't need to prove this, just look at Paula Deen. Wildtype, as the name implies, and as the pictures indicate to the discerning eye, is trying to me more like wild-caught salmon. There's a niche for salmon sushi rolls, a sub-niche for wild-caught salmon rolls, and a sub-sub-niche for people who want a lab-grown version of that. The point of my earlier comment is that I would rather see them target a market that's one less level of niche deep, and that's the theoretical holy-grail marbled looking high-fat farmed-style "USDA Prime" kind of lab-grown salmon, which I would rather eat, and I expect most other customers would rather eat too. I just want to finish this comment with a disclaimer that I in no way mean to belittle the pioneering folks behind Wildtype, nor disparage any health, environmental, or ethically focused enthusiasts here who are really excited about this. It is exciting and great that Wildtype and other companies like this are doing what they do. I feel that it's important to say it, because my previous comment seemed to have struck a nerve, and that wasn't my intention.
roadnottaken 6y ago
Bullshit
posterboy 6y ago
"sushi-grade" sounds like "fantastic" or any other not leverageable marketing promise. The cells I suppose must be stem cells, induced with some solution to grow into a homogenous mass of soft tissue. I'm very confused about this. Why just gimme the nutrient solution.
- vangelis 6y ago
  Sushi-grade isn't a thing! It's marketing. I also doubt this follows the FDA rules for flash freezing that sushi grade implies given the lack of risk for parasites.
  - elhudy 6y ago
    Sushi-grade IS a thing with real fish. It means the meat has been inspected for parasites or frozen to kill them.
    - rileytg 6y ago
      Unfortunately there is no enforcement of that. People often consider "sushi grade" what you've described but there isn't any official rating like there is for wines or beef. Source: ex-commercial fishmonger
      - elhudy 6y ago
        FDA guidelines dictate that fish sold for raw consumption must be frozen under one of the following conditions to kill parasites: -4°F (-20°C) or below for 7 days (total time) -31°F (-35°C) or below until solid, and storing at -31°F (-35°C) or below for 15 hours -31°F (-35°C) or below until solid and storing at -4°F (-20°C) or below for 24 hours Whether or not this is enforced is another thing, but the absurdly low rates of sickness from sushi in the US are testament to the fact that companies are probably trying to protect consumers from the hazards of eating their raw fish. With ground beef recalls left and right, we fortunately live in an age of avoiding large-scale liability.
    - 6y ago
BrianOnHN 6y ago
What are their methods? Does this make $100/lb salmon?
- jvalencia 6y ago
  "The sample of salmon cells served up in Portland cost $200 per sushi roll (six pieces)." https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-faux-fish-coming-to-a-restaurant-near-you/ https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-faux-fish-coming-...
  - monocasa 6y ago
    That's pretty damn good for an 0.1 release with no economies of scale.
    - FredPret 6y ago
      We’re having Salmon v0.1 for lunch. Welcome to the future!
- WillPostForFood 6y ago
  For reference, fresh, wild, King Salmon, which is only available at certain times of the the year (depends on your state/country), can be $30 a pound or more. At $100 or $200 a pound, they don't have that far to go to be in the ballpark.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I could see people paying that sort of money for 4 ounces of nigiri in some endangered species. Cruelty free blue fin tuna, anyone?
miketery 6y ago
Very cool. Any estimate on current or target costs? If this is possible efficiently would help reduce destructive commercial fishing practices (just watched seaspiracy...).
f430 6y ago
looks like another Beyond Meat style pump & dump
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  Wait, Beyond meat is one of the main meat substitutes making the rounds alongside Impossible burgers, right? If I'm not mixing up my names, what makes it a pump and dump?
  - danhak 6y ago
    It seems like the discourse has shifted to describe even legitimate businesses that are overvalued in the opinion of an author as "pump and dump" or "ponzi scheme"
    - bradleyjg 6y ago
      It’s maybe not entirely accurate, but it seems at least in the ballpark of a reasonable description for a public company that’s never made money and has no legible path to making money. That said, it looks Beyond Meat made money in two quarters last year. So not a good fit on those criteria.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - f430 6y ago
        > It’s maybe not entirely accurate, but it seems at least in the ballpark of a reasonable description for a public company that’s never made money and has no legible path to making money. Which is the whole point of YC. IPO over valued companies and dump it on the retailers while cashing out your chips. Never mind the structural dangers cheap capital pose when the cycle winds down.
  - ampdepolymerase 6y ago
    There is debate about whether their technology is truly novel or whether it is just hype as soy protein based food manufacturing is not exactly new. Their most important technological achievement appears to be the artificial heme that they were able to source from a plant origin.
jvalencia 6y ago
Yes, but how does it taste?
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  It's easier to overlook taste than price.
  - idiotsecant 6y ago
    Depends who your target audience is. I imagine the audience for extremely expensive and hard to obtain artifically grown sushi with decent taste is probably bigger than the market for, say, extremely expensive and hard to obtain artificially grown hotdog meat with decent taste.
aaaaaadsfscxva 6y ago
Incredible!
- aaaaaadsfscxva 6y ago
  indeed
nickthemagicman 6y ago
There's a number of pictures of the final sushi product.. but I couldn't find pictures of the actual salmon that was created in the laboratory or pictures/explanations of the lab process.
vessenes 6y ago
Boy I really wish I knew more about the science here. I can't tell if it's yucky, so they don't discuss it, or if it's vapor, so they don't discuss it. That said, their photo looks like something I would at least taste! Matrix-grown meat seems to me like something that will have its place in the world, especially if the net environmental impact is favorable. So, Wild Type: more details, yo.
- tyingq 6y ago
  It's a year old, and probably not exactly what you're asking for, but a NYT article on the product: https://archive.is/2vdTu https://archive.is/2vdTu They seem to be heavily implying stem cells: “The cells know what to do,” Mr. Elfenbein said. “They become muscle fibers. They become fat tissue. They create the connective tissue that we know as meat.”
- WillPostForFood 6y ago
  The photo on their website looks amazing, with perfect fatty stripes. Photos from one of their early tastings in 2019 didn't look so good. Mostly chopped up, and larger pieces didn't seem to have the fatty layers. https://i0.wp.com/thespoon.tech/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/wildtype_salmon2.jpeg https://i0.wp.com/thespoon.tech/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/w... It makes me question if the salmon in the photos on their website is really lab grown. If so, it is quite an achievement.
  - michaelmior 6y ago
    I was thinking the same thing. It's really unclear if the photos are their own product or just supposed to represent good salmon in general.
  - saxonww 6y ago
    I had a different reaction on seeing it. Yes, it has the striped pattern, but the texture looks completely wrong. Compare their image now with e.g. https://i.redd.it/12cdw2wb55p01.jpg https://i.redd.it/12cdw2wb55p01.jpg. It's superficially similar; the 'early tasting' picture you link to looks _better_ from a texture perspective, to me. That doesn't mean it's not tasty, but I would not choose this over the real thing (traditional preparation? idk).
californical 6y ago
The possibilities with this are so exciting, as someone who eats a vegetarian diet due to environmental and moral concerns with the meat industry. It appears on their website that this is real & ready to sell. I thought large-scale lab-grown meat was still 10-20 years in the future... Does anyone know the pricing? I didn’t see anything on their website, but I feel like it must be expensive. Also, did they pick salmon because it’s easier than other meat types for some reason?
- tymekpavel 6y ago
  See the comments below - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905472 ~$200 for a 6-piece sushi roll.
  - marricks 6y ago
    Ok, well that's way less than thousands of dollars so it's a start! Not to mention, they probably haven't realized the economies of scale yet at all.
    - intricatedetail 6y ago
      Exactly. Also if you decided to go on a boat and catch one yourself that easily could end up in thousands...
  - robotpony 6y ago
    That's less bad than I thought the early pricing would be (and isn't far from the highest end sushi I've seen around the west coast here).
    - ac29 6y ago
      Its an order of magnitude higher than traditional salmon nigiri would cost though ($2-3/piece in a restaurant).
      - 6y ago
toddh 6y ago
No mention of the nutritional value. Which is my concern with Beyond Meat as well. It's great that it's not meat from factory farming POV, but it's not nutritious food either.
- rednerrus 6y ago
  Beyond meat isn't lab grown animal cells, right? This is actual salmon.
  - lprubin 6y ago
    Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat are imitation meat made with plants, aka "Meat Substitutes". This company is what's known as "Lab Grown Meat" where the end result is basically meat at the molecular level. So theoretically this will have a very similar nutritional profile to farmed or caught salmon. At least thats one of the goals of the lab grown meat sector. It fact, it might even have a better nutritional profile because it won't be exposed to ocean contaminants like mercury and plastic.
- DeepYogurt 6y ago
  Which is fine as far as I'm concerned. We live in a world of nutrition surplus not deficit
  - jfengel 6y ago
    We have a calorie surplus, certainly. The nutrition content is more complex. It's true that for most people, the main malnutrition is a surplus of calories. If they're deficient in something, it's likely to be dietary fiber, and perhaps vitamin D. Salmon has none of the former, but it would be interesting to know how this stacks up in the latter.
- ch4s3 6y ago
  Why would it have less nutritional value than a slab of muscle cells grown inside of a fish vs cells from that fish induced to grown in a tank?
pelagic_sky 6y ago
I wonder if this scales up to having a larger piece of meat, to make steaks and such. Or is it only good when its "raw" and sliced up real thin.
- avereveard 6y ago
  And the other question is what will the nutrition value be after it gets industrialised for mass production
dang 6y ago
> Join our waitlist How real is this?
dukeofdoom 6y ago
Is it worse to kill something for food, or deny it from ever living? I think personally I think I would prefer to have lived and be killed than not lived at all. I also kind of believe that things have an essence, a soul of sorts. So eating any part of an animal is still repulsive on some level.
- jtolmar 6y ago
  Widespread adoption of this technology would likely lead to more total salmon lives, as wild populations recover.
  - WillPostForFood 6y ago
    This seems non-obvious. How many salmon are farmed vs wild right now? Salmon is already protected and very expensive, so what's the potential for increase in wild population? 2x? 10x? And there would still be demand for "the real thing".
    - Daishiman 6y ago
      Farmed salmon incurs a heavy cost to the environment that surrounds said farms. Demand for real salmon will still be around but it will be a rare delicacy, which is totally OK.
      - WillPostForFood 6y ago
        It wasn't a question about what's the best outcome for the environment. Parent poster claimed, "Widespread adoption of this technology would likely lead to more total salmon lives". Eliminating farmed salmon would be good for he environment, but it reduces the number of salmon lives.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Wild populations might not budge much as long as their historic spawning grounds up estuaries remain scarred by human development.
jtolmar 6y ago
Wonderful! I hope they publish the yucky details, it could be really interesting. Also, I know this will be an industrial process for a long time, but I'm having fun imagining a day where a hobbyist can grow meat cultures at home. Like an advanced version of maintaining a sourdough starter.
- cheese_please 6y ago
  I've got good news for you! The Shojinmeat Project's (https://shojinmeat.com/wordpress/en/ https://shojinmeat.com/wordpress/en/) mission is the "democratization of cellular agriculture." They develop methods for DIY cultured meat (recently someone posted about developing a cell culture medium out of Red Bull). They do have a slack channel, but it's not super active recently. They're pretty active on Twitter though, and their website is a great resource. I would highly encourage you to also check out some of Yuki Hanyu's (founder) talks on YouTube; he's great.
hutzlibu 6y ago
From the landing page, there is this great claim: "the chance to eat the foods we love without sacrificing our food ideals" But not information on how it is produced. So I won't know, whether it really matches my food ideals. I mean, how does it get produced? From real fish stem cells? So still, there needs be dead fish in the process at some point? So how many fish do you need to kill, to produce one portion of sushi? Or can you grow forever, with one batch of stem cells? (probably not I guess) Without knowing this and about what else is involved in the production chain, I really cannot believe such statements.
- cheese_please 6y ago
  I don't know about WildType specifically, but it's not necessarily true that a salmon would need to die at any point in the process. Cells from a simple muscle biopsy could be cultured for this purpose, and a single biopsy may have the potential to produce a great deal of cells depending on the culture conditions. Or they may have developed an immortalized salmon cell line from an initial biopsy that they can proliferate indefinitely (though this leads to questions about genetic drift after a certain number of population doublings; I'm sure they would have a bunch of frozen vials to restart from early passage numbers every few batches though).
  - UglyToad 6y ago
    Plus as a lapsed-vegetarian I'm excited for lab grown meats even if there's an animal killed at some point in the process. It's impossible to choose a food without at least some harm. How many fish are killed by fertilizer runoff or damming for irrigation or whatever else is needed for all forms of agriculture? I'm going to assume a non-zero amount. So my view is the aim with all ethics-based dietary choices with the motivation of avoiding harm to animals is basically to optimize for least animals killed per calorie per 'sentience' unit or whatever. All food choices are inherently non-zero in animal suffering and I don't think it's reasonable to hold lab grown meat to any higher standard.
    - hutzlibu 6y ago
      "All food choices are inherently non-zero in animal suffering and I don't think it's reasonable to hold lab grown meat to any higher standard. " I know. I am not even a vegetarian. (I just have a big problem with the industrial food machine) But if something is advertised as totally ethical, then yes, it should hold to a higher standard.
iamwil 6y ago
As a curiosity and side note, Salmon wasn't always eaten by the Japanese as sushi. It was considered a garbage fish that you'd grill due to its likelihood of being infected by parasites. It was the Norwegians that had a surplus, and was looking for a new market to open up that salmon sushi became a thing. https://medium.com/torodex/salmon-sushi-is-not-a-japanese-invention-9189d9cd78b7 https://medium.com/torodex/salmon-sushi-is-not-a-japanese-in... The Norwegians probably won't pay attention to this initially, but will probably come out against it, given that Salmon is at least a chunk of chain for their industries.
- chrismaeda 6y ago
  Yes, I was thinking to myself that 'sushi-grade salmon' was an oxymoron.
  - beaner 6y ago
    Only in japan
  - the_af 6y ago
    Even if salmon wasn't traditionally consumed in sushi by the Japanese, wouldn't the later reversal indicate that, even in Japan, there is such a thing as sushi-grade salmon?
  - viraptor 6y ago
    The way I understand it, it's not the meat that's sushi-grade. It's the way it's preserved / delivered. Basically if you can eat it raw and not let the parasites from salmon grow, then it's sushi-grade. Most commonly that means storing salmon in a freezer which kills the parasites. (think -50C) Here's a decent article https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/05/how-to-prepare-raw-fish-at-home-sushi-sashimi-food-safety.html https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/05/how-to-prepare-raw-fish-...
- ddlatham 6y ago
  As with many interesting topics, there's a great Planet Money episode about this too: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/09/16/440951873/episode-651-the-salmon-taboo https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/09/16/440951873/epis...
woeirua 6y ago
This is a great business model. If they can culture a reasonable enough imitation of salmon then they can certainly do so for other fish that are even more expensive to farm and grow. They only have to come in just under the price of farm grown fish for this to take off like wildfire (which should be easy). This company could be immensely profitable very quickly.
asaph 6y ago
Other companies working on cell-cultured fish: Finless Foods: https://www.finlessfoods.com/ https://www.finlessfoods.com/ BlueNalu: https://www.bluenalu.com/ https://www.bluenalu.com/
- cheese_please 6y ago
  Just wanted to add a few more: avant: https://www.avantmeats.com/ https://www.avantmeats.com/ ShiokMeats: https://shiokmeats.com/ https://shiokmeats.com/ Umami: https://www.umamimeats.com/ https://www.umamimeats.com/ Bluu Biosciences: https://www.bluu.bio/ https://www.bluu.bio/ Cell Ag Tech: https://cellagtech.com/ https://cellagtech.com/ Clean Research: https://cleanresearch.org/ https://cleanresearch.org/ (they do a lot of stuff, but cultured fish is one of the things listed) Cultured Decadence: https://www.cultureddecadence.com/ https://www.cultureddecadence.com/ Please note a few of the companies (italicized) are very young, so their websites don't have much info. I recommend this site for keeping up with which companies are active in the alternative proteins space: https://newprotein.org/ https://newprotein.org/. For cultured meat, click "Alternative Protein V 3.0" and it's in the top left (or just head to page 2 for a more zoomed in view).
raldi 6y ago
What I'm looking forward to is lab-grown meat that improves upon nature. Imagine pigs didn't exist but someone figured out how to make bacon in the lab. What do we not have on this Earth that makes bacon seem like chicken breast? What might we invent that's three levels past otoro?
- Daishiman 6y ago
  Give it a decade and we'll be taking this to a level of customization where we'll be able to select our own level of marbling, connective tissue and water content.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  Be careful what you wish for: people are programmed to like a fat and salt. Fatter salter meats probably aren't as good for you as nice lean salmon... That's without the industrial side of this: meats with built in preservatives and colouring that are actually no good for you but look good and supermarkets will prioritise. I think both GM and lab grown meat suffer from this issue: smart doesn't mean good for you, it means good for the sales person sadly.
  - Symmetry 6y ago
    If the increased tastiness means we eat more of it then it'll be good that the meat is fattier. In terms of macronutrients your body needs a certain amount of fat and a certain amount of protein but not necessarily any carbohydrates. But too much protein can lead to medical problems like gout so ancient hunters who lived off large animal kills tended to prefer the fattier cuts of their kills which were both tastier to them but also healthier given the rest of their diet. As to salt you do have a point.
    - astrange 6y ago
      The evidence that salt is bad for you is actually quite weak and many people probably don't get enough. What is lean about salmon though…? If it was lean it would taste like tilapia.
- 6y ago
andrewla 6y ago
This movement towards synthetic meat seems very antithetical to the natural foods heuristic. Isn't what we've learned over the last half-century or so that processing food in an attempt to make it more nutritious/uniform/etc. generally involves a reductive analysis of the value of the food and in doing so destroys most of the actual nutrient value? The "shopping at the edges of the market" thing is a tolerably good heuristic for avoid foods that have been modified based on outdated or incorrect theories of human nutrition. The push for heavily processed synthetic meats seems like a huge step backwards.
- ianai 6y ago
  It’s at least more efficient and doesn’t result in killing animals. This is probably way more sparing of water use, for instance. Whether someone wants more nutritious food or not is a secondary concern from decoupling meat consumption from current (horrible) practices.
  - jraph 6y ago
    Exactly. I see the benefit of this kind of food even if it is somewhat weak nutritionally if used occasionally in an otherwise well balanced diet. Sure, don't do this for every meal, but maybe don't it with regular sushi neither anyway. Enjoy your occasional sushi without the ethical / environmental drawbacks of eating actual salmon, and remain healthy by diversifying food. I'd be glad too, actually.
    - neuralRiot 6y ago
      What i see and taking in account the higher comments about economics of scale is that at some point synthetic meats will become cheaper that natural so food manufacturers will start replacing it with a tiny disclaimer “may contain synthetic meat” and that if the FDA forces them to.
      - jraph 6y ago
        I hope the disclaimer will say "is synthetic meat" if it is actually entirely synthetic. Uncertainty would ruin it!
anonAndOn 6y ago
Do they also grow it with shrimp cells so it turns pink or just use food coloring like they do with farmed salmon? [0] [0]https://wildalaskancompany.com/blog/heres-why-salmon-are-pink-orange-or-red https://wildalaskancompany.com/blog/heres-why-salmon-are-pin...
- astrange 6y ago
  It's not accurate to call astaxanthin just food coloring. It's the actual source of pink color in flamingos/algae/shrimp/lobsters and it's certainly not unhealthy. https://examine.com/supplements/astaxanthin/ https://examine.com/supplements/astaxanthin/
  - anonAndOn 6y ago
    Synthetic astaxanthin is only added to the corn/soy pellets in the feedlot because people don't buy gray salmon. It's a line item in the COGS, nothing more.
kleton 6y ago
Why wouldn't you do tuna in a vat instead? Higher value fish, and the culture requirements would be nearly identical.
bogomipz 6y ago
It's worth pointing out that there is no such thing as "sushi-grade" fish in the US. The fish used in commercial sushi is always flash-frozen on the ship. Neither the USDA or FDA have designations for fish similar to the grades they have for say beef. There is a regulation around freezing temperatures in order for it be sold for raw consumption but this has nothing to do with the quality of the fish. The regulation is used to guarantee parasite destruction. I can highly recommend the book "The Sushi Economy" by Sasha Issenberg for a very interesting look at how the sushi trade works.
- viraptor 6y ago
  The description makes sense though - since you have a controlled growth environment, you don't get parasites in this meat. Which is the goal of "sushi-grade".
LetThereBeLight 6y ago
This is a cool company that started out of QB3. One of the co-founders was a postdoc at UCSF working in regenerative medicine before starting wildtype. I think these wetlab incubator spaces near universities is really key to getting more biotech startups.
hinkley 6y ago
How is it that anyone thinks you're going to grow nutritious tissue without an immune system and expect anything but bad long-term outcomes?
- ipsum2 6y ago
  Not a biologist, but I recall the use of antibiotics is pretty common with cell culturing.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I had a rather rude awakening when I was reading about a biological mystery that centered on a yeast that would not culture in a Petri dish. On top of the late discovery of h. pilori, and knowing a few people with mystery chronic illnesses, i think most of us have been set up by our education to think that microbiologists just about have everything figured out when in fact relatively speaking we still don’t know a goddamned thing about the microscopic world. They think we’ve identified something like 0.1% of all fungi in the world. We have bacteria and molds that can evade detection. Antibiotic resistance in ones we can see. I don’t agree that we can stack-rank priorities, and I hate many of the ways in which people say, “maybe they should put their energy into something else first,” but I suppose that’s exactly what I’m implying here. It’s entirely possible that trying to make things like this work will illuminate some of those exact mysteries. I think I’m just worried what happens in between those two events.
ur-whale 6y ago
Great, now do Chūtoro !
akeck 6y ago
According to Google, their site doesn't mention "FDA" or "USDA-FSIS", both of which regulate parts of the lab grown meat process as of 2019. I assume they'll need some sort of approval to actually sell the stuff in the US.
dublin 6y ago
If this doesn't qualify as Frankenfood, I don't know what does. (This is nearly as scary as unproven, untested "vaccines" intended to provoke a life-long autoimmune response...) Just what the heck is wrong with an actual fish, people??? If sales of this is allowed at all, it should be VERY conspicuously marked and labelled ALL the way to the table, especially in restaurants. The older I get, the more Bill Joy is proven wisely prescient...
christiansakai 6y ago
Welcome to the future.

266 points by zuhayeer 6y ago

My girlfriend and I have both spent years working in Sushi restaurants, and judging by those pictures alone, this "salmon" falls short of our fat requirement. I.e., it's kind of lean looking. We'd try it even at the high price point, but only if they come up with a fatty "salmon belly" edition.

canucker2016 6y ago
I would have expected that lack of colouring as well for lab-grown salmon meat. Wild salmon meat gets its pink shade from eating krill/shrimp according to https://qz.com/358811/heres-why-your-farmed-salmon-has-color-added-to-it/ https://qz.com/358811/heres-why-your-farmed-salmon-has-color... Farmed salmon doesn't get enough krill/shrimp so the farmers have to add colouring to the farmed-salmon diet to get something close to the colour of wild salmon. see previous qz.com link. At least you won't have to worry about microplastics in the lab-grown salmon meat. see https://www.ecowatch.com/are-microplastics-in-your-salmon-filet-1882083719.html https://www.ecowatch.com/are-microplastics-in-your-salmon-fi...
- 1MachineElf 6y ago
  I understand that wild salmon and farmed salmon are vastly different in appearance, texture, taste, smell, and provenance. Wild is considered to be the healthiest by a lot of measures. Yes, I even remember the "microplastics in your fish" submissions here on HN. I've mentioned that I've worked at sushi bars, including ones offering wild-caught salmon, even with pamphlets at the counters advertising the virtues of wild caught over farm-raised. You are preaching to the choir here. :) >I would have expected that lack of colouring as well for lab-grown salmon meat. In my comment, I wasn't referring to lack of coloring. I was referring to lack of fat. In fact, more fat means less color overall, and I'm saying that's desirable. Why? Because in my experience, wild-caught salmon sushi doesn't sell as well, even in areas where patrons have higher than average disposable income and higher than average health consciousness. This is the same issue you often see with grass-fed steaks vs. industrial steaks. Grass-fed steak is healthier for you by a lot of measures, and depending on your pallette, tastes better. I love my grass-fed steak. (I love my BeyondMeat and Impossible Burgers too.) But many people find it to be too "gamy" and that includes the handful of chefs I know. They aren't putting it on menus. Most people are unaware that "grass-fed" beef is actually "finished" on grain instead of grass in order to offset what would be and even more gamy taste than they're getting. Now, I'm not saying that wild-caught salmon is gamy, but it does have a distinct taste, and is comparatively lean. Farmed salmon is like that dramatically marbled USDA prime steak. It's practically a different fish, it's a less healthy fish, and arguably a less ethical fish too, but it's what people most often choose. Imagine two ham and cheese sandwiches, but only one has mayo. Even people who think they don't want fattening mayo still prefer the sandwich with mayo. There are more analogies I could give with butter or lard or beef tallow. I don't need to prove this, just look at Paula Deen. Wildtype, as the name implies, and as the pictures indicate to the discerning eye, is trying to me more like wild-caught salmon. There's a niche for salmon sushi rolls, a sub-niche for wild-caught salmon rolls, and a sub-sub-niche for people who want a lab-grown version of that. The point of my earlier comment is that I would rather see them target a market that's one less level of niche deep, and that's the theoretical holy-grail marbled looking high-fat farmed-style "USDA Prime" kind of lab-grown salmon, which I would rather eat, and I expect most other customers would rather eat too. I just want to finish this comment with a disclaimer that I in no way mean to belittle the pioneering folks behind Wildtype, nor disparage any health, environmental, or ethically focused enthusiasts here who are really excited about this. It is exciting and great that Wildtype and other companies like this are doing what they do. I feel that it's important to say it, because my previous comment seemed to have struck a nerve, and that wasn't my intention.

roadnottaken 6y ago

Bullshit

posterboy 6y ago

"sushi-grade" sounds like "fantastic" or any other not leverageable marketing promise. The cells I suppose must be stem cells, induced with some solution to grow into a homogenous mass of soft tissue. I'm very confused about this. Why just gimme the nutrient solution.

vangelis 6y ago
Sushi-grade isn't a thing! It's marketing. I also doubt this follows the FDA rules for flash freezing that sushi grade implies given the lack of risk for parasites.
- elhudy 6y ago
  Sushi-grade IS a thing with real fish. It means the meat has been inspected for parasites or frozen to kill them.
  - rileytg 6y ago
    Unfortunately there is no enforcement of that. People often consider "sushi grade" what you've described but there isn't any official rating like there is for wines or beef. Source: ex-commercial fishmonger
    - elhudy 6y ago
      FDA guidelines dictate that fish sold for raw consumption must be frozen under one of the following conditions to kill parasites: -4°F (-20°C) or below for 7 days (total time) -31°F (-35°C) or below until solid, and storing at -31°F (-35°C) or below for 15 hours -31°F (-35°C) or below until solid and storing at -4°F (-20°C) or below for 24 hours Whether or not this is enforced is another thing, but the absurdly low rates of sickness from sushi in the US are testament to the fact that companies are probably trying to protect consumers from the hazards of eating their raw fish. With ground beef recalls left and right, we fortunately live in an age of avoiding large-scale liability.
  - 6y ago

BrianOnHN 6y ago

What are their methods? Does this make $100/lb salmon?

jvalencia 6y ago
"The sample of salmon cells served up in Portland cost $200 per sushi roll (six pieces)." https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-faux-fish-coming-to-a-restaurant-near-you/ https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-faux-fish-coming-...
- monocasa 6y ago
  That's pretty damn good for an 0.1 release with no economies of scale.
  - FredPret 6y ago
    We’re having Salmon v0.1 for lunch. Welcome to the future!
WillPostForFood 6y ago
For reference, fresh, wild, King Salmon, which is only available at certain times of the the year (depends on your state/country), can be $30 a pound or more. At $100 or $200 a pound, they don't have that far to go to be in the ballpark.
hinkley 6y ago
I could see people paying that sort of money for 4 ounces of nigiri in some endangered species. Cruelty free blue fin tuna, anyone?

miketery 6y ago

Very cool. Any estimate on current or target costs? If this is possible efficiently would help reduce destructive commercial fishing practices (just watched seaspiracy...).

f430 6y ago

looks like another Beyond Meat style pump & dump

0xffff2 6y ago
Wait, Beyond meat is one of the main meat substitutes making the rounds alongside Impossible burgers, right? If I'm not mixing up my names, what makes it a pump and dump?
- danhak 6y ago
  It seems like the discourse has shifted to describe even legitimate businesses that are overvalued in the opinion of an author as "pump and dump" or "ponzi scheme"
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    It’s maybe not entirely accurate, but it seems at least in the ballpark of a reasonable description for a public company that’s never made money and has no legible path to making money. That said, it looks Beyond Meat made money in two quarters last year. So not a good fit on those criteria.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - f430 6y ago
      > It’s maybe not entirely accurate, but it seems at least in the ballpark of a reasonable description for a public company that’s never made money and has no legible path to making money. Which is the whole point of YC. IPO over valued companies and dump it on the retailers while cashing out your chips. Never mind the structural dangers cheap capital pose when the cycle winds down.
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  There is debate about whether their technology is truly novel or whether it is just hype as soy protein based food manufacturing is not exactly new. Their most important technological achievement appears to be the artificial heme that they were able to source from a plant origin.

jvalencia 6y ago

Yes, but how does it taste?

BrianOnHN 6y ago
It's easier to overlook taste than price.
- idiotsecant 6y ago
  Depends who your target audience is. I imagine the audience for extremely expensive and hard to obtain artifically grown sushi with decent taste is probably bigger than the market for, say, extremely expensive and hard to obtain artificially grown hotdog meat with decent taste.

aaaaaadsfscxva 6y ago

Incredible!

aaaaaadsfscxva 6y ago
indeed

nickthemagicman 6y ago

There's a number of pictures of the final sushi product.. but I couldn't find pictures of the actual salmon that was created in the laboratory or pictures/explanations of the lab process.

vessenes 6y ago

Boy I really wish I knew more about the science here. I can't tell if it's yucky, so they don't discuss it, or if it's vapor, so they don't discuss it. That said, their photo looks like something I would at least taste! Matrix-grown meat seems to me like something that will have its place in the world, especially if the net environmental impact is favorable. So, Wild Type: more details, yo.

tyingq 6y ago
It's a year old, and probably not exactly what you're asking for, but a NYT article on the product: https://archive.is/2vdTu https://archive.is/2vdTu They seem to be heavily implying stem cells: “The cells know what to do,” Mr. Elfenbein said. “They become muscle fibers. They become fat tissue. They create the connective tissue that we know as meat.”
WillPostForFood 6y ago
The photo on their website looks amazing, with perfect fatty stripes. Photos from one of their early tastings in 2019 didn't look so good. Mostly chopped up, and larger pieces didn't seem to have the fatty layers. https://i0.wp.com/thespoon.tech/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/wildtype_salmon2.jpeg https://i0.wp.com/thespoon.tech/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/w... It makes me question if the salmon in the photos on their website is really lab grown. If so, it is quite an achievement.
- michaelmior 6y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. It's really unclear if the photos are their own product or just supposed to represent good salmon in general.
- saxonww 6y ago
  I had a different reaction on seeing it. Yes, it has the striped pattern, but the texture looks completely wrong. Compare their image now with e.g. https://i.redd.it/12cdw2wb55p01.jpg https://i.redd.it/12cdw2wb55p01.jpg. It's superficially similar; the 'early tasting' picture you link to looks _better_ from a texture perspective, to me. That doesn't mean it's not tasty, but I would not choose this over the real thing (traditional preparation? idk).

californical 6y ago

The possibilities with this are so exciting, as someone who eats a vegetarian diet due to environmental and moral concerns with the meat industry. It appears on their website that this is real & ready to sell. I thought large-scale lab-grown meat was still 10-20 years in the future... Does anyone know the pricing? I didn’t see anything on their website, but I feel like it must be expensive. Also, did they pick salmon because it’s easier than other meat types for some reason?

tymekpavel 6y ago
See the comments below - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905472 ~$200 for a 6-piece sushi roll.
- marricks 6y ago
  Ok, well that's way less than thousands of dollars so it's a start! Not to mention, they probably haven't realized the economies of scale yet at all.
  - intricatedetail 6y ago
    Exactly. Also if you decided to go on a boat and catch one yourself that easily could end up in thousands...
- robotpony 6y ago
  That's less bad than I thought the early pricing would be (and isn't far from the highest end sushi I've seen around the west coast here).
  - ac29 6y ago
    Its an order of magnitude higher than traditional salmon nigiri would cost though ($2-3/piece in a restaurant).
    - 6y ago

toddh 6y ago

No mention of the nutritional value. Which is my concern with Beyond Meat as well. It's great that it's not meat from factory farming POV, but it's not nutritious food either.

rednerrus 6y ago
Beyond meat isn't lab grown animal cells, right? This is actual salmon.
- lprubin 6y ago
  Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat are imitation meat made with plants, aka "Meat Substitutes". This company is what's known as "Lab Grown Meat" where the end result is basically meat at the molecular level. So theoretically this will have a very similar nutritional profile to farmed or caught salmon. At least thats one of the goals of the lab grown meat sector. It fact, it might even have a better nutritional profile because it won't be exposed to ocean contaminants like mercury and plastic.
DeepYogurt 6y ago
Which is fine as far as I'm concerned. We live in a world of nutrition surplus not deficit
- jfengel 6y ago
  We have a calorie surplus, certainly. The nutrition content is more complex. It's true that for most people, the main malnutrition is a surplus of calories. If they're deficient in something, it's likely to be dietary fiber, and perhaps vitamin D. Salmon has none of the former, but it would be interesting to know how this stacks up in the latter.
ch4s3 6y ago
Why would it have less nutritional value than a slab of muscle cells grown inside of a fish vs cells from that fish induced to grown in a tank?

pelagic_sky 6y ago

I wonder if this scales up to having a larger piece of meat, to make steaks and such. Or is it only good when its "raw" and sliced up real thin.

avereveard 6y ago
And the other question is what will the nutrition value be after it gets industrialised for mass production

dang 6y ago

> Join our waitlist How real is this?

dukeofdoom 6y ago

Is it worse to kill something for food, or deny it from ever living? I think personally I think I would prefer to have lived and be killed than not lived at all. I also kind of believe that things have an essence, a soul of sorts. So eating any part of an animal is still repulsive on some level.

jtolmar 6y ago
Widespread adoption of this technology would likely lead to more total salmon lives, as wild populations recover.
- WillPostForFood 6y ago
  This seems non-obvious. How many salmon are farmed vs wild right now? Salmon is already protected and very expensive, so what's the potential for increase in wild population? 2x? 10x? And there would still be demand for "the real thing".
  - Daishiman 6y ago
    Farmed salmon incurs a heavy cost to the environment that surrounds said farms. Demand for real salmon will still be around but it will be a rare delicacy, which is totally OK.
    - WillPostForFood 6y ago
      It wasn't a question about what's the best outcome for the environment. Parent poster claimed, "Widespread adoption of this technology would likely lead to more total salmon lives". Eliminating farmed salmon would be good for he environment, but it reduces the number of salmon lives.
- asdff 6y ago
  Wild populations might not budge much as long as their historic spawning grounds up estuaries remain scarred by human development.

jtolmar 6y ago

Wonderful! I hope they publish the yucky details, it could be really interesting. Also, I know this will be an industrial process for a long time, but I'm having fun imagining a day where a hobbyist can grow meat cultures at home. Like an advanced version of maintaining a sourdough starter.

cheese_please 6y ago
I've got good news for you! The Shojinmeat Project's (https://shojinmeat.com/wordpress/en/ https://shojinmeat.com/wordpress/en/) mission is the "democratization of cellular agriculture." They develop methods for DIY cultured meat (recently someone posted about developing a cell culture medium out of Red Bull). They do have a slack channel, but it's not super active recently. They're pretty active on Twitter though, and their website is a great resource. I would highly encourage you to also check out some of Yuki Hanyu's (founder) talks on YouTube; he's great.

hutzlibu 6y ago

From the landing page, there is this great claim: "the chance to eat the foods we love without sacrificing our food ideals" But not information on how it is produced. So I won't know, whether it really matches my food ideals. I mean, how does it get produced? From real fish stem cells? So still, there needs be dead fish in the process at some point? So how many fish do you need to kill, to produce one portion of sushi? Or can you grow forever, with one batch of stem cells? (probably not I guess) Without knowing this and about what else is involved in the production chain, I really cannot believe such statements.

cheese_please 6y ago
I don't know about WildType specifically, but it's not necessarily true that a salmon would need to die at any point in the process. Cells from a simple muscle biopsy could be cultured for this purpose, and a single biopsy may have the potential to produce a great deal of cells depending on the culture conditions. Or they may have developed an immortalized salmon cell line from an initial biopsy that they can proliferate indefinitely (though this leads to questions about genetic drift after a certain number of population doublings; I'm sure they would have a bunch of frozen vials to restart from early passage numbers every few batches though).
- UglyToad 6y ago
  Plus as a lapsed-vegetarian I'm excited for lab grown meats even if there's an animal killed at some point in the process. It's impossible to choose a food without at least some harm. How many fish are killed by fertilizer runoff or damming for irrigation or whatever else is needed for all forms of agriculture? I'm going to assume a non-zero amount. So my view is the aim with all ethics-based dietary choices with the motivation of avoiding harm to animals is basically to optimize for least animals killed per calorie per 'sentience' unit or whatever. All food choices are inherently non-zero in animal suffering and I don't think it's reasonable to hold lab grown meat to any higher standard.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    "All food choices are inherently non-zero in animal suffering and I don't think it's reasonable to hold lab grown meat to any higher standard. " I know. I am not even a vegetarian. (I just have a big problem with the industrial food machine) But if something is advertised as totally ethical, then yes, it should hold to a higher standard.

iamwil 6y ago

As a curiosity and side note, Salmon wasn't always eaten by the Japanese as sushi. It was considered a garbage fish that you'd grill due to its likelihood of being infected by parasites. It was the Norwegians that had a surplus, and was looking for a new market to open up that salmon sushi became a thing. https://medium.com/torodex/salmon-sushi-is-not-a-japanese-invention-9189d9cd78b7 https://medium.com/torodex/salmon-sushi-is-not-a-japanese-in... The Norwegians probably won't pay attention to this initially, but will probably come out against it, given that Salmon is at least a chunk of chain for their industries.

chrismaeda 6y ago
Yes, I was thinking to myself that 'sushi-grade salmon' was an oxymoron.
- beaner 6y ago
  Only in japan
- the_af 6y ago
  Even if salmon wasn't traditionally consumed in sushi by the Japanese, wouldn't the later reversal indicate that, even in Japan, there is such a thing as sushi-grade salmon?
- viraptor 6y ago
  The way I understand it, it's not the meat that's sushi-grade. It's the way it's preserved / delivered. Basically if you can eat it raw and not let the parasites from salmon grow, then it's sushi-grade. Most commonly that means storing salmon in a freezer which kills the parasites. (think -50C) Here's a decent article https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/05/how-to-prepare-raw-fish-at-home-sushi-sashimi-food-safety.html https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/05/how-to-prepare-raw-fish-...
ddlatham 6y ago
As with many interesting topics, there's a great Planet Money episode about this too: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/09/16/440951873/episode-651-the-salmon-taboo https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/09/16/440951873/epis...

woeirua 6y ago

This is a great business model. If they can culture a reasonable enough imitation of salmon then they can certainly do so for other fish that are even more expensive to farm and grow. They only have to come in just under the price of farm grown fish for this to take off like wildfire (which should be easy). This company could be immensely profitable very quickly.

asaph 6y ago

Other companies working on cell-cultured fish: Finless Foods: https://www.finlessfoods.com/ https://www.finlessfoods.com/ BlueNalu: https://www.bluenalu.com/ https://www.bluenalu.com/

cheese_please 6y ago
Just wanted to add a few more: avant: https://www.avantmeats.com/ https://www.avantmeats.com/ ShiokMeats: https://shiokmeats.com/ https://shiokmeats.com/ Umami: https://www.umamimeats.com/ https://www.umamimeats.com/ Bluu Biosciences: https://www.bluu.bio/ https://www.bluu.bio/ Cell Ag Tech: https://cellagtech.com/ https://cellagtech.com/ Clean Research: https://cleanresearch.org/ https://cleanresearch.org/ (they do a lot of stuff, but cultured fish is one of the things listed) Cultured Decadence: https://www.cultureddecadence.com/ https://www.cultureddecadence.com/ Please note a few of the companies (italicized) are very young, so their websites don't have much info. I recommend this site for keeping up with which companies are active in the alternative proteins space: https://newprotein.org/ https://newprotein.org/. For cultured meat, click "Alternative Protein V 3.0" and it's in the top left (or just head to page 2 for a more zoomed in view).

raldi 6y ago

What I'm looking forward to is lab-grown meat that improves upon nature. Imagine pigs didn't exist but someone figured out how to make bacon in the lab. What do we not have on this Earth that makes bacon seem like chicken breast? What might we invent that's three levels past otoro?

Daishiman 6y ago
Give it a decade and we'll be taking this to a level of customization where we'll be able to select our own level of marbling, connective tissue and water content.
LatteLazy 6y ago
Be careful what you wish for: people are programmed to like a fat and salt. Fatter salter meats probably aren't as good for you as nice lean salmon... That's without the industrial side of this: meats with built in preservatives and colouring that are actually no good for you but look good and supermarkets will prioritise. I think both GM and lab grown meat suffer from this issue: smart doesn't mean good for you, it means good for the sales person sadly.
- Symmetry 6y ago
  If the increased tastiness means we eat more of it then it'll be good that the meat is fattier. In terms of macronutrients your body needs a certain amount of fat and a certain amount of protein but not necessarily any carbohydrates. But too much protein can lead to medical problems like gout so ancient hunters who lived off large animal kills tended to prefer the fattier cuts of their kills which were both tastier to them but also healthier given the rest of their diet. As to salt you do have a point.
  - astrange 6y ago
    The evidence that salt is bad for you is actually quite weak and many people probably don't get enough. What is lean about salmon though…? If it was lean it would taste like tilapia.
6y ago

andrewla 6y ago

This movement towards synthetic meat seems very antithetical to the natural foods heuristic. Isn't what we've learned over the last half-century or so that processing food in an attempt to make it more nutritious/uniform/etc. generally involves a reductive analysis of the value of the food and in doing so destroys most of the actual nutrient value? The "shopping at the edges of the market" thing is a tolerably good heuristic for avoid foods that have been modified based on outdated or incorrect theories of human nutrition. The push for heavily processed synthetic meats seems like a huge step backwards.

ianai 6y ago
It’s at least more efficient and doesn’t result in killing animals. This is probably way more sparing of water use, for instance. Whether someone wants more nutritious food or not is a secondary concern from decoupling meat consumption from current (horrible) practices.
- jraph 6y ago
  Exactly. I see the benefit of this kind of food even if it is somewhat weak nutritionally if used occasionally in an otherwise well balanced diet. Sure, don't do this for every meal, but maybe don't it with regular sushi neither anyway. Enjoy your occasional sushi without the ethical / environmental drawbacks of eating actual salmon, and remain healthy by diversifying food. I'd be glad too, actually.
  - neuralRiot 6y ago
    What i see and taking in account the higher comments about economics of scale is that at some point synthetic meats will become cheaper that natural so food manufacturers will start replacing it with a tiny disclaimer “may contain synthetic meat” and that if the FDA forces them to.
    - jraph 6y ago
      I hope the disclaimer will say "is synthetic meat" if it is actually entirely synthetic. Uncertainty would ruin it!

anonAndOn 6y ago

Do they also grow it with shrimp cells so it turns pink or just use food coloring like they do with farmed salmon? [0] [0]https://wildalaskancompany.com/blog/heres-why-salmon-are-pink-orange-or-red https://wildalaskancompany.com/blog/heres-why-salmon-are-pin...

astrange 6y ago
It's not accurate to call astaxanthin just food coloring. It's the actual source of pink color in flamingos/algae/shrimp/lobsters and it's certainly not unhealthy. https://examine.com/supplements/astaxanthin/ https://examine.com/supplements/astaxanthin/
- anonAndOn 6y ago
  Synthetic astaxanthin is only added to the corn/soy pellets in the feedlot because people don't buy gray salmon. It's a line item in the COGS, nothing more.

kleton 6y ago

Why wouldn't you do tuna in a vat instead? Higher value fish, and the culture requirements would be nearly identical.

bogomipz 6y ago

It's worth pointing out that there is no such thing as "sushi-grade" fish in the US. The fish used in commercial sushi is always flash-frozen on the ship. Neither the USDA or FDA have designations for fish similar to the grades they have for say beef. There is a regulation around freezing temperatures in order for it be sold for raw consumption but this has nothing to do with the quality of the fish. The regulation is used to guarantee parasite destruction. I can highly recommend the book "The Sushi Economy" by Sasha Issenberg for a very interesting look at how the sushi trade works.

viraptor 6y ago
The description makes sense though - since you have a controlled growth environment, you don't get parasites in this meat. Which is the goal of "sushi-grade".

LetThereBeLight 6y ago

This is a cool company that started out of QB3. One of the co-founders was a postdoc at UCSF working in regenerative medicine before starting wildtype. I think these wetlab incubator spaces near universities is really key to getting more biotech startups.

hinkley 6y ago

How is it that anyone thinks you're going to grow nutritious tissue without an immune system and expect anything but bad long-term outcomes?

ipsum2 6y ago
Not a biologist, but I recall the use of antibiotics is pretty common with cell culturing.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I had a rather rude awakening when I was reading about a biological mystery that centered on a yeast that would not culture in a Petri dish. On top of the late discovery of h. pilori, and knowing a few people with mystery chronic illnesses, i think most of us have been set up by our education to think that microbiologists just about have everything figured out when in fact relatively speaking we still don’t know a goddamned thing about the microscopic world. They think we’ve identified something like 0.1% of all fungi in the world. We have bacteria and molds that can evade detection. Antibiotic resistance in ones we can see. I don’t agree that we can stack-rank priorities, and I hate many of the ways in which people say, “maybe they should put their energy into something else first,” but I suppose that’s exactly what I’m implying here. It’s entirely possible that trying to make things like this work will illuminate some of those exact mysteries. I think I’m just worried what happens in between those two events.

ur-whale 6y ago

Great, now do Chūtoro !

akeck 6y ago

According to Google, their site doesn't mention "FDA" or "USDA-FSIS", both of which regulate parts of the lab grown meat process as of 2019. I assume they'll need some sort of approval to actually sell the stuff in the US.

dublin 6y ago

If this doesn't qualify as Frankenfood, I don't know what does. (This is nearly as scary as unproven, untested "vaccines" intended to provoke a life-long autoimmune response...) Just what the heck is wrong with an actual fish, people??? If sales of this is allowed at all, it should be VERY conspicuously marked and labelled ALL the way to the table, especially in restaurants. The older I get, the more Bill Joy is proven wisely prescient...

christiansakai 6y ago

Welcome to the future.