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Cell-cultured meat industry veteran (and dropout) here. If Singaporean companies are able to make a viable business out of cell-cultured meat, that would be fa
by arrobbiato 2y ago
Cell-cultured meat industry veteran (and dropout) here. If Singaporean companies are able to make a viable business out of cell-cultured meat, that would be fantastic, and a boon to the world. Some skepticism is warranted, though. It's very difficult to do this at scale, and that's regardless of unit price. Cultivating the meat that sells at a mass-market price is the real challenge and one I wouldn't bet on anytime soon, not even by 2030. The technical challenges are too many to list here, some of which are not public knowledge. Besides, the once-touted environmental advantages have turned out to be marginal at best.
One way this business might make sense would be to sell boutique cell-cultured "specialty" meats, like scallops, veal, and wooly mammoth (yes, it's been seriously considered). They're not nearly as price-sensitive, and the scale is smaller. Here's hoping we can ease the burden on endangered populations and mitigate the inherent cruelty of some of those industries with cell-cultured alternatives.
- contingencies 2y agoSingapore is a follower. Whatever they're in to happened elsewhere 2 years before. More broadly, it's not really about cell-cultured meat. It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever which can be ingratiated in to the food supply chain anywhere. The huge success in culturally normalizing the consumption of 'beef balls' and similar '<highly processed, derivative, nominal protein identity> balls' in markets like Thailand to my critical eye largely stem from the beef ball factories of Shantou in Guangdong. Make no mistake: those people are making bank selling total bunk for real bucks. Poverty will be the driver. Economically, it's hard to pass up plants. They've literally evolved over millions of years to produce the goods using almost nothing in resource terms. Somehow the world just needs to learn to love Indian food and stop expecting protein and lipid dense meals.
- jsemrau 2y agoSingapore also has great universities. Research into this area fits Singapore well.
- pydry 2y agoThe entire culture of the country is much more oriented to being a fast follower though. They do not innovate.
- _lvbh 2y agoBy your standards, most of the world outside the US does not innovate, which makes sense since if they did, the tech would be bought up by a US company anyways
- pydry 2y agoNo, not really. There are some unique facets to Singaporean culture that heavily discourage innovation. This isn't the case for most of the rest of the world.
- gmerc 2y agoWhich is why water desalination tech is one of their major exports. They mastered the technology out of survival need (Malaysia constantly threatening to cut off water supply) and are exporting it now.
- nradov 2y agoYou're not wrong about the economics. Access to large amounts of high-quality protein (regardless of whether it's plant or animal derived) is increasingly going to divide the rich and poor. We can easily grow enough crops to provide everyone with enough calories (distribution problems aside), but people can't maximize performance and healthspan eating mostly grains and starches. https://peterattiamd.com/lucvanloon/ https://peterattiamd.com/lucvanloon/
- contingencies 2y agoSure but most people aren't in to resistance training. They're in to high fructose corn syrup, processed foods, and sedentary lifestyles. I wondered which product generates higher returns: protein powders or statins? Actually according to Google the former is USD$28B and the latter is only USD$20B at the moment. I'd expect the latter to grow and the former to shrink.
- AlexandrB 2y agoNot just statins but diet drugs like wegovy. I suspect that people's addiction to corn syrup will be solved medically, not with willpower or lifestyle changes. Side note: "in to" should be one word - "into".
- jfengel 2y agoI fear that people will eat less corn syrup but only because they're eating less overall. I'd love to see people put the money they save into higher quality food, but history suggests otherwise. The corn syrup based foods are cheap, tasty, and really easy to eat. It's too bad they have no nutrients besides calories.
- sundvor 2y agoFear? Corn syrup will easily lead to early death through obesity. Any reduction would clearly be a positive.
- 2y ago
- olejorgenb 2y ago> It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever which can be ingratiated in to the food supply chain anywhere We have at least some options for this already. Mycoprotein is one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn#Production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn#Production (apart from the plant isolates)
- Scarblac 2y ago> Singapore is a follower. Whatever they're in to happened elsewhere 2 years before. > [...] > It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever Personally I follow fermentation based (bacteria based) proteins with interest, potentially they can have an even smaller footprint than plant based protein. Like Solein ( https://solarfoods.com/solein/ https://solarfoods.com/solein/ ), which has now been accepted as safe for human consumption in one country: Singapore. So they're not always behind the curve.
- contingencies 2y agopotentially they can have an even smaller footprint than plant based protein. Maybe one day - the potential of fungi is amazing. It's a whole world that is fundamental to ecology and comparatively poorly understood or mapped. However, I remain skeptical at present once you factor in one or both of the lab costs (steel vats, process control, power consumption, thermal systems, and lab employees) and the raw inputs (fermentation doesn't happen on thin air). By the time you've grown the raw input, why not just grow a food crop? I feel virtue-signalling regulatory moves are meaningless. Case in point: many markets are totally unregulated, by your logic they're ahead of the curve. I don't disagree.
- padjo 2y agoIt does seem like hubris to think we’re anywhere near being able to design a protein synthesis process that’s more efficient than a soy plant.
- bitmasher9 2y agoI don’t think so. A soy plant has tons of evolutionary baggage tied to its protein synthesis. It has to reproduce, out compete other life for resources, be hardy enough to survive both pests and pesticides, and it evolved in a resource constrained environment. For life generating protein is a byproduct of other goals. It seems possible that we can do better.
- Scarblac 2y ago
- 1992spacemovie 2y ago> wooly mammoth (yes, it's been seriously considered) Hell yeah. I'm not really a fan of the lab grown meat aspect but I'd try a wooly mammoth burger.
- perihelions 2y agoTo think no one in history has ever tasted mammoth burger—milled flour bread buns wouldn't have coexisted with Neolithic mammoth hunters, that was an expensive specialization of the agriculture era. (Or perhaps Neolithic people would pity us and our culinary traditions—the bland, meaningless ennui of takeout fast-food. The true enjoyment of mammoth steak, we shall never know, is what it tastes when you've chased it down yourself for three days on foot).
- delichon 2y agoLab grown human flesh would remove the health risks around cannibalism but I assume the taboo would remain. Otherwise I'm imagining tasting menus of an extreme variety of creatures extinct, endangered or just previously hard to fit into the supply chain.
- fbdab103 2y agoDepending on where tastes go, you could even have celebrity meats. Swiftie Burgers. Kardashian hot dogs. Nixon ribs.
- leni536 2y agoEat the rich?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 2y agoArthur C Clarke got there some 60 years before you: https://bestreadables.com/short-stories/arthur-c-clarke-the-food-of-the-gods/326/ https://bestreadables.com/short-stories/arthur-c-clarke-the-...
- 23B1 2y ago> the once-touted environmental advantages have turned out to be marginal at best. Would love to see an article about this if you have one. Just curious is all.
- arrobbiato 2y agoHere’s one: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.21.537778v1.full https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.21.537778v1.... Decent summary: https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/lab-grown-meat-carbon-footprint-worse-beef https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/lab-grown-meat-carbon-foot...
- 23B1 2y agoThanks king
- foota 2y agoSingapore is a rich nation with tiny amounts of land, so it might make sense there even if not other places. Huh... I figured that china would account for most of their food imports, but that's not actually the case. https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/SGP/Year/2021/TradeFlow/Import/Partner/by-country/Product/16-24_FoodProd/Show/Partner%20Name;MPRT-TRD-VL;MPRT-PRDCT-SHR;AHS-WGHTD-AVRG;MFN-WGHTD-AVRG;/Sort/MPRT-TRD-VL/Chart/top10 https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/SGP/Yea... Surprisingly France and the UK are high up there, despite being geographically distant industrialized countries (e.g., not primarily based on agriculture). I wonder if this is because this is showing dollar value imports and these places export high cost food products? ... is it just champagne from France? Edit: oh my god it is champagne (or more generally spirits: https://tradingeconomics.com/singapore/imports/france https://tradingeconomics.com/singapore/imports/france)
- metadat 2y agoAt what point does the high-effort labmeat become more economical for Singapore than importing meat? I suspect this is the nontrivial bit of the equation, massive quantities of imports are already inbound every single day.
- foota 2y agoThere may be some aspect of geopolitical independence here as well, if they're dependent on imports for luxury foods (like meat) then they're more exposed to higher prices and external supply issues (which might be health related, scarcity, or some kind of politically caused scarcity).
- metadat 2y agoI must respectfully disagree. Geopolitical independence is fundamentally less of a concern for luxury goods. You not being able to get a fancy steak is not a national security threat.
- photonthug 2y ago
- rodgerd 2y ago> Cultivating the meat that sells at a mass-market price is the real challenge and one I wouldn't bet on anytime soon, not even by 2030. Given the money going into lobbying states to make it illegal in the US, I can only assume that it must have some chance of success.
- DaoVeles 2y agoA few years back I saw a great article that listed out some fairly reasonable criticisms of Cell-cultured meats. Wasn't one of those "but think of the farmers!" type things. More a list of the hurdles to over come. The one thing it raised was that cultured meats do not have any sort of immune system. Thus if they are not produced in, what amounts to, TSMC level sterile environments there is the potential of entire batches being rendered useless as bacteria have a feast. There was also a lot of issue with scale, things I am sure you are aware of. For specialty meats, yeah it makes sense. But for pure scale I am a bit more hopeful on things like Precision Fermentation of yeasts as being a much more viable meat alternative. Turns out things like Quorn were way ahead of there time in that sense.
- arrobbiato 2y agoThis is exactly right. I saw enormous batches turn to bacterial sludge on a regular basis, which is exactly what you’d expect even in very clean environments. The fundamental problem is that bacteria are specifically evolved to infiltrate and infect; and, they multiply orders of magnitude faster than vertebrate muscle cells.
- luqtas 2y agoi was reading an interview once & the researcher, if i ain't mistaken, was excited more about the new possibilities of vegetal cultures than animal; do we have any movement towards that already or it's still stuck @ "not enough market"?
- arrobbiato 2y agoDefinitely there are some exciting advances in vegetal protein, as well as fungal protein. It’s still difficult, but (in my opinion) the difficulty there is the inertia of consumer tastes, and the food distribution business. They’re not trying to fight things like thermodynamics and cellular biology, which are far more formidable opponents. Two examples of non-meat protein advances: fungal-derived cheeses, and protein extracted from duckweed.
- ClassyJacket 2y ago> The technical challenges are too many to list here, some of which are not public knowledge I'd love to know the major ones, or whatever you can share. I'm much more optimistic about lab grown meat than most people. In fact I would love to invest in some lab grown meat companies. The more I know the better.
- standardUser 2y agoI'd pay some pretty silly amounts of money to eat reasonably accurate replicas of otherwise unobtainable meats. I doubt I'm the only one. I feel like East Asia alone could easily fuel such an industry.
- wuschel 2y agoPM me if you will. Been around the ground zero of lab grown meat in the mid in the last decade, and I am curious what is/was happening there.