3 ms·
Excellent article explaining why lab-grown meat will never scale: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ https://thecounter.org/lab-gro
by nberkman 4y ago
Excellent article explaining why lab-grown meat will never scale: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...
> David Humbird, the UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who spent over two years researching the report, found that the cell-culture process will be plagued by extreme, intractable technical challenges at food scale. In an extensive series of interviews with The Counter, he said it was “hard to find an angle that wasn’t a ludicrous dead end.”
> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
> “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
- algoatecorn 4y agoI have a theory that the hype surrounding cellular ag is driven by the private investment world's obsession with scale. Investors hear a founder say "we can disrupt the food industry but we just need to SCALE", "we need a massive deal size, and then we'll sort out the economies", "look how sexy and different our technology is"
- disintegore 4y agoIt seems more accurate to say that the business model is contingent on a number of breakthroughs that may never occur. It's not hard to see how the development of a more (and, let's say, sufficiently) economical process would retroactively justify all the capital invested and press generated up to that point, especially if it can put an end to the ecological disaster and permanent superholocaust that is the modern meat industry.