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It will be animal cells differentiated into muscle tissues on collagen scaffolds initially. The technology comes from attempts to grow functional organs (ie, li

• prometheus76 4y ago
  It's meat, but also without the immune system so...good luck.
  • ncallaway 4y ago
    (This isn’t a sarcastic or Socratic question, just genuine curiosity) Is there some aspect of the immune system that remains active and providing protection to an animal, or parts of an animal after it’s slaughtered?
    • prometheus76 4y ago
      Not being exposed to air, for one. That's why it's safe to eat a rare steak (where the surfaces exposed to air are cooked to kill bacteria) and why it's not safe to eat rare hamburger (where all the meat has been exposed to air through grinding the meat).
      • LtWorf 4y ago
        > That's why it's safe to eat a rare steak The USA department of agriculture begs to differ. https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Is-a-rare-steak-safe-to-eat https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Is-a-rare-steak-safe-to-eat Personally I never place much trust in random comments on the internet.
        • JasserInicide 4y ago
          So if the USDA recommends this, what's the reasoning behind allowing restaurants to sell rare steaks?
          • sokoloff 4y ago
            They recommend 145°F, which is medium-well. Experiential outcomes suggest pretty strongly to me that forcing all steak to be cooked medium-well or greater is wildly overly conservative.
            • jaywalk 4y ago
              There's also steak tartare, which isn't cooked at all.
            • LtWorf 4y ago
              > Experiential outcomes suggest pretty strongly to me that forcing all steak to be cooked medium-well or greater is wildly overly conservative. Do you mean you grew coltures of bacteria from various levels of cooking and compared? Was this work peer reviewed?
              • sokoloff 4y ago
                I do not mean that. (That would be experimental rather than experiential.) Order of magnitude, ~15% of beef consumed is quality steak cuts. US residents on average eats 67 pounds of beef (so 10 pounds of steak) per year. If eating steak cooked less than medium-well was dangerous in a practical/meaningful sense, it would be common knowledge (based on lived experience) that steak should be catastrophically over-cooked as a food safety measure.
          • ncallaway 4y ago
            Look at almost any menu in any restaurant that serves steak and you’ll find a little asterisk, and a note about the USDA’s recommendation at the bottom of the menu. The USDA has not made it illegal or unlawful to cook steak rare. They recommend against it. A lot of people like rare steak, and will pay a restaurant to prepare a rare steak. So they do.
      • ncallaway 4y ago
        Sure, but this is chicken, which is already notably porous, which is why it’s generally considered unsafe to eat rare chicken, even if it’s been well cooked on the outside. At least for that aspect, I’d think the protection is less relevant. I would be very curious how that’s handled with other meats, like lab grown beef. I’d be more hesitant about lab grown beef, if the cooking instructions prevented cooking it rare.
      • formerly_proven 4y ago
        > and why it's not safe to eat rare hamburger (where all the meat has been exposed to air through grinding the meat). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett
        • evilduck 4y ago
          > permits mett to be sold only on the day of production Sounds like Germany's laws acknowledge that non-fresh mett poses the same dangers as store bought hamburger.
  • chollida1 4y ago
    Can you explain the significance of your statement? Surely the meat we all eat is dead along with the immune system and then cooked.
    • prometheus76 4y ago
      I'm talking about while you are growing the meat, whether it be in a natural system that is self-regulating and with an immune system, or in a vat where any contamination will spread rampantly. That's one of the biggest problems with lab-grown meat: if you make it at a scale that is economically feasible, the chance for contamination is so high that very few batches will make it through the process, and will have to be discarded instead.
      • lr4444lr 4y ago
        Can't we solve this at least temporarily with a sodium rich environment? It seems to be effective for safe fermentation. I have no idea whether the biochemical reactions necessary to produce the meat though would be inhibited if we did this.
        • prometheus76 4y ago
          Try injecting yourself with saltwater and see what happens. The osmotic effects won't just affect the undesired cells. It will also affect the desired cells.
          • olddustytrail 4y ago
            • prometheus76 4y ago
              Depends on the salt content. If you try things you read in comment sections on the internet, maybe you shouldn't be on the internet.
            • 4y ago
  • drdaeman 4y ago
    If I understood your comment correctly (I'm sorry if I didn't) - isn't it grown in essentially sterile conditions, so lack of immune system isn't an issue as I must imagine it shouldn't be able to communicate any transmissible diseases?
    • mlindner 4y ago
      "Sterile conditions" isn't really a thing without temperatures high enough to cook the meat.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • aendruk 4y ago
      That’s correct. The challenge is that ensuring purity of ingredients during production is tricky at scale. A small mistake could ruin a large batch of food, lowering total yields and raising costs. Ideally the production process would include something analogous to the immune system to make it more robust. For certain contaminants simple outcompetition by probiotics might suffice.
      • kube-system 4y ago
        The alternative, natural meat, is even trickier to keep sterile at scale. This is why it is advised to cook meat fully. The presence of bacteria on natural animal meat is common.
        • lost_tourist 4y ago
          It's more than "common" it's almost 100% guaranteed.
        • aendruk 4y ago
          This is a misleading statement. We don’t even try to keep slaughtered meat sterile during production; the animal’s immune system makes that unnecessary.
• matrix_overload 4y ago
  For context, the life of an average herbivore in the wild consists of living with no shelter in harsh weather while having to fear every sound. And it typically ends by being ripped to pieces by a predator and eaten alive while the brain still has some residual oxygen and awareness. The typical farmed animal experience where you are sheltered, vaccinated against common illnesses, provided food and slaughtered after being knocked out with electricity is surely boring, but hardly encompasses more suffering.
  • shoulderfake 4y ago
  • ALittleLight 4y ago
    You may want to look into the life of factory farmed pigs, for example, before you conclude which life is worse than the other. I would certainly prefer to be a wild pig over a factory farmed one.
  • toqy 4y ago
    The animals that we have been breeding for ages are pretty far removed from their wild counterparts of yore. Also, there's a lot of homeless people that would live better as my slaves, but you'd probably still rather see them free.
    • Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
      I don't think this is sound reasoning as the main issue with slavery is the abuse of the slaves. What GP is saying is that animals are more abused by nature than by people. If the same could be proven that homeless would be better as slaves (ie. thag they would not be whipped and worked to death) then that would in fact be better but since we can't make that guarantee and history has generally shown otherwise we do not allow it. There is also the fact that it would normalize slavery in general.
      • tshaddox 4y ago
        Or better yet, we just don’t force the people one way or the other.
• kikokikokiko 4y ago
  "And hopefully it'll eventually be cheaper than growing animals too." Just as simply planting a tree and letting the sun provide the energy for it's growth will always beat those "synthetic trees" people like to hype from time to time, I can expect to never see a synthetic process that is more cost effective to create "meat" than simply letting nature do it's thing. Down here in Brazil you basically give the animals it's vaccines and let them graze for a few years, you can't beat that. And btw, I'll rather starve than eat anything syntesized that can be made, cheaper and for sure tastier, naturally.
  • d23 4y ago
    > Just as simply planting a tree and letting the sun provide the energy for it's growth will always beat those "synthetic trees" people like to hype from time to time, I can expect to never see a synthetic process that is more cost effective to create "meat" than simply letting nature do it's thing. Evidence? Do you have any background in the field? It's easy as a layperson to imagine that not having to support the life of the entire organism and just growing the meat directly could absolutely be less energy intensive.
    • kikokikokiko 4y ago
      For evidence, my extended family down here raises cattle to this day. It's hard to beat doing hardly anything other than let the beasts eat grass for a couple of years. Try to beat that for a cost of goods.
      • BobbyJo 4y ago
        If we go off thermodynamics there is a lot of energy being wasted in producing the meat, even if that energy isn't expended by those tending the cattle. To say nothing of the animal suffering involved, we currently expend ~10x the calories we get from the beef producing it (IIRC). If we could get even to 5x that'd be a huge environmental win. Edit: Looking it up, beef sits at 25x, and chicken 9x. So, a lot of room for efficiency improvements.
• runarberg 4y ago
  > It's meat. It's just without the animal suffering Are you sure about the no suffering part. Currently this meat is grown using a growth medium most often extracted from a pregnant mare using a technique called bloodletting which is often extremely painful for the animal. EDIT: I think I’m actually wrong about the pregnant mare. Animal suffering through bloodletting from pregnant mares was a recent scandal where I’m from and I must have conflated it in my mind. I was actually thinking about FBS which is extracted from a slaughtered pregnant cow. So my point still stands.
  • ncallaway 4y ago
    > from a pregnant mare I’m quite skeptical about this. How do they obtain and culture chicken cells from a horse?
    • alocasia-1 4y ago
      It's the medium, not the genes. Like someone else mentioned, it's called fetal bovine serum (presuming GP meant "cow" and not "mare") and it's used in large quantities.
      • ncallaway 4y ago
        Ah, that makes sense! Thank you! I’m much less skeptical now
    • Vecr 4y ago
      Not the cells, but the growth medium. You need a growth medium to grow cells in a culture, because there's no support from the rest of the animal for growth. Normally the animal would provide blood, etc. to the tissue, but there is no animal in this case.
  • zenburnmyface 4y ago
    It’s call FBS, and it can be grown in a lab, too (if it’s even required…). See companies like Future Fields.
• eloff 4y ago
  When this technology finally gets there, and I see no reason to think it won't eventually, it will change the world so dramatically. The amount of land and water we won't need to raise animals or food for animals it's staggering. The amount of meat the world consumes will double by the end of the century (will it? I made that up). As the world gets richer, people eat more meat. Combine that with a rising population and the amount of land we need for livestock dwarfs the remaining agricultural land we'll need (again, I made that up, but it could be true.) We could rewild huge parts of the Earth, returning the habitat to nature.
  • ars 4y ago
    Only if it's cheaper. They said the same thing about plant based meat - and it hasn't because it's more expensive.
    • 411111111111111 4y ago
      Pretty sure it's not more expensive. People that are willing to buy vegan are just generally richer and more likely to be able to spend more. Thus the prices are artificially inflated by market segmentation. At least where I'm from the companies make way more profit from their vegan substitutes then their equivalent meat products.
      • jokethrowaway 4y ago
        I agree that making the same volume of food is probably cheaper if you're processing vegan only ingredients - but if you look at the amount of nutrients / $, vegan substitutes are nowhere close to meat
        • 411111111111111 4y ago
          That's honestly highly unlikely. These animals consume the same products the vegan alternatives are made with... for months or years, depending on the animal. It might be true in places without massive animal farms, but that's usually connected to more human attention which would make it even more unlikely.
• flenserboy 4y ago
  "Meat", at best. Yes, muscle cells in a matrix. The problem will be getting the rest of the structure to be there, and to grow properly, such as connective tissues and fats, and to get the same amounts of minerals and other nutrients into the "meat" as an animal does. Meat, as a food, is much more than a clump of muscle cells. Then there are the costs to do this properly (packaging the correct nutrients in bioavailable forms, for one), which will likely be much greater than simply letting a cow loose in a pasture to do what it does. This is to say nothing of the long-term testing that should be done on any such product — whether it promotes cancer, leads to misfolded proteins, thereby jetting new and interesting prions into the population, etc. The 20th century was marked by morally-unmoored technocrats allowed to run wild; why is the 21st century doubling down on this?
  • cloverich 4y ago
    > The problem will be getting the rest of the structure to be there I would guess if they can handle real actual meat, they can handle fat and nutrients which would seemingly be the easy part. If not would it be any different than today's vegetarians which just take supplements? > letting a cow loose in a pasture to do what it does. Are most cows pasture raised? I think most are raised on feed farms; I think antibiotics and hormones play a role in at least some, but perhaps most? They also emit C02 which we'll eventually have to pay for. And more generally animal farming is a (the?) primary source of new diseases already. I wouldn't expect "lab" grown meat to do any worse there, but perhaps better. Still, it is something new and new always carries some risk. But > The 20th century was marked by morally-unmoored technocrats allowed to run wild; why is the 21st century doubling down on this? It was also marked by dramatic increases in quality and quantity of life.
    • solraph 4y ago
      > Are most cows pasture raised? I think most are raised on feed farms. This is very much dependant on the country. For example, New Zealand beef is about 96% pasture fed, Australia is about 66% pasture fed, and Brazil seems to be about 90% pasture fed.
  • stefantalpalaru 4y ago