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From https://www.wildtypefoods.com/our-salmon https://www.wildtypefoods.com/our-salmon : > "We harvest the cells from our tanks and integrate them with a few p
by bowmessage 1y ago
From https://www.wildtypefoods.com/our-salmon https://www.wildtypefoods.com/our-salmon :
> "We harvest the cells from our tanks and integrate them with a few plant-based ingredients..."
Gross. This should not legally be allowed to be marketed as salmon, at all.
- derefr 1y agoLook more closely. Here's their actual ingredients list (from https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingredients-besides-cells-in-wildtype-salmon https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...): > In addition to water and cell-cultivated salmon, our saku contains fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae, soy (an allergen), potato starch, konjac (a root vegetable), beta-carotene and lycopene (natural colors), carrageenan (an extract from red seaweed), and natural flavors. Think about why each of these things are in there: • Fats — because the parts [tissues] of the salmon that we eat, have not just muscle cells contained in them [the part that tastes + mouthfeels + cooks like salmon], but also fat cells (adipocytes), to contribute the taste + mouthfeel + cooking properties of "fatty tissue" [which is how we expect salmon to be] vs "lean tissue". And sure, the people creating this thing could have another tank growing "salmon-derived adipocytes", with some hormone bath to trick those adipocytes into absorbing and metabolizing nutrients from the environment to grow heavy with fat... but why bother? (That actually sounds dangerous, in fact — you might end up eating big doses of fish hormones trapped in the fat.) At the micro level, a little sphere of fat is a little sphere of fat; you can use a salmon adipocyte, some other kind of adipocyte, or even just a skin of sodium alginate, and the taste and texture of the result will be identical, as long as the fat inside the bag has identical properties (glyceride chain length, mostly). • Natural colors and flavors — weirdly enough, because salmon grown on its own wouldn't look or taste fully like salmon. The look and flavor of salmon comes not just from what the salmon itself produces via the action of its cells/proteins/DNA, but also from "impurities" — things the salmon eats, that end up depositing into the salmon's tissues over time. Like how eating shrimp makes flamingos pink. Salmon without those things is white, and missing some of the sweetness we associate with salmon. (You can even notice this in salmon meat from different conditions; wild-caught salmon usually gets more of these nutrient sources than farmed salmon, so wild-caught salmon is often a much deeper reddish-pink color than the orange of farmed salmon.) • Starch, maybe carrageenan (and the implicit ingredient, water) — together, a simulacrum of (slightly-viscous) salmon blood. Using water alone wouldn't work; it's too thin, it'd just run out of the muscle tissue like a water from a sponge, desiccating the tissue over a span of minutes. You need some thickener to prevent that. (I suppose you could make salmon blood plasma + platelets. Might be more nutritious if you did. Not sure how you'd get it into the tissue reliably, without any kind of circulatory system in there. And it probably doesn't make much of a difference to taste or texture even if you did. But this might still be a v2.0 goal of theirs.) • Soy and konjac (and also maybe carrageenan here) — a simulacrum of connective tissue, i.e. collagen. This is likely the matrix holding the cells in place. There's no such thing as "cells stacked directly on other cells" that actually stays together; there needs to be some non-cellular tissue matrix that the cells slot into. (Compare/contrast: "meat glue." Is a chicken nugget chicken?) Why not actual collagen as a matrix, or maybe, say, gelatin? Why not ground-up shrimp as a colorant instead of beta carotene + lycopene? Why vegetable oils instead of animal fats? In all these cases, probably because their goal with these ingredients seems to be to only build this salmon out of plants + cells, rather than any animal byproducts. An unstated premise here seems to be that they want to design the process such that no matter how far it gets scaled up, there's no point at which it would be more economical to switch one of the ingredient sources from "make it in a bioreactor" to "get it from an animal byproduct sources", and at even further scale, "drive animal slaughter to get said byproduct as the product." AFAICT, this is almost the closest thing you will ever be able to get to something you can call "salmon" — or maybe more specifically, "animal-harm-free salmon" — that can be created solely in a lab. (To get any closer, you'd need to get pretty mad-science-y. You could, in theory, genetically engineer a... tree, or what-have-you, that would metabolically synthesize the salmon blood plasma, the salmon connective tissue, the salmon-prey-species tissue trace impurities, etc.; and also act as a host to a commensal salmon cell population; eventually putting all that together inside a fruit or something. Pluck and peel the fruit, and inside — salmon muscle matrix tissue, fully cellularized, with solutes. [Though probably with the tree's vascularization, rather than salmon vascularization.] We're probably 50 years from understanding genetic engineering well enough to do that; and even then, it'd probably be operationally impractical, due to salmon muscle tissue rotting at any temperature a tree would grow at. But that product would technically be "closer to salmon", I guess.)
- bowmessage 1y ago> Why not actual collagen as a matrix, or maybe, say, gelatin? Why not ground-up shrimp as a colorant instead of beta carotent + lycopene? Why vegetable oils instead of animal fats? Simple answer: they're cutting corners -- increasing shelf life, decreasing production costs, and overall increasing profits, like many of the big food corporations operating today.
- lukevp 1y agoThe cost of the processes for these alternative meats astronomically outweighs the cost of ingredients, especially the cell culturing. It is unlikely that any of these companies are even making profit at this point. This is a long play to get the public to buy into this alternative food source, and only then will the scaling be enough to reasonably profit from any of this. There’s a baseline cost that they have to hit (farm raised salmon) and it’s incredibly cheap. Swapping out ingredients won’t make it cost competitive. Scaling up bioreactors might.
- derefr 1y agoI don't know about that. Buying some filtered animal-derived blood plasma on the open market and letting the tissue grow/soak in it, would likely be a lot cheaper than precision mixing+dispersing of thickeners + reverse-pressure-gradient tissue impregnation of those thickeners. Food-grade blood plasma is the lowest-demand animal byproduct there is — it's what gets rejected out of even blood-sausage manufacture. Same with collagen vs., specifically, carrageenan — collagen's cheap in bulk and works great for getting animal cells to stick to it; carrageenan's expensive, finicky to work with, and there are concerns about the carcinogenic effects of its long-term consumption. Many food-product manufacturers have moved away from previous formulations containing carrageenan; companies are only sticking with carrageenan at this point if there's nothing else that works within their constraints. Judging by other carrageenan-containing products, those constraints are probably something like "plant-derived; solid at room temperature; melts in your mouth; decent compressive strength, yet tears easily under tension." And vegetable oils would be cheaper than animal fats... but vegetable oils with the same set of health guarantees as salmon (i.e. "omega-3 rich" vegetable oils) are not. And their product does claim to have the same health benefits as real salmon; so presumably they are aiming for that omega-3:omega-6 ratio target, since it's usually the headline "health benefit" of eating salmon. Which means they're probably buying, continuously-measuring, and mixing different oils to hit that ratio — similar to what orange-juice processors do to create a homogeneous juice.
- tyleo 1y agoThis is also the part that bothers me the most. I don’t think it’s gross but I wish we had a full hunk of meat you could get in a lab. I’d try it. The products with plant based ingredients are less interesting to me.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoTo grow a hunk of meat without spoilage you need an immune system that basically just requires the rest of the animal
- lumost 1y agoWouldn’t that happen in plant based approaches as well? Or be mitigated by growing in exceptionally sterile environments? This is starting to sound like a process which will require untold quantities of anti biotics and preservatives.
- glenstein 1y agoMy understanding is it actually reduces the use of antibiotics, and this benefit is one of the main things people point to as a selling point.
- colechristensen 1y agoNo you wouldn't. Plenty of things are grown in labs or even on industrial levels which don't need immune systems. Maintaining a sterile environment is a challenge but not that hard.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoThen why are the only lab grown meat products ground / reconstituted ? I'm only going off a interview with a startup CEO that pivoted to lab grown egg white because of the aforementioned challenge. You can keep sterile petri dishes, but if you try to reach even a chicken nugget sized piece of solid muscle, you aren't going to keep it free of contaminants.
- mvdtnz 1y ago"It's true that our salmon represents innovative science, but first and foremost, it's just really good fish". It's certainly not fish.
- lelandfe 1y agoIt is especially not just fish.
- NoGravitas 1y ago"Mostly fish" (in the same way that scumble is mostly apples)
- Klonoar 1y agoIf the cells came from salmon, and it's made to look like salmon, I don't particularly see why we can't call it salmon.
- mvdtnz 1y agoIf I make a fish potato cake in the shape of a snapper can I call it "snapper"?
- Klonoar 1y agoSure. I'm comfortable either reading the description on a menu or the packaging it presumably comes in to determine what I'm actually getting.
- goda90 1y agoSo why not just call it "vegetable and lab grown salmon cells"?
- maximus_01 1y agoI think that example wasn't the best as it's probably so obvious it isn't salmon it wouldn't fool anyone. But would you be comfortable if someone sold Hoki or Puffer Fish as Salmon? And then only in the fine print said it was actually Hoki that tasted like salmon or whatever. What if someone sold actual fish but called it Tofu, and only disclosed in the description that it was fish that tasted like Tofu? That is a world I don't want to live in.
- zukzuk 1y agoAlmost every sushi restaurant in North America sells “crab” that contains 0% crab. Very few people seem to make a fuss about this.
- maximus_01 1y agoI must admit I didn't know that. Do you think that is widely known amongst people who eat them? But yes, either way, I find that disturbing.
- conradev 1y agoIt took a lot of digging to find which plant based ingredients, but they include color and flavor: https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingredients-besides-cells-in-wildtype-salmon https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...
- bowmessage 1y agoThank you for the link. Canola and sunflower oils, soy, and "natural flavors". Definitely skipping this one. I wish they'd just sell the fish cells, alone. Would love to try that.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoI wonder if roe would be feasible
- tptacek 1y agoCanola, sunflower, and soy are some of the most widely consumed foods on the planet; presumably far exceeding consumption of salmon.
- themafia 1y agoThis wasn't always the case. It makes it easy to wonder if there's a connection between that fact and the types of diseases, particularly auto immune and inflammatory diseases, that occur in the population.
- GloriousKoji 1y agoThe large majority of the final product is salmon cells so I think it counts. I don't see how this is too different from fish paste products like imitation crab or chikuwa.
- wakawaka28 1y agoIt needs to be clearly distinguished somehow from natural product, just like other "alternative" products.
- timeon 1y agoClear as body milk and salad with meat in it?
- mapt 1y agoSurimi is not mostly fish, it is mostly soy, wheat, various starches. Fish (blended Alaskan pollock usually) is a minority of material in most packagings. This came as a shock to me. The macronutrients don't lie, though. Fish is protein and a little fat, carb content is fractions of a gram, and these labels are telling me that there's more carbohydrate than protein. The ingredient labels that the FDA allows, do find a way to lie. If you read a ten-ingredient label that says "Ingredients: Beef, wheat flour, corn flour, oats, textured vegetable protein, canola oil, vegetable oil, xanthan gum, carageenan, salt", and tell people that this is the highest-percentage ingredient to the lowest-percentage ingredient ordering, most people will assume it's >75% beef, but all the label is saying numerically is that it's >10% beef; If every other ingredient was in the 9.0 to 9.9% range then the beef input would be around 1/6th of the material. Add more ingredients and this can be manipulated even more. I also don't think this is comparable. Blended Alaskan pollock had an immune system before it hit the cold chain.
- bowmessage 1y agoThank you for the point about “ingredient stuffing”. I had never considered this method of deceiving consumers and will be on the lookout for it. Why doesn’t the FDA require explicit percentages be listed..?
- dekhn 1y ago"Engineered salmon product"?
- wakawaka28 1y ago"Phish" lol
- IAmBroom 1y agoNah, that's a mushroom-based product. I hear.
- burkaman 1y agoI don't really care if it's called salmon or not, but why is that gross?
- OsrsNeedsf2P 1y agoIt's gross because it's so misleading
- tptacek 1y agoThe entire pitch for this product is that it's lab-grown salmon. Who are they misleading?
- glenstein 1y agoJust so I'm following, you used gross in the food context but not to mean anything about a sensory or culinary experience (which would be the dominant connotation brought to mind by most people who read it), you meant it as kind of an ethical objection? Also it's the mostly same ingredients that farmed salmon is already packaged with.
- bowmessage 1y agoWhich is exactly why I don’t buy farmed salmon.
- whycome 1y agoIt’s lab-grown salmon… I was not expecting salmon to be actually raised — that’s just farmed. Cell cultures to create solids was everything I’d expected. The term “plant based ingredients” is kinda dumb though.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- idiotsecant 1y agoWhy is it any more gross than, for example, meatloaf?
- colechristensen 1y agoAll of the things in meat loaf are recognizably food. Meat, bread, eggs, dairy, onion, herbs, spices. Industrial food has a lot of things which are much less recognizable as food. Degrees of separation from something alive which I'd like to eat to the ingredient matters to plenty of people.
- i_love_retros 1y agoHow is eating eggs not gross? It's a chickens egg... And milk from a cows udder, how is that not gross? You know there's puss and blood in cows milk because they all have raw infected udders from being milked non stop by a machine? Enjoy your meatloaf!
- juanani 1y ago[dead]
- colechristensen 1y agoIn general I do not find eating animals or animal products offputting. I am an animal, I eat animals. The disconnect from nature caused by your entire diet being boxed and shrinkwrapped gives a person strange perspectives on biological reality. Vegitables are grown IN THE DIRT THEY ARE BY DEFINITION DIRTY, FIGS CONTAIN DIGESTED WASPS, nearly every agricultural product contains at least a little bit of BUGS, FRUIT IS THE REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS OF A FLOWER. Sigh.
- bowmessage 1y agoWell said. I will never understand how so many defend the expeller-propelled and solvent laden oils as somehow pleasant and natural…
- aperrien 1y agoIf it tastes good and reduces harm to salmon, I'm in.
- pparanoidd 1y agoYou don't stop to think about health in your food at all?
- oceanplexian 1y agoNot allowing something to exist is a really strange way of conceptualizing reduction of harm. I'm perfectly fine eating something that was alive, so long as it was treated with respect and was killed humanely. Doing so connects you, a living being, to other living beings that are part of the circle of life, which live and die the same way you and I will.
- fayten 1y agoUnless you are actively managing your own herd or actively hunting I don’t see how you are connecting to nature at the grocery store. People don’t care as long as it tastes good. The current methods we have for farming meat do not scale and we need to work on alternatives. Meat is tasty and people want to eat it. Innovation will continue in the lab grown meat sector and when it eventually scales it will over take traditional methods. Current factory farming is anything but natural and there is plenty of harm being done.
- KempyKolibri 1y agoDepends on the context, not necessarily weird. If the choice was between “world A” where sentient beings were perpetually bred into existence to be perpetually tortured until they died and “world B” where the breeding stopped and the beings became extinct, it would be insane to favour world A over B.
- timeon 1y ago> killed humanely What does this mean? Not sure about fish but mammals produced for meat are usually killed before adult age. Is that "killed humanely"?
- morleytj 1y agoIt's not exactly the same, but given that much of it is for coloring, I feel the comparison should be drawn that basically all farmed salmon in the US is specifically fed food containing astaxanthin to give it a more pleasing coloring, the same as the purpose of the beta-carotene added here.
- mvdtnz 1y agoHow is that relevant to this discussion?
- morleytj 1y agoThe argument in the comment above is that lab grown salmon cells should not be allowed to be marketed as salmon because they have had components such as beta-carotene added for coloring. In light of the fact that similar compounds are added to the majority of farmed salmon for similar reasons, the comparison shows that the objection is likely a fallacious appeal to nature, purporting that something is good because it is "natural" or "normal" rather than presenting any objective evidence to argue their point.
- kamaal 1y ago>>This should not legally be allowed to be marketed as salmon The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their correct name - Confucius They need to call this tankcellfillet or something on those lines. Companies must not be allowed to get away to slap the tag healthy on clearly harmful foods and get away.
- lovich 1y agoI’m all for regulations on truthful marketing, but you made a big leap to >clearly harmful foods
- OfficeChad 1y ago[dead]
- NoGravitas 1y agoSomeone else suggested "engineered salmon product", which seems reasonable to me.
- baby 1y agoHonestly what is sold as salmon shouldn't be legal. I've completely stopped buying and eating salmon.
- cyberax 1y ago> Gross. Want something even grosser? Go catch a salmon and then look at how many parasites are in _every_ fish. If you have ever eaten salmon, you've swallowed tons of parasites in all stages of their lifecycle.
- bowmessage 1y agoI have caught many salmon. The parasites are part of the circle of life and are in no way gross to me. Sorry you feel that way.
- KempyKolibri 1y agoWhat do you mean by “part of the circle of life”? I’m not sure why that would be a compelling reason to be ok with something either way? For most of human history eating meat riddled with maggots was part of the circle of life, is it weird to be grossed out by eating meat riddled with maggots?
- bowmessage 1y agoSpoiled meat that needs to be tossed != live fish that needs to be cooked.
- KempyKolibri 1y agoWhat’s the practical difference as far as the appeal to nature argument you’re making goes? Humans lived for thousands of years on maggot-riddled meat, same as they did on parasite-riddled salmon. Surely if it was good enough for us to live on back then, it’s part of the circle of life and should be totally fine. Right? If one’s no longer acceptable because we don’t do it any more, then surely if lab meat gets established then we’ll look back at that parasite-riddled salmon with the same revulsion as we do the maggots.
- hildolfr 1y agoIf you don't think parasite ridden flesh is gross then your meter needs recalibrating. Even ancient man avoided parasites when possible. Parasites can kill you, regardless of how natural they are. Dog shit and nightshade are part of the circle of life too, but they seem to be avoided by most. Something being good because it's 'part of the circle of life', whatever that means, is as blind and irrational as 'all upf is bad by virtue of being defined as upf.' Life isn't as simple as black and white.
- oulipo 1y agoKilling salmon is gross too...
- lopis 1y agoDo you have a better name than Lab-grown salmon, that describes what this product is to the average consumer?
- jzackpete 1y agoyou mean artificially colored canola soy extrusions, with an unspecified (i.e. very small) quantity of chemically replicated salmon cells? how about counterfeit biohazard salmon?
- lopis 1y agoDo you buy breakfast "cereals" or do you buy blended, colorized reformed wheat and other grains paste, fortified with vitamins and minerals?
- bowmessage 1y agoWho cares about their health and still eats cereal in 2025?
- jzackpete 1y agoneither, for the same reasons