25 ms·
World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day
- ethanbond 5y ago> Future Meat Technologies says this facility requires 96-percent less freshwater than livestock production, as well as using 99-percent less land and producing 80-percent fewer greenhouse emissions. Even accounting for PR hyperbole, it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do. This is a national security issue. We can choose to curse our younger generations with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future.
- ben_w 5y agoI’m all in favour of this for climate change and animal welfare reasons, but I don’t see how it’s a national security concern in e.g. Europe and America, given they already encourage farming overproduction specifically because food is so important, and that almost everywhere could already be more effective in how many people a given unit of land area or fresh water can support, both by encouraging vegetable-based diets and separately with more poly-tunnels, greenhouses, and aeroponics.
- Retric 5y agoOverproduction is based on assumptions around how variable farm output is. Climate change increases variability.
- airhead969 5y agoClimate change isn't the weather. Climate is the average. We are in a global warming emergency and no one is doing enough about it.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoClimate change is literally the weather.
- ben_w 5y agoLong term average weather. But yes, IIRC, climate change is causing more extreme variability, and that variability itself is a problem. Though I do disagree with @airhead969, as the literally exponential growth of PV by itself looks to me to be enough to make us net zero in a decade or two (probably two, given exponentials are often sigmoids in disguise).
- Retric 5y agoClimate isn’t the average weather it’s the expected weather. X hurricanes every Y years for example doesn’t change the average significantly, but their a major climate concern in areas at risk from them.
- ethanbond 5y agoWell one mechanism by which this becomes a natsec concern is food scarcity in other parts of the world might simultaneously cause domestic instability as well as mass migration to more food-secure locales. We should also do all of the things you mention here.
- devy 5y agoThe greenest protein factory is the one that we don't have to build - even if it's 99% less land or 80% fewer greenhouse emissions than the traditional farming of cows, sheep and poultry. It's actually this: https://interestingengineering.com/the-explosion-of-insect-protein https://interestingengineering.com/the-explosion-of-insect-p...
- ethanbond 5y agoWe should do that too
- justinmchase 5y agoJust eat the bugs...
- kwere 5y agodont forget to be happy...
- Noos 5y agoIt's always fun with these kinds of posts, because people never think what their total progressive future will be like. No cars, no pets, eating bugs for protein, taxed to shit to provide a social safety net, forced to clump up in cities for efficiency. Probably a lot more than that. Being an eco-serf.
- salt-thrower 5y agoThis is the kind of sentiment that watching too many Alex Jones documentaries will give you. It's funny that you think places like America, which can't even manage to legislate sensible climate-saving policies, would ever get to an extremist state of banning cars and pets, or forcing you to eat bugs for protein. You are laughably out of touch with reality.
- me_me_me 5y ago> sense of ickiness or masculinity If they can keep the cost lower (2/3 or better 1/2 price) than animal meat, all of the stigma will just poof out of existence. This is very exiting, but its a not solution to global warming (only small factor). >> Methane has a large effect but for a relatively brief period, having an estimated mean half-life of 9.1 years in the atmosphere, whereas carbon dioxide is currently given an estimated mean lifetime of over 100 years Still very exiting to possibly live through end factory farming.
- ethanbond 5y agoTotally agreed - competitive flavor at superior price will make those other arguments disappear. That’s why I think we should view this as a foregone conclusion and get positioned to simply own the future, or at least not have our future owned by someone else.
- Noos 5y ago...sure, like Carob was a foregone conclusion to replace chocolate: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/how-carob-traumatized-a-generation https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/how-c... As someone who actually had to eat Tiger's Milk bars as a kid, good luck at it.
- me_me_me 5y agoWe are not talking about alternative faux products, but meat fibres that are grown form actual animal tissue at the start (AFAIK thats how they do it). In theory this should taste similar to traditional meat and in the future they will work out marbling etc
- everdrive 5y ago>ickiness or masculinity, How is this related to lab-grown meat?
- sidlls 5y agoThere's a certain squeamishness some have about eating something labeled as "lab-grown", as if it's somehow tainted with "unnatural" origin. At the same time, there's a certain machismo, bravado, "manliness" associated with eating meat from an actual animal, mainly a vicarious association with hunting, but also by demonstration of some certain kinds of "alpha male" traits (access to resources to afford it, dominance, etc.). Lab-grown meat wasn't hunted or butchered, so may be viewed as "easier" in some sense--less manly, in other words.
- hardwaregeek 5y agoI agree but also "protein security" reminds me of "mineshaft gap" from Dr. Strangelove
- hcknwscommenter 5y agoIt is of course impossible to verify either way, but I am very sure these statistics of 96% savings in freshwater are total nonsense. Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc. Moreover, we have seen time and time again, the reporting of extremely high numbers for water usage in beef and milk production, but it turns out they are counting the water that falls as rain on the pasture land, or the rain/ground water used to grow the alfalfa. Should that be counted? Rain seems to be fairly renewable, but I admit that (in the extreme) society can harm ecosystems by diverting too much rain water (see Colorado River). Ground water renewability is a bit context dependent. If the water savings is mostly nonsense, well then I also question the savings in GHG emissions. Land savings? Sure, fine, that makes sense... but farm land is orders of magnitude cheaper than land that has a fully functioning cell culture factory on it. In the end, we will know if this works by what price it can sell at and make a marginal return. The jury is out on that one.
- ceejayoz 5y ago> Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc. Given that this is all happening in a lab, is collecting and filtering for reuse an option?
- hcknwscommenter 5y agoSure. But then you have to spend way more energy on the "filtering" part. It typically makes a lot more sense in terms of energy usage to just take tap water and run it through a polishing step (deionization and/or reverse osmosis), than to take the comparatively "dirty" water coming out of your process (dirty but not toxic) and try to clean that up.
- f38zf5vdt 5y agoAn autoclave requires distilled water and an enormous amount of energy to operate. You could save the water but you'd potentially need to distill it again after. They use an enormous amount of energy and water overall. The feed for the cells still has to come from somewhere too, and the growth of the cells is aerobic and generates CO2. That said, artificial meat is supposed to hit market parity price by 2026 and probably below parity after. [1] We will probably see a rapid transition to cultured meat within a decade. There are a very large number of these companies competing right now. [2] [1] https://www.mitsui.com/mgssi/en/report/detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2021/01/18/2011t_sato_e.pdf https://www.mitsui.com/mgssi/en/report/detail/__icsFiles/afi... [2] https://cellbasedtech.com/lab-grown-meat-companies https://cellbasedtech.com/lab-grown-meat-companies
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago> We can choose to curse our younger generations with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future. A false dichotomy if I ever saw one.
- ethanbond 5y agoIt is a false dichotomy currently because the in-between area is largely occupied by “do the economics make sense.” That is very clearly trending in one direction (towards “yes”), so at some point in the future it will largely boil down to something akin to this dichotomy. My framing is definitely dismissive of one side, but it does strike me as a set of arguments that are largely aesthetic on one side and the reality of food security on the other.
- bttrfl 5y agoEvery time I read stats like this I wonder what are the externalities the PR team decided to omit. One day you hear that farmed fish are eco, the next day you find out that gigantic trawlers are depleting Antarctic oceans for feed. I tried to google the possible environmental downsides of lab-meat (taste/health aside), but couldn't find anything. Any suggestions?
- frankus 5y agoThere’s the question of what sort of feedstocks they’re using and where they come from. I would assume that it’s something like what the animals they’re replacing eat, but presumably in smaller quantities since they’re only growing muscle tissue and not an entire animal. There’s something to be said for a device that transports itself around marginally-arable land eating grass and pumping out fertilizer while creating edible protein. Especially if the alternative is intensively-farmed row crops like corn and soy that tend to require tons of fertilizer and herbicides. IMO an equally exciting area of research is taking something like algae that only need water, sunlight, and some minerals to produce food. Which could then be further processed into lab-grown meat or be eaten as is.
- tomp 5y ago> with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future I think you're confusing a few things. I'm very pro lab-grown meat, and I don't see why it would be either "icky" (if anything, it could be much more "pure", able to grow in controlled conditions without any pesticides, hormones or antibiotics) nor less "masculine" (a steak is a steak is a steak). I'm very much against plant-based "fake" meat, because they're usually far from natural (tons of chemicals) and full of propaganda ("red meat is unhealthy" but conveniently conflating pure red meat with highly-processed stuff like sausages and salami, or "red meat is unsustainable" while we keep burning coal and importing plastics from China... don't get me wrong, I strongly support carbon tax, but want to be able to what to consume (drive car vs. eat steak) myself).
- yaseer 5y ago> they're usually far from natural (tons of chemicals) I really object to marketing use of the word 'natural' and 'chemicals'. I don't mean to single you out - these concepts are widespread in marketing. Plenty of 'natural' things are bad, like small pox, the Ebola virus and salmonella. Plenty of 'unnatural' things are good, like antibiotics to treat infection. All matter is made from chemicals. Whether a chemical like penicillin or salt is synthesised in a lab, or extracted from the ocean, holds no baring on whether that chemical is good for you. - EDIT - Generalised the penicillin example.
- actuator 5y ago> it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do This is hardly the only solution though. We can also shift to just plant based diets from crops which are not water intensive. Vegetarianism has been present in many parts of the world from a long time and those parts have also done fine with surviving. We have a plethora of recipes as well which we can import from those parts of the world and add it with other highly nutritious vegan recipes. At least I have been far more impressed with eating those cuisines than eating fake meat as such.
- exabrial 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma Good try though.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoYou're foolishly projecting ideology and personal beliefs into somewhere so far removed from the consumer that it simply won't matter. Commodities buyers don't care who's corn is ethical or who's corn is unethical. They don't care who's ground beef is manly and who's isn't. It all comes down to cost per results at the end of the day. Resource usage is just a part of that calculation. No different than the cost of shipping. If McDonalds and Walmart can cut their existing beef with fake plant beef or lab beef without hurting their bottom line (by making their products less attractive to consumers) they will. Will there be people who try and capture the high end market with some ideologically themed marketing in the meantime? Of course. But make no mistake, the long term goal for these new synthetic meat (both plant meat and lab meat) producers is not the high end market. It's the thousands of reefer cars that put that house brand 80/20 on a store shelf near you. Pandering to whatever the premium consumer wants to hear until you can make your product cheap enough and good enough to make real money is just a necessary part of bootstrapping that. Putting the McDouble back on the dollar menu with the help of synthetic beef is what societal progress looks like.
- ethanbond 5y agoI agree with everything you say here and if I communicated that the arguments against lab meat are durable, that was the opposite of my intention. What I mean to say is that it’s a foregone conclusion and we should be expediting its arrival and gaining an edge in that future.
- andscoop 5y agoI used to feel similarly, but now, I'm not so sure. What worries me is that lab-grown meat will allow big ag practices to continue, which will do more harm to our co2 emissions and world's soil health. To expand on this further, there is active research and practices into sustainable farming practices that show diverse crop rotations along dense but short grazing across the land has the ability to rebuild top soil 10x than previously thought. Most importantly this top soil serves as a MASSIVE CARBON SINK. Using this proven methods, we can leverage the world's farmland to sequester carbon while improving the health of our soil and the nurtition density of our food. The catch is that we need the animals to restore soil health and presumably we need the business model of selling the meat to make this practice sustainable. Further Reading: Dirt to Soil - Gabe Brown Alan Savory's Holistic Management Practices - https://youtu.be/q7pI7IYaJLI https://youtu.be/q7pI7IYaJLI https://www.marincarbonproject.org/ https://www.marincarbonproject.org/
- jurip 5y agoHow many animals are we talking about in a scenario where all the animals were being used for crop/grazing rotation? I've heard about this and it sounds good to me, but without having looked into it at all, it sounds to me like something that probably wouldn't support the number of animals we're using right now for meat production?
- greenonions 5y agoEven if you could convert all the corn/soybean land in the United States to more regenerative methods, you probably wouldn't be able to meet the current demand for meat. Additionally you have a logistical problem with the animals being distributed across an enormous area vs concentrated in a CAFO. Now, you would easily be able to grow enough food for the country and possibly the globe, but meat demand cannot be sustained.
- andscoop 5y agoDo you have a source for not being able to meet meat demand? using which "regenerative methods"?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- shadofx 5y agoMaybe eventually eating plant matter won't be considered efficient either, what with the massive expenditure of fertilizer and ecological damage of pesticide and herbicide runoff. We will need to figure out to bio-engineer edible plant matter as well. Then once we've mastered that, we can start bio-engineering ourselves to photosynthesize from the sun directly, to cut out all middlemen from the food chain. Then we can bio-engineer a vacuum-resistant carapace and launch ourselves toward the sun to exist as truly self-sufficient organisms. Then we blot out the sun with our flesh, and find some way to go to a different star.
- koheripbal 5y agoI think what the comment above is missing is that these are the metrics that the PR team chose to publish. The lab meat might also use 100x the CO2 in other production materials. It might be more labor and energy intensive. The cost might be 10x higher - even at scale. You cannot trust the PR numbers from a company looking to normalize their product. This is why 3rd party analysis is required.
- genericone 5y agoDepending on the capital requirements and cost of these facilities, and imagining them as semiconductor fab type facilities, a nation would really be putting all their eggs in one basket if their protein security relies on just a few dozen such facilities across the country. This major centralization could be done in by one ransomware attack or activist employee , whereas the decentralized protein production by tens of thousands of producers today is far less susceptible. Once food security becomes tech-driven, its something to worry about.
- aurora72 5y agoA key benefit of cultured meat is its minimized impact on the environment => And the key danger is its maximized impact on the body.
- IntelMiner 5y agoWhat impact?
- airhead969 5y agoDiverticulitis, gout, hyperlipidemia, halitosis, ...
- IntelMiner 5y agoHow is that specific to lab meat versus regular meat, though?
- kazen44 5y agohow so? as far as i am aware, this is actual meat, compared to a substitute.
- DoingIsLearning 5y agoThis is a great concept and likely to be the only way to continue to eat meat in a long-term future. However, applying a cautionary principle, I would really prefer to find a detailed description of what ingredients are these meat cultures being supplied with during growth. For example, cow meat is theoretically healthy but the previous outbreak of BSE started with cow feed that included other cow parts. In the same way sea fish is theoretically healthy, however aquaculture fish feed includes a large portion of fishmeal which is again grinded dead fish guts and bones. The nutrional value of this (lower omega fatty acids content?) is to me not clear and the impact of this is perhaps insuficiently studied (Happy to read any sources others may suggest). I am not arguing that a lab grown muscle cell is different from a muscle cell appended to a chicken. But I would very much like to see more detail on the supply chain of how that muscle cell is provided with nutrients.
- ykevinator3 5y agoStill high cholesterol but a good idea
- spywaregorilla 5y agoThe price seems to be ~$3.90 to produce chicken breast. Given that I regularly find chicken breast in a store for $1.99, I'll assume that's still ~3x as costly as just farm raising chickens. It will be interesting if subsidies can change this though. The negative externalities of raising animals must be huge. The jobs tied up in these industries are enormous as well though.
- sva_ 5y agoI'm pretty sure that the poultry industry is already receiving major agricultural subsidies to get to that price.
- Falling3 5y agoYep. Animal ag is both directly and indirectly subsidized pretty heavily in the US. If we removed their subsidies and moved them to lab grown meat, the economics work out in favor of the latter much sooner.
- xjlin0 5y agoNot only benefits from human economical point of view, but traditional farming also help environment in certain area. Animals convert plants (grass and beans from solar energy) to manure for benefiting soil. It's human that didn't evenly distribute it well. Lab-grown meat doesn't have that yet. ps. Not comparing wild ecology to human farming, just comparing traditional farming with lab-grown tech here.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoThat's almost certainly true, in the very least in the form of corn subsidies for feed. My point was more that there are millions of jobs in the poultry industry alone. This is an existential threat to an enormous job market. One that is likely to become very messy. I think the US will struggle greatly to embrace this quickly, but nations that don't have large farming populations have a huge incentive to create a strong lab grown meat industry and export it. Very big economic opportunity, as well as another impending wave of poverty and irrelevance for traditional players.
- 5y ago
- wuschel 5y agoReally cool they made it happen. I looked at the topic years ago, and was pushed away from serum (e.g. FBS) costs, and potential PR backlash coming from using genetic modification or cell line immortalizion to decrease unit costs. Alas, they seem to have done it w/o these modifications. I need to crawl into their patents. There are clear advantages to produce animal protein via biotechnology, although I wonder if the formulation of more complex end product's (e.g. a bio identical steak) will be doable within the cost frame. I love how they made the PR in the whole industry: very ideologic, almost like Apple. I wonder how the acceptance rate will be. Interesting times for pharmers. At the end, it is just another technology leap like the Haber Bosch Process. Sustainable management of resources and human population control is what really counts.
- bckr 5y agoI would also like to express pure excitement for this development.
- airhead969 5y agoLet's consider that cultured meats are okay as future historically-correct delicacies. We are religiously-attached to meat agriculture now, but we must kick the habit because it's killing us and going to kill us: resource utilization, climate change, antibiotics resistance, and pandemics. How about we design a specific protein product that is healthiest first? And then second: how to produce it as efficiently as possible?
- gbear605 5y agoThat only works if you can convince the 90% of people who are non-vegetarian to switch over. Assuming you won’t legally ban it (I presume you’re not planning a revolution), that means you need a product that people will prefer to normal meat, which means tastier or cheaper than normal meat.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- notdang 5y agoHow far are we from real meat texture as opposed to this minced meat for burgers?
- detritus 5y agoI know we've got to start somewhere and I'm all for this direction, but wake me up when we're making synthetic meat products based on beef or pork cell lines. Chicken's the one meat I don't feel too guilty about eating, especially in emission terms. Yet, anyway...
- wccrawford 5y ago>At this point, the facility is already able to produce lamb, chicken, and pork products without using genetic modification or animal serum. Future Meat says that it will soon also be able to start production on beef, too. So, they're not producing it commercially, but they can do pork. I'd say the day is inevitable at this point.
- detritus 5y agoThat's interesting - I thought that fat was the trickier element to replicate, which is a more important dimension in pork and beef. Now then, the interesting question for an Israeli-company - would producing and then consuming synthetic pork be Kosher?
- wccrawford 5y agoI wasn't surprised to see that beef was left out initially. Even without the religious objection, they aren't likely to have much of a market for vat-beef locally because cow-beef isn't desired locally. But once they go more global, there's a really big market for vat-beef. And I would love to know of the religious implications of this as well... Both for cow and pig, for various religions and other beliefs, such as veganism.
- edanm 5y agoWhy do you think that cow-beef isn't desired in Israel? We eat plenty of beef.
- 5y ago
- aaron695 5y ago> World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day If this was true billion $ industries just ended. The stock market would collapse. What they are really doing is amazing. But it's all a while off yet.
- endisneigh 5y agoI'm curious how healthy this is compared to grass fed animals.
- dharmaturtle 5y agoThey don't produce beef yet: > At this point, the facility is already able to produce lamb, chicken, and pork products without using genetic modification or animal serum. Future Meat says that it will soon also be able to start production on beef, too.
- shafyy 5y agoNote that they are not yet "pumping" out anything. Their plan is to start selling next year, which means that it probably will take another few years. I think that it makes much more sense to make meat and cheese directly from plant proteins, without going through the trouble of growing meat in bioreactors. Assuming that both will have a similar endproduct (and Impossible shows that it's possible), making from plant proteins directly will always be cheaper, faster, require less resources and be healthier. That said, I'm not against companies going in this direction. I think it's worth exploring. It's just a bit sad that this "high tech" gets much more press and hype than the more boring alternative, which is already here and reducing greenhouse gas emissions TODAY (which is the key). This is very similar to direct-air-capture technologies, which some day might be viable, but there are plenty of things that we can today that are just not as sexy and therefore don't get hyped in the media. To be clear: I see a future where most meats and cheeses will be made directly from plants, and a small minority made using cultured cells.
- mdorazio 5y ago> making from plant proteins directly will always be cheaper, faster, require less resources and be healthier This is not clear at all. If you look into what goes into making something like an Impossible Burger, it is basically none of those things.
- shafyy 5y agoWhich part is not clear?
- djrogers 5y agoFor one thing, plant based meats require a ton of resources, and for another there’s no clear evidence that it’s any healthier than vat grown meat.
- shafyy 5y agoOk, let's leave out the health part because nutritional health is a tricky topic. We could argue days and nights about this. But what we can tell for certain is that it does not require a ton of resources. The cultured cells in the bioreactor also need energy and nutrtients from somewhere, they don't just create it out of thin air. The energy and nutrtients ultimately comes from plants. Basic physics dictates that there will be a conversion loss. So it is always better to directly eat the plants than to feed plants to something else and eat that.
- paraschopra 5y agoI'm surprised at the claim that it does 80-percent fewer greenhouse emissions. The recent research suggests that lab-grown meat may not be better than conventional meat (at least for beef) because a part of cows emissions are methane related that dissipates fast while majority of emissions for lab grown meat is CO2 that stays in the atmosphere for long. From https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00005/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.0000... >We conclude that cultured meat is not prima facie climatically superior to cattle; its relative impact instead depends on the availability of decarbonized energy generation and the specific production systems that are realized.
- yboris 5y agoHow do you reconcile your claim that "methane ... dissipates fast" with this: > Methane is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane
- wavefunction 5y agoIt seems like a faulty way to analyze the problem in any case. Atmospheric methane devolves into CO2 in about eight years, "on average." CO2 emitted into the atmosphere appears to stick around for 300-1000 years. The heat-trapping of methane is obviously much greater during that eight years but then it devolves into CO2. I guess the only way to draw a real conclusion would be comparing the amount of Methane+subsequent CO2 resulting from traditional animal husbandry with the amount of CO2 produced by this lab process.
- yboris 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane > The 20-year global warming potential of methane is 84. That is, over a 20-year period, it traps 84 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide (CO2). For us, the well-off HN folks, there is no reason to consume meat other than to have a meal that tastes different than another meal we could have instead. We individually could choose to make choices that result in less methane (and CO2 as well) produced, by simply eating more plant-based meals.
- yawaworht1978 5y agoDoes this meat have the same nutritional value, as in percentage of proteins and fats? Same taste as the real thing?
- marcus_holmes 5y agoI always wonder about the morality questions. This is like a lab experiment for subjective morality. For the sake of the experiment, let's assume the sci-fi writers are right, and eating animals will eventually be considered immoral. This is an extreme stance at the moment (hello PETA) but let's assume it will eventually be accepted as the only moral stance. How long will it be between the introduction of lab-grown meat until killing animals for food is banned? Is this a generational thing (so older people still consider eating animals to be acceptable, while younger people do not), or is it a country-wide thing (countries move to ban eating animals one by one, driven by a general shift in moral attitude), or what? How does this change in morality propagate through society? Will we get to the point where statues of now-famous people are pulled down because they ate animals? Assuming some variant of "cancel culture" exists then, will that act retroactively and currently-lionised people get cancelled because they are carnivores, even though the current culture that they exist in considers it acceptable? Will we see clever re-interpretations of religious texts dealing with the eating of animals? Will we get religious divisions between different interpretations? Will some people refuse to accept the general moral stance on eating animals because their religious text says it's acceptable? How does this interaction between objective religious morality and subjective secular morality work? It's going to be really interesting to watch this unfold.
- justinmchase 5y agoAnother question is, if its banned to kill an animal for meat, for various animals, how long until they go extinct? Many are co-dependent on humanity for their survival at the species level... Or at the very least how will it affect their evolution?
- falcolas 5y agoGood question. Another: How will the ranchland dedicated to their raising be used? In Montana, where the cows outnumber the people, the land they occupy is considered unfit for farming, largely because it’s not friendly for combines. There’s also the whole infrastructure and supply chain dedicated to the breeding and raising of various meat sources. What will happen to them?
- bionhoward 5y agoDoes lab-grown meat have a lab-grown immune system to prevent lab-grown contamination?
- watertom 5y agoThis still won't fix the fundamental problem facing the environment, which is over population, it also won't fix the problem that the environment is already locked into a number of positive feedback loops driving climate change.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sharikous 5y agoActually it fixes exactly that. A more efficient way to get food allows for a larger population with less strain on the Earth's resources.
- EForEndeavour 5y agoAlthough global population is still increasing, the rate of increase has been declining since the 1960s, so that's acceleration in the right direction: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth
- davidivadavid 5y agoHow much research is being done into exploring "exotic" new invented fake-meats with different textures / tastes / etc. ?
- bckr 5y agoSlow down! I'm not ready for Meech Munchies
- wonderwonder 5y agoI love this project for the simple reason that it makes me think of the possibility for large crewed long distance space flights with onboard protein producing capabilities. Would also go a long way towards making life on mars more realistic.
- cout 5y agoThe article touches on water and emissions; I wonder how these products compare on electricity usage (and whether that's counted in the emissions estimate).
- koheripbal 5y agoCows don't use a lot of electricity, so it's got to be higher emissions. ...even considering the cow methane.
- bronzeage 5y agoAnother interesting part of it is that it might be able to produce kosher pork meat. The reason pork is forbidden is because it's not possible to slaughter pork in a kosher way, but if no animal dies, it might be kosher.
- bayesian_horse 5y agoThe problem with most lab-grown meat currently is that it still requires fetal bovine serum, which you need to kill cows for...
- djrogers 5y agoFTA: >At this point, the facility is already able to produce lamb, chicken, and pork products without using genetic modification or animal serum. Future Meat says that it will soon also be able to start production on beef, too. So seems like they’ve solved that little conundrum.
- shaunregenbaum 5y agoI worked in this lab! Would be glad to answer questions.
- Mvhsz 5y agoHave you tried it? How was it?
- shaunregenbaum 5y agoI haven't tried it personally (I worked in a different part of the lab), but I've been told that its pretty indistinguishable from ground chicken/beef.
- Trufa 5y agoIs it only burger style meat? Grinded? Or are they trying to replicate the shape and consistency of a steak too?
- shaunregenbaum 5y agoFuture Meat is focused on ground meat/chicken products. There are other companies in Israel focused on more refined products, check out Aleph Farms. More refined products are wildly more expensive though as you can't easily grow it in vats.
- deegles 5y agoIs it just meat or also fat? How does the nutritional content compare to say beef liver or a regular steak?
- shaunregenbaum 5y agoThe main IP in the lab is replicating the fat + other stuff in meat. It compares to average ground beef by design.
- kadonoishi 5y agoFrom a comment above, > But you have to feed the cells. And you can't just grow some plants and feed it to the cells, you have to manufacture a very precise blend of chemicals (amino acids, sugars, surfactants, antioxidants, etc.) at >99% purity for each one. Often extremely nasty solvents are involved in the production process. Usually, some sort of petroleum product is a feedstock. How would you assess these statements?
- torcete 5y agoHow do they prevent infections without an immune system?
- mattwest 5y agosterile environments
- rglover 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eCeX0oN4uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eCeX0oN4uw
- eloff 5y agoI'm not sure vegans would touch this, but they've always been more akin to a religion than a diet. Vegetarians would largely go for this I think. I'd be very happy if could get meat that was cheaper, safer, cleaner, and didn't have animal cruelty issues. This is the future. Also does anyone else here remember the beef vats in Call to Power, the civilization knockoff game? It really feels like I'm living in the future when I read articles like this.
- koheripbal 5y agoI really dislike the notion of throwing entire swaths of people into a single bucket. Some vegans will eat it - others won't. I don't think you can say with confidence what portion of them will until there's some data. Many are vegan on ethical grounds - which don't apply here.
- eloff 5y ago> I really dislike the notion of throwing entire swaths of people into a single bucket. Because there are always exceptions to the rule? Or because you think you can't generalize about any diverse group of people (yes you can, knowing that it obviously doesn't apply to every individual)? > Some vegans will eat it - others won't. I don't think you can say with confidence what portion of them will until there's some data. Yes that's fair. But remember the backlash against beyond and impossible burgers because they're grilled on the same grill as meat - as if meat were an infection. Some vegans are a special bunch.
- koheripbal 5y ago> Because there are always exceptions to the rule? No, because the exceptions are the few times they are correct!
- eloff 5y agoIt's a pretty bad generalization if it's generally wrong then. I'd say the problem is with the flawed generalization then, not being able to generalize about groups in general.
- cvg 5y agoLab grown pork from an Israeli company! Is this kosher?
- koheripbal 5y agoKosher certification in Israel is a process, but it's entirely possible that they'll be able to get certification because it's not "really" from a pig.
- ginko 5y agoSome rabbis seem to think so: https://www.newsweek.com/cloned-pigs-kosher-rabbi-yuval-cherlow-kashrut-transgenic-genetically-857497 https://www.newsweek.com/cloned-pigs-kosher-rabbi-yuval-cher...
- OJFord 5y agoI'm excited for these to be readily available and around normal meat pricing - but articles never seem to show any photos. I'm really curious how they actually 'grow' it, what sort of form it takes, and then what the final product texture is like or how versatile it is. For example, the '5k burgers' figure comes from dividing the mass produced by some nominal figure for a burger. But is it actually mince they're producing? Is it minceable meat that could also be sold as steaks or .. 'joints' or 'ribs' (-like meat without there, presumably, ever being a bone)? Are they (expecting to be) able to differentiate different cuts, sirloin, rump, etc. that are pretty different when naturally grown? Or is it just a sort of vague meaty thing that you can have in whatever shape you want, but is pretty homogeneous, and like an 'average' chunk of meat, or whichever piece they sampled for it initially?
- awillen 5y agoThe cuts are exactly what I wonder. Burgers seem like the easy starting point for the same reason that the Impossibles of the world started with them - the texture is fairly easy to achieve. But I would think here that it would be possible to grow specific cuts - start with pluripotent stem cells and get them to develop into the right thing. Whether or not that's what they're doing now isn't clear, and I'd love to know if that's a short step from burgers or a huge leap. Then beyond that, I wonder if all steaks will end up being A5 wagyu grade. Is it more difficult to grow a steak that's more vs. less marbled with fat?
- armchairhacker 5y agoIt looks like the lab-grown meat looks indistinguishable from real meat. They've even got salmon sashimi with the texture of real salmon. (source: captions in https://www.fooddive.com/news/cell-based-meat-plants-come-online-for-future-meat-technologies-and-wildtyp/602301/ https://www.fooddive.com/news/cell-based-meat-plants-come-on...) I doubt it tastes indistinguishable though, from hearing other reports of tasting lab-grown meat.
- OJFord 5y agoOh wow, I hadn't heard of it being done with fish, that's great. Just earlier today I was looking at my (frankly ridiculous) dill crop and wondering what to use it with that isn't salmon.
- sebringj 5y agoI wonder then if "vegetarian" will be expanded to include lab grown meat or possibly a newer "labatarian"? "I like green eggs and ham." has a new meaning now.
- mattwest 5y agoThis post sparked nice discussion, but let's also acknowledge that slashgear is just regurgitating a PRnewswire article. I would take the statements with a grain of salt.
- hnthrowaway2 5y agoAs a vegetarian, I always have a moral dilemma when choosing dietary supplements. Perhaps I don't have to face these dilemmas if I can include lab grown meat in my diet therefore obviating the need for supplements. But having been a lifelong vegetarian, it still feels odd. Objectively looking at it, lab grown meat seems to be a good idea. I'm not entirely sure of the "morality" or ethics of it. Will take some getting used to, but if this gives rise to innovations in the synthesizing of supplements such as collagen then I'm all for it.
- Aqueous 5y agoArticle contains virtually nothing on what it is or how it's grown.
- stefantalpalaru 5y ago> Article contains virtually nothing on what it is or how it's grown. Maybe because it's grown in freshly squeezed aborted calves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum
- LatteLazy 5y agoI wonder why they're doing beef. I would have assumed a lion/woolly mammoth/T-Rex burger would have a much bigger market and markup.
- obiefernandez 5y agoI worry that if the premium for lab grown meat is high enough, we'll eventually have unethical actors selling real meat as fake meat (with no easy way for the consumer to tell the difference.)
- t0mbstone 5y agoThis is kind of a weird question, but how exactly does anyone prove that this is actually lab grown meat and isn't just normal meat that has been turned into meat paste and then sold for twice as much as normal meat? I mean, obviously, they wouldn't do this at first. They would wait until everyone was complacent and used to eating lab grown meat before they started supplementing their production. As long as creating lab-grown meat is more expensive than growing real animals and butchering them, there will be an economic incentive for this sort of fraud.
- madacol 5y agoThe promise is that it should eventually be cheaper than normal meat, otherwise they'll fail
- t0mbstone 5y agoRealistically, even fake meat sold as "lab grown" could be cheaper than normal meat if what they are doing is turning low quality meat into paste and forming it into shapes and stuff.
- AnotherGoodName 5y agoYou can ask this about a lot of foods. How do you know your baby formula isn't just crushed white building material mixed with water? (This happened btw, see melamine baby formula). In the end big conspiracies like this leak out since there's a lot of employees in the supply chain and trust in the brand is broken. The Chinese go out of their way to buy Australian and New Zealand branded baby formula to this day because trust in their own local brands was destroyed. So this is unlikely. Possible and similar short sighted things have occurred in management before (see Boeing) but it would be ridiculously poor management to let something like this happen.
- gentleman11 5y agoWhat is lab grown meat? Is it alive? Are there any nerves? Does it just absorb nutrients in a pasty vat? Is there skin? Does it get cancer if you left it too long on there? Can you get it to soak up extra nutrients or make new meat types?
- Animats 5y agoPricing is a big issue. This is a complicated process. They're pricing their chicken somewhere around $30/lb.[1] This isn't a competitive product yet. This is a press release about a pilot plant. Impossible Burger's process, by comparison, is simple and cheap. It's mostly soy and potatoes. The only complex component is heme, and that's a meat flavoring used in small quantities. [1] https://www.foodmanufacturing.com/consumer-trends/news/21259338/future-meat-technologies-prices-its-cellbased-chicken-at-750-raises-27m https://www.foodmanufacturing.com/consumer-trends/news/21259...
- jimdavenport 5y agoMaybe don't use the verb "pump"?
- ninjavis 5y agoLooking forward to all the new cancer cases due to this. <- obvious sarcasm But, seriously, manipulating something the way God intended it to be always results in dire consequences. But of course, no one will care, it's all money money money
- gbear605 5y agoWhich is why you only use natural fibers right, never synthetic ones? And you definitely don’t wear blends (directly proscribed by God).