Why not do a blend with real meat instead, as a temporary substitute. Get the 5-20 percent of beef that is needed, and blend it with plants. That should cut down the beef need by eventually 60 or so percent, with any luck. Yes, it is not totally vegan, but it is a quick fix to solving a big problem, until the taste part can be solved.
While this absolutely makes logical sense, unfortunately people are not that logical when it comes to making decisions around food. Part of the emotional benefit from eating a meat alternative product comes from knowing that no animals were killed and it’s definitely better for the environment; that emotional benefit can be lost as soon as there’s even some conventional meat in there. It’s not logical, because the same person may reach for a guilty-pleasure conventional burger the next night, but it is how people behave—hence why attempts to do this kind of thing in the past haven’t worked out very well (Tyson attempted to do something similar with their ‘raised and rooted’ brand and it failed, so they pivoted to 100% plant based)
Tyson doesn't have an incentive to undercut its meat sales, so it wouldn't be likely to price a 10% meat, 90% plant burger below its 100% beef offering. But could a competing company do it? If the 10% meat is enough to be indistinguishable on taste, and the blend costs 25% less, I think it might find a market -- Noah, for example!
Because the people who don’t have a problem with eating meat will just eat the normal kind of meat, and vegetarians/vegans don’t want to eat any meat that came from a real animal, they don’t just want a reduction in the amount of an animal used.
So your solution kind of alienates both sides and appeals to very few people.
We see plenty of part-butter part-vegetable oil products in the butter section of the grocery store. In this case it has an advantage in price and spreadability over 100% butter, which advantages would not transfer to meat.
I was thinking today it would be interesting to genetically engineer farm animals to reduce / eliminate any suffering involved, or to not be conscious somehow.
Just another way to avoid animal suffering, albeit a lot less efficient. If anyone wants to fund this idea, you know where to find me.
I think the people surrounding the Hedonistic Imperative started by David Pearce are interested in a pretty similar vision (but including wild animals as well). https://www.reddit.com/r/HedonisticImperative/ this subreddit might have resources you'd be into
I would love to know the actual energy needs to "grow" either a plant (TVP) burger or a lab-meat burger. I have a hard time believing that they are actually a net positive compared with pastoral farming and grazing. Compared with industrial farming, perhaps, but traditional animal husbandry practices are extremely efficient.
If you really want to save the planet, I would suggest an energy intensive, lab grown meat substitute is the wrong way to go. Get a pig, feed it scraps and graze it on corn, and get yourself some bacon in 6-9 months. Chickens are also good. Their feed needs (for eggs at least) are minimal.
(And yes, I raise chickens and sheep. Not commercially, just for myself.)
It would be great if all meat could be raised pastorally in areas that can’t be farmed otherwise. Unfortunately the majority of beef in the US (70%+) comes via feeding lots, not pasture. And 80% of the deforestation of the rainforest is related to cattle, often to create pasture land. The reality is that the world’s demand for meat far outstrips what can be provided in a regenerative way.
"The reality is that the world’s demand for meat far outstrips what can be provided in a regenerative way." Is that true? Do you have data to back it up? I'm not trolling, I'm really curious.
One of my arguments with environmentalists like Paul Kingsnorth is that they're too willing to dismiss the famine that would be caused be eliminating industrial agriculture. There is a good deal of data demonstrating that the agricultural carrying capacity of the Earth (without petroleum based fertilizers) is about 5B people. Like it or not, we're stuck with petroleum for a while, since it's both the feedstock and the energy source for nitrate fertilizers. No oil... no food. Kingsnorth himself calls petroleum fertilizers "fossilized sunlight", which is a great way to think about them.
As a result, I'm always curious when someone makes a claim that the it's physically impossible to do something on the Earth. You may be right; I don't know. But I'd love to find out, and the calculation wouldn't be hard to do given the right data (protein conversion efficiency of various species, arable land percentages, caloric density of various land types, etc...)
You are correct about beef. Cows are lousy digesters and even worse builders of protein. For efficiency, pigs, chickens, corn, and legumes are the way to go.
In the case of nitrogen fertilizer, technically it has been possible to make it from water and air for 100 years. Doing that is now becoming economically competitive with steam reformation of fossil methane, as water electrolysis is highly complementary to solar PV power, using free "excess" power from the midday peak, and the capital cost of electrolysers is falling rapidly.
No, they aren’t, unless you attribute zero value to the land used for grazing.
I’m pretty sure you could provide solar power to the lab meat factory using far less land than you’d have to devote to pasture to raise the equivalent amount of lamb or beef.
Grazing land is already a solar farm connected to a meat growing factory; the intermediary is chlorophyll instead of lithium. While I can't find data to prove that chlorophyll is the more efficient of the two: we've been at solar panel design for about 50 years; evolution has been at plant design for about 500 million. I know who my money is on.
This is a perfect example of a technocratic-environmentalist solution. Let's dig up the plants and put in solar panels to supply our energy needs... because we're smarter than Nature. There is a different kind of environmentalism, the Weldell Berry, E. F. Schumacher, Paul Kingsnorth (who writes here in substack) kind that seeks to live in harmony with Nature instead of dominating it.
Solar panels and lab meat aren't going to save the world. Pastoral agriculture might not either, but long term, I think it stands a better chance.
The great majority of calories fed to meat animals comes from maize and soy.
That's because they produce far more calories per acre than pasture. If you can genetically engineer pasture to improve its caloric yield tenfold, then you can compete. But you're using a technocratic solution.
Dark Mountain style "back to Nature"-ism is the worst kind of elitism and hypocrisy. We need things that will work for eight billion people, without eroding the soil away or trashing the rivers and oceans.
The calories going into growing the synthetic meat will still be maize and soy, they're the most efficient feedstock we have. No one is going to use solar power to synthesize basic carbs and proteins when we have corn and soy. Any improvements in the sunlight-to-nutrient phase in the process will come from genetic engineering of those plants. (As an aside, remember that evolution didn't optimize for photosynthesis efficiency, it optimized for overall reproductive fitness. Among plants there is wide variation in photosynthetic activity relative to leaf area, so you can't assume evolution always gives us the most efficient energy conversion!)
The efficiency gains of synthetic meat come from the speed at which the synthetic meat reaches maturity. Cows grow over time, and expend much of the energy they take in just staying alive. Cells coming out of a bioreactor have a far shorter lifetime, and thus waste far fewer nutrients staying alive.
I have high hopes that by allowing us to convert plant-based nutrients to meat more efficiently, we can return more farmland to nature. Which means more venison for me... plus all this climate stuff. Animal wellfare isn't a major issue for me because I don't believe animals have intrinsic moral worth, though I'd point out that if they did, hunting would be more ethical than factory farming or maybe even pasture farming.
Also I second what others are saying about how pasture farming just doesn't provide enough food for our population. Industrial farming will have to keep getting productivity gains until our population finally levels off.
I have been vegetarian for 45 years, but I do notproselytise. Nature manages to feed us and combines that with beauty. I see no beauty in a factory or a solar panel
I’m a fan of David Humbird who wrote the techno economic analysis (TEA) this article references. His conclusion was that 100% cultivated meat is uneconomical with existing technology, and without the use of genetic engineering. I agree.
That’s a big reason why 1. blended products will be coming first, and 2. We are using genetic engineering. With this combination of approaches it’s possible to make an affordable product with existing technology, which we have validated with our own TEA that incorporates Humbird’s analysis.
Longer term, getting to 100% will require step changes in bioreactor design and other elements. There are multiple startups working on these problems. They won’t be solved quickly, but I’m confident they will succeed eventually.
Exactly! You beat me to linking to it. Anyone who wishes to grapple with the profound challenges in scaling lab grown meat to a commercial scale should read this outstanding article.
The thing that kills cultivated meat, for me, is that you're eating cancer. Literally. These are cell lines that are "immortalized" - that keep dividing indefinitely. That's literally cancer. There's a whole zoo of euphemisms and alternative terminology but that's what it is.
It's not a safety issue at all. You have zero chance of getting cancer from it (well, no more than you would from eating regular meat). It's purely the ick-factor.
If cultured meat ever gets big, I think that issue will be a significant barrier to mainstream adoption. Ick factor risk can't be overstated when it comes to popular acceptance in the food market. Just look at what happened to GMOs.
All stem cells are immortal, and yet they're not 'cancer'. Cancer fundamentally is a disease of a body with many different hallmarks. And unlike cancers, any cell line used for cultivated meat has to be genetically stable and to maintain its core identity.
Thanks for the response. When you say it's a "disease of the body", are you saying that a tumor-derived cell line isn't "cancer" any more solely by virtue of being outside a body? If so, you may be technically correct and perhaps I shouldn't say "literally cancer". But I'm not sure that's a super meaningful distinction.
"Many different hallmarks" is true, and the immortalized cell lines do have some number of those. And if you're engineering cells to be anchorage-independent, that'd be a hallmark of metastatic cancer, right?
Re: genetic stability, I'd be fascinated to hear about how you characterize it and quantitatively how genetically stable your cell lines are over time.
Regardless of the science term semantics though, I still expect the degree of genetic modification/mutation (and the similarities between those changes and oncogenic ones) to be an obstacle to popular adoption. And I wonder if/how the cultivated meat companies plan to address it.
I was thinking of the failure of the flavr savr and the battles over labeling in the US (still playing out as I understand it). And of the relatively stringent regulations and limited adoption in Europe. But you're right, for some crops it's widespread in the US. It was just way more of a battle than I think it deserved to be.
I've been vegetarian for decades but I think I would switch back to meat if the only alternative to them was this kind of stuff... Cmon guys, this is food.
And it's also more expensive? F that. Wait to see the life-cycle analysis for energy use too. Not sure we can make that more efficient in a bioreactor than in a real animal.
And health uncertainties?
Traditional plant-based protein tastes good, is healthy, is cheap, is far more convenient than meat, is sustainable, prevents hunger in developing countries... You just need to know how to cook it. And that's not hard either, but you do need to know a few things. Would make more sense to have that cooking know-how widely shared, than have all these tech' "solutions". No incentive for private capital though, which is why public funds must come in - government paying for better knowledge on preparing beans and tofu. Why not? Government pays for dairies consumption and plenty such stuff all over the world.
This is all part of the Great Reset, but I guess some people really trust the WEF and other global outfits who only have our best interests at heart... I haven't eaten red meat for over 20 years, but that doesn't mean I am interested in eating stuff from a lab. Thanks, but no thanks!
Great guest post, thanks Joshua and Noah! The technical aspect of getting meat cells to stick to stuff went a bit fast for me, and I think taking slightly more space to explain this would have helped me better understand. Would be interested in a follow-up somewhere in the future!
What fascinates me is where this could go, say, 50 or 100 years from now.
Replicating the taste of meat is one thing (and hard enough!), but I suspect there are vast reaches of the "taste space" that evolution has never touched.
The first step into that space may be hybrid tastes, like lamb-beef or meat-vegetable crossovers. But eventually I'd hope we can get entirely novel flavours, so that food becomes a far richer arena of human creativity than it is now.
You could argue that our taste evolved to identify a limited set of chemicals, but surely there are enough variables, including the 5 flavour elements plus all the range of scents and textures, for a pretty huge space of possibilities.
I remain unconvinced that getting people to eat cultivated meat will be any more successful than getting people to eat less meat in general. I favor committing more resources (advocacy, education) to the latter as it is much more palatable to most people, pun intended.
The problem is that in order to get people to switch over from real meat to fake meat, it cannot just be almost as good and/or kinda look like real meat. It needs to be BETTER and identical. Oh, and cheaper too. The reality is that people like meat. They really like it. They also hate change, and for people to force them to change when they don’t want to. As we can see with pretty much every issue, moral arguments do not work.
Rushing to market with products that are over-hyped but do not deliver creates bankruptcies and sets back movements. Teslas gained traction because they were cool, fast and comfortable. They are meeting the hype, but we don’t really know if charging will work, if it will scale, and if people will give up their gasoline machines. Sounds like the fake meat industry isn’t even close to meeting the hype, and there is no promise that it will create a better product. Just a lot of hope.
We won't know unless someone tries. Full credit to Joshua and his competitors for making the attempt. We'll learn a lot either way.
I agree with the "better AND cheaper" argument, and about the dangers of hype. I hope these guys have learned from the history of Beyond and Impossible.
I understood from a professor emeritus here in Sweden that a large proportion of people - 40% or so of 16 year old girld, over 60% of nursing home residents, both men and women, etc. - are deficient in iron.
And that the heme in artificial meat is not an accessible iron source for humans.
That implies that artificial meat does not have the health benefits of meat.
This is true for plant based meats where they have added iron. It's not true where the iron comes with a heme protein, like in Soy leghemoglobin (found in Impossible Foods), or in myoglobin, which is inherent in animal cells and will be found in cultivated meat, and fundamentally is the same as eating conventional meat.
Great guest post. I don't know enough about the science behind cultured meat and genetic engineering to have any reasonable opinion on that. Just two things.
One, it is extremely funny to me that some people refuse to eat meat grown in a lab because it is unnatural. Well, everything we eat is already unnatural. Humans have been genetically modifying food for millenia. Indeed, that's one of the principal reasons some civilizations advanced faster. Pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, etc, all of those things are 'unnatural', and they are vital in every agricultural system across the world. This naturalistic fallacy, that something is good merely because it is from nature, has got to go.
Secundo, I don't really see a viable pathway here. Meat, at the end of the day, is a commodity, which means you will have extremely thin profit margins. When you factor in all the technology costs for cultivating meat and the fact that the organic meat industry is sponsored by heavy subsidies plus all the marketing costs to make cultivated meat seem cool, rough calculations indicate serious losses for a considerable period of time. Can that storm be weathered long enough to achieve mainstream adoption. The odds don't look good.
Thanks for this guest post, which does seem encouraging. I've switched to a diet of plant-based 'mince' (the format that works best for taste/texture) and 'ethical' beef (slaughtered at very low scale, in the cattle's own field, avoiding live animal transportation). Both reatively expensive but somewhat better for me, personally. Watching this area with great hope.
Perhaps it would be easier to grow a fat mixture whose profile is equivalent to that of beaf using conventional bacterial/yeast type bioreactors, then blend these fats with vegi proteins...
Why not do a blend with real meat instead, as a temporary substitute. Get the 5-20 percent of beef that is needed, and blend it with plants. That should cut down the beef need by eventually 60 or so percent, with any luck. Yes, it is not totally vegan, but it is a quick fix to solving a big problem, until the taste part can be solved.
While this absolutely makes logical sense, unfortunately people are not that logical when it comes to making decisions around food. Part of the emotional benefit from eating a meat alternative product comes from knowing that no animals were killed and it’s definitely better for the environment; that emotional benefit can be lost as soon as there’s even some conventional meat in there. It’s not logical, because the same person may reach for a guilty-pleasure conventional burger the next night, but it is how people behave—hence why attempts to do this kind of thing in the past haven’t worked out very well (Tyson attempted to do something similar with their ‘raised and rooted’ brand and it failed, so they pivoted to 100% plant based)
— Joshua March
Tyson doesn't have an incentive to undercut its meat sales, so it wouldn't be likely to price a 10% meat, 90% plant burger below its 100% beef offering. But could a competing company do it? If the 10% meat is enough to be indistinguishable on taste, and the blend costs 25% less, I think it might find a market -- Noah, for example!
Because the people who don’t have a problem with eating meat will just eat the normal kind of meat, and vegetarians/vegans don’t want to eat any meat that came from a real animal, they don’t just want a reduction in the amount of an animal used.
So your solution kind of alienates both sides and appeals to very few people.
We see plenty of part-butter part-vegetable oil products in the butter section of the grocery store. In this case it has an advantage in price and spreadability over 100% butter, which advantages would not transfer to meat.
isn't that what sausage meat basically is? bits of real meat mixed with w whole lot of "fillers"?
I have been vegetarian for 45 years, because I recognised that animals are sentient, like us. They cant intellectualism, thats all.
But nature not ony provides, but is beautiful too. How beautiful is a farm of solar panels, or an artiicial meat factory ?
More beautiful than a feedlot, and more beautiful than a forest burned to the ground by climate-driven wildfires!
Not sure these ever caught on https://www.mapleleaffoods.com/news/50-50-products-made-with-half-meat-half-plant-based-protein/
I was thinking today it would be interesting to genetically engineer farm animals to reduce / eliminate any suffering involved, or to not be conscious somehow.
Just another way to avoid animal suffering, albeit a lot less efficient. If anyone wants to fund this idea, you know where to find me.
Douglas Adams was way ahead of you…
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ameglian_Major_Cow
I’ve wondered if bivalves (which are probably not sentient) could be used to make a more realistic faux fish product.
I think the people surrounding the Hedonistic Imperative started by David Pearce are interested in a pretty similar vision (but including wild animals as well). https://www.reddit.com/r/HedonisticImperative/ this subreddit might have resources you'd be into
What about the suffering of farm laborers, and meat packing workers? Or the environmental harms of growing beef animals?
You'd likely run up against halal/kosher objections too. Most beef is halal, a case of the stubborn minority forcing their preference on the majority.
I work in a meat packing plant. Cultivated meat can't come soon enough.
I would love to know the actual energy needs to "grow" either a plant (TVP) burger or a lab-meat burger. I have a hard time believing that they are actually a net positive compared with pastoral farming and grazing. Compared with industrial farming, perhaps, but traditional animal husbandry practices are extremely efficient.
If you really want to save the planet, I would suggest an energy intensive, lab grown meat substitute is the wrong way to go. Get a pig, feed it scraps and graze it on corn, and get yourself some bacon in 6-9 months. Chickens are also good. Their feed needs (for eggs at least) are minimal.
(And yes, I raise chickens and sheep. Not commercially, just for myself.)
It would be great if all meat could be raised pastorally in areas that can’t be farmed otherwise. Unfortunately the majority of beef in the US (70%+) comes via feeding lots, not pasture. And 80% of the deforestation of the rainforest is related to cattle, often to create pasture land. The reality is that the world’s demand for meat far outstrips what can be provided in a regenerative way.
"The reality is that the world’s demand for meat far outstrips what can be provided in a regenerative way." Is that true? Do you have data to back it up? I'm not trolling, I'm really curious.
One of my arguments with environmentalists like Paul Kingsnorth is that they're too willing to dismiss the famine that would be caused be eliminating industrial agriculture. There is a good deal of data demonstrating that the agricultural carrying capacity of the Earth (without petroleum based fertilizers) is about 5B people. Like it or not, we're stuck with petroleum for a while, since it's both the feedstock and the energy source for nitrate fertilizers. No oil... no food. Kingsnorth himself calls petroleum fertilizers "fossilized sunlight", which is a great way to think about them.
As a result, I'm always curious when someone makes a claim that the it's physically impossible to do something on the Earth. You may be right; I don't know. But I'd love to find out, and the calculation wouldn't be hard to do given the right data (protein conversion efficiency of various species, arable land percentages, caloric density of various land types, etc...)
You are correct about beef. Cows are lousy digesters and even worse builders of protein. For efficiency, pigs, chickens, corn, and legumes are the way to go.
In the case of nitrogen fertilizer, technically it has been possible to make it from water and air for 100 years. Doing that is now becoming economically competitive with steam reformation of fossil methane, as water electrolysis is highly complementary to solar PV power, using free "excess" power from the midday peak, and the capital cost of electrolysers is falling rapidly.
No, they aren’t, unless you attribute zero value to the land used for grazing.
I’m pretty sure you could provide solar power to the lab meat factory using far less land than you’d have to devote to pasture to raise the equivalent amount of lamb or beef.
Grazing land is already a solar farm connected to a meat growing factory; the intermediary is chlorophyll instead of lithium. While I can't find data to prove that chlorophyll is the more efficient of the two: we've been at solar panel design for about 50 years; evolution has been at plant design for about 500 million. I know who my money is on.
This is a perfect example of a technocratic-environmentalist solution. Let's dig up the plants and put in solar panels to supply our energy needs... because we're smarter than Nature. There is a different kind of environmentalism, the Weldell Berry, E. F. Schumacher, Paul Kingsnorth (who writes here in substack) kind that seeks to live in harmony with Nature instead of dominating it.
Solar panels and lab meat aren't going to save the world. Pastoral agriculture might not either, but long term, I think it stands a better chance.
The great majority of calories fed to meat animals comes from maize and soy.
That's because they produce far more calories per acre than pasture. If you can genetically engineer pasture to improve its caloric yield tenfold, then you can compete. But you're using a technocratic solution.
Dark Mountain style "back to Nature"-ism is the worst kind of elitism and hypocrisy. We need things that will work for eight billion people, without eroding the soil away or trashing the rivers and oceans.
The calories going into growing the synthetic meat will still be maize and soy, they're the most efficient feedstock we have. No one is going to use solar power to synthesize basic carbs and proteins when we have corn and soy. Any improvements in the sunlight-to-nutrient phase in the process will come from genetic engineering of those plants. (As an aside, remember that evolution didn't optimize for photosynthesis efficiency, it optimized for overall reproductive fitness. Among plants there is wide variation in photosynthetic activity relative to leaf area, so you can't assume evolution always gives us the most efficient energy conversion!)
The efficiency gains of synthetic meat come from the speed at which the synthetic meat reaches maturity. Cows grow over time, and expend much of the energy they take in just staying alive. Cells coming out of a bioreactor have a far shorter lifetime, and thus waste far fewer nutrients staying alive.
I have high hopes that by allowing us to convert plant-based nutrients to meat more efficiently, we can return more farmland to nature. Which means more venison for me... plus all this climate stuff. Animal wellfare isn't a major issue for me because I don't believe animals have intrinsic moral worth, though I'd point out that if they did, hunting would be more ethical than factory farming or maybe even pasture farming.
Also I second what others are saying about how pasture farming just doesn't provide enough food for our population. Industrial farming will have to keep getting productivity gains until our population finally levels off.
I have been vegetarian for 45 years, but I do notproselytise. Nature manages to feed us and combines that with beauty. I see no beauty in a factory or a solar panel
I was disappointed not to see any mention of this article: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
I’m a fan of David Humbird who wrote the techno economic analysis (TEA) this article references. His conclusion was that 100% cultivated meat is uneconomical with existing technology, and without the use of genetic engineering. I agree.
That’s a big reason why 1. blended products will be coming first, and 2. We are using genetic engineering. With this combination of approaches it’s possible to make an affordable product with existing technology, which we have validated with our own TEA that incorporates Humbird’s analysis.
Longer term, getting to 100% will require step changes in bioreactor design and other elements. There are multiple startups working on these problems. They won’t be solved quickly, but I’m confident they will succeed eventually.
Dear Joshua: thank you for this very thoughtful and edifying response. Greatly appreciated! Good luck in all.
I wonder if the graph featured in both articles is a stealth mention?
That's a fair point I suppose! I had forgotten that that graph is in both articles.
Exactly! You beat me to linking to it. Anyone who wishes to grapple with the profound challenges in scaling lab grown meat to a commercial scale should read this outstanding article.
Yeah, this isn't my industry. I assume that the author of this piece is aware of the article I link to.
The thing that kills cultivated meat, for me, is that you're eating cancer. Literally. These are cell lines that are "immortalized" - that keep dividing indefinitely. That's literally cancer. There's a whole zoo of euphemisms and alternative terminology but that's what it is.
It's not a safety issue at all. You have zero chance of getting cancer from it (well, no more than you would from eating regular meat). It's purely the ick-factor.
If cultured meat ever gets big, I think that issue will be a significant barrier to mainstream adoption. Ick factor risk can't be overstated when it comes to popular acceptance in the food market. Just look at what happened to GMOs.
All stem cells are immortal, and yet they're not 'cancer'. Cancer fundamentally is a disease of a body with many different hallmarks. And unlike cancers, any cell line used for cultivated meat has to be genetically stable and to maintain its core identity.
Thanks for the response. When you say it's a "disease of the body", are you saying that a tumor-derived cell line isn't "cancer" any more solely by virtue of being outside a body? If so, you may be technically correct and perhaps I shouldn't say "literally cancer". But I'm not sure that's a super meaningful distinction.
"Many different hallmarks" is true, and the immortalized cell lines do have some number of those. And if you're engineering cells to be anchorage-independent, that'd be a hallmark of metastatic cancer, right?
Re: genetic stability, I'd be fascinated to hear about how you characterize it and quantitatively how genetically stable your cell lines are over time.
Regardless of the science term semantics though, I still expect the degree of genetic modification/mutation (and the similarities between those changes and oncogenic ones) to be an obstacle to popular adoption. And I wonder if/how the cultivated meat companies plan to address it.
Aren’t GMOs actually pretty widely accepted in practice in the United States, despite people liking to say they’re opposed?
I was thinking of the failure of the flavr savr and the battles over labeling in the US (still playing out as I understand it). And of the relatively stringent regulations and limited adoption in Europe. But you're right, for some crops it's widespread in the US. It was just way more of a battle than I think it deserved to be.
Can you imagine if there was a case of HeLa contamination in a cultivated meat facility? Just think of the headlines
https://everything2.com/title/The+Food+Of+The+Gods
I've been vegetarian for decades but I think I would switch back to meat if the only alternative to them was this kind of stuff... Cmon guys, this is food.
And it's also more expensive? F that. Wait to see the life-cycle analysis for energy use too. Not sure we can make that more efficient in a bioreactor than in a real animal.
And health uncertainties?
Traditional plant-based protein tastes good, is healthy, is cheap, is far more convenient than meat, is sustainable, prevents hunger in developing countries... You just need to know how to cook it. And that's not hard either, but you do need to know a few things. Would make more sense to have that cooking know-how widely shared, than have all these tech' "solutions". No incentive for private capital though, which is why public funds must come in - government paying for better knowledge on preparing beans and tofu. Why not? Government pays for dairies consumption and plenty such stuff all over the world.
This is all part of the Great Reset, but I guess some people really trust the WEF and other global outfits who only have our best interests at heart... I haven't eaten red meat for over 20 years, but that doesn't mean I am interested in eating stuff from a lab. Thanks, but no thanks!
Great guest post, thanks Joshua and Noah! The technical aspect of getting meat cells to stick to stuff went a bit fast for me, and I think taking slightly more space to explain this would have helped me better understand. Would be interested in a follow-up somewhere in the future!
What fascinates me is where this could go, say, 50 or 100 years from now.
Replicating the taste of meat is one thing (and hard enough!), but I suspect there are vast reaches of the "taste space" that evolution has never touched.
The first step into that space may be hybrid tastes, like lamb-beef or meat-vegetable crossovers. But eventually I'd hope we can get entirely novel flavours, so that food becomes a far richer arena of human creativity than it is now.
You could argue that our taste evolved to identify a limited set of chemicals, but surely there are enough variables, including the 5 flavour elements plus all the range of scents and textures, for a pretty huge space of possibilities.
I remain unconvinced that getting people to eat cultivated meat will be any more successful than getting people to eat less meat in general. I favor committing more resources (advocacy, education) to the latter as it is much more palatable to most people, pun intended.
The problem is that in order to get people to switch over from real meat to fake meat, it cannot just be almost as good and/or kinda look like real meat. It needs to be BETTER and identical. Oh, and cheaper too. The reality is that people like meat. They really like it. They also hate change, and for people to force them to change when they don’t want to. As we can see with pretty much every issue, moral arguments do not work.
Rushing to market with products that are over-hyped but do not deliver creates bankruptcies and sets back movements. Teslas gained traction because they were cool, fast and comfortable. They are meeting the hype, but we don’t really know if charging will work, if it will scale, and if people will give up their gasoline machines. Sounds like the fake meat industry isn’t even close to meeting the hype, and there is no promise that it will create a better product. Just a lot of hope.
We won't know unless someone tries. Full credit to Joshua and his competitors for making the attempt. We'll learn a lot either way.
I agree with the "better AND cheaper" argument, and about the dangers of hype. I hope these guys have learned from the history of Beyond and Impossible.
I understood from a professor emeritus here in Sweden that a large proportion of people - 40% or so of 16 year old girld, over 60% of nursing home residents, both men and women, etc. - are deficient in iron.
And that the heme in artificial meat is not an accessible iron source for humans.
That implies that artificial meat does not have the health benefits of meat.
This is true for plant based meats where they have added iron. It's not true where the iron comes with a heme protein, like in Soy leghemoglobin (found in Impossible Foods), or in myoglobin, which is inherent in animal cells and will be found in cultivated meat, and fundamentally is the same as eating conventional meat.
thank you for the clarification
Why would one sort of heme not be accessible if it’s chemically the same as the other?
Great guest post. I don't know enough about the science behind cultured meat and genetic engineering to have any reasonable opinion on that. Just two things.
One, it is extremely funny to me that some people refuse to eat meat grown in a lab because it is unnatural. Well, everything we eat is already unnatural. Humans have been genetically modifying food for millenia. Indeed, that's one of the principal reasons some civilizations advanced faster. Pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, etc, all of those things are 'unnatural', and they are vital in every agricultural system across the world. This naturalistic fallacy, that something is good merely because it is from nature, has got to go.
Secundo, I don't really see a viable pathway here. Meat, at the end of the day, is a commodity, which means you will have extremely thin profit margins. When you factor in all the technology costs for cultivating meat and the fact that the organic meat industry is sponsored by heavy subsidies plus all the marketing costs to make cultivated meat seem cool, rough calculations indicate serious losses for a considerable period of time. Can that storm be weathered long enough to achieve mainstream adoption. The odds don't look good.
Thanks for this guest post, which does seem encouraging. I've switched to a diet of plant-based 'mince' (the format that works best for taste/texture) and 'ethical' beef (slaughtered at very low scale, in the cattle's own field, avoiding live animal transportation). Both reatively expensive but somewhat better for me, personally. Watching this area with great hope.
It's not Beef ..Quit calling it that.Its plant based food like Solent Green.
Perhaps it would be easier to grow a fat mixture whose profile is equivalent to that of beaf using conventional bacterial/yeast type bioreactors, then blend these fats with vegi proteins...