4 ms·
Will it be as expensive as lab-grown meat? I think cost is going to be the #1 success factor for this innovation. Personally, I love natural fibers for my clo
by r00fus 3y ago
Will it be as expensive as lab-grown meat? I think cost is going to be the #1 success factor for this innovation.
Personally, I love natural fibers for my clothing and can't stand synthetics (other than for fitness gear), so am very interested in this development.
- fbdab103 3y agoAt minimum, you do not need end to end certification that everything is fit for human consumption. That feels like a potentially huge cost savings vs bioreactor meat.
- vezycash 3y agoHow cheap would lab grown protein be if they don't care about taste?
- fbdab103 3y agoI suppose that depends if you still wanted it to vaguely resemble meat or were fine with a yeast smoothie. Pretty much every beer brewery could likely grow some kind of complete protein microorganism given barley feed stock.
- jmopp 3y agoYou can purchase spirulina culture online and grow your own protein source.
- jncfhnb 3y agoThey don’t care about tasteless as in it tastes like nothing or it tastes foul and has a terrible odor and texture?
- vezycash 3y agoTasteless would be best as a dirt cheap replacement for plant protein in animal feed.
- gumby 3y agoLab grown meat is expensive due to its low volume. That should change as volume ramps up. It’s also relatively expensive compared to the feedlot stuff in part for the reason above and in part because externalities (e.g. GHG emissions) are not priced in yet. The promise is that on a net/net basis the lab will be better. We’ll see. As a diabetic I get a lot of protein and calories from meat bc I don’t want a lot of carbs. I’d be much happier with lab-sourced animal proteins, especially if there were a little game from time to time. Factory farm meat lacks a lot of flavor anyway.
- jncfhnb 3y agoLab grown meat is not going to be easy to scale up. Keeping giant bioreactors free of contaminations is hard.
- rajnathani 3y agoI remember reading on HN, on more than one occasion, that the unit cost of production of lab grown meat is always going to be very high. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621288
- gumby 3y agoI’m hopeful that there will be enough economic incentive to tip the balance. But nobody knows right now.