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The world’s biggest cultured meat factory is under construction in the U.S.
- vadym909 4y agoWow. I think the world will be so much better with less cruelty to animals if this works. But I’m not so psyched about eating lab grown meat myself because of the unknowns
- echelon 4y agoLet's hope this continues well beyond meat and to the point where we can culture human tissue replacements. New organs, skin, hair, blood. All monoclonal with non-reactive ABO/MHC/etc. antigen groups.
- lIl-IIIl 4y agoI think it's the other way around - the medical research around tissue growth inspired artificial meat technology.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoThat could easily flip if fake meat turns out to be a big industry.
- colordrops 4y agoDon't eat farmed meat either then. There's plenty of evidence against it. No need for unknowns.
- DontchaKnowit 4y agoWhat do you mean by evidence against it?
- colordrops 4y agoHealth risks, animal suffering, damage to the environment. The evidence is endless.
- lantry 4y agoCultured meat - you mean salami?
- ripvanwinkle 4y ago>>Cultured meat - you mean salami? salami is cured meat
- kikokikokiko 4y agoCultured meat is meat obtained from cows that were exposed to classical music and read books from the great authors of western civilization, just the way I like it.
- waterhouse 4y agoMakes me think of the pig that wants to be eaten, from the Hitchhiker's Guide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAF35dekiAY&t=73s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAF35dekiAY&t=73s
- mbg721 4y agoAnd if you're worried about the effects of cultured meat, you can always just eat an equal amount of countercultured meat, just like how you can cancel out pasta with antipasto.
- pbreit 4y agoI do not totally understand the concept of non-meat meat. If you don't want to eat meat, there are a LOT of alternatives.
- happyopossum 4y agoThat’s like saying there are a lot of alternatives to pizza. Sure, I could eat a meatball sub, but it’s not a pizza.
- tintedfireglass 4y agoexactly, you can get the same nutrients from other food too. why do you need the exact texture and feel of meat if you don't want to eat meat.
- headsoup 4y agoWhy do you need any of that other food either then, just have your soylent green.
- aetherson 4y agoI think there are lots of people who want to eat meat, but feel that it's cruel to animals or bad for the planet to eat it.
- AndrewDucker 4y agoI mostly don't eat based on nutrients, but on the flavour and textures I enjoy. Which includes meat.
- Eleison23 4y agoCultured meat is meat, it's just not taken from slaughtered animals. So there's a world of difference between processing vegetable matter and faking it into meat-like substances, vs. culturing meat "humanely" with technology to avoid the perils of factory farming. All things being equal, the promise is that cultured meat will be equivalent in taste, texture, nutrition, etc. to animal meat.
- taejavu 4y agoHow can I short this company?
- themodelplumber 4y agoIs it possible they'll eventually be able to let people 3D print meat at home? And what about printing parametrized meats with desired form & texture at home? And how different would that be from printing cooked or seared meats, in terms of tech? Could the coooking or searing be customized at home or is it cheaper to print as-cooked by design? Like, this is just my opinion but if this leads to further meat customization, great? What is the downside?
- trompetenaccoun 4y agoIt's not "printed", it's cultured. Not sure about this company's process but the ones I'm familiar with use a method called 'precision fermentation'. It's like regular fermentation but they control exactly what protein is produced by genetically engineering microbes to produce exactly the product that is wanted. You could theoretically do this at home but for now it would be prohibitively expensive. Who knows maybe in the future there will be companies delivering the starter bacteria and then you can feed them your own nutrient solution in your own tank. I doubt that will be a thing any time soon though. No Star Trek type replicator just yet, sadly.
- Teever 4y agoThis is the tip of the iceberg man. Picture an expecting mother putting the finishing touches on her baby-to-be's room with her fiance but instead of the fetus gestating inside the mother it's sitting in a small sleek artificial womb that looks like a futuristic microwave. Or imagine a refrigerator that grew fresh chicken eggs for you daily, and had a spout that produced fresh milk right from some artificial breast tissue deep inside the bowels of the machine. It's kind of frightening but also amazing.
- hiddevb 4y ago> This huge investment seems like a bit of a leap of faith considering the company doesn’t have regulatory approval to produce and sell cultivated meat anywhere Does this happen more often? There are so many challenges for this technology and almost nobody has ever tasted it, and here we go building a huge factory. I really love the idea, but I'm still pretty sceptic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621288) about it being realistic. Sometimes I feel most of these companies are just there to burn venture capital and make bold promises, and there are _many_ of them. I'll believe it after I tried it for a reasonable price.
- mufty 4y agoI hope those who are against eating meat enjoy this enough to allow we meat eaters enjoy our meat in peace
- colordrops 4y agoUs vegans get a lot more heat from meat eaters than the other way around. And I mean both social heat and environmental heat.
- oifjsidjf 4y agoI've never seen a meat eater forcing anything upon a vegan. But you see the inverse all the time.
- colordrops 4y agoBullshit
- DoreenMichele 4y agoBoth the meat-centered diet crowd and the vegan crowd seem to be about equally awful about being judgy about what other people eat. I eat a semi vegetarian diet. I'm not a vegetarian but some of my meals are. Both camps seem equally happy to give me hell. I try to hope that most aren't really like that and, like with homeless people, we just seem to notice and remember the worst representatives of such groups because the rest are so quiet as to go unnoticed.
- esperent 4y ago> Both camps seem equally happy to give me hell. Important to remember here that it's a tiny vocal minority from each side. Probably in the <0.01% range. Most people just live their lives.
- prirun 4y ago> it's a tiny vocal minority from each side. Probably in the <0.01% range It's important to keep this rule in mind for all public discussions. Unfortunately, no one, including politicians and policymakers, does.
- thefounder 4y agoAt this point I think companies should be required to run long clinical tests for the "foods" they produce/process. The food industry became an out of control experiment with world's population as guinea pigs.
- actionfromafar 4y agoHard agree - all the antibiotics and hormones in meat, there's no telling what the consequences in the human body might be.
- Nathanba 4y agoI've long believed that about many consumer products like chocolate or candy. Why should it be allowed to sell and market this stuff to children when longterm damage is somewhat unknown or known to be quite bad. No, saying "everything in moderation" is not a valid religious dogma to use here. Moderation is a term used for "eat the correct amounts" and what is correct is up for the discussion.
- darraghenright 4y agoIndeed. About a decade and a half ago I went backpacking, which plucked me out of my western European reality for a few months. When I returned, I was very shocked every time I walked into any convenience store for a snack to realise that these places pretty much exclusively sold nothing but sugary, nutritionally void garbage wrapped in plastic. If there was a deli, the food products were the lowest imaginable quality. At that moment it felt like a very large and problematic social addiction. I'd normalised this all my life.
- rdtwo 4y agoWhere did you go that the local grocery Marts weren’t just stuffed full of dried and canned foods? Fresh food is a huge luxury
- makeitdouble 4y agoWith that approach you'll also have to do the same for rice, wheat, salt, butter, milk, carbonated water, etc. Basically every ingredients we daily use, like the ones currently classified as Generally Safe in the US [0] I'm not sure any country is ready to go through requalification through long and extensive health trials of every single food product they've been using litteraly centuries. That's a crazy monumental effort (there is no consensus on food that doesn't need any moderation, so yes, it becomes a all or nothing issue) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_recognized_as_safe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_recognized_as_safe
- harriet1 4y ago[dead]
- dvh 4y agoNobody wants to eat artificial meat, but everybody want some other group to eat it. Meat eaters want vegans to eat this thing instead of soy meat. Vegans wants meat eaters to eat this thing to prevent animal harm. Rich people want poor people to eat this instead of insects. And poor people want rich people to eat this as a punishment.
- MaxDPS 4y agoAs a meat eater, I hope this succeeds because I think doing without the whole factory farming stuff would be pretty cool.
- diordiderot 4y agoI want to eat artificial meat! Maybe not the initial product, but I imagine after a few iterations I'd bet they'll be growing freaking wagyu,iberco, and sushi grade blue fin for much cheaper than the real deal
- niek_pas 4y agoI don’t think this is true? Anecdotal (would love to see actual studies) but many of my friends and I are vegetarian, and we’d jump at the chance to try this. I miss meat.
- lota-putty 4y agoI like that train of thought. As a vegetarian in childhood, weekly meat-eater in 20's, vegan over a decade since 30th birthday; I don't want anybody to eat artificial/lab-grown meat. They rather eat home-grown animals instead.
- lIl-IIIl 4y agoMany people are not vegetarian because being vegetarian can be hard (can't eat favorite family recipes, order favorite food at restaurants, etc). Anything that makes it easier can cause people to switch. "Meat eaters want vegans to eat this thing instead of soy meat" - why would meat eaters care about what vegans eat?
- 4y ago
- oifjsidjf 4y agoFrom a nutritional standpoint I'd never touch this with a 10 foot pole. The ridicoulous belief that they can dump some vitamin powders into this and then say this is in any shape or form nutritionously adequate is absurd. Also have fun you and your children being guniea pigs for a novel food that humans have never eaten. The last time we tried such an experiment (~1950 and today) the USA ended up with 30M out of 300M total population (10%) with diabetes. Kids are getting liver disease, which until ~1980 was unheard of (only in alchoholics up to that point). Not to mention the destruction of human teeth and the explosion in other diseases related to metabolic illness and obesity. Knowing this, I have no idea how people can be stupid enough to feed any novel "food" to themselves or their children.
- culopatin 4y agoDo you have any technical reasoning or sources that show that lab grown meat is “something with vitamin powders” on it and doesn’t have nutrients? You seem to be familiar with the process of growing cells, what part of the process is the dangerous one for humans?
- oifjsidjf 4y agoThe dangerous part is "that it's a novel food that was never eaten by humans". All cultures that eat bad food have died, so there is a survivorship bias because we now think "just eat this food": but only cultures who came up with a healthy diet have survived throughout history. Nothing guarantees you that this food is "healthy" since we cannot analize the long term of effects of these foods with any modern technology.
- headsoup 4y agoI think something being overlooked is this creating more centralised control of food production. Especially, if it comes with patents and licensing. This is not a good thing for equitable and available food supply, no matter how it looks on the pamphlet.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI really want to eat a cellular blend of salmon, pork, beef, and chicken.