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One thing I don't quite understand about this is why these cultivated meat companies don't start at the high end. Sure, it's true that commodity beef might be $

by darawk 5y ago

One thing I don't quite understand about this is why these cultivated meat companies don't start at the high end. Sure, it's true that commodity beef might be $4/lb, but a high end Wagyu steak is an order of magnitude or more higher than that. I would think that producing high end meats using cultivation shouldn't be much more expensive (if at all) than producing low end meats, given the primary difference is the marbling, which is a fairly arbitrary parameter biologically. There must be some good reason why this is hard, but i'd just like to understand why that is.

User23 5y ago
I imagine making A5 graded meat in a bioreactor is beyond the state of the art. It might also have trouble in the marketplace. And from what I know those cattle live pretty nice lives until they’re slaughtered. Which, if done properly, is painless because the brain is instantaneously destroyed. Edit: I find factory farming gross and I’m omnivorous. I’m opposed to unnecessary suffering, but I don’t think that’s really a problem for high grade meat.
- darawk 5y ago
  > I imagine making A5 graded meat in a bioreactor is beyond the state of the art. It might also have trouble in the marketplace. And from what I know those cattle live pretty nice lives until they’re slaughtered. Which, if done properly, is painless because the brain is instantaneously destroyed. I agree that it doesn't achieve the moral/social/climatological objective immediately, but as a business strategy to get to that objective later it seems like a better approach.
- donw 5y ago
ska 5y ago
I think you are vastly underestimating the size of the technical jump you are suggesting.
- darawk 5y ago
  I understand it's a technical jump, but it seems like a more tractable one than substantially reducing the cost of scale production.
  - ska 5y ago
    I suspect you have those two significantly inverted, but that's just a SWAG.
PeterisP 5y ago
The thing is that we can't make low end meat, those products are not trying to do that. We are making meatfree alternatives to the processed products that are customarily made by mangling low end meat (ground meat, sausage, hamburger, chicken nuggets), but we don't (yet?) have an effective/affordable/reasonable way to make the macrostructure/texture similar even to a lousy piece of low end meat before it gets minced up. It's not trivial (and perhaps even impossible) to transform the equivalent of meat slurry (which is what you can get from the current manufacturing process - they cultivate separate single cells, not connected tissue) back to a slab of meat even if you'd be satisfied with the quality of cheapest cuts. There are some concepts of growing whole tissue which could be a solution, however, that's not what's discussed in this article and that's not (yet?) commercially usable as far as I know. If we could make an artificial equivalent of a cut of beef then you're right, it would make all sense to try to replicate Wagyu marbling instead of a cheap cut as itwould not be that big of a difference for the technology; however, at the moment we aren't making replicas of actual whole pieces of meat.
- darawk 5y ago
  Huh, I had thought that you could use meat glue [1] to synthesize steak-like things from lower end chunks of meat pretty effectively, and sort of assumed that you could scale that up in a 3d printer type setup to achieve something resembling a steak. Is that not the case? Here's an example of a meat glued steak being produced from small chunks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA6TKxu8Vhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA6TKxu8Vhk It's obviously not as significant a reconstruction as going from even ground beef to steak, let alone cell slurry. But I guess I figured that was primarily a matter of precise printing, rather than something more complex. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_glue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_glue
  - AbrahamParangi 5y ago
    It would be equivalent to a hamburger patty shaped like a steak.

by darawk 5y ago

User23 5y ago

I imagine making A5 graded meat in a bioreactor is beyond the state of the art. It might also have trouble in the marketplace. And from what I know those cattle live pretty nice lives until they’re slaughtered. Which, if done properly, is painless because the brain is instantaneously destroyed. Edit: I find factory farming gross and I’m omnivorous. I’m opposed to unnecessary suffering, but I don’t think that’s really a problem for high grade meat.

darawk 5y ago
> I imagine making A5 graded meat in a bioreactor is beyond the state of the art. It might also have trouble in the marketplace. And from what I know those cattle live pretty nice lives until they’re slaughtered. Which, if done properly, is painless because the brain is instantaneously destroyed. I agree that it doesn't achieve the moral/social/climatological objective immediately, but as a business strategy to get to that objective later it seems like a better approach.
donw 5y ago

ska 5y ago

I think you are vastly underestimating the size of the technical jump you are suggesting.

darawk 5y ago
I understand it's a technical jump, but it seems like a more tractable one than substantially reducing the cost of scale production.
- ska 5y ago
  I suspect you have those two significantly inverted, but that's just a SWAG.

PeterisP 5y ago

The thing is that we can't make low end meat, those products are not trying to do that. We are making meatfree alternatives to the processed products that are customarily made by mangling low end meat (ground meat, sausage, hamburger, chicken nuggets), but we don't (yet?) have an effective/affordable/reasonable way to make the macrostructure/texture similar even to a lousy piece of low end meat before it gets minced up. It's not trivial (and perhaps even impossible) to transform the equivalent of meat slurry (which is what you can get from the current manufacturing process - they cultivate separate single cells, not connected tissue) back to a slab of meat even if you'd be satisfied with the quality of cheapest cuts. There are some concepts of growing whole tissue which could be a solution, however, that's not what's discussed in this article and that's not (yet?) commercially usable as far as I know. If we could make an artificial equivalent of a cut of beef then you're right, it would make all sense to try to replicate Wagyu marbling instead of a cheap cut as itwould not be that big of a difference for the technology; however, at the moment we aren't making replicas of actual whole pieces of meat.

darawk 5y ago
Huh, I had thought that you could use meat glue [1] to synthesize steak-like things from lower end chunks of meat pretty effectively, and sort of assumed that you could scale that up in a 3d printer type setup to achieve something resembling a steak. Is that not the case? Here's an example of a meat glued steak being produced from small chunks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA6TKxu8Vhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA6TKxu8Vhk It's obviously not as significant a reconstruction as going from even ground beef to steak, let alone cell slurry. But I guess I figured that was primarily a matter of precise printing, rather than something more complex. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_glue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_glue
- AbrahamParangi 5y ago
  It would be equivalent to a hamburger patty shaped like a steak.