6 ms·

There is a decent chance this article is correct but I also dislike part of article's focus. The part I dislike was focusing a lot on the size of the reactors

There is a decent chance this article is correct but I also dislike part of article's focus. The part I dislike was focusing a lot on the size of the reactors needed in order to replace the US meat production. It is a bit unfair to compare the size of a bioreactor to a meat packing plant without considering the size of all the (organic?) bioreactors... livestock. There are ~30M cattle in the US at any given time so the volume is considerable. To ignore the infrastructure and space that livestock use is making the implicit claim that livestock are 'free' instead of 'cheaper currently'. Considering how efficient meat production is (at the expense of everything else), we can basically make a single head of cattle as our standardized unit to evaluate the cost & thermodynamics. Basically at scale is a engineered bioreactor cheaper than the natural blood & bones bioreactor? Certainly not upfront unless small scale bioreactor in a bag technology... oh wait that exists [1]. Sucks that pricing isn't easy to get but I think it is still more expensive than fixed/reusable vessels at least over time. [1] https://www.sartorius.com/en/products/fermentation-bioreactors/single-use-bioreactors https://www.sartorius.com/en/products/fermentation-bioreacto... It's really hard to know without having more knowledge about the specifics of but I think there's a lot of unexplored areas that makes these projects worthwhile.

moralestapia 5y ago
>Basically at scale is a engineered bioreactor cheaper than the natural blood & bones bioreactor? No, it's not. That's what the whole article is about. It won't be cost effective, not even at that scale. Plus, it gives some other physical/pragmatic reasons on why it may not be even possible to do it (disregarding costs).
- KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  It was a question. My main disagreement is not the outcome but rather that there was never a real cost breakdown of lab vs natural. Personally I found the article's structure makes it a bit hard to follow and even more difficult to formulate a good response. However the reports it mentions are pretty good: GFI (Good Food Institute which represents these lab meat companies) https://gfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/cultured-meat-LCA-TEA-policy.pdf https://gfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/cultured-meat-LCA... Ezra Klein/Vox/Huw Hughes: https://www.scribd.com/document/526220188/Cultivated-Meat-review-of-the-cost-of-manufacturing https://www.scribd.com/document/526220188/Cultivated-Meat-re... Open Philanthropy/David Humbird: https://engrxiv.org/795su https://engrxiv.org/795su
robbiep 5y ago
It seems you missed the point of the article - which is that given some of the fundamentals underpinning the growth of cells out of the body, with our current and mid-future predicted levels of technology, it is not going to be possible to produce economical meat in a lab anytime soon.
- sroussey 5y ago
  As a no name angel investor, I’ve seen a few of the companies in the report. But also others that are changing the assumptions. So yeah, if you think you are going to produce meat by replicating in vats used for vaccines, then you are going to have problems. There are other paradigms that are more likely to be disregarded out of hand from someone with decades of knowledge, but can work if someone with a bit of naïveté goes forward anyhow. I mean, AI researchers when I was in college laughed at using any kind of neural network. And they were right, if you had a short timeframe. I do think the timeframes are, uh… optimistic like a new SPAC with no revenue. Overly optimistic.
sbierwagen 5y ago
>Basically at scale is a engineered bioreactor cheaper than the natural blood & bones bioreactor? A cow walks around and eats grass by itself. A bioreactor needs constant monitoring by a worker. If each and every beef cow was hand-raised by a single human, regular beef would be $100/kg too.
- ruined 5y ago
  you can't leave cows unattended. they wander off, get injured, fall ill, might be stolen, and all kinds of things. if they don't eat well enough they might not be worth slaughtering. you can either keep them in cages and attend to them there, with all the distasteful complications that brings, or herd them in large pastures at the cost of very difficult and dangerous skilled labor. it will certainly require some training to attend to a bioreactor but assuming an eventual working model they seem much less problematic than a wandering animal, and would probably suffer less and get sick less than lots of caged animals.
  - robbiep 5y ago
    you have absolutely zero understanding of the nature of raising beef cattle. Which, for many subsets of cattle rearing, can basically be left to their own devices. From where I sit currently I can see our 150 head comfortably munch their way through oats and pasture into which they were introduced4 months ago, and where they will stay for at least another 4 months, with minimal human intervention until the next calving season comes. There is very little that is difficult and dangerous about the labour required to herd cattle a couple of times a year, unless you are talking about the gyrocopter cowboys in far north queensland and the Northern Territory, of whom a better description would be crazy or insane Feedlotting is more labour intensive, but then the beef is more expensive because in some markets it is considered of a higher grade, and they may weigh more
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    This is wrong. Cattle farming is not a labor intensive industry which is why high wage first world countries like USA, Australia, France, Germany are among the top producers and western countries export to places like Indonesia and China competitively with Brazil and India other big beef exporters with lower cost of labor. > you can't leave cows unattended. Of course you can. There are remote areas that essentially let cattle roam freely over thousands and thousands of acres and bring them in as little as once a year for maintenance (branding, medication, castration, selling, etc). No fences, no roads, rarely ever being seen aside from routine checks of water points (which is becoming less common with remote monitoring equipment). > they wander off, get injured, fall ill, might be stolen, and all kinds of things. if they don't eat well enough they might not be worth slaughtering. > you can either keep them in cages and attend to them there, with all the distasteful complications that brings, or herd them in large pastures at the cost of very difficult and dangerous skilled labor. There is not much dangerous skilled labor at all. Difficult, yes like a lot of manual labor. Dangerous and skilled no outside of some rare cases like the use of helicopters to drive cattle in aforementioned remote areas with terrain sometimes not even accessible to motorbike so helicopter and horse is used. Importantly even in those situations, the amount of labor required per value of beef produced is simply not very high. And those aren't really the options. Feedlots are increasingly used (what distasteful complications?) but most of the world's beef is not produced that way, and where those are used it is often as a finishing step after a free-range life to improve consistency and make up the last bit of weight.
babel_ 5y ago
Well the long and short of that is the infrastructure and space usage of livestock etc. aren't ignored, they're part and parcel of what the cost of bringing meat to your plate is. Can't say what exact breakdowns are, likely the answer is "it depends" on the meat and cut/grade/etc but there will be industry reports and such so I'm sure you can find something. The fundamental point here is that the analysis says that at no point soon does a bioreactor get cheaper than livestock, and will likely remain significantly more expensive for a long time if these promised magical breakthroughs do not occur (and I say promised since they're looking for investment, so if they don't then it's a massive loss on everyone's parts). Humbird estimated $17-$40 for a pound of ground meat by 2030. Future Meat has already reached $18 for cultured ground "chicken" but as the article points out is unlikely to go lower. Currently, ground beef costs about $4 per pound. $4. That's how much everything, from infrastructure to land use to feed to water to labour to delivery costs for the same ground beef you'd get from livestock as you'd get straight out of the bioreactor (which they said was 70% water and 30% basically ground meat). A round steak costs about $6 per pound if you're lucky, and often higher. Going for steak with meat cultures this would drive the price well beyond $17 since you'd need to do a LOT more work in processing it. Livestock has been scaled out very efficiently by ignoring all the environmental damages it causes. Since the whole point of this is to not "cut corners", they're already on the back foot, and the article explains many of the concerning avenues they are considering to even try and get close to dropping the price. Ultimately, livestock has been optimised, and isn't getting cheaper, quite the opposite. Prices are slowly rising for meat. But the "hidden" cost is the environmental damage (a damning cost at that). Scaling out the bioreactors physically with higher capacity is how you'd drop the cost of cultured meat at the same volume, fewer larger reactors being more efficient than many smaller ones, since the pharmaceutical industry has failed to make game changing breakthroughs in the other approaches to making more efficient cultures that would meet this need in recent years (though, as mentioned, Future Meat has done just this, but would still need economy of scale to get competitive). They could scale up tomorrow with ten thousand times as many reactors without making a real dent in their efficiency, simply replicating what they already have, and still be forced to sell at cost like Eat Just or sell at an unjustifiable price. Current cost according to the article is typically between $10k and $22k per pound. That's obscene. Getting down to $17 per pound, or even close such as Future Meat with it's incredible $18 per pound, is still a losing battle. After all, even if we removed subsidies and doubled the price of meat, that's still significantly cheaper than ground meat cultures, let alone being processed. Meanwhile, plant-based alternatives and such are already reaching the point of being cost competitive, with $6 per pound for a Beyond Beef burger, and an average price of $9 per pound for meat alternatives, and some people are already switching. So if there's anything that governments should focus on, it's the one that's clearly successful (and in way more volume) and just about a similar win in terms of soy/grain usage and similar. Is the article perfect? No. Is it correct? Most likely. I don't think the focus is off, though I do think that there's some ground work that could have been done, showing breakdowns of costs and such in a clearer way, though clearly it's prose in the end while the reports speak for themselves. Talking about the story of the analysis and what it actually means for the likely future of meat culture. Hopefully I've collected those points you were looking for a little bit here, though not being an industry expert naturally I've been unable to trivially procure breakdowns for how much is labour costs per pound etc., so mostly it's a denser version of the factoids in the article and what's readily available online.
Maursault 5y ago
> There are ~30M cattle in the US at any given time That number is the count of full grown cattle, 31M. When you include calves, it's 98M total in the US. It isn't easy to realize just how nauseating that truly is. There's roughly 330M people in the US. One cow will feed 2300 people 3oz of beef, which is the most meat one may eat in a sitting and still be considered healthy (though I personally disagree, no amount of red meat is healthy IMO). 360M / 31M comes out to around 10 people per cow, which will feed them once a day 3oz for 230 days. So the US has enough beef to serve every man, woman and child a a 3oz steak serving once every 38 hours, all year long. Of course, nothing close to this amount is actually consumed, and at least 23% of it is entirely wasted in production, 7.1M cattle annually are effectively turned into garbage before product can hit store shelves.
- azinman2 5y ago
  You’re forgetting that the US exports beef, and also turns it into other products such as dog food. You also need to feed people all over again next year, and it’s not like we’re all eating <1 year old cows.
  - Maursault 5y ago
    14% of US beef is exported, but if the beef industry disappeared overnight, no one would starve as a result, and neither would the ~70M dogs in the US, which are omnivores btw. And typically slaughter occurs between 12 and 22 months, so it's more accurate to snark "it's not like you're all eating >2 year old cows."
- sbakzbsmx 5y ago
  That doesnt sound right. I’m sure I eat, on average, at least 6 oz/ day. I estimate I eat anywhere between 50-100 kg/ year or somewhere between 5-10 oz a day. Probably closer to around 7. Or about three times your estimate.
  - Maursault 5y ago
    Not for long. :( And we hardly knew you. May you rest in heavenly peace.
dev_tty01 5y ago
>To ignore the infrastructure and space that livestock use is making the implicit claim that livestock are 'free' instead of 'cheaper currently'. No one is ignoring it. It is already baked into the cost of the meat.
- jzoch 5y ago
  not exactly - cattle farming is very very heavily subsidized. The true price is definitely not baked in
  - hcurtiss 5y ago
    This is a talking point for the environmental left, but it's not really true. Ranchers don't get cash subsidies (most other crops do). Farmland, including pastureland, is generally taxed at a lower rate than other lands, but that's because we usually want to disincentivize conversion to other uses. Likewise, sometimes there are NRCS grants available, but those are for things like wetland investments or fallowing ground. Public land grazing rates are lower than what you'd typically pay for private lands, but public lands generally have very low value/productivity with huge tracts of unfenced ground requiring relatively large investments to retrieve and drive cattle, and with a much higher mortality rates. Even if public land grazing were marginally less expensive, only a very small portion of cattle are fed on public lands -- I think it's something less than 2%. People like to distort the meaning of "subsidies," to cast disfavored industries in a negative light, but cattle are no more subsidized than housing or roads or cars or computers or any of the other things that make life better.
    - PretzelPirate 5y ago
      > most other crops do And some of these crops are used in finishing lots. > but cattle are no more subsidized than housing or roads or cars or computers or any of the other things that make life better. I think it’s questionable that cattle make “like better”. They are an inefficient form of food who suffer when we kill them, and we don’t need to eat them to eat delicious, nutritious food.
  - 5y ago

moralestapia 5y ago

>Basically at scale is a engineered bioreactor cheaper than the natural blood & bones bioreactor? No, it's not. That's what the whole article is about. It won't be cost effective, not even at that scale. Plus, it gives some other physical/pragmatic reasons on why it may not be even possible to do it (disregarding costs).

KingMachiavelli 5y ago
It was a question. My main disagreement is not the outcome but rather that there was never a real cost breakdown of lab vs natural. Personally I found the article's structure makes it a bit hard to follow and even more difficult to formulate a good response. However the reports it mentions are pretty good: GFI (Good Food Institute which represents these lab meat companies) https://gfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/cultured-meat-LCA-TEA-policy.pdf https://gfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/cultured-meat-LCA... Ezra Klein/Vox/Huw Hughes: https://www.scribd.com/document/526220188/Cultivated-Meat-review-of-the-cost-of-manufacturing https://www.scribd.com/document/526220188/Cultivated-Meat-re... Open Philanthropy/David Humbird: https://engrxiv.org/795su https://engrxiv.org/795su

robbiep 5y ago

It seems you missed the point of the article - which is that given some of the fundamentals underpinning the growth of cells out of the body, with our current and mid-future predicted levels of technology, it is not going to be possible to produce economical meat in a lab anytime soon.

sroussey 5y ago
As a no name angel investor, I’ve seen a few of the companies in the report. But also others that are changing the assumptions. So yeah, if you think you are going to produce meat by replicating in vats used for vaccines, then you are going to have problems. There are other paradigms that are more likely to be disregarded out of hand from someone with decades of knowledge, but can work if someone with a bit of naïveté goes forward anyhow. I mean, AI researchers when I was in college laughed at using any kind of neural network. And they were right, if you had a short timeframe. I do think the timeframes are, uh… optimistic like a new SPAC with no revenue. Overly optimistic.

sbierwagen 5y ago

>Basically at scale is a engineered bioreactor cheaper than the natural blood & bones bioreactor? A cow walks around and eats grass by itself. A bioreactor needs constant monitoring by a worker. If each and every beef cow was hand-raised by a single human, regular beef would be $100/kg too.

ruined 5y ago
you can't leave cows unattended. they wander off, get injured, fall ill, might be stolen, and all kinds of things. if they don't eat well enough they might not be worth slaughtering. you can either keep them in cages and attend to them there, with all the distasteful complications that brings, or herd them in large pastures at the cost of very difficult and dangerous skilled labor. it will certainly require some training to attend to a bioreactor but assuming an eventual working model they seem much less problematic than a wandering animal, and would probably suffer less and get sick less than lots of caged animals.
- robbiep 5y ago
  you have absolutely zero understanding of the nature of raising beef cattle. Which, for many subsets of cattle rearing, can basically be left to their own devices. From where I sit currently I can see our 150 head comfortably munch their way through oats and pasture into which they were introduced4 months ago, and where they will stay for at least another 4 months, with minimal human intervention until the next calving season comes. There is very little that is difficult and dangerous about the labour required to herd cattle a couple of times a year, unless you are talking about the gyrocopter cowboys in far north queensland and the Northern Territory, of whom a better description would be crazy or insane Feedlotting is more labour intensive, but then the beef is more expensive because in some markets it is considered of a higher grade, and they may weigh more
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  This is wrong. Cattle farming is not a labor intensive industry which is why high wage first world countries like USA, Australia, France, Germany are among the top producers and western countries export to places like Indonesia and China competitively with Brazil and India other big beef exporters with lower cost of labor. > you can't leave cows unattended. Of course you can. There are remote areas that essentially let cattle roam freely over thousands and thousands of acres and bring them in as little as once a year for maintenance (branding, medication, castration, selling, etc). No fences, no roads, rarely ever being seen aside from routine checks of water points (which is becoming less common with remote monitoring equipment). > they wander off, get injured, fall ill, might be stolen, and all kinds of things. if they don't eat well enough they might not be worth slaughtering. > you can either keep them in cages and attend to them there, with all the distasteful complications that brings, or herd them in large pastures at the cost of very difficult and dangerous skilled labor. There is not much dangerous skilled labor at all. Difficult, yes like a lot of manual labor. Dangerous and skilled no outside of some rare cases like the use of helicopters to drive cattle in aforementioned remote areas with terrain sometimes not even accessible to motorbike so helicopter and horse is used. Importantly even in those situations, the amount of labor required per value of beef produced is simply not very high. And those aren't really the options. Feedlots are increasingly used (what distasteful complications?) but most of the world's beef is not produced that way, and where those are used it is often as a finishing step after a free-range life to improve consistency and make up the last bit of weight.

babel_ 5y ago

Well the long and short of that is the infrastructure and space usage of livestock etc. aren't ignored, they're part and parcel of what the cost of bringing meat to your plate is. Can't say what exact breakdowns are, likely the answer is "it depends" on the meat and cut/grade/etc but there will be industry reports and such so I'm sure you can find something. The fundamental point here is that the analysis says that at no point soon does a bioreactor get cheaper than livestock, and will likely remain significantly more expensive for a long time if these promised magical breakthroughs do not occur (and I say promised since they're looking for investment, so if they don't then it's a massive loss on everyone's parts). Humbird estimated $17-$40 for a pound of ground meat by 2030. Future Meat has already reached $18 for cultured ground "chicken" but as the article points out is unlikely to go lower. Currently, ground beef costs about $4 per pound. $4. That's how much everything, from infrastructure to land use to feed to water to labour to delivery costs for the same ground beef you'd get from livestock as you'd get straight out of the bioreactor (which they said was 70% water and 30% basically ground meat). A round steak costs about $6 per pound if you're lucky, and often higher. Going for steak with meat cultures this would drive the price well beyond $17 since you'd need to do a LOT more work in processing it. Livestock has been scaled out very efficiently by ignoring all the environmental damages it causes. Since the whole point of this is to not "cut corners", they're already on the back foot, and the article explains many of the concerning avenues they are considering to even try and get close to dropping the price. Ultimately, livestock has been optimised, and isn't getting cheaper, quite the opposite. Prices are slowly rising for meat. But the "hidden" cost is the environmental damage (a damning cost at that). Scaling out the bioreactors physically with higher capacity is how you'd drop the cost of cultured meat at the same volume, fewer larger reactors being more efficient than many smaller ones, since the pharmaceutical industry has failed to make game changing breakthroughs in the other approaches to making more efficient cultures that would meet this need in recent years (though, as mentioned, Future Meat has done just this, but would still need economy of scale to get competitive). They could scale up tomorrow with ten thousand times as many reactors without making a real dent in their efficiency, simply replicating what they already have, and still be forced to sell at cost like Eat Just or sell at an unjustifiable price. Current cost according to the article is typically between $10k and $22k per pound. That's obscene. Getting down to $17 per pound, or even close such as Future Meat with it's incredible $18 per pound, is still a losing battle. After all, even if we removed subsidies and doubled the price of meat, that's still significantly cheaper than ground meat cultures, let alone being processed. Meanwhile, plant-based alternatives and such are already reaching the point of being cost competitive, with $6 per pound for a Beyond Beef burger, and an average price of $9 per pound for meat alternatives, and some people are already switching. So if there's anything that governments should focus on, it's the one that's clearly successful (and in way more volume) and just about a similar win in terms of soy/grain usage and similar. Is the article perfect? No. Is it correct? Most likely. I don't think the focus is off, though I do think that there's some ground work that could have been done, showing breakdowns of costs and such in a clearer way, though clearly it's prose in the end while the reports speak for themselves. Talking about the story of the analysis and what it actually means for the likely future of meat culture. Hopefully I've collected those points you were looking for a little bit here, though not being an industry expert naturally I've been unable to trivially procure breakdowns for how much is labour costs per pound etc., so mostly it's a denser version of the factoids in the article and what's readily available online.

Maursault 5y ago

> There are ~30M cattle in the US at any given time That number is the count of full grown cattle, 31M. When you include calves, it's 98M total in the US. It isn't easy to realize just how nauseating that truly is. There's roughly 330M people in the US. One cow will feed 2300 people 3oz of beef, which is the most meat one may eat in a sitting and still be considered healthy (though I personally disagree, no amount of red meat is healthy IMO). 360M / 31M comes out to around 10 people per cow, which will feed them once a day 3oz for 230 days. So the US has enough beef to serve every man, woman and child a a 3oz steak serving once every 38 hours, all year long. Of course, nothing close to this amount is actually consumed, and at least 23% of it is entirely wasted in production, 7.1M cattle annually are effectively turned into garbage before product can hit store shelves.

azinman2 5y ago
You’re forgetting that the US exports beef, and also turns it into other products such as dog food. You also need to feed people all over again next year, and it’s not like we’re all eating <1 year old cows.
- Maursault 5y ago
  14% of US beef is exported, but if the beef industry disappeared overnight, no one would starve as a result, and neither would the ~70M dogs in the US, which are omnivores btw. And typically slaughter occurs between 12 and 22 months, so it's more accurate to snark "it's not like you're all eating >2 year old cows."
sbakzbsmx 5y ago
That doesnt sound right. I’m sure I eat, on average, at least 6 oz/ day. I estimate I eat anywhere between 50-100 kg/ year or somewhere between 5-10 oz a day. Probably closer to around 7. Or about three times your estimate.
- Maursault 5y ago
  Not for long. :( And we hardly knew you. May you rest in heavenly peace.

dev_tty01 5y ago

>To ignore the infrastructure and space that livestock use is making the implicit claim that livestock are 'free' instead of 'cheaper currently'. No one is ignoring it. It is already baked into the cost of the meat.

jzoch 5y ago
not exactly - cattle farming is very very heavily subsidized. The true price is definitely not baked in
- hcurtiss 5y ago
  This is a talking point for the environmental left, but it's not really true. Ranchers don't get cash subsidies (most other crops do). Farmland, including pastureland, is generally taxed at a lower rate than other lands, but that's because we usually want to disincentivize conversion to other uses. Likewise, sometimes there are NRCS grants available, but those are for things like wetland investments or fallowing ground. Public land grazing rates are lower than what you'd typically pay for private lands, but public lands generally have very low value/productivity with huge tracts of unfenced ground requiring relatively large investments to retrieve and drive cattle, and with a much higher mortality rates. Even if public land grazing were marginally less expensive, only a very small portion of cattle are fed on public lands -- I think it's something less than 2%. People like to distort the meaning of "subsidies," to cast disfavored industries in a negative light, but cattle are no more subsidized than housing or roads or cars or computers or any of the other things that make life better.
  - PretzelPirate 5y ago
    > most other crops do And some of these crops are used in finishing lots. > but cattle are no more subsidized than housing or roads or cars or computers or any of the other things that make life better. I think it’s questionable that cattle make “like better”. They are an inefficient form of food who suffer when we kill them, and we don’t need to eat them to eat delicious, nutritious food.
- 5y ago