republicans chasing ghosts, episode 2137
outside of silicon valley marketing materials, lab-grown meat is ridiculously expensive or straight up doesn’t exist. deer has immune system, grasshopper has immune system, stainless steel reactor full of cell suspension doesn’t. in order to prevent entire batch turning into mold or something, every starting material has to be pharma-grade and every operation has to be performed in sterile technique. it’s all fine for products like insulin or vaccines where single dose fits easily in sub-mg range, but if you try to price meat like this, it won’t be ever competitive for this reason alone.
but it gets worse, because people who try to do that are some random techbros without engineering background. strangely enough, this doesn’t matter, because every enterprise of this kind just rides on VC money. predictably, they burn it all. as long as you can attract it, things are good and for that all you need is good pitch. We’ll solve single cell meat with nanotechnology! We’ll solve single cell meat with 3d-printing! We’ll solve single cell meat with blockchain! We’ll solve single-cell meat with chatbots!
if you believe these people, world is simple and future is bright. i know many of you all on lemmy do.
i’ll say more: these people are selling imagined future where you can save the world in some measure (go vegan), and you don’t have to give up anything in the process (eating meat), as long as you Buy Our Product! then there are credulous marks primed for luxurious gay space consumerism, but magic tech that allows for it is just beyond the corner, then they disappear. but people still believe, and are disappointed when they have to make even tiny sacrifice on their own. newsflash dipshit: future won’t be convenient
That’s an overly negative take. Yes, there are serious challenges to the production of lab-grown meat; Wikipedia provides a good summary. This isn’t a business that’s ready to take off soon. But humans who are actually smart and do know what they’re doing are working to solve these things.
The challenges are serious, and anyone telling you “world is simple and future is bright” about the future of this industry, yeah, that’s bullshit. I’ve never heard anyone say that, and I don’t know where you heard that from. It might never be a viable industry. But it’s not just a gimmick to keep fleecing VC investors.
what I find silly about going “vegan” is that it’s roughly 5% of the US population. Let’s say you boost it to 10% with all the posturing about saving the planet. Getting 50% of the population to half their meat consumption would have 5x the impact.
yeah it’s maximalist and in some ways impractical, not to mention some other considerations like carbon emissions
Trump utterly destroying the US’s economy may very well be the best thing for global warming. No one will be able to afford meat. It’s rice and beans for everyone!
we don’t even know how little we know about finer details of immunology
but you know that? go and sell this idea somewhere in bay area. it doesn’t matter if it’s all wishful thinking, i won’t stop you, and maybe you’ll get to meet Elizabeth Holmes
Yeah, gotta keep slaughtering innocent animals. That’s the Murican way!
How unnecessary. Lab grown meat will fail to sell and be dropped from stores all on its own merits.
Cheap guilt free meat built to whatever fat percentage you want will fail to sell?
Well you enjoy your $50/lbs wagu, and I’ll enjoy exactly the same quality at $3/lbs.
I mean there’s a difference between normal steak and wagu too.
Like at my Walmart steak is selling for ~$10/lbs, and ground beef is like $6 or $7 per pound. Right now beyond ground beef is selling for ~$11/lbs.
And it doesn’t taste the same. So you will actually have to hit that $3/lbs mark your talking about before it becomes a good option. Because pork chops are already only $4/lbs
But it inevitably will become that cheap, as your steak and pork become infinitely, exponentially more expensive over time.
We’re already massively subsidizing meat production and we’re entirely ignoring the majority of meats costs in calculating prices.
Those costs are going to keep getting higher, however, and those subsidies won’t be able to last even in a wealthy monetary issues country like the US. Unless you completely abandon capitalism, real beef isnt going to be a thing for middle class or poor people within 20 years, and it won’t be a thing period within a hundred.
However the tech to print meat will get smaller and cheaper over time and the seed ingredients are already cheaper than the land maintenance and feed for real livestock. Hell it’s cheaper than most inputs for anything except corn and wheat. There will be a time in the next few decades where middle class people in smart countries will have a meat printer at home to make whatever they want for dinner and shopping for meat will be too prohibitively expensive for anyone but the rich.
Climate change is already causing crop failures and water distribution fights, and quite frankly the meat industry doesn’t have enough money to fight the climate on this issue.
Any data to support that? I’ve noticed that the animal free meat options at the grocery stores near me are growing.
Are you talking about Animal free “meat”, like impossible burgers, or are you talking about actual lab grown meat? I’m not aware of lab grown meat being on the shelves yet, and animal free meat options isn’t the same thing as lab grown meat.
From what I’ve read in a few places, and this really does make sense, it’s one thing to grow a vat of animal derived proteins, but all you have at that point is basically goo. That has to be processed into “muscles”, which is a process of creating long chains of these proteins and bundling them. Then there’s the question of fat: what is that process? You can’t just add some oil and think it’s going to actually be analogous to fatty layers, and lipid cells have to be arranged into, I dunno, rinds? Blobs for “ground beef”, I guess, but you see what I mean.
I think this is as neat an idea as anyone does. And I can ask you the same question: any data to support the idea that I’m wrong? Everything I’ve read about this that goes into any amount of detail talks about the difficulties of actually processing this into something that resembles meat as we know it. I have seen absolutely nothing, and I’ve looked, to suggest that there’s been any kind of meaningful success in making these protein slurries into anything we’d call meat. I’d imagine that ground meats would be the obvious first thing to come to market, that’s gonna be the easiest thing to do. But a steak? Boy, color me skeptical. The other thing that I would imagine would be a difficult thing to replicate is going to be flavor. The animals we eat get their flavors in large part from how they’re fed and raised. Chickens in the US haven’t got the flavor of chickens in Europe, for example. Or a domesticated turkey vs a wild one. There are high grade steaks that you can get and when you see the fat caps, you can see a difference in color due to the cow’s diet. How do they control for that? How do they create these proteins and make them flavorful? Will simple nutrient baths do that? Is there more to it than that? What will the B vitamin content be, and where will that come from? Will it be more bioavailable to the eater? Will it be premethylated, or will people with methylation problems in their livers not be able to effectively get those B vitamins from these meats? How will all of that effect cost?
Everything I understand about this is that while they can grow the proteins, the food engineering that it takes to make a piece of meat that will be able to compete with meat from the hoof is a way off, and that we’re a long way from this being cheap.
I’d bet that the first lab meats we see coming to market are going to be gooey and bland. I’m imagining ground turkey but worse. And I’d be happy to be wrong, but I don’t expect that making meats that are actually analogous to “real” meat is going to be a process of fast iteration. I was around for the beginning of the meat substitutes that came along in the 80s and they were DIRE. And there’s nothing to suggest that the processes they’ve discovered for texturing plant based mock meats can be applied to this lab grown meat goo. Everything I’ve read, and it all makes logical sense to me, suggests that this is going to take a long time to become actually appealing to the masses just because of the pretty substantial food engineering problems that it presents.
My guess is that it’s going to end up being its own thing, more like the “mock duck” and things you can get in cans. Bite sized pieces. I’ll be happily surprised if they can grow a steak in a lab within my lifetime.
We all know that Mississippi is one of the most rational states, so I’m sure they aren’t letting their stupid religious beliefs drive their science. /s
I only want my meat to be raised by a cow on a feedlot while covered in manure and constantly smelling so awful, I would gag if I ever went. Then I want that cow’s greatest mental stimulation to be the one time he climbed on top of the 1 meter pile of manure and could see further than any other cow, and then proceed to stick his head back into the giant trough of corn that’s been pre-mixed with antibiotics because corn is not a natural food source for cows. That’s what meat is supposed to be, as god intended.
Just an FYI: In Florida (at least) a similar bill was passed not because of any concerns about lab-grown meat but because loads and loads of rich people keep small amounts of cattle on their property which gives them massive property tax breaks (money that most of these counties desperately need). There’s literally over a million cows living like cow kings in Florida.
I get what you’re saying about factory farms but I just wanted to point out the truth: While those conditions are common for other farm animals I’m not aware of it being that common for cows (in the US) 🤷
As far as I know the factory farms that are like that are all related to poultry and swine (the people that run them).
While cows are not factory farmed at the same rate as other farm animals, over 70% are raised in factory farms (in the US).
Source (they used USDA data): https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates
Let’s drink swill milk [Wikipedia] to that.
The swill milk scandal was a major adulterated food scandal in the state of New York in the 1850s. The New York Times reported an estimate that in one year, 8,000 infants died from swill milk.
Swill milk referred to milk from cows fed swill which was residual mash from nearby distilleries. The milk was whitened with plaster of Paris, thickened with starch and eggs, and hued with molasses.
Swill milk dairies were noted for their filthy conditions and overpowering stench both caused by the close confinement of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of cows in narrow stalls where, once farmers tied them, they would stay for the rest of their lives, often standing in their own manure, covered with flies and sores, and suffering from a range of virulent diseases. These cows were fed boiling distillery waste, often leaving the cows with rotting teeth and other maladies. The milk drawn from the cows was routinely adulterated with water, rotten eggs, flour, burnt sugar, and other adulterants with the finished product then marketed falsely as “pure country milk” or “Orange County Milk”.
