“ Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.”
I didn't read that as insinuating anything. I saw it as noting a congruence between the new name and newly-grown meat, just as the top-level post was noting the congruence of the user name and the topic. I thought it was funny.
As a big fan of the idea of manufacturing meat in an environmentally sustainable way (and without having to resort to raising and killing animals), reading this article felt as if someone was throwning a bucket's worth of ice-cold water on my face.
According to the article, the barriers to cost-efficient manufacturing of lab-grown meat at large scale are fundamental, e.g., impossible to overcome according to the Laws of Thermodynamics and our current understanding of cell biology and chemistry.
Quoting from the OP:
> David Humbird, the UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who spent over two years researching the report, found that the cell-culture process will be plagued by extreme, intractable technical challenges at food scale. In an extensive series of interviews with The Counter, he said it was “hard to find an angle that wasn’t a ludicrous dead end.”
> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
Is there anyone on HN with deep expertise in this area who can comment on this article's scientific accuracy?
And it was true, until cheap LI ion batteries became commercially available because they have the required power density to make it viable. From there it was just a matter of the economies of scale.
It's like saying that it's impossible to climb a mountain because, from a mile away, you can't see any handholds.
Obviously thermodynamic arguments that conclude with, "And so, we see that it's actually more efficient to house, feed, water, and slaughter real, live animals for meat," are ridiculously invalid. The same will eventually become true for the economic arguments in the article. It's 'just' a matter of asking how we get there from here, and putting in the R&D work necessary to make it happen.
All advanced technology looks like a "wall of no" until someone finds a path through. Or doesn't. The only way to know is to throw dollars and smart people at it until one's appetite for risk is spent, or one hits it big.
We haven't done it yet, but even if we had it's not a comparable analogy. We have a plan to get a few people to Mars that (while not exactly cheap) could conceivably happen. Similarly we already have lab-grown meat at very small scales, at a fairly high markup.
What would be a comparable analogy would be maintaining a stable, economically sustainable colony on Mars with similar population growth to what we might experience on Earth. Nobody has any remotely realistic proposal for how we are going to get there, just as no one has a remotely viable proposal for how to scale up current lab grown meat production to even an appreciable fraction of current meat consumption.
The article is as hand wavy with defeatism as enthusiasts. Mars would never support current levels of population on it, it’s too small and tech can’t change that.
They said population growth like we see on Earth, not the total population. It's only too small for the total population if we assume the current inputs and outputs of humanity on Earth.
A lot of the points here seem to revolve around the physiology of animal cells. All the "extra" energy that's supposedly being saved by lab-grown meat is what's used in real animals to do things like drive the immune system, maintain boundaries around cells that lack walls, regulate growth and toxin removal, pump oxygen, etc. An "efficient" approach is impractical to scale with animal cells, because of the unrealistic cleanliness and nutrient purity requirements of growing animal cells without any of these things.
I think the article's main point is that a breakthrough is unlikely to come from the usual culprits when it comes to economies of scale (larger tanks, greater nutrient production, etc.). Indeed the smaller scale operations are the only ones that seem likely to be able to sell meat at realistic prices in the near future. Something would most likely have to be done at the level of animal cell physiology, and we have no real idea of how to do that while still making what we're growing "meat." And none of the companies involved seem anywhere close to an idea that should work--not even a promising approach that hasn't been tested yet. It's essentially further from reality than something like energy positive fusion is, something that gets treated with great skepticism every time there's an article about a breakthrough posted to HN and which depends on government and university funding for grants--yet we're treating it as though it's imminent or inevitable technology, and investment funds are pouring billions of dollars into these companies as though they're expecting to see returns on investment relatively soon.
Don't warm-blooded animals spend 90% of our energy keeping ourselves at the same temperature? That's major low hanging fruit. Cleanliness and purity failing to scale sounds like something specific to an approach rather than something fundamental.
I think you and the article make good cases that the current approaches won't work out and that a lab-meat winter is imminent. Fundamental limits, though? Not so much.
Firstly, thermogenesis is only about 10% of our total energy expenditure (and it's not like organisms floating around in a tank don't need to regulate their temperature either!).
Secondly, even with the tank model we're talking 3 or 4 calories in/calories out vs. 10/1 (for chicken; you may of course choose some other animal as your baseline if you want to make things look better for lab meat). It's an improvement, but not as significant one as you might think.
Thirdly, there's lots of evidence that the processes I mentioned (oxygen pumping and blood circulation, filtering out toxins from incoming nutrients, filtering out waste, and the active immune system) are a huge percentage of animal energy expenditure. The Wikipedia breakdown of our BMR shows that the liver (responsible for flushing out toxins from incoming nutrients) represents about 27% of the BMR, the kidneys (responsible for filtering out waste) another 10%, and the heart (responsible for pumping blood and oxygen) another 7%. Even if you assume "other organs" (taking up another 19% or so) represent inefficiency here, and the brain (another 19%) isn't needed, that still means that in humans, about 45% of our BMR are devoted to these three functions (18% is used directly by skeletal muscle and is presumably also required in a lab setting). Additionally, from what I read elsewhere, the active immune system represents a remarkably large proportion of animal energy (some 25-30% of our basal metabolic rate!); there may be some overlap with these other organs, but I suspect this reflects a substantial portion of the remaining energy use.
So now we're at somewhere between 50 and 70% of the energy use in comatose animals being taken up by exactly the processes outlined in the article as being challenging for lab meat, not far off from the 50% - 75% reduction we are supposed to get from growing meat in a lab. I somewhat doubt this is a coincidence! It's true that there's extra unnecessary stuff animals do (such as growing bone, physical activity, and thinking), but there's a reason the BMR is such a high percentage of our overall metabolism--this stuff is all really important, and trying to do without it leads to the kinds of issues discussed in the article.
Moreover, even if you disregard the energy expenditure requirements, I think oxygen transport not scaling well with increased container volume (given the physiology of animal cells) is pretty fundamental. AFAIK it is one of the things that historically has made it difficult for animals to get too large. Yeast or plant cultures can get around this because they don't all need oxygen to metabolize in the first place, and have cell walls that can filter out byproducts more much effectively than animal cells can. Animal cells do not, and as noted in the article the lack of cell walls also makes aggressive mixing a no-go. That to me is a big reason for pessimism that I don't think is easily resolvable without significant changes to their cellular anatomy.
All that being said, I'm not saying to give up--I think everyone would love for lab grown meat to work and be at least competitive (on both a cost and energy basis) with "regular" meat. And of course it's possible that we can find more energy efficient solutions to all of the problems I outlined than animals do. But I do think that we should be realistic about the fact that we have no good reasons to think current approaches are going to work, and lots to think they won't, and therefore treat claims of near-term improvements in this field with appropriate skepticism.
Bigger tanks allow for economies of scale to make the product for less money, but there are lots of other things that can be streamlined in production.
A building with 10,000 vats and 50 workers. If you can reach that point and the factory has low opex and expected lifetime of 50 years: is that really still not considered "good enough"?
I have no experience in the area, but just to point out that you could equally apply some of those arguments to meat production.
The current meat industry is only cost effective because we've spent the last few millennia optimising the everloving hell out of it - and its scale is just as unfathomable. A significant proportion of the Earth's land surface is currently dedicated to either growing animals or growing animal feed.
So of course, for an alternative to displace it, it would also have to work at unfathomable scales too.
And bearing in mind, the technology to grow meat is essentially an exercise in recreating eons of evolution in a factory. It's an enormous challenge, but that alone doesn't mean it's impossible. Current meat production is also incredibly inefficient from a thermodynamic perspective.
I have no idea whether lab meat will ever come to pass. I suspect it will eventually, but probably take longer than expected.
"A significant proportion of the Earth's land surface is currently dedicated to either growing animals or growing animal feed."
It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose. They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no arable land, and no human population that is competing with the cattle population for resources.
That's only a portion of it, though. That area could be used for something other than agriculture, and a significant portion of arable land is used for growing crops that go exclusively toward animals that are later slaughtered, e.g. soybeans.
Moving away from meat is the right way forward - ethically, ecologically, and economically.
If not used by cattle ranching it would be used as a natural preserve - there are huge chunks of the country that aren't fit even for ranching and in those chunks of the country you'll see... nothing. Except a biome that's doing its thing without human intervention. If this land is good for nothing but cattle rearing and we stop cattle rearing then we can return big chunks of it to nature.
You can do cattle ranching in a regenerative way that would be better than doing nothing and making a place a national park. [0] Are there problems with current chicken, pig and some ruminant ranching? Yes. Does it have to be done this way? No. Are there major environmental issues also with monoculture plant farming that nobody seems to bring up? Yes.
Getting rid of ruminant cattle farming will just make the world worse off as food demand gets redirected to a smaller amount of arable land and missing cattle would accelerate climate change and desertification. Humanity does not have a lack of land to live on, there is plenty to go around. City land is expensive because everyone wants to be on small space.
> Getting rid of ruminant cattle farming will just make the world worse off as food demand gets redirected to a smaller amount of arable land and missing cattle would accelerate climate change and desertification. Humanity does not have a lack of land to live on, there is plenty to go around. City land is expensive because everyone wants to be on small space.
Wouldn't getting rid of ruminant cattle farming reduce the amount of arable land required since so much of it is used to grow animal feed?
"If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million,"
> Wouldn't getting rid of ruminant cattle farming reduce the amount of arable land required since so much of it is used to grow animal feed?
I think this is exactly the point missed by the people in this thread saying that a lot of cattle are raised on otherwise useless land. The presumption is that if you got rid of cattle farming you'd have to replace the lost calories for humans by growing other food on that land or cutting down more forests.
But this presumption is false. Even if every bit of land used for raising cattle turned out to be worthless for doing anything else, you'd still have an overall environmental win by getting rid of cattle. Convert not the land used to raise cattle directly but the land used to grow the food they eat to producing vegetables and grains for us.
I don’t understand your last sentence. Get rid of cows and then give people what?
I also think vegetables are very energy inefficient compared to for example potatoes. Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.
> I also think vegetables are very energy inefficient compared to for example potatoes. Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.
Cattle are herbivores, so we're feeding _them_ plant matter for them to convert to meat for us to eat. We're also growing massive amounts of soy and corn just to feed those cattle already, when we could be growing substantially less than that to feed ourselves.
> Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.
Not sure how we can defend the current status quo when we're growing many times the amount of crops to feed the animals using those pesticides and herbicides, _and_ pumping said cattle full of antibiotics, but yet here we are.
Livestock overgrazing is one of the leading causes of desertification. Can you explain how removing them and simultaneously making the food chain more efficient could worsen the situation?
I'm aware that you linked the Allan Savory TED talk, but that's been heavily controversial and many of the studies on it find limited effects beyond any other reasonable strategy.
The area on which is cattle ranching is better than nothing is a very small portion of the world. People loves to bring this argument, but it is order of magnitude lower than area destroyed by cattle ranching (farms for feeding beefs lead to deforestation, badly managed water leads to desertification).
A lot of the land used in the US for raising cattle was previously the habitat of wild bison, who were themselves the primary food source of the indigenous people who lived on that land. Cattle ranching in the American Great Plains is just a domesticated and industrialized version of what the Great Plains have been doing all along.
> I always like to point out that before the Europeans decimated the American bison, there were more head of bison roaming the west than there are head of cattle today. Just turning our monocrop soy and corn farms in the midwest back to prairie (by actually doing nothing to the land - just leave it alone), we could have regenerative ranching and cows and more food for less energy input than we do today.
I don’t know for sure if that’s true, but it sure as hell wouldn’t surprise me.
Yeah there's almost no way that's true. Maxmimum bison population in North America was never more than 50 million. US alone has 90M head of cattle, Canada and Mexico have ~10 million each.
Also Bison grew at natural rates and lived for 20+ years... Beef cattle are slaughtered around 2/3 years - so you're turning over ~2,000lbs of mass per head every few years. Just an unfathomably massive industry.
So that's about twice the population for about 1/10th the lifespan, so about a 20x increase in scale. Which seems...not entirely unreasonable compared to near-complete wilderness supporting a hunter-gatherer population?
No; I’m saying it seems reasonable to get 20x the bovine field from the same land through active ranching and agriculture than it would naturally support.
> That's only a portion of it, though. That area could be used for something other than agriculture,
Like what? What do you propose as a better use of the high plains? (Let’s define this as land west of 100 degree W to Rocky Mountains) There are no natural resources, no large cities, lack of infrastructure, etc. Other than wind farms, what can you do with grasslands that receive less than 10” of rain a year that sits on top of a rapidly depleting aquifer?
WeWork co-working spaces. There's a slight infrastructure situation, which you mentioned, but nothing a ton of money won't fix. What're you doing the next couple months? I have some money I'd like to invest. I hope you good with construction!
Most of the farming on the high plains depends on fossil aquifers which are being depleted, or snowmelt-fed rivers. The snow is increasingly falling as rain and/or melting in a big rush in early spring, leaving the rivers dry for more and more of the year.
Farming on the high plains mostly isn't sustainable. Certainly not the way it's done now. Not in the context of climate change.
Interestingly, several of the sites I work with do both. Pretty surprising when you're heading back to camp in the LV and suddenly a cow steps onto the road
Water isn’t particularly scarce in the US either. Just because a handful of states are managing their resources sub-optimally doesn’t mean the whole country has a shortage.
European forest area has actually increased as modern farming made land use more efficient so we could reduce farm area. The forests were cut down centuries ago. All farming in Europe has to be sustainable since there is no farmland left to expand into.
> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose
I'm not so sure about that. Brazil is the second largest producer of beef, and there have been huge outcries because large swathes of the Amazon are being cut down to facilitate beef production (as well as crops such as soya - which I should note is mostly used as animal feed - and palm oil).
Apparently the soil does soon become unsuitable for even raising cattle, so it does become land unsuitable for other purposes. But it certainly didn't start out that way.
If it wasn't as economical to do it because you couldn't sell the meat produced that way, less of it would be cut down because they couldn't make money that way. In other words, it's their only resource, but it's only valuable to destroy if there is something they can sell, i.e., meat. (Or palm oil)
That’s kind of a wacky argument. It’s like saying that they wouldn’t need money if only these people wouldn’t eat.
The fake meat story is a fraud - if you care about pollution, like every other industry yu can regulate how they handle waste products and other operational practices.
Fake meat is just a consolidation play, which happens to be the factor that made meat production a horror show in the first place. Instead of cutting down rain forests for pasture, we’ll cut them down for more protein sources to manufacture fake meat. Ditto with palm oil, which will drive some apes to extinction because there is a marketing problem with selling lard and a health problem associated with selling hydrogenated oils.
Most of Brazillian beef came from natural grassland area, "Serrado"
Also Pantanal (a kind of swampland of sorts) create some awesome natural pastures, although raising cattle there is harder because of the floods.
Amazon Rainforest destruction has much to do with stupidity (the land there is sand actually, destroying the forest to plant ANYTHING there, even soybeans, is stupid idea), logging, illegal land grabbing, and issues related to certain US companies (Cargill in particular is a big offender).
Also there a lot of conflict is going on there, including political, that made the destruction faster, including destruction being sped up in name of conservation, for example worldwide media was all happy when a particular logger got arrested, only for the destruction to speed up after his arrest, because the people that kept calling the police on him were actually trying to use the police to push him out so they could squat the land, and indeed they did so, as soon he was kicked out, illegal loggers and miners moved in, and fortified, now THOSE people can't be kicked out because they are heavily armed and the police fears the political fallout of that. Meanwhile the area they squatted had logging sped-up a lot, and trees that previously were being preserved as seed stock got cut down, ruining the management work being done there.
Except it's not true - all sources say that the primary reason for deforestation in brazil is cattle grazing. Wikipedia [0] has numerous sources that say the exact opposite of what OP has said.
It can both be true that deforestation isn't important to Brazils meat industry but that people mostly burn down forests to create meat. Just means that we could stop the deforestation without much consequences, which is a good thing.
You are correct. Most of the deforestation issue could be fixed with better law enforcement, mind you not just "harsher" enforcement, part of the problem is some previous governments went overboard with it, bothering people that weren't doing anything illegal. Sadly the current government fixed it by doing the opposite (enforcing too little).
I'm a little confused; why is rural Texas less able to support human life than Manhattan? Other than the infrastructure that was built by humans, I assume the primary advantage of Manhattan is protection from human invasion and easily accessible water?
If a cattle farm isn't built in Manhattan, a thousand other people will be lining up to turn it into office, residential, or retail space.
If a cattle farm isn't built in Erath County Texas, that land is going to sit there doing nothing. It has no other productive use case.
The point of this is that pointing out how much land beef production uses isn't as insightful as it may at first seem, because that land isn't being taken from another economic activity.
Some of that land historically was inhabited by relatives of current herbivores (bisons) so some of the land is feeding herbivores as it did historically.
Now, there are places where forest was cut down for grazing. Thats true. We also have experience where leaving the land alone a few decades reverts it back to forest (this is seen in forests in the eastern US which were once grazing lands for domesticated herbivores and now are back to being mature forests.
> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose
The land used to grow the food used to feed most cattle most definitely could be used for other purposes or just left alone.
The vast majority of cattle aren't grass-fed on the high plains just before slaughter. Sustainably produced beef like this simply can't scale and is too expensive for mass consumption.
Most cattle are fed in feedlots using grains produced en masse for that purpose.
That is why beef production has such a huge carbon footprint - because of the massive crop fertilizer inputs needed to feed massive quantities of cattle.
I recently watched a documentary that really called to question this common wisdom. https://youtu.be/SdrhpThqlCo For context, I was vegan from 2006-11, and the environmental reasons were my primary motivation. Now it seems obvious that the numbers couldn't have been what I thought. Put into context that "carbon footprint" was a slogan invented by the fossil fuel industry, and its clear who is served by shifting the blame to cows.
> Put into context that "carbon footprint" was a slogan invented by the fossil fuel industry, and its clear who is served by shifting the blame to cows.
We should absolutely be scrutinizing the fossil fuel industry. There's also no reason to _shift_ blame; both can be blamed at the same time. Ulterior motives behind the origin of carbon footprints does not negate the impact of our diets - particularly animal agriculture.
Willpower is finite, political will is finite, social capital is finite. We really can't afford to squander those things on low-impact high-pain measures. Farm bills and government subsidies to fossil fuel make your diet not even noise. Its not detectable at any scale. The only way to change diets at scale is price and availability.
Electric cars are sold to wealthy people so they can maintain their lifestyle with a fresh narrative of being the solution. Meanwhile, a few meters of road being built releases massive amounts of crap to the air.
Lab-grown meat is the same. Bioreactors taking resources from states away to pump out goo for people to eat states away is not sustainable and will never be sustainable.
We need to return to the land, but governments work hard to ensure every last human is a citizen, and produces wealth for someone else. People who resisted were met with violence and their land seized. The system is going to collapse, I really don't have hope. But the least you could do is spare people the party line of blame and shame.
/doomer-rant
Analysis claiming that beef production at large is not the major source of CO2 emissions among livestock is ignoring the supply chain CO2 of beef production - ignoring the CO2 emissions of the food produced to feed the cows.
Also, whether one is a vegan or not is irrelevant to the question. These are systemic issues based on, as you yourself say, the lack of price put on CO2 emissions to account for their externalities.
However, the lack of political will to do so up to this point doesn't mean we can or should end industrial society and return to the land. There are less dramatic solution paths, but they will need time to acculturate.
That just isn’t true. Most arable land is used to grow animal feed. And maybe the Brazilian rainforests can’t be used for much which has economical value, only things like producing oxygen and being one of the richest and biodiverse ecosystems on earth, but I still think it would be better to try to preserve them instead of converting them to land for grazing.
This is a good point until you recognize that you need vast resources beyond "unsuitable land" to raise cattle, let alone raise cattle at scale. Water, food (big one), medicine, manpower, infrastructure, transportation, and all of the subsidiary requirements therein all come into play.
When you properly recognize this your reduction disarms nothing.
I live in upper midwest in what should be native forested area and large tracts of forest have been clearcut just for cattle. My neighbor last year cut dozens of acres of heavy forest to raise more cattle. I don't think people fully understand what has been done in many areas to destroy the native environment just to raise cattle.. let alone the corn raised that many cattle ranchers in midwest at least feed their cattle.
Land use questions are far more of a concern in developing countries than in the US. The area of forested land in the US is actually increasing, not decreasing.
But in general the point is that meat production does not have to be displacing other food production. Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise.
> Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise.
I think this is provably false. As mentioned above, a lot of land used for cattle used to be forest; the global beef market is one of the main drivers for deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest.
There are second order effects, too. Cattle that's factory farmed in the developed world is raised on corn, wheat, soy, and other calorie dense foods. Those crops are grown with a large quantity of fertilizer, and for every calorie of corn, wheat, etc. grown, about one calorie of petroleum is used.
I don't think there's any doubt that beef, in particular, is only economical because of the negative externalities involved. Accounting for those externalities would probably go a long way toward making lab grown meat (more) competitive.
Not sure if you're intentionally trying to misunderstand to make some weird point. All I said is that there exists land that is not forest, and is not otherwise suitable for agriculture, but that can be converted by cows into food. This is not only not provably false, it's actually true.
The fact that a lot of cattle production does not do this is not proof that this is not possible.
Thermodynamics says nothing about which plants can grow on which land. A lot of land in the world can only sustain grass. Letting animals graze on that land is as close to free as you can get
Uhm......sure, but there absolutely are cows that are raised with very little maintenance on land that is otherwise useless. Here in UK farmers often raise cows on moorlands, which are mostly just a pile of rocks with a bit if soil on top to support minimal vegetation, that land isn't and can't be used for other types of farming - yet farmers happily leave cows on it in the spring and collect them for slaughter in autumn. They feed on what grows there and there's little need to supplement them. Then they are usually slaughtered locally too. I can't believe that this kind of beef farming is even 10% as bad for environment as the big factory farming elsewhere.
It's probably reasonably high, anecdotally every time I got out walking in the hills in most parts of the UK there are large numbers of sheep and cattle grazing on basically unusable wilderness, often which is part of a national park so can't be built on much anyway. They seem to be pretty self sufficient eating grass unless there is a heavy snowfall, which is quite rare in England, farmers would then supplement with feed crops like turnips etc.
"But in general the point is that meat production does not have to be displacing other food production. Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise"
Arguably that's a value judgement not everyone shares. For example, if you placed value on the carbon storage capacity and biodiversity contribution of the Forrest then replacing it with cows may not be an increase in efficiency of useful use of the land.
Arguably broad acre farming is currently getting a free ride on a number of external costs, if the math of that were to change meat grown on a small footprint would be much more competitive.
You're picturing a world where the only land that exists is forested land and you have to choose to either leave it a forest or cut it and use it for agriculture or grazing. But a lot of land is not forested, and not suitable for agriculture. But it is suitable for grazing. This is the otherwise worthless land that can be converted by cows into food.
As I said, land use issues where you replace forest with cows is a problem (though not in the US, it is a problem in the developing world).
It's not about replacing forest with cows. It's about replacing forest with cow-feed.
1% of US cows are grass-finished, the rest eat grain.
These grain-eating cows may be located in a place that has grass, couldn't be forest, and couldn't be agricultural land. And yet they eat grain nonetheless, from another place, that could be agricultural land, forest or otherwise nature that creates biodiversity.
The grain comes from somewhere. That creates land use issues. Not because of replacing forest with cows, but because 99% of cows sold in US stores are eating grain which must come from somewhere that is obviously not only useable for growing just grass.
Yes, in theory it's possible to have cows eat grass only, that's quite obvious. But if you were to limit beef in US stores to only those type of situations, you'd have to reduce the supply by 99% today and radically shift the way beef is produced worldwide.
And even that 1% / 99% isn't the entire story. That only tells you what is grass-finished vs cows that eat grain. An even smaller portion of that 1% are cows that are eating grass from a place that could solely grow grass and could not be used for other purposes such as forest.
Grass-finished. Think about what that means. Most (all besides veal?) eat grass. They finish them (fatten them before slaughter) with grain. That 99% isn't 100% grain. It consists of lots of grass.
> Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food
As someone who lived in a subsistence farm, that's absolutely not true, not on a large scale.
That is true in some places where the soil is not suitable for agriculture and the cows only eat grass, but that would be a minority of cows that exist today.
If that was even remotely true, there would be no cows raised by eating grain.
It's the same in the rural and semi-rural Northeast (I mean Vermont and upstate NY specifically), most of the cattle are raised for dairy.
Though a farmer in the area (an old neighbor actually) recently converted a good portion of his maize fields into a solar energy facility. I'm not sure exactly what his motivations were, but farmers are for the most part not stupid people, especially when it comes to maximizing the productivity of their land.
> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose. They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no arable land, and no human population that is competing with the cattle population for resources.
Traditionally yes, but my understanding is nowadays, at least in America, a lot of cattle are fed grain in industrial feedlots.
I'm not convinced that cattle ranching is always or necessarily the best use for much of that land, but I think the second point made was the more impactful one -- "growing animal feed." Much of _that_ land is either land that would be better suited for other purposes, or is land that we're intensely farming at high costs to the environment.
Not in sweden. 70% of arable land is used for feed production. These are numbers from Svenskt Kött, a lobby organisation for meat producers, in swedish:
> They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no arable land, and no human population that is competing with the cattle population for resources
Nasa [0] claims that the single biggest reason for deforestation is conversion to cropland and pasture, and Vice [1] says that 80% of the deforestation is for cattle in Brazil. Meanwhile, in the US almost 70% of all crops grown are used as animal feed [2] (e.g. all that midwestern corn and soy) - and the efficiency of that is staggeringly low; Only about 3% of the calories used for beef feed translate into our human food,
> They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan,
They're not because it's a concrete jungle, and land is expensive in the immediate areas.
I like to joke sometimes that we already have a technology to transform indigestible biomass into meat: livestock.
> A significant proportion of the Earth's land surface is currently dedicated to either growing animals or growing animal feed.
Almost the entire land surface of the earth, as well as almost all of the water, ultimately provides nutrients to carnivores. Sometimes the carnivores are fish, dolphins, tigers, or bears. Sometimes we are the carnivores.
You could argue that agriculture and livestock domestication are a huge difference, but that only becomes a concern at a certain scale and a certain level of industrialization. Well into the 19th century, large parts of North America were primarily populated by nomadic hunter-gatherers who mostly subsisted off of wild bison.
There is a part of me that finds the notion of lab-grown meat somewhat revolting in this context. Not only did the white man massacre the bison and transform their habitat into cattle ranches, but now even the cattle ranch is not industrial enough for him.
The white man destroyed sustainable ecosystems around the world, many of which had extremely high levels of meat consumption by indigenous people, and replaced them with unsustainable, industrialized meat production. That is the only reason “high meat consumption” is a question in the first place.
Western meat production isn't unsustainable, at least not the one run in Europe. If the production method used in USA is unsustainable then it is only because you have so much space that you have more environment to ruin, if it looked like Europe where you don't have more nature to ruin you'd adapt meat production to become sustainable. It makes meat a bit more expensive in Europe but people still happily pay and eat it.
I don't see the problem? UK is a densely populated island. Mainland Europe has way more land, it makes sense for them to import. Or do you argue that UK shouldn't eat meat since they don't have enough land for it while mainland Europe can eat meat just fine since they do have that land? We trade between nations for precisely this reason!
>> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
> I have no experience in the area, but just to point out that you could equally apply some of those arguments to meat production.
> The current meat industry is only cost effective because we've spent the last few millennia optimising the everloving hell out of it
Eh. I'd probably say the meat industry is cost effective because they have a superior bioreactor design: rugged, self-contained, low maintenance, and cheaply replicated. Lab grown meat probably can't compete until they re-invent "animals" in the lab.
Maybe that’s the solution. Is there some level of “living” things that has all the same qualities of a cow, but that we would feel comfortable raising and slaughtering in inhumane conditions? If not, what makes eating cultivated tissue better?
Imagine an industrial life support system, I would venture our medical tech is either there or almost there for it. The hard part where I'd envision the greatest challenge is an artificial immune system that works in the tanks but absolutely won't harm people after the vat grown products are taken out of the loop.
As a bonus this same type of technology could work for growing organs and any other biological part.
Not sure the Dune simile is a good one, here... in the prequals they're shown to be humans hooked up to nutrient feed lines. Or that was the point and I missed it...
Yes and the article discusses this extensively. The problem is that it's very hard to achieve the necessary level of cleanliness. The article mentions needing to take apart, clean and re-assemble entire plants because some bacteria were hiding in small pits inside imperfect welds!
Similar to how hard it is to clean MRSA or prions. Hot high pressure CO2 does it. (It's cheap, readily available everywhere. It's a process problem. It's hard to do it in hospitals in a safe and automated way because humans, but in a factory the pesky humans are not a problem.)
Yeah, I know the thought of semi brainless cows all hooked up to some machine, Matrix-style, may seem like a horror show to many, but from my perspective, it's the ethical thing to do. The primary reason I try to cut down on eating meat is from an animal rights perspective - I just can't grok the cognitive dissonance it takes to ooh and ahh over the cute, "human-like" reactions of, say, a cow getting a backscratch on r/aww, while simultaneously munching down on a burger.
If I could eat meat from a creature that I knew felt no pain and basically had no higher emotions at all, I wouldn't have an ethical dilemma over it.
Would you have a problem eating meat from a dna manipulated cow that essentially was born brain dead? (Mother isn't but the baby's dna is modified during pregnancy).
If yes because it was modified during pregnancy.
What about impregnation said cow with dna modified sperm.
The ethical problem I have with that scenario is that you'd basically have mother cows lined up, factory style, to give birth. Google "pig gestation crate" to get a sense for what that horror show is like.
Cows are mammals and we now do know that we, as mammals, share a common trait which is we love our children so much because it’s an evolutionary advantage for the survival of our species.
So in your scenario, either cows will suffer from giving birth to brain dead children, or at least, not different from today, because we take their children to get their milk.
Brain dead mothers would be ethically ok to me but … that’s really a really strange thought and I feel that there would be unknown issues like how could you know that your cow is sick like a full bag of bacterias if the cow is not showing suffer ?
Why stop there? Couldn't the mother be brain dead as well?
It's a dystopian idea - breeding zombie cows that aren't alive on a cognitive level - but you can draw parallels to abortions and pulling the plug on brain dead human patients. As a society we somewhat agree rationally that the lack of subjective experience or cognition renders most ethical concerns moot.
From an emotional/intuitive stand point it still grinds a few gears though. Would we be fine with growing brain dead humans for consumption?
There is a significant dissonance there for sure. For example, most people would say that some wars are justified ethically, yet they might change their mind completely if a family member is killed in one. Emotional impact can be a significant part of what you deem ethical. Yet you can't structure broad ethical "rule sets" based on subjective trauma or experience.
The relationship between rationality and emotions when it comes to ethics is really complex, and since it's in the realm of philosophy I don't think there are any clear cut answers.
> semi brainless cows ... it's the ethical thing to do
A second way to make it ethical in terms of animal suffering is to effectively start eating road kill. That is, you raise a farm of cows, treat them well, and eat them when they die naturally.
A third way is to raise a farm of cows, anaesthetise them via their food when they're old enough, and kill them in their sleep. It's more debatable than the above but I believe it's ethical as long as it's done right (which it won't be, in practice).
This all of course ignores GHG emissions and loss of biodiversity due to the need to produce large amounts of feed and large uses of land. But speaking strictly from the cow's perspective, I think it is ethical.
For many (most?) animals, predation or starvation is the "natural" way to die before actual old age would be an issue. Many suffer horribly towards actual old age death.
I think this is a children's tale disney style myth we've grown up with.
I would argue that slaughter is more "humane" if done right.
But significantly better to not breed animals for food to begin with, if there is an alternative. Even if the alternative costs significantly more.
I think we are not discussing ethics in depth enough in our soviety. What specifically is it that is unethical about the meat industry? Is it the way the cows are slaughtered? Is it that we take their life? Is it how they live their life? Can any of these arguments be made void from an ethical standpoint, if they are addressed somehow?
Since this discussion lead into brainless cows, why does that solve the ethics problem? Could it not be argued that it would be even more unethical to breed severly handicapped cows, without ability to experience the world?
Yes pretty much all of the above. Forcing a sentient being to live an existence that it didn't evolve for is extremely cruel. Even animals such as cows and chickens have social and emotional needs that were built into them in millions of years of evolution. A couple thousand years of domestication don't turn them into automata that can be treated as a product whose purpose it is to make our food taste a little better, but which we can easily find substitutes for.
> Forcing a sentient being to live an existence that it didn't evolve for is extremely cruel.
This seems like it would strongly apply to modern day humans living in an extremely complex, sedentary, large scale and atomized world. Much more so than cows even!
It does apply to modern day humans in some aspects and is a reason for a lot of misery and suffering in our world. Obviously I'm not saying that we have a lower quality of life than our hunter and gather ancestors, but a lot of the things that go against our evolutionary environment are the direct causes for much of our suffering. But going back to the actual argument, the the degree to which our lives differ from that we evolved in is obviously much smaller than for livestock.
Inspired by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - breeding animals that want to be eaten is more ethical than killing animals that don't want to be eaten.
> I just can't grok the cognitive dissonance it takes to ooh and ahh over the cute, "human-like" reactions of, say, a cow getting a backscratch on r/aww, while simultaneously munching down on a burger.
The key is "inhumane". There are many people ok with farming and slaughter, but not in the conditions necessary to accomplish it at the current scale, convenience, and price the world consumes.
I would be really surprised if none of those people had ethical problems with a Matrix-style farm of brain-dead cows too. It's like asking what they prefer between raising brain-dead children in vats vs raising like in the movie The Island. I'm not sure one dystopia is better than the other.
Insect protein is pretty good. I don't get why people are OK with the messy, cruel slaughter of pigs and cows who have family lives and friends, but eating insects, ugh?
On the other hand, meat doesn't really have much of a taste. It's more about the texture. If you forget to add spices to your meat, it tastes like nothing.
That's completely false. Even the most bland piece of meat has some taste.
I understand you don't eat chicken breast without spices or some sauce but most pieces of meat are pretty good as they are, especially if it has some fat.
Maybe if you grew up somewhere where spices are used a lot you can't enjoy food without them, but that doesn't make your comment true.
That's the first thing I thought of as well. Other invertebrates would presumably work too. There's already no taboo against eating crustaceans, and mollusks are generally acceptable as well. Though you probably have to restrict molluskivorism (that's my word of the day) to gastropods and other less complex organisms to avoid the ethical and cost problems that would come with cuttlefish, squid, and octopus farming.
As I have read, that’s primarily a difference between pasture and feedlot breeds; pasture breeds mostly do fine without antibiotics whereas feedlot breeds require constant attention.
Also worth noting that antibiotics in meat production is not only about health. For unclear reasons (or at least, it was unclear years ago when I learned about this) giving cows antibiotics just makes them grow much better and fatter. Presumably, there are bacteria that inhibit growth without making the cows visibly sick. Result: antibiotics get deployed to all cows as a general growth enhancer, rather than focusing on actual sickness.
> Ruggedness and low maintenance is kind of debatable. A lot of that is just anti-biotic overuse. Which is a big issue.
Not compared to a bioreactor. From the OP:
> The simple reason: In cell culture, sterility is paramount. Animal cells “grow so slowly that if we get any bacteria in a culture—well, then we’ve just got a bacteria culture,” Humbird said. “Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event.”
> Viruses also present a unique problem. Because cultured animal cells are alive, they can get infected just the way living animals can.
> “There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick,” Humbird said. “Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”
It's like comparing steel plate to a piece of tissue paper. Sure, an armor-piercing bullet can defeat the plate, but pretty much everything can defeat the tissue paper.
silicon (the interesting part) inside plastic that you see is quite small and thin. You would need hundreds/thousands of them to approach the size/weight ratio to single steak.
And silicone that needs that high level of cleanliness is not cheap.
Most chips are fabricated on larger/older processes that do not require that high level of cleanliness
The sliced wafer is small, but due to the precision and process requirements everything else is big. Chip fabs have a complete chemical plant in them because they need high purity solvents and deposition feedstock.
That older level of cleanliness is still above a typical pharma factory level cleanliness. (Where there's no laminar air flow and no need for bunny suits, but everything is sterile and consumables like containers, pipes, feedstock is unpacked right before. And there are a number of verification (QA) steps before the finished lot leaves the factory. Just like with chips, just in the pharma/chemical case it can be done in bulk if it's in a homogeneous liquid phase.)
The amortized cost is not that expensive. What's big is the price tag on a new fab with all the new tech gadgets from all the vendors (for example when you buy one big EUV machine from ASML and it takes 40 rounds with their special 747 to deliver it).
The meat industry is also cost effective due to massive government subsidies, at least in the US. Would these subsidies be available to lab grown meat operations?
The New Zealand meat and dairy industries do not receive subsidies after radical market deregulation during the Labour government of '84.
We have a highly efficient and profitable sector, mainly for the reason that we compete in fairly extreme conditions against subsidised international players.
Note that this process incurred significant pain for many individuals while the industry reoriented and consolidated, and I am not inviting any argument around environmental impacts (which I would contend are bad, but also clearly less bad than other countries).
So yes, "natural" meat can be competitive and efficient without government subsidies.
All that is true, but - we also don’t force farmers to internalize the externalities created by their industry.
Southland farmers themselves are saying that if they had to comply with proposed water and soil quality regulations that they wouldn’t be able to exist due to the increased costs involved.
The backlash even from the introduction of a heavy vehicles tax are representative of how much these farmers think they rely on the unpriced benefits they are getting.
> People always say things like this until they are forced to, and somehow find a way.
That is one of two possible outcomes. The other is that the sector just dies off and relocates to another place on earth, where externalities don't have to be considered, maybe for strategic reason. This has happened many times.
Farming is thankless, backbreaking, poorly-paid work that often is only viable because of subsidies the government provides, because the government recognizes that without farmers we'll all starve. And you're concerned that they're not paying their fair share. Fine. Good luck with that.
That's not how it works. There is no fair share. He is saying that farmers are not actually paying the costs they make society incur. Therefore these costs are not priced into the meat they produce which would not be that competitive if that was the case. It's a form of subsidy.
The cost of food as a share of income has fallen dramatically over the last fifty years or so. It's not unfathomable that it rises a bit again in exchange for properly pricing in externalities.
and yet if you actually did that, people on the other side of the political spectrum would complain that it's unfair for poor people because they now have a higher food cost burden. Shouldn't the rich subsidize for the poor for these essentials?
So then you get back to the original condition - subsidizing food once again. In fact, this is the reason why they are subsidized in the first place!
No, if you implement a efficient system to transfer wealth, you don't subsidize meat as meat and plant based food are treated equally.
If a less lucky person (or what you call poor) receives money, they are still incentivized to spend the money efficiently. With the money they have available now, they can buy less meat but more plant based food than before.
We could for example lower taxes for those that earn least while increasing water and soil quality regulations (with matching tariffs for imports). This would increase food costs, which would hopefully match the money that people gained through lower taxes.
Meat would then become slightly more expensive than plant, but also have a major benefit for products that don't use a lot of water or harms the soil. Aquaculture would get a big boost, as would alternative method of meat production. The use of farm animals as an ecological alternative to using machinery to keep land clear of unwanted vegetation has become a niche method, and increased water and soil regulations would indirect benefit such farming alternatives.
Please, every time someone proposes farmers lead a less cushioned life we get these huge bitter fights from somewhere. They don't also have to exist here. If you have a vested interest and want your subsidies to continue, that's cool! But there's no need to peddle your salty response to it when literally everyone everywhere has already heard them said many, many times.
> All that is true, but - we also don’t force farmers to internalize the externalities created by their industry.
The net externality is probably positive, and if you want to start evening the slate using externalities then farmers would deserve a subsidy (which is bad policy).
Food is about as high on a supply chain as it is possible to get, and the entire downstream supply chain would count as an externality of the farmer's activity. If farmers didn't produce food we'd all starve to death, but that is absolutely not priced in to how much they get paid.
As I said, I really don’t want to get drawn into the environmental debate, but there is one persistent myth that does need to be corrected: the idea that emissions from “heavy” vehicles are not priced. They are. They’re in the ETS. Reductions in heavy vehicle use due to tax will not reduce carbon emissions at all, as it will be emitted elsewhere in the economy. The only way to reduce the emissions of an activity covered by the ETS is to lower the cap, which can be done without a vehicle tax of any kind.
We'd probably have to define what "not receive subsidies" means.
I'm pretty sure they don't pay for the damages caused by the methane and N2O emissions caused by the meat production. "We don't have to care about our externalities" is ultimately a form of subsidy.
> The meat industry is also cost effective due to massive government subsidies, at least in the US. Would these subsidies be available to lab grown meat operations?
Why would those subsidies matter when you're comparing a cow to a bioreactor? You can stick the cow in a dirty field and have hundreds of pounds of meat a few years later, as dirt-poor herdsmen with practically no captial have been doing for thousands of years. Its equivalent competitor would be a fussy bioreactor in a clean room that would require millions in capital, as well as high-end expertise and labor. Apparently the "food" is also ridiculously expensive.
> According to recent data from Metonomics, the American government spends $38 billion each year to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, but only 0.04 percent of that (i.e., $17 million) each year to subsidize fruits and vegetables.
US meat production is about 100 billion pounds / year, half meat and half poultry. So removing subsidies alone would raise costs by about $0.38/lb, but it may be as much as twice that if subsidies fall primarily on one subsector.
The externalities -- both environmental and the poor labor conditions tolerated in the meat processing industry -- are probably a bigger "subsidy" than the budgetary ones.
A google search for Metonomics returns only results with this exact same quote. What is the source for this, what is meant by subsidizing an industry versus “fruits and vegetables” (ie, Is subsidized grain part of the meat industry? Why would we compare an industry to two specific categories of food?), and what does recent mean?
Not that I claim to know how to factor the cost in, but meat production has negative externalities that the industry doesn't pay for. Not to mention things like water rights etc. If the farmers actually paid those costs, my guess is the price gap would close a bit.
What has exchanged is 1) the massive scale of the human population and 2) wider access to animal protein. Without the subsidies, I expect prices would rise for consumers (most farmers are not making vast profits despite subsidies) and that is not a vote winner.
> What has exchanged is 1) the massive scale of the human population and 2) wider access to animal protein. Without the subsidies, I expect prices would rise for consumers (most farmers are not making vast profits) and that is not a vote winner.
But the context here is lab grown meat. If you removed all subsidies from traditional meat production, I really doubt meat would become more than ten times more expensive. From the OP:
> This approach is one factor that helps to cut down the volume of media needed, leading to what sound like impressive results: $18 to produce a pound of cultured chicken, according to a press representative.
> That’s the lowest real-world figure I heard in the course of reporting this story. It could also easily translate into a price of more than $30 dollars per pound at retail—and may never go any lower.
It's worth noting that those numbers are estimates and the facility that is supposed to produce them hasn't been built to validate them.
The country with the most expensive meat I know is Switzerland. The local chains Migros and Coop mostly sell meat produced in Switzerland. Here's the chicken you can usually find on the shelves in Migros:
Given that Switzerland has a world class chemical engineering and pharmaceutical industry and production facilities already, hypothetical lab-grown meat from Switzerland will probably among the cheaper high quality lab-grown meat in the world.
My understanding of Swiss manufacturing industry is high-end, complicated things. I agree it's likely that Swiss lab-made meat would be the cheapest in the world, but only by virtue of being the only place where it's feasible to make it.
They have a high income and are really good at ignoring the poor who do the dirty, low paid jobs and at best eat mortadella/baloney, cheese and eggs (doing their part for the planet, unlike everyone else lmao). Just like other western EU countries, tbh.
Switzerland does have poor people. ~10% of the population below the poverty line which is defined around 2.2k CHF/month per person. This definitely doesn't allow for a lot of high quality meat consumption.
My grandmother had to raise the meat she ate herself. That meant that meat was fairly rare, usually only on Sundays you'd get an actual piece of meat on your plate. Today we eat way more meat than in the past because it's so cheap thanks to subsidies.
Raising a cow is only a part of the problem, and it isn't that much harder to raise 10 cows than 1 cow, if you have the acreage. O(log) at the worst.
Butchering and preserving the meat was the O(n) operation, and usually required O(n) resources to salt or smoke, which could be expensive resources depending on your time and place in history.
Refrigeration changed the game, to where we could preserve the meat as fast as we could butcher it. Now instead of spending days or weeks salting, canning, smoking or curing your meat, you can fill a freezer in an afternoon.
> Lab grown meat probably can't compete until they re-invent "animals" in the lab.
Yes, but this also means it's going to be huge improvement over "regular" meat - they don't have to reinvent whole animals, just the parts that matter.
I find it weird to postulate deal-breaking fundamental limits for a process that's a strict subset of a process we've been using and improving for thousands of years.
> Yes, but this also means it's going to be huge improvement over "regular" meat - they don't have to reinvent whole animals, just the parts that matter.
Meanwhile breeding will be working toward the same end from the other direction: minimizing unnecessary animal components. We have chickens that are impaired by the weight of their own overgrown breasts, and very possibly there are already other organs that are withering away under breeding pressure.
Both directions of advancement are disturbing. I think the breeding program, if it reaches this optimal efficiency conclusion, is probably more disturbing. But also much easier.
> I find it weird to postulate deal-breaking fundamental limits for a process that's a strict subset of a process we've been using and improving for thousands of years.
The process that they're talking about isn't anything like the one we've been using for thousands of years. "Lab grown meat" is about growing cells in vats. Very different. It almost feels like trying to make a car cheaper by not having tires and a windshield (and no substitute). Sure you might be able to get something that limps along, but the things you're dropping solve important problems. Trying to grow massive amounts of animal cells with no immune system seems just as foolish.
> It almost feels like trying to make a car cheaper by not having tires and a windshield (and no substitute).
The way I see it, it's like people were buying cars only to hook stuff up to the alternator to power it, and someone figured maybe we should just build a combustion engine in a box, optimized for electricity generation, so we don't have to deal with the rest of the car.
> The way I see it, it's like people were buying cars only to hook stuff up to the alternator to power it, and someone figured maybe we should just build a combustion engine in a box, optimized for electricity generation, so we don't have to deal with the rest of the car.
I don't think that's a good analogy, because it presumes the removed parts were unnecessary for the core function. Trying to find a perfect analogy is a waste of time, but I think yours would be closer to the truth if during their "optimization" they also removed the oil and air filters. After all, who needs those? We're running the engine to covert fuel to power, not filter air or lubricants (but without doing that the engine will get damaged).
With a lot of systems, you can't just remove any component you wish and still have something that functions well. The lab grown meat people appear to have "removed" far too much (i.e. petty much everything).
"I have no idea whether lab meat will ever come to pass. I suspect it will eventually, but probably take longer than expected."
Since we humans always overestimate what happens in 2-3 years and underestimate what happens in 10 (because we are so poor with exponential functions), you're saying it will be about 10 years then ;)
One thing to keep in mind is that lab-grown meat would still need to be "fed".
The conversion from feed to useable meat may be more efficient but we would still need to grow animal feed and to actually process it more than we do now: A cow can eat hay, but lab-grown meat will need that to have been digested to ready to use at cellular level.
I can imagine than lab-grown meat will always be more expensive than 'normal' meat because of the tech involved and because animals grow themselves but I don't think the aim of lab-grown meat is to be cheaper.
>So of course, for an alternative to displace it, it would also have to work at unfathomable scales too.
The alternative is already there, vegetarianism. It's not unhealthy either, much more thermodynamically and land mass efficient, even cruelty free if you believe in that.
It's just that the almost only meat diet has taken over the planet.
We just need to make meat cost prohibitive enough to force the majority of people to eat the majority of their meals vegetarian.
Yes, animals waste most of the calories we feed them. By huge factors. We could feet a lot more people with the current energy and land-use, or feed the current number of people with a lot less effort.
I don't know how you can think that the animals we eat have a good enough life than that it's better than if they weren't born. Imagine being only into cages without social interaction, fed horrible junk, only to be killed a few months later for food.
I'd definitely choose not be born over being born as cattle.
People buy what they want to buy. Given the most efficient would be for example peas. Does it mean eating peas should be allowed but eating grains forbidden? Or are we going to do artificial cutoff by the divide meat/plants? Why? To make 10% of vegetarians happier?
I think everything should be allowed, but we should do a better job of making people pay for what they use by pricing the externalities into the consumption of a product. Once those price signals are in place then you let people make their own decisions.
Ok, so let's say the lowest externality food will be a baseline. For example peas. Grains are higher, so we would also tax grains? And we would grow this until the highest - beef. Or is there going to be "accepted externality"? If so, why those who suggest taxing meat more suggest the cutoff right between plants and meat?
For the reason you give, a Pigovian tax on the externalities themselves is a better approach than specific regulations or pre-defined taxes on each class of consumer product.
Another benefit of this approach is that it provides price signals to the product's producers as well as consumers -- after all, if a company comes up with a way to produce beef with fewer externalities, they should be able to capture some of the value!
There is certainly disagreement with regard to how to handle some of the more difficult-to-assess externalities, but even taxing a handful of externalities still helps push product prices slightly closer to their true cost.
Another problem is that taxing negative externalities is often used for another things than eliminating given externality.
I will buy beef (or corn). It will emit CO2. Capturing given CO2 would cost $5. So the tax will be $5. But politician will not use these $5 for capturing the CO2 emissions.
He will buy votes instead. $1 for a symfonic orchestra. $1 for police department. $1 to subsidies to a company of a friend lobbyist. $1 for a new playground... Most often, negative externality taxes are just proxy for taxing people more without using money to fix the externality. So even if you believe the externality exists, but you are not supporting given politicians' program, it is a rational choice not to pay the tax.
The primary goal of taxing a negative externality is to discourage it. Using the funds for mitigation would be a secondary benefit.
If you object to using tax policy to shape public behavior because politicians cannot be trusted to efficiently allocate the resultant revenues then perhaps you'd be in favor of returning the revenue as a dividend[1], which is an option that has become more popular lately.
> The alternative is already there, vegetarianism.
Since "lab grown meat" lacks characteristics that would make it an animal (both by biological definition and also according to popular opinion), i.e. it's not motile, it too should be considered a vegan option.
Because it's not coming from an animal, it's not even "meat" - it's technically just flesh.
Yes, I think so too. Previous comment I think meant that if making cultured 'flesh' is infeasible, we can switch to a diet that is vegetarian and feasible at scale.
Veganism as an ethical principle is very simple - the use of any products created from or by animals is unethical. Since you still have to get your stem cells and fetal serum from somewhere, cultured meat isn't vegan. Even if you managed to get self-renewing stem cells and a different growth medium, you still have that initial gathering of stem cells making it non-vegan.
Vegan doesn't follow from ethical. While this would technically qualify as vegan, most people also have a pretty strong stance against cannibalism even if voluntary.
If the only connection to "meat" is the initial stem cell gathering then you may be right that it's not technically vegan but I can't imagine most people would care about that
> I can't imagine most people would care about that
It depends. In India for example, vegetarians also have a learnt aversion towards meat (for religious/caste reasons). Even now, in colleges, many vegetarian students demand to have their own separate hostels and canteens, so that they don't have to use the same utensils that have once been contaminated with meat (even though they have been washed thoroughly with soap after).
For someone like this, anything meat like is disgust-inducing and not even remotely an option.
Of the vegans I know in real life, none take such a hard-line approach with respect to products such as vaccines that were initially cultured with animal tissue, or even tested on animals. [1] I assume cultured meat would fall into a similar category, though they might avoid it for other reasons. When we discussed it, most of them also do not object to native peoples hunting wild animals or judge people who consume animal products in places (e.g. above the arctic circle) where a vegan diet is cost-prohibitive.
There are no doubt vegan purists who consider my friends to be "bad vegans", I'm just bringing it up to refute the notion that the vegan community is as fanatical or monolithic as some make them out to be.
I believe vegan considers the ethics of production too, so milk is out, even though milk is not technically an animal. Honey is a common example that is considered on the borderline I think that may (or may not) be similar to lab grown meat depending on the specific process.
When I last researched, most studies studying vegetarian diets for toddlers and young children showed clear deficiencies when it came to certain nutrients and delayed development due to this. So I'm not entirely sure I'd call it unhealthy.
That said, as an adult I do strive to heavily reduce meat and fish consumption and to adhere to a vegetarian diet 80% of the time but it's easier to manage for adults than for young children.
My kids are 100% vegetarian from birth and I can't say we have observed any issue whatsoever. We do ensure they eat a very varied diet. We do get their bloods checked from time to time and nothing notable there either.
Of course it's possible they would have been gigantic, athletic super-geniuses if we'd fed them meat. I can't disprove that, except to say I ate meat as a kid and I'm decidedly average.
How can you be so sure that whatever blood test is being done would detect a deficiency? Humans evolved to eat meat. The energy density is what gave us large enough brains to eventually develop civilization. Which is why a "healthy" vegetarian diet (one which does not result in malnutrition) comes with a laundry list of necessary foods and supplements, all of which could simply be replaced by eating meat as nature clearly intended.
Children can fairly easily have a vegetarian diet without any issues. There are a few things to look out for (enough vitamin B1, B12, iron and protein), but if you provide fish, eggs, tofu, tempeh, and legumes this is not generally a problem. Most store-bought meat replacements (vegetarian meat balls etc.) have those added already.
Veganism is a different beast and requires much more care (and probably advice from a dietician). Vegan children not getting the nutrition they need seems to be a point of concern for many health care professionals.
I would wager that most national nutrition centres provide useful guidance on vegetarianism or even veganism by now based on up-to-date research — the Dutch Voedingscentrum does¹.
On the B12 front, it should be noted that while vegetarians and vegans usually need to supplement this, animals are supplemented B12 in their feed, which is the largest reason why meat eaters don't need to supplement. They're being indirectly supplemented.
I keep seeing this claim in these HN threads and across the internet, do you have a reliable source for this? Google brings up nothing but vegan conspiracy sites.
Yeah, this article makes more sense. My grandfather put out the blue salt blocks every year so the cows would get enough cobalt (I remember asking teachers why salt blocks were blue until one knew why). That's why this all seems like nonsense, none of the farmers I know ever gave their cows B12 supplements or have even heard of it. Now their VET might have given B12 shots to the odd calf like that article states, that I would believe.
Trust me, it's always a rabbit hole; with claims like "humans used to be entirely, or mostly, vegan and got our vitamin b12 from eating the dirt on root vegetables" or "if we stopped washing our fruits and vegetables we would get enough from the bacteria on the produce"
Things can be complicated I'm not sure that is a reason to think these theories are incorrect. I am tempted to believe microbiome and eating more slightly rotten/off food than we currently do also helped but it's not as if humans from antiquity were all living into their 90s.
Well, except there is no evidence at all that humans were ever anything other than omnivores and large segments of humanity were know to be hunter gatherer societies from the archaeological record. A few societies have become ovo-lacto vegetarians and some modern humans have effectively become vegan.
Strictly speaking that depends on the definition of meat, which for some is limited to mammalian meat. Others prefer to call vegetarianism plus fish pescetarianism, vegaquarianism, or pesco-vegetarianism.
He said specifically that eating fish is not vegetarian, this is 100% an accurate statement, you can choose to define the word "meat" however you want but the textbook definition of vegetarianism does not include fish.
The word "just" in this sense is a signal that you might easily be underestimating the difficulty or cost of something.
> We just need to make meat cost prohibitive enough to force the majority of people to eat the majority of their meals vegetarian.
If you were talking about persuasion, this would be fine.
When you start talking about forcing people to change their habits, it is time to take a step back and get curious about those other people's perspectives. In this case, you're talking about the daily or weekly dietary habits of more than 2 billion people.
Before moving forward, you should have a clear answer to the question of how many megadeaths you are willing to cause through war and famine.
>Before moving forward, you should have a clear answer to the question of how many megadeaths you are willing to cause through war and famine.
War and famine is what we currently get with the current dietary trend. Going back to a mostly vegetarian food supply would liberate so much land mass that you would have fewer issues feeding the world.
>In this case, you're talking about the daily or weekly dietary habits of more than 2 billion people.
Humanity hasn't had such a high meat consumption ever before, it's an aberration of the last century that is unsustainable. We changed the dietary habits of a lot of people over the last century. There's no reason we couldn't change them back.
I'm with you for the most part. I'm vegetarian myself, chiefly for environmental reasons. And certainly we could change people's habits back, but there's an obvious reason this would be very hard: it's easy to give people something they want; it's hard to take it away. People feel loss more keenly than gain, so they will feel return to the status quo ante to be a greater loss in quality of life than leaving it was a gain.* And most people everywhere just aren't that pro-social. They want to eat meat. They don't particularly care about the well being of others or their future selves. I think this is malleable, but most people would prefer not to change their attitudes. I'm not sure what the solution is.
* Also, we discount utility by distance. A gain one year ago or one year from now feels less important than the same gain today. And if we're talking about a gain felt by a previous generation, the utility drops down another notch. Someone else's imprisonment or freedom just doesn't matter as much to you as your own. Change is hard in part because you feel the pain now and the gain is sometime in the future.
> And most people everywhere just aren't that pro-social.
As we've seen with COVID, a significant number of people aren't willing to wear a mask in Walmart to avoid killing grandmas; they certainly aren't giving up their McDonalds and BBQ steaks without some kind of squabble.
No, we allowed people to change their own dietary habits and they chose to do so.
> There's no reason we couldn't change them back.
There is a reason: The probability that they would respond with violence that would spiral into a massive humanitarian crisis.
Remember that the Syrian civil war was kicked off in large part by the prices of food in the Arab world putting pressure on pre-existing fault lines.
> Going back to a mostly vegetarian food supply would liberate so much land mass that you would have fewer issues feeding the world.
You're not wrong about the destination...but the path to get there matters if you want to avoid making things worse. Also, there is a massive difference between freeing up the alfalfa fields of California and the grazing lands of Afghanistan or Pakistan.
>No, we allowed people to change their own dietary habits and they chose to do so.
Because it became vastly cheaper. But you still called it a choice. So why do you keep referring to the opposite scenario (people eating less meat because it's more expensive) like it's not?
1. People making choices which feel unpleasant often consider themselves to be forced. Those people can be willing to use violence to avoid those choices.
2. I’m responding to someone who talked about forcing behavior change.
A few things here, some to other posts upstream of yours.
1) There is absolutely no shortage of arable land. None.
Even with the immense amount of "the best growing land ever" being covered with cities, for cities formed where the living / land was good, there is an incredible amount of farming land purposefully fallow.
In the EU, people are paid not to farm. In Canada, land use is restricted by quotas on who and how land can be used. Market pressures are used elsewhere.
I can't overstress how much land is just not being used.
This has a secondary benefit -- if times get "tough", environmental, or just many dry seasons, fallow land can be brought into use. This is vital, for this is what prevents wars!
2) We currently through away massive amounts of food, due to spoilage.
Many different discussions about this, but I've seen numbers from 33% to 50% lost in silos.
Again, this is what prevents war. Starvation. You don't plant crops, and decide "OK, I need $x food per person, I'll plant $y crops."
Pests are cyclical, and even with pesticides, take a toll. Water (rain) is random, and too much is just as bad as too little. How cool or hot, how sunny or cloudy, all effect output.
So, we must grow excess crops in order to keep people reliably fed.
3) Due to the above, and how much corn, and others are redirected into fuel manufacturing, the problem feeding people isn't food supply, it's "Will they pay us for our food".
Almost every year, the above spoiled food just rots. More is thrown away. Why? Pay me or I won't give you things."
Right or wrong, that's the reality of it. We could feed, if we really wanted to, 100 billion people, including meat, without even going to advanced farming methods. And population growth looks to be, soon, on a downward* trend. We've reached peak people.
4) But...!, I'll try to answer some 'buts'.
* crop rotation, and the science behind it, including soil testing is well understood. It often isn't done, because crop $x is worth good money, and $y is worth meh, but without fertilizer this is the way to go. And it works. Well. It's all about cost here.
* cattle can easily graze, and there is almost unlimited land here. The real issue with cattle is grain feed, combined with petro-chemicals (fertilizers) to grow that grain. That is where "cattle = bad".
Many places outside of the US do indeed grass/free graze feed. There is absolutely no environmental cost here. If those cattle didn't exist, then wildlife would grow abundant, and feed instead.
Only through some false, artificial means, eg humans fencing off land, and then killing anything which intrudes, prevents everything from rabbits, to goats, deer, etc from eating that grass.
* meat is the most environmentally friendly way to transport energy, due to its density. Trains space, boat space, is often not about weight, but space. Grain takes a lot more than just meat.
* the problems which are cited in this article are really simply put.
A cow, sheep, goat, etc does all the work for you, of collecting energy. Grow your own meat, and you must supply all that energy!
When it comes to free-range cattle, nothing could be more energy efficient for making meat.
> When it comes to free-range cattle, nothing could be more energy efficient for making meat.
It's also far less cruel than more sensitive people here imagine it to be.
Animals die in the end, true, but eventually everyone dies. They live a decent life, walk in the pastures, play with their kin, get treated if injured. This is better than life of animals in the wild by a huge margin. Some of them also get to have a long life; many cows that are used for milk usually are not slaughtered until they get old.
Factory farmed meat is fucking genocide and should be banned forever.
> Many places outside of the US do indeed grass/free graze feed. There is absolutely no environmental cost here.
In Brazil huge tracts of the Amazon are converted into grassland every year for cattle grazing. This is not environmentally free. This has turned the Amazon from a carbon sink to a carbon source. And the density of ruminants on grasslands is vastly different if those ruminants are raised for meat instead of fending for themselves. And, of course, ruminants emit methane. Just burning the grass every year would be better for the environment than feeding it to cattle.
> Many places outside of the US do indeed grass/free graze feed. There is absolutely no environmental cost here. If those cattle didn't exist, then wildlife would grow abundant, and feed instead.
That replacement does sound like something that could reasonably described as a cost. To the environment.
From agricultural point of view, it is nonsense. There are places that generate more human edible calories by having animals. For example Mongolia, or nordic regions.
> Humanity hasn't had such a high meat consumption ever before, it's an aberration of the last century that is unsustainable. We changed the dietary habits of a lot of people over the last century. There's no reason we couldn't change them back.
If people will decide to eat less meat then be so. Forcing them would be disgusting.
>From agricultural point of view, it is nonsense. There are places that generate more human edible calories by having animals. For example Mongolia, or nordic regions.
Exceptions that prove the rule. Also nomadic hunters will not pay higher taxes on food in stores, because they're hunting it themselves, limiting the amount to what they can hunt, and limiting their fertility to the amount of calories they can get from the land. We have had unlimited growth of the human population elsewhere, which is what's worrysome, not the minuscule amount of leftover hunter-gatherers.
>If people will decide to eat less meat then be so. Forcing them would be disgusting.
Forcing humanity to march into inhostiptable environments because a portion of humanity doesn't care is I would say more disgusting than telling somebody, you have to eat food that's better for you and the environment.
I guess places that would implement these policies (taxing meat consuption for environmental reasons) are exactly regions that get older, are shrinking or are likely to shrink in the future (EU, USA). While in places like India, China, Africa, such a regulation is unlikely and increase of the living standard there will compensate (more likely overcompensate) for eliminated meat consumption in Europe and the US.
> because a portion of humanity doesn't care
People care. I doubt there is even one adult in this world who has never heard about vegetarianism, climate, emissions. They do care. But their values are complex and their influence on the climate is just part of the decision making process. It is not their fault they would decide differently from you.
> to eat food that's better for you and the environment
If they are adults, they can decide for themselves. How could you be so sure that switching over to vegetarianism would make their life longer, more satisfying and environment significantly better?
> Humanity hasn't had such a high meat consumption ever before, it's an aberration of the last century that is unsustainable.
Humanity hasn't had 7 billion people before. It grew by 6 billion in said century. Is that sustainable, you think? Every extra person has a carbon footprint and consequently contributes to increase in land-use and resource exploitation, and by extension environmental destruction. Modifiers like fossil fuels exacerbate the rate of destruction but ultimately the scaling remains with whatever we replace with. The only sustainable course is for growth to stagnate entirely. This is popularly predicted on the horizon, but it seems too optimistic. So long as there is global poverty and inaccessibility to contraceptives there will be growth.
High meat consumption isn't exactly novel, it just hasn't been done to this scale. During Victorian period of inequality it may have been lower among workers, but that hasn't always been true. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_dining_in_the_Roman_E...
First, thanks for raising that. Good-faith discussion matters.
The strongest interpretation I was able to come up with is "Meat has enough environmental impact that it is worth public interventions to raise the prices of meat in enough communities around the world that billions of people notice the increased cost and feel forced to give up meat"
Is there a more charitable interpretation that I am missing?
Does anything in my words indicate that I think carlmr desires the deaths of people? (I don't think he wants that. I hope we all know we're talking about unintended consequences here).
I doubt it is healthier diet. Researches showing vegetarians are healthier have a problem that puts vegetarians to one group and omnivores to the second group putting people eating at fast foods altogether with people eating for example Paleo or mediterranean diet.
Greek diet is healthy, still they eat fish, seafood and meatballs.
Japanese cuisine is healthy, still they eat fish and seafood.
Korean cuisine is healthy, still they eat pork, fish.
Mediterrean diet is healthy, still they eat all types of meat.
Speaking of sustainability, there are regions where animal product is better (Mongolia, nordic regions). Besides that, sustainability is one of measures in the equation. People want sustainable diet, but not by all costs.
2. Adapted to local cultures -- Such as the startup/industrial culture of California and much of the US.
We can significantly reduce the environmental impact without sparking large conflicts.
Talking about enforcing a change on the world is so large as to be counterproductive. Talking about influencing an area the size of California, Texas, or the UK has a chance to improve things.
The healthy aspect is in not overeating meat, which is well proven by modern science to be a significant public health risk in various developed countries.
The other major alternative is diet from aquaculture, which has better fresh water and land use than vegetarianism.
What we need to do is make the externalities created by farming part of the food price, including the pollution they create. The artificial fertilizers, the fossil fuels, the energy costs, water pollution, eutrophication, the destruction of biodiversity and land usage. All of it need to be part of the price so that it incentivize a change in the dietary culture towards more sustainable production.
Getting people to change their culture is the hard part. Convincing people to eat less meat is like convincing a vegetarian to eat more molluscs. Almost impossible.
> The other major alternative is diet from aquaculture
If push ever actually comes to shove, bugs are way more efficient than fish. The fact you can’t buy a soldier-fly larva burger even if you want to, makes me think we’re far from peak meat.
I am not totally convinced with insect farms. Creating food in the ocean has a unique aspect of not using land, which would allow for more of those carbon binding trees. With 71% of earth being covered in water there is a lot of unused space.
Promising technology from aquaculture is algefarming which can be used for carbon capture or ecological alternative for animal feed, seaweed farming which can either be used directly in human diet or as animal feed, molluscs, shellfish and fish farms. Some shellfish are already heavily involved in water treatment and water quality control.
Insect farms in comparison seems more limit in use, and harder in terms of cultural change. There has already existed plenty of cultures that have depended on the ocean for their diet, similar to cultures in the past which primarily depends on vegetarian diet. All that might be required for a cultural shift is a nudge in the right direction with economical incentives.
Vegetarians eat eggs, drink milk, eat cheese and use leather (and other materials sourced from animals) so the scale of animal production could be lower but cannot be eliminated.
Vegan alternatives in materials depend on oil production.
So in some way, I think, animal production and animal industry is inevitable for us.
As somebody, who has been half half vegetarian (16 years), I would be strongly against making meat even 1 % more expensive. What people eat is their decision, not mine.
>I would be strongly against making meat even 1 % more expensive. What people eat is their decision, not mine.
We can't solve collective issues with individualist extremism like this. We're all living on the same planet. So as long as we all share this one resource for our collective survival, other people's food decisions aren't "theirs", if they're not carbon neutral or low-emission.
If the food you eat has global externalities you should pay for them.
> We can't solve collective issues with individualist extremism like this
That's what innovation is for. Case in point: seaweed-additive feed that is set to be adopted for production in Brazil, and Australia. Boom, no more methane.
A measure such as forcing people to avoid meat has to be justifiable for the public to concede to it. As it stands, it isn't, though some will be receptive to the idea of either reducing consumption or forgoing it altogether for a variety of reasons. What people aren't receptive to authoritarian rhetoric.
Unless practically everything (food, transport, education)... becomes a collective issue and no space for individual liberty is left.
Honestly, I'd rather live on 1 degree warmer Earth with 1/100 of regulations/subsidies than the opposite. And this is my vote, yours is yours.
> If the food you eat has global externalities
Everything has externalities. Pesticides have externalities. Mining base materials to do just anything (a tractor to farm land, materials to build a house) decrease amount of nonrenewable materials, which is externality. Many meat substitutes are packaged in plastic materials made from oil.
There just must be acceptable level of negative externalities.
>Honestly, I'd rather live on 1 degree warmer Earth with 1/100 of regulations/subsidies than the opposite.
What you're really saying, though, is that you'd rather everyone live (or die, as the case will be for a lot of people) on a 1 degree warmer Earth.
Make no mistake about it, you want other people to suffer and die as a result of climate change because you want don't want to be told what to do. Yay for individual liberty.
Yes, this is exactly what I say. I would rather everyone live in the World with cons of underregulations then in the World with cons of overregulations.
For me, overregulation is suffering too.
And honestly, even when people don't realize it explicitly, their acts are very much the same (90% of people know that meat increases emissions, still they eat meat; 90% of people know that petrol cars increase emissions, still they...; 90% of people know plastics pollute oceans, still they buy plastic things even when non-plastic alternatives are available).
There is demand for behaviors that have negative externalities. And it is massive, I doubt I even know a single person who doesn't cause any negative externalities.
>What you're really saying, though, is that you'd rather everyone live (or die, as the case will be for a lot of people) on a 1 degree warmer Earth.
What a weird thing to say, when there is an order of magnitude more people dying from cold than from heat today. You seem to be the one wanting people to suffer and die.
Really? Don't you think it's a little hyperbolic to call this personal choice "extremism"?
>We're all living on the same planet. So as long as we all share this one resource for our collective survival, other people's food decisions aren't "theirs"
I don't think you appreciate how dangerous such rhetoric is. Arguably far more "extreme" than allowing people to choose for themselves whether to eat meat. Every choice has a cost, how far are you willing to see people's quality of life destroyed to solve what are only potential future problems?
Mostly agree, though would be fine with reducing/eliminating subsidies in the West which drive incentive for increased meat consumption. Speaking as a quasi-vegetarian who consumes fish and poultry regularly.
>oh wait that takes effort, everyone wants a low effort, idealistic (yet unfeasible), solution to the food problem.
This is what I can see is the problem in any of these conversations. Vegetarianism is the cure! And look! You don't really have to change your life that much! Lab grown meat is the cure! And look! You don't really have to change your life that much!
When did conversations about sustainability just completely drop the 'your life will have to be different' approach?
Also, lawn chickens are a good idea, but only as part of a concerted neighborhood effort.
If Mr. Jones has chickens, and Mrs. Smith has a milk goat, and Mr. Lee has an exceptional vegetable garden, and Mrs. Brown has apple and pear trees, then everyone can get what they need within their own neighborhood. Extrapolate out across the entire suburb, and you really have something.
(now I'm going to get really, really cynical) The problem is now that most people are selfish, self-centered, and short-sighted. There is no sense of community, and no sense of immediate gratification for working as a co-op to help the neighborhood succeed.
I agree with your sense that most people have completely lost their sense of community; this is the primary reason that I oppose widespread immigration. Increased diversity of class, race, culture, religion, values, etc. makes it extremely difficult to organize along non-financial lines. People withdraw into their sub-communities as a result of living near people who don't think like them.
This should be obvious, but I'm astonished that it's not. I think people are afraid of being called racist, but it's a very simple concept. Is it easier to organize a high school party in a group made up of 15 jocks, or a group made up of 3 nerds, 3 jocks, 3 skaters, 3 gangsters, and 3 choir kids? Or, a less "immature" version of the same question--which is a higher-trust environment, a big group of recent immigrants from the same country speaking the same language and worshipping the same god, or an equal-sized set of random people taking a bus in New York?
The reason that I mention this is that I desperately want to change my and everyone else's life to be sustainable, as you describe in your example, and participate in a mutually beneficial exchange of value with people in my community, but the people in my community share very little common ground with me and will not go out of their way to help me (which is completely not the case for my friends and family, who are scattered across the world). This is not the case for me; I often go out of my way to help people that are not like me, but the favor is rarely returned.
That's interesting. Because I have the same thoughts, but came to the exact opposite conclusion.
Arbitrary borders make it harder for people to get to know each other. My experience is that one the easiest things to bond over is 'difference' between cultures. Whether that's food, holidays, religion, whatever. Easy, seamless immigration helps people move around, easing the process of getting to know each other.
Further, building community of place is all about knowing each other. (Source; my life). Knowing your neighbors, and where they come from, helps build empathy for others, in general, in my opinion.
I find it fascinating that we both come at the same problem, with wildly different conclusions. Human brains, what weird things.
Do you really find that people bond over differences in culture more than they bond over similarities? Devout Catholics and dedicated Protestants? Introverted nerds and extroverted jocks? Career felons and beat cops?
People inside the same culture don't bond over differences, so why would people from other cultures do so? I had a many differences with the recently-immigrated Mexican kitchen staff in the restaurant I worked in, many with the dirt-poor kids at my high school who fought each other daily, and many with the rich kids from the mansion district, and not one of those groups was friendly or desirous of "bonding" with me. Their contextual social power and sway was immense, and their loyalty to each other was far stronger than any voluntary community of differences I've ever belonged to.
> My experience is that one the easiest things to bond over is 'difference' between cultures.
Are you talking about "people who behave and think like Western progressives, but happen to speak different languages and hail from different locales"? That isn't real diversity. I get along very well with highly-educated immigrants from China, Singapore, India, Nigeria, etc. because we all had nearly exactly the same life: a lot of studying, reading, and close ties with our family. It's very fun to bond over differences then, but the only reason the differences arise is because we're already almost the same. When we laugh over how our holidays and food are different, we are constantly reinforcing our similarities; we speak at the same volume, we let one another talk at similar rates, we ask questions of a matching intimacy, and we have the same desires of each other, namely to allow the other peacefully prosper. I can bond easily with an engineering student from Thailand, but not so with a career thief from the same country.
> I find it fascinating that we both come at the same problem, with wildly different conclusions. Human brains, what weird things.
Beware of ignoring certain patterns in order to come to fashionable conclusions, although perhaps you really have never experienced anything like what I've experienced.
>Do you really find that people bond over differences in culture more than they bond over similarities?
Yes, that has been my experience. Talking with people and learning about how and why they do things is the easiest way to become neighbors. Taking an honest interest in the people around me has been the easiest social lubricant that I have found. It has helped me build a community in the past, present, and I assume in the future.
>Are you talking about "people who behave and think like Western progressives, but happen to speak different languages and hail from different locales"?
No. I have lived in the same house/apartment and/or in the same neighborhood as individuals from other cultures, including those relatively similar to mine and wildly different; from folks who were fabulously wealthy and well-connected, and those that had just the clothes on their backs when they came here. In my experience the only individuals who I have been unable to actually interact with positively are those who regardless of where they're from I wouldn't have been able to anyway. Religious extremists, that's one. Bigots, that's another. These are people who I would not get along with, even if they were from my own family.
Your example of the Thai career thief is a prime example. Someone coming here specifically to undercut and sociopathically 'get ahead' is not someone I would want to interact with. There are those people who already live here, though. That's not an immigration issue.
>although perhaps you really have never experienced anything like what I've experienced.
I feel like that's obvious; we're two different people.
What I was saying is that it is fascinating to me that two people with the same conclusion 'society is fragmented' have two wildly different conclusions about the reason for it.
I think organization along financial lines is much more egalitarian. It’s fungible and people can make changes in their lifetime to move between social classes. You’re proposing racially based zones in the world where everyone of a single race must reside. It’s asinine and odious.
To a degree it is not a bad idea. Landfills account for more carbon emissions that air travel, and even in the case where we collect kitchen waste it usually end up as fuel which release some amount of carbon into the air.
In addition we tend to use lawn mowers to cut grass, and chickens are quite effective at keep grass down. Replacing mechanical means that (often) run on fossil fuels with animals would be a boon to the environment and air quality. Chickens also keeps out most pests which reduces the need for toxic chemicals.
There are downsides, but on the whole I suspect it has a net-positive for the environment.
It's not an alternative. It's like saying that having no email is an alternative to having a GMail account, it isn't. Sure some people get by just fine, but it's not realistic to suggest it to people.
I raise cows for myself and "F&F" consumption. In our case, they are sustainable: I own the land they graze on and the economics of raising them is quite simple. It's no more complex than balancing one's checkbook to show this.
Most other things are far less sustainable when you consider the industrial supply chains and the environmental impact of those. E.g. ANYTHING coming from manufacturing in China is already far, far worse.
If you use current technology for growing cells I can easily believe that it will never be competitive. Even with economies of scale that is rather sensitive work that is very easily spoiled. Unless you figure out how to ensure clean-room conditions for low cost this part alone might make this too expensive.
But I don't see how there could be any kind of insurmountable problem here. Animals "solve" this problem for us right now, so there is a way. I just think that the solution has to be quite different than how we grow cell cultures in the lab right now.
Short term I'd be really skeptical on the prospects of replacing meat in this way. But long term is an entirely different question.
It's like looking at the Wright Flyer and saying that it is neat proof of concept, but that affordable transatlantic flight will simply never be possible. Prescient at that point in history, but myopic over a long enough time frame.
I do have times when I look at my phone and think about the first "computer" I touched. I'm still amazed sometimes of how tech changed since I was 6-7 years old(talking almost 40 years)
I'm no fan of lab growing anything because or banning people from raising animals or having food plots because those that make the food make the rules. That being said... I wouldn't be suprised to see, in 2-3 decades, something taking off in that regard. All it takes is one stroke of genius and a ton of elbow grease to change it all.
These sorts of things look like inspirational posters and suffer from survivorship bias. Many more ideas failed than succeeded.
We also seem to think that no one learned from all that experience. We can see the things that made something once thought impossible work at scale. We all know these stories. So we’re more primed to be wary of just being negative.
I’m all for spending money on this, but it could turn out certain breakthroughs are needed and we don’t know when or if they will come.
> Those of us in the computer industry can well remember when "640K should be enough for anyone."
I can remember the urban legend, but there seems to be no solid evidence that it was ever actually said, let alone believed by anyone. The saying is normally attributed to Bill Gates, but he denies ever saying it, and tells how he was pushing computer makers to include even more RAM.
When 640k was all you could reasonably buy as a consumer, it had to be enough for anyone if you wanted to own a computer at the time. It was never thought of as some fundamental limit that could not be broken or utilized in larger quantities, however.
Most things people said wouldn't happen didn't happen though. Some remarkable things happened, yes, but you can't count on remarkable breakthroughs happening in any specific area.
People looked at past results and thought we would live forever by now, but we still die and there is no end in sight of that.
People looked at past energy use and saw the future of fusion solving all human energy needs, but energy use has been flat for the past 50 years as no new efficient enough energy sources was found.
People looked at the innovations of transportation and assumed we would all have flying cars today, yet we still drive cars on the ground just like 70 years ago. They are a bit safer and more efficient today, but they are still just cars.
Those slides was 2.5 years ago, there ought to have been some very interesting development since then if it is just 5 years away, right? Can't you link something more recent?
I just figured the physics symposium lecture would be more interesting given the deep-dive details and allusions to why ITER "failed" to achieve the desired breakthroughs.
Thanks, that looks cool. Just that a professor with slides is rarely a good sign that something is soon production ready, but them meeting production milestones is a good sign.
Still I wont bother to check the physics, if they are right it is great, but I wont change my life based on them making it. I know the problems with ITER, it will be too expensive to really revolutionize much, but I haven't done physics in a while and wont bother with more now.
(Just to elaborate on ITER. It's the classic too big to fail project, not to mention it has basically one feature: it's so over-engineered that it can't fail. It's almost the equivalent of the LHC. Built to "prove" a theory. Of course almost everyone wished some beyond the standard model physics to pop up at the LHC, it didn't as far as I know. Almost nobody wishes for unexpected things to happen at ITER, so it's supre boring. With a really eye-watering price tag. But at the same time it is a big umbrella project to get the necessary components designed, built, and tested for fusion. It's accumulating know-how, training experts, it's literally paving the fucking way. Hence the name. And in that context it's basically free. Companies spend more on filing and litigating dumb parents, and those are obvious too.)
Agreed. Skimming Humbird's analysis, he mentions concentrations of catabolites as a significant limit on cell density, and points out that their removal is usually the job of the kidneys. To me that immediately raised the question of how to design an artificial kidney-like structure that can also live in solution. Similarly, the cleanroom conditions are very difficult to sustain, but what if we could engineer a replacement for the immune system to police the reactors?
Both of those are of course complete science fiction currently, but they're not "thermodynamically impossible" like he seems to suggest. They're 'just' conditioned on a significantly deeper understanding of biochemistry and genetic engineering than we currently have.
Given the current state of the technology and the implications of meat for global warming, I suspect that meat might just become more expensive until it stops being eaten entirely. And when the technology exists to produce it artificially, there won't be a market for it anymore. Speaking as someone who eats meat regularly, it's mostly a matter of conditioning. I don't think I would have independently invented the idea of killing and consuming an animal if other's hadn't taught it to me.
If you solve those issues cost efficiently enough to grow meat cells you basically also solved all human blood and heart diseases. Just run your artificial kidneys to clean the blood etc. It isn't impossible to solve as you say, but solving it would basically revolutionize all of medicine.
"Engineer a replacement for the immune system" sounds insanely hard. Problem statement: "constant incoming stream of incredibly diverse unknown bacterial and viral invaders that you have to recognize and kill before their replication overwhelms your systems, but make sure you don't attack any of your own extremely diverse tissues, oh also those bacteria and viruses are constantly evolving to bypass your defenses". Natural immune systems are incredible biotech and it's a miracle we're not all dead.
> I don't think I would have independently invented the idea of killing and consuming an animal if other's hadn't taught it to me.
If you were really hungry I think you'd figure something out.
I completely agree on your first point. I was going for a bit of understatement, but to be clear, doing any of that is firmly on the other side of many revolutionary breakthroughs in our understanding of biology. But that being said, the standard for success isn't to have an immune system that can protect a complete animal for its entire life. The standard is to put up a nonzero amount of resistance to the reactor getting colonized by opportunistic bacteria (yeast etc), and not attack the one specific cell type that you care about. It's about pushing the requirement for sterility down from 100% to 'only' 99.99%.
> Agreed. Skimming Humbird's analysis, he mentions concentrations of catabolites as a significant limit on cell density, and points out that their removal is usually the job of the kidneys. To me that immediately raised the question of how to design an artificial kidney-like structure that can also live in solution. Similarly, the cleanroom conditions are very difficult to sustain, but what if we could engineer a replacement for the immune system to police the reactors?
But then you're talking about re-engineering complex animal life, which is nowhere close to happening any time soon. Plus once you add those systems back in, you may loose most of the energy savings that make "lab grown meat" look attractive. This comment when into more detail and did some back of the envelope calculations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28623349.
> Speaking as someone who eats meat regularly, it's mostly a matter of conditioning. I don't think I would have independently invented the idea of killing and consuming an animal if other's hadn't taught it to me.
To be fair, you're a human: you had to learn all your survival skills. You wouldn't have independently invented the idea of eating plants either, let alone picking the ones that would give you a nutritionally complete diet without poisoning you.
> Nothing on this scale has ever existed—though if we wanted to switch to cultivated meat by 2030, we’d better start now. If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
Optimistically it seems even according to this article that most of barriers for affordable cultivated protein are with high capital costs and once the factories are built, you can eventually amortize a lot of the costs aka how solar/electric cars did so. Also they are aiming for a self-imposed 2030 deadline, sure it might take until 2040/2050 but nothing the article says it won't eventually be built. (Unlike say the water/housing/ education/healthcare crises with bottlenecks of land/regulations/labor)
> If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030
Why do we need protein from meat? The money to engineer cultivated protein could be directed to educating simple americans on the fact that they're consuming way too much protein already. Most americans consume twice the daily protein they need.[1][2]
Cutting out something you don't actually need rather than inventing lab grown meat is an elegant answer to a complex problem.
It isn't like asking people to be vegan or something extreme like that. Just be aware of what your body actually needs and don't go overboard or be wasteful.
Why would that be some kind of controversial message or idea?
Inventing lab grown meat is a good way to make the problems of scaling the raw inputs for custom grown human organs to be sufficiently cheap that everyone can have them.
Building a factory to make aluminium foil is extremely expensive if that's all you're trying to do: it's a lot cheaper if there's already a global mining industry producing aluminium in many near-finished states.
I loathe the idea that everyone getting replacement organs is some kind of good thing to be shooting for.
I have a condition where organ replacement is fairly common. I very much wish the world invested more effort in keeping people like me actually healthy rather than celebrating the macabre prospect of giving more of us replacement organs.
So this is a problem space I've thought about a fair amount and I have zero sympathy for an argument for engineering organ replacement for everyone.
You seem unaware of the many and myriad reasons organ transplants are performed. Like you get that by the time doctors are considering it, it's because the alternative is they think you're either (1) going to die soon when it becomes necessary or (2) is necessary right now.
Did you know there are people who survive COVID and wind up in kidney failure from the stress on their body? What's your answer to them? Oh right: hope you can get a kidney and then enjoy life on immunosuppressant drugs.
But you know, go tell those dialysis patients on the waiting list that actually they're not that important.
You seem unaware of the many and myriad reasons organ transplants are performed.
I'm not. I'm just skeptical that putting more time, energy and money into headline grabbing "heroics" actually makes people healthier and I am very concerned that it only turns people like me into guinea pigs for people who want some limelight more than they want (people like) me to experience some kind of reasonable quality of life.
> it only turns people like me into guinea pigs for people
Did you also know that you are legally allowed to decline medical procedures? You can even sign yourself out of a hospital AMA ("Against Medical Advice") if you don't like what's happening.
You are also completely free, and generally advised, to seek alternate medical opinions.
The existence of a medical procedure or option has not, and never does, obligate you to take it.
The absence of alternatives is my concern. If we optimize for better organ replacement instead of optimizing for how to help people keep their existing organs functional, it's really an asinine thing to pretend they have some kind of meaningful choice.
"Oh, well, now that we've let your organs decline this far, you can get a transplant and maybe live. Or you are free to decline it and almost certainly die." is not a meaningful choice.
I've gotten ridiculous amounts of flak for making real choices about my health. Much of the world would like me to know I'm evil incarnate for doing prosaic things like eating better as a first line of defense.
I guess you could say this, but given that the planet is essentially burning it seems like we're getting way ahead of ourselves with this type of "solution" when we could be working on more important problems.
Indeed. Back when dialup internet was the norm I had the opinion that after the 57k6 faster access at home would take ages and require new infrastructure to the homes since the phone system was build for low bandwidth voice. With 4kHz bandwidth and 45dB Shannons theorem didn't allow for much more.
Understandably I was really amazed at the first ADSL implemenations I saw. Felt a bit like they were cheating. Yeah if you just bypass the exchange and use the raw last mile sure it's possible.
I think this article is more clickbaity than it should be. From a physics perspective, of course you should be able to grow meat, because we do it now with a bunch of other unnecessary things like thoughts, nerves, behaviors, etc. There is no reason in principle that it cannot be done.
But it's a lot of work, which everyone agrees.
I personally think a blend of lab grown and veggie (Impossible/Beyond) will be the first "killer app": tastes better and costs less than traditional meat for most applications.
IMO impossible is close now for some cases, cost is probably the main issue with some extra flavor that I think may need to be synthesized.
> I personally think a blend of lab grown and veggie (Impossible/Beyond) will be the first "killer app": tastes better and costs less than traditional meat for most applications.
Well we have seitan which, when prepared, can get very close to a meat-like texture. So I think it will be some lab grown meat and gluten abomination.
I've been on the other side of this - going more toward regenerative ranching as the other way away from the industrial food supply. I can't really beat Diana Rogers on explaining this, so I'll just point you here.
Also - before folks say that we couldn't feed everyone that way, I always like to point out that before the Europeans decimated the American bison, there were more head of bison roaming the west than there are head of cattle today. Just turning our monocrop soy and corn farms in the midwest back to prairie (by actually doing nothing to the land - just leave it alone), we could have regenerative ranching and cows and more food for less energy input than we do today.
You are right on the money here and I wish more people understood that there is a sustainable path forward using animals as part of the carbon capture solution. When you say you are on the other side do you mean actively working on ranching? It's something I'm very interested in myself.
>I always like to point out that before the Europeans decimated the American bison, there were more head of bison roaming the west than there are head of cattle today.
I don't think that's true. Most estimates of the peak Bison population I've seen put them at about 30 million. Some estimates are as high as 60 million. Today, we have about 94 million head of cattle down from a peak of 104.
Additionally, your linked article is incredibly unconvincing. It's riddled with Appeals to Nature and attempts to use a single instance of questionable behavior by a single company to poison the well for all alternatives to raising animals for slaughter.
Regenerative agriculture is not a sustainability solution [1]:
Written by FCRN’s Dr Tara Garnett in collaboration with Cécile
Godde of CSIRO and a team of international experts, this report
dissects claims made by different stakeholders in the debate,
and evaluates them against the best available science. This report
finds that better management of grass-fed livestock do not hold a
solution to climate change as only under very specific conditions
can they help sequester carbon. This sequestering of carbon is even
then small, time-limited, reversible and substantially outweighed
by the greenhouse gas emissions these grazing animals generate. Dr
Garnett explains the key takeaways from this report:
“This report concludes that grass-fed livestock are not a
climate solution. Grazing livestock are net contributors to the
climate problem, as are all livestock. Rising animal production and
consumption, whatever the farming system and animal type, is causing
damaging greenhouse gas release and contributing to changes in land
use. Ultimately, if high consuming individuals and countries want
to do something positive for the climate, maintaining their current
consumption levels but simply switching to grass-fed beef is not a
solution. Eating less meat, of all types, is.”
How can't it be a sustainable solution? Cows doesn't magically generate carbon out of nothing, it comes from the plants they eat. If you have a stable farmland area like Europe and keep raising and slaughtering cattle on it then the carbon footprint is net 0.
Methane has more than 10 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.
That means if the grazing plants capture 1 mol of carbon dioxide from the air, and then is consumed by cows who turn some of the carbon into methane, then the warming potential of the system has increased even though it's still carbon neutral.
Methane breaks down though, it only gets worse if we scale up production. Basically eating meat forever is equivalent to a year or so of other carbon pollutants. I'd rather we regulate other emissions a year or so early than ban all meat forever.
This is an incredibly unconvincing article that flat out misrepresents facts or didn't do enough research to actually understand what happened.
Most of it complains saying that Impossible Foods went to market without being approved by the FDA and implies it's unsafe, but that seems to be literally 100% false and completely misrepresents the facts from my basic research on it.
They received FDA approval in Oct 2019 [0]. The Center for Food Safety filed a lawsuit against _the FDA and Impossible Foods_ later that year saying they didn't think a strong enough standard for approval was done. Earlier this year, the court ruled in favor of the FDA and said they did have enough reason to believe it was safe. [1]
I had some more written about this but it doesn't even explain the method it claims is better, provides no scientific evidence for them, and ends by saying things like "WILL NOT SAVE US" and "NOT MORE HUMANE" bold and in caps. You can make up your own mind on how trustworthy this is.
I think the thing to keep in mind is that this is very specific to the concept of growing meat using a cellular culture. This in no way invalidates other methods of replicating meat.
"According to the article, the barriers to cost-efficient manufacturing of lab-grown meat at large scale are fundamental, e.g., impossible to overcome according to the Laws of Thermodynamics and our current understanding of cell biology and chemistry."
I came away with the opposite understanding. I don't understand why lower cost lab grown meat would be fundamentally impossible. At its theoretical best, lab grown meat takes the existing non-lab grown situation and improves on it in two very important ways - less energy wasted growing non-meat, and less land required due to vertical farming capabilities. Rather, the issues I saw that the article talks about, such as issues maintaining sterile environments, aren't things that are theoretical limits, but are practical problems that might or might not have an eventual answer.
There is the relatively free transformation of solar energy into meat when done naturally. Lab grown meat would seem to require a lot more process to turn that free solar energy into a consumable product.
For certain definitions of "free" and "naturally". But certainly not free of side effects on the environment: land and water use with deforestation and water crises, pesticide runoff, pesticide resistance, increased transportation costs and pollution for supplies and feed, increased transfer of disease (swine flu), increased CO2 and methane production. And also increased animal suffering.
If we can assume that the meat labs could overcome all their serious challenges if only we tried hard enough, ISTM certain problems related to traditional livestock agriculture could also be solved with some effort. Vote with your meat-purchasing dollars!
My main reason for staying with meat is that we evolved to eat it and not these plant based or lab grown alternatives. There is a very complex biological process in nutrition that we probably don't understand barely at all.
> we evolved to eat it and not these plant based or lab grown alternatives
Can I ask if you avoid soda, beer, cheese, every vegetable oil, artificial sweeteners, cookies, pastries, cake, pasta, and so on? Many plant based meats come from protein extracted from peas, wheat, soy, plus some oil, binders (that generally are also used in non-plant-based foods), and seasonings.
Do you avoid soy- and wheat-fed meat? Doesn't that affect the nutrition of the meat, since the animal had not evolved to survive on this diet?
I didn't say they can't eat it - obviously they can. The post I replied to specifically called out that they were sticking with meat because humans hadn't evolved to eat plant-based or lab-grown meat, and then implied their nutrition would suffer if they gave up meat. If that's correct, it must also then affect livestock's nutrition, since they didn't evolve to eat a soy/wheat or, as you correctly call out, corn diet. So I asked if they avoid meat fed on this "not evolved to eat" diet as well.
Certainly their outcome does change based on diet. You can compare corn fed, grass fed - corn finished, grass fed and finished, and wild game.
In all cases, there are nutrients and proteins that you cannot find in plant based alternatives. If you are vegetarian or stronger, you have to supplement with pills to get the things that are not in your diet. It is unclear whether lab-grown will lack nutrients found in natural meat, or if artificial supplementation is really equivalent.
Hence the desire to stay close to our evolutionary roots. Same idea as walking a lot and squatting to duce.
those are process problems that already have solutions (which reduce profit somewhat). the biotech process has a bunch of unsolved scale problems, will likely have it's own externalities, and cost significantly more.
I'm thinking of the solar panels and batteries that would be needed and the environmental costs tied to creating them. They may be better allocated to replacing other sources of energy consumption in the near term.
I agree that the likely result is that lab-grown meat will most likely cost more. I'm just not sure that not-lab-grown meat will stay cheap. The unseen environmental costs of raising livestock are not currently well-represented in its price, which is also heavily subsidized (both financial subsidies and unhandled environmental externalities). And there's not enough land in the US to put all of its livestock to graze. There's water supply problems for livestock and feed (which takes 10x resources to grow compared to simply growing plants). So if, on top of that, you introduce mitigations that reduce profit somewhat, the price will have to go up even more.
Factory farms are also currently benefitting from economies of scale, something that plant-based meat manufacturers are only now catching up to. Plant-based meat's ingredients are generally pretty cheap compared to the cost of raising livestock, so theoretically they could potentially beat the cost of meat.
My non-expert hunch is that its externalities of lab-grown meat will be somewhat different from factory farms. Time will tell if they're better, more sustainable trade-offs.
Regenerative agriculture uses livestock to increase viability of soil. If used correctly theyre already a sustainable ag tool that uses waste and grazing as a benefit to plant production and carbon sequestration, not just a meat generation source. Lab meat will become less efficient at high scale not more efficient according to the history of previous biotech scale up attempts, most of which use more viable organisms than animal cell culture.
According to the article there are no economics of scale. A ten times larger facility would cost more than ten times as much to run. This is apparently a very difficult problem: "But the truth is this: For cultured meat to move the needle on climate, a sequence of as-yet-unforeseen breakthroughs will still be necessary. We’ll need to train cells to behave in ways that no cells have behaved before. We’ll need to engineer bioreactors that defy widely accepted principles of chemistry and physics. We’ll need to build an entirely new nutrient supply chain using sustainable agricultural practices, inventing forms of bulk amino acid production that are cheap, precise, and safe. Investors will need to care less about money. Germs will have to more or less behave. It will be work worthy of many Nobel prizes—certainly for science, possibly for peace. And this expensive, fragile, infinitely complex puzzle will need to come together in the next 10 years."
> A ten times larger facility would cost more than ten times as much to run.
This is an impossibility. You can just build ten smaller factories to scale up and get at least a linear gain. No economics of scale just means that you can't get much better than linear, but in nearly all cases you at least get linear scaling.
It depends, if they share some facilities with other functions that pay parts of the bills then those parts wont scale up. Like lets say you rent out part of your capacity to a nearby lab that pay research lab money for it, that could cover most of their expenses for a small facility. I wouldn't be surprised if that is how they are running things right now.
Linear scaling of any project large enough to disrupt an industry (as is being suggested here) is a pipe dream.
When you are trying to scale up something that big, you eventually get beyond economies of scale for the required infrastructure and feedstock, and as a result, increase overall demand, which raises prices.
You only get near-linear scaling for a very short, initial "ramp-up" period.
Beyond that, you start cornering markets, which makes prices spike, not decrease or even hold steady.
Environmentalists often have a bias for small scale operation. They just really like the idea of everyone having their own bioreactor in their closet powered by their own rooftop solar panels. I think it may be simply an aesthetic preference that they then try to rationalize, facts be damned.
The article says you need 40 000 of these to replace our meat consumption:
> Each of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator.
You know what the total value of the entire worlds meat industry is today? Less than a trillion. So if we could run those labs for free, it would only take a bit over 80 000 years to for them to pay off. But of course they can't run for that long and they need manpower etc. Now if we mass produce those labs it might become cheaper, but will it really get ten thousand times cheaper?
Now, you could say that costs go down with scale. But we also know that projected costs of large projects rarely stay that low, likely those facilities would cost way more than that at first. And price would have to go down really quickly, as just building the first 10 would cost the equivalent of 20 year of meat production.
Correcting my comment here, the article apparently have a huge error: The 1.8 trillion would be for 4000 facilities, not per facility.. The article says this:
> If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
> Each of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator.
However, the link it is refering says this:
> According to CE Delft's techno-economic analysis, each factory could cost around $450m. A quick calculation suggests 4000 factories at this price would cost an eye-watering $1.8trn.
So the 1.8 trillion would be for 4000 facilities, not per facility. At that cost the investment to replace the worlds meat production would be worth 20 years of traditional meat farming, and then running cost above that. Significant but not unsurmountable as the article wanted to claim.
Your proposal only works if the production equipment will have a greater than 20-year life. All available evidence says it wont, so the ROI is not 20 years, but practically infinite — and hence insurmountable.
Scientist: We need a machine that can fly so we can travel faster.
Universe: You have feet. It took me a few billion years to craft the perfect long distance running machine, and tuned it for your purposes and called it human.
In other words, what the are you even talking about? Naturalism is stupid. If we were to rely solely on what "God", err rather "universe" has "created" for us we would have been stuck in a stagnant evolutionary pool with little of the modern conveniences most of us enjoy today.
Forget spacefaring civilizations, forget even planetary civilizations, actually forget even nation-states we would be happily meandering about the Sahara with little care save for your typical eat-sleep-fuck routine.
Scaling up and replicating the digestive tract and metabolic processes of a cow is so much more complex than a plane, that's a terrible comparison. Continuing with your naive reasoning, let's make synthetic corn instead of farming too, because why not needlessly maximize complexity of the systems that we have to maintain?
> Continuing with your naive reasoning, let's make synthetic corn instead of farming too because why not needlessly maximize complexity of the systems that we have to maintain?
Sarcasm aside, it is worth exploring. The typical photosynthetic efficiency of crops is only in the 1-2% range.
Modern solar panels reach 20%. The electricity can be used to produce hydrogen at 80% efficiency. The hydrogen could be used as energy input for an engineered yeast to produce proteins that we need.
I don't know about the efficiency of that last step, but it is at least plausible that the overall process could be more efficient than photosynthesis. Solar Foods[1] is betting that it will be.
That is actually very cool and a much more promising path than animal cell culture, but tbh even with 10+ years of sustained investment I have serious doubts about whether it would compete with lower yielding sustainable ag efficiency at scale. Glad someone is doing the research though.
Seems like there is a two step conversion, step 1 is 40-50% efficient in mass conversion H + co2 to acetate by Clostridium ljungdahlii, then a 25% efficiency conversion by yeast to biomass. So that's already down to 2% overall for .07g/L/h at lab scale. Then additional losses in down stream processing to remove the water. The output is more of a yeast protien meat replacement.
It's extremely, extremely unlikely that we're going to beat plants on efficiency of biomass production, on either a per unit solar energy or per unit resources basis (there are two general photosynthesis pathways that optimize for each of these two endpoints). That doesn't mean we can't beat them at other things, of course (as solar panels demonstrate) but this is what they are optimized for, and the competitive advantage of finding a better way to synthesize biomass is huge to the point that it only needs to evolve once to take over a large fraction of the Earth.
> It's extremely, extremely unlikely that we're going to beat plants on efficiency of biomass production
I'm not so sure this is true. If it turned out that a more efficient pathway is possible with solar energy collection via sheets of extremely pure crystalline silicon (i.e. solar panels), then I would not think that it's strange that evolution didn't come up with it first. Some solutions simply aren't accessible to evolution.
> "According to the current technical parameters, the annual production of starch in a one-cubic-meter bioreactor theoretically equates with the starch annual yield from growing 1/3 hectare of maize without considering the energy input," said Cai Tao, lead author of the study.
It sounds like they're trying to save on land and freshwater, not energy or raw materials.
> In other words, what the are you even talking about?
I'm not talking about naturalism. I'm talking about economics.
We're trying to grow muscle tissue without the rest of the organism present, and now we're finding out that you need basically the entirety of the rest of an organism in order to support growing vast quantities of muscle tissue.
Read the article. The exact problems that need to be solved -- supply nutrients and fluids, protect the tissue from infection, allow the tissue to be grown as large as the food supply that is available for it, etc. -- are exactly the same problems that an animal already has to solve in order to survive long enough to reproduce.
We're not talking about taking what a bird does and scaling up the concept to something large enough to carry a human. We're talking about taking what an organism does and replacing everything except the muscle tissue with an artificial replacement. You need a circulatory system, immune system, digestive system, respiratory system, temperature regulation system, waste removal, etc. It's not a bigger version of what nature has to do. It's identical to what nature already has to do. They're the same problems on the same scale. It doesn't really matter if we're talking about scaling to massive 100 ton batches. A blue whale is 200 tons.
That's why it's so hard to create something artificial to compete economically with animal husbandry. Evolution has already had to solve the identical problems, and it's already done so with the requirement of selecting for efficiency of resources. All we did with animal husbandry was also select for optimal growth and domesticity. And the scales that nature already operates at are already within the range of what is logistically workable for human industry.
It's not that nature does it better. It's that nature's been solving this problem since abiogenesis and it wasn't particular about the flavor of the muscle tissue it got. It shouldn't surprise us that it's solution is cheaper cheaper or more efficient. It has over 3 billion years of a head start.
There's no way we can't genetically engineer a solution to this problem. Maybe not today, but certainly in the near future. I'm surprised he seems so pessimistic.
We did genetically engineer a solution to this problem, the program was called "selective breeding" and it was first practiced by the group called "early pastoralists" who published their findings in the journal "ancient history"
How are you proposing to create individually tailored meat products when they are concerned that the process doesn’t scale in the mass-produced first place? Personal bio-reactors?
The same issues happen with most biotech production. As you try to scale you need different bioreactor geometry bc the amount of heat, co2/o2 distribution, and waste build up in proportion to side wall area of the vessel changes drastically. Also genetic drift increases as you increase the population of microbes, making it difficult to keep your target organisms on the right metabolic path. Amyris biofuel is a good case study for why biotech fails during the scale up..
https://www.fastcompany.com/3000040/rise-and-fall-company-wa...
Manufactures and researchers/professors have been trying to push bioreactors onto civil engineers for wastewater treatment for years, because they're infinitely configurable and admittedly are neat, but they can't come remotely close to scaling up like a traditional WW treatment plant or even an activated sludge plant.
It's always seemed to be an inherent limitation of bioreactors.
Which tells me that the solution these people need to be looking for will resemble something between a wastewater treatment plant and an oil refinery, but in any case, steady state manufacturing, not bioreactors and batches.
The obvious alternative to meat long term is plant protein. That cuts out an entire stage in the food chain, which is obviously going to be more efficient (about a factor of 10 more is the usual rule of thumb). The key is to make sure the plant protein is complete, which is why pea protein and legumes are preferred over things like soy.
> The key is to make sure the plant protein is complete, which is why pea protein and legumes are preferred over things like soy.
1. I thought we were done pushing the complete protein thing? All the essential amino acids are essential (duh), but don't need to be consumed together like once thought.
2. With that said, soy is a complete protein.
3. Soy is also a legume.
> I thought we were done pushing the complete protein thing?
By "complete protein" I just meant that you need to have all the essential amino acids in your diet, not that they all need to be contained in the same dish. However, AFAIK all animal proteins do contain all the essential amino acids in a single dish, which makes it a lot easier to make sure you are getting them all. So any plant protein that is going to be a good meat substitute should have that same property.
> soy is a complete protein. 3. Soy is also a legume.
The day that this complete protein tastes, looks, and behaves exactly like meat..might be the day it's accepted as a substitute, otherwise it's a lost cause. and before that one has to factor in the effort to make that change to the plant protein.
> The day that this complete protein tastes, looks, and behaves exactly like meat..might be the day it's accepted as a substitute
While I'm sure there are people who won't accept anything less than that, I suspect there are many more who, like me, would be quite happy with "fairly close" to meat instead of "exactly like". There are plant protein products on the market now that already meet that goal. Even if such products don't displace 100% of meat consumption, they might still make a huge dent in it.
You're not wrong. I'm still very much a fan of meat, but have swapped out most of my consumption for plant-based versions. Mostly from the Linda McCartney brand. It feels much better post-meal digesting the lighter alternative and the flavour and texture is very comparable imo. The sauce and sides carry most of the flavour in our case anyway. Which is I guess why the "tastes like chicken" line became so widespread.
Haven't found a steak replacement yet, but we eat vanishingly few of those so it's not much of an issue. Will jump on a healthy, eco alternative that's full of iron though.
As it stands, I'm really not interested in labmeat. I'll just save my meat consumption for "special occasions", while using plant-based as the daily driver.
They say they could feed the world on plant-based food, if only they'd give it a fraction of the subsidies meat gets. I think it's an avenue worth taking seriously.
I don't know of any way to answer this question. The only question I know of a way to answer is, how much will animal food cost if it has to compete on a level playing field with other protein sources? We can answer that question by simply having a free market in food. If enough people's preference is to not eat food that involves animal suffering to produce, then the free market will result in that kind of food not being produced any more.
(Btw, it's not necessarily true that animals raised for food will suffer. It's perfectly possible to raise them humanely and kill them when the time comes in a way that causes no suffering. In a free market that might not even cost more than factory farming of animals does today, since animals raised humanely are generally healthier and require much less artificial intervention such as antibiotics, which are routinely fed to factory farmed animals because of the artificial environment they live in.)
For market forces to work, we need to attribute some monetary value to the quality of life of animals.
Eggs from chicken that have more space and can go outside suffer less but are more expensive to produce.
Ignorance or questionable ethics should not be rewarded by monetary gain. That is why relying on consumers to "vote with their wallet" is a fundamentally broken design.
External costs should always be included in the price of a product.
> For market forces to work, we need to attribute some monetary value to the quality of life of animals.
In a free market, there is no "we". Each individual decides what to buy at what price based on whatever criteria they like, and each seller decides what to sell at what price based on whatever criteria they like. They everyone continually adjusts their choices based on what results they observe. There is no central authority that decides what anything is "worth".
> Eggs from chicken that have more space and can go outside suffer less but are more expensive to produce.
Generally, yes, which means you, as a buyer, have to be willing to pay more in order to provide a positive incentive to producers that do this. Which is exactly what my wife and I do when buying eggs (and many other things); we choose to pay more to reward producers that do things in a humane way and thus incur higher costs.
> Ignorance or questionable ethics should not be rewarded by monetary gain.
You are perfectly free to not buy from producers that don't do things the way you think they should be done.
> That is why relying on consumers to "vote with their wallet" is a fundamentally broken design.
If other consumers disagree with you, then the way for you to "fix" that "problem" is to convince them to change their buying decisions. Trying to get a central authority to dictate who can buy and sell what does not work; no central authority can aggregate all of the necessary information. It's mathematically impossible.
> External costs should always be included in the price of a product.
In general, the only viable way to do this is to not have externalities: to allow property rights to be traded so that all externalities get internalized, i.e., they are explicit costs or explicit benefits to one of the parties to the transaction. That ensures that they get properly taken into account.
That's the Impossible Burger. The process for making that is reasonably simple and scales well. Part of the trick is that they add heme, made via fermentation of genetically engineered yeast, to produce the "bloody" taste people want in meat. So the only part that requires a bioreactor is no more complicated than a small brewery. The other part of the trick is some clever extrusion technology to get a meat texture.
It's not bad as a burger. Go to a Burger King and get a beef Whopper and and an Impossible Whopper and compare. Even with no condiments they're pretty close.
Now if they can get the excessive salt content down...
> Now if they can get the excessive salt content down...
As I understand it, that's not a necessary part of the process, it's just what fast food places like Burger King do to all their meat. I don't see why something like ground Impossible Burger meat substitute that was sold in a grocery store would need to have the same salt content that the BK version does.
Eh, I hope the person you're responding to clarifies whether they meant the BK burger(s) or store options, but I wanted to chime in.
I was in the store just a day or so ago looking at alternative meats and I _also_ found the sodium content to be a bit high in some (though offhand, I can't remember if it's Impossible specifically). A frustrating aspect of some of these alternatives is that they overload on this stuff to get around taste differences - many of the coconut yogurts have more sugar than their dairy counterparts, for instance.
I generally prefer these options but it's frustrating that they have these caveats. Would be nice if we could learn from the mistakes made in the existing products.
For yogurt at least, the casein yeast will hopefully give rise to yogurt that is much closer to cowmilk yogurt. We’ll probably see a formulation that uses yeast-derived casein in the next 5 years.
> about a factor of 10 more is the usual rule of thumb
That's often a dishonest figure which ignores how land is actually used, such as:
- Much of the land used for animals (for grazing etc) is not suitable for growing human edible plants.
- We feed animals with plants that would otherwise go to waste. When growing corn, we only use the seeds. The whole rest of the plant (i.e. most of it) is feed to animals.
> Much of the land used for animals (for grazing etc) is not suitable for growing human edible plants.
I wasn't talking about land use. I was talking about energy. Plants capture solar energy directly. Animals capture it indirectly, by eating plants. That extra stage in the food chain decreases the available energy to humans eating animals instead of plants by a factor of about 10.
Also, if plant protein largely replaced animal protein in human diets, the land now used for animal grazing could be used for wild animals that weren't raised for food at all but just allowed to exist in their natural habitat. So the fact that that land is not suitable for growing human edible plants does not mean the use of that land is irrelevant to the choice between animal and plant protein in human diets.
> We feed animals with plants that would otherwise go to waste.
No, they would otherwise go into the food chain somewhere else, most likely by being eaten by microorganisms and fungi. That's not "waste". It's a natural part of the cycle. Whether or not animals eating the plant material is a stage in the cycle does not change the fact that the cycle is there.
I personally think that "vegan meat replacements" will only get better. We may never beat a rare veal steak but we'll get close. I like hamburgers and hot dogs more than most big hunks of meat anyway :) . I've replaced at least half of my meat intake with vegan version. I'll probably never be a full on vegan though.
I don't have any expertise here, but I don't really see anything in the article to support the idea that the problems are fundamental. That's certainly the conclusion their experts come to, but it all seems to be based on looking at the proposed technique and poking holes in the assumptions. There are all these problems, and while they have solutions, the solutions are expensive. Ok, but maybe there's another technique that's better. We can't think of one right now, and maybe we never will, but it's not in the same class of impossible as faster-than-light travel. It's more like fusion power: the engineering is too hard.
The article is pretty persuasive on the lesser claim though - all this enthusiasm is unwarranted, and we shouldn't invest heavily.
What comes most to mind is the impossibility of flight and the mortal peril of traveling at speeds above 60 mph.
I.e., "never" is a lot longer than hyperbole allows for; and, it's easy to poke holes in a selected straw-person, a lot harder to anticipate the manners in which someone might change some of your axioms out from under you.
One off the cuff example: actual-whey-protein non-animal ice cream is now available down the street from me. Is it "vat milk"? Well, no; it's a novel solution that marries the actual protein in cow milk, with fats from vegetable sources.
They didn't violate thermodynamics to produce an interesting middle ground between cow-milk and plant milks (oat, almond, soy, coconut, whatever).
Similarly, it's a lot easier to tsk tsk about some arbitrary idea of what cultured meat is,
than to anticipate the ways in which it might be grown which have nothing to do with your tidy model.
As an aside, I'm interested to look in who is funding David there.
The American industrial farm meat industry has a LOT to lose if we get vat-bacon. Certainly enough to fund some opposition research water-muddying, eh?
> actual-whey-protein non-animal ice cream is now available down the street from me. Is it "vat milk"? Well, no; it's a novel solution that marries the actual protein in cow milk, with fats from vegetable sources.
In what sense is cow milk derived whey protein non-animal?
I work in industrial biotech, read the entire article and found it mostly compelling, aside from lacking discussion of the reasons meat production might increase in cost over the time frame of the analysis.
The fundamental challenge is not a lack of understanding - it seems to be mostly centered around keeping bacteria out of giant 100,000 Liter vats, and out of all of the smaller upstream processes.
Think of biotech as happening in successively larger tanks. Start in a vial, go up to a flask, go up to a tank fermenter, go up to a bigger and bigger vat. If competing bacteria get into your process at any of these steps or the transfers between them and start winning, you kill the batch and start over. And you probably take down your equipment for a deep clean as well. This takes you offline for some time. This is already a problem for fermentation of other bacterial cultures, but it’s an even bigger problem for animal cells because they grow so much slower. So there’s some lack of fundamental understanding on animal cell growth mechanisms.
Given how much attention has been focused during the pandemic on understanding how to limit the spread of germs, it seems to me that there may be some synergistic advancements in keeping large scale processes contamination-free. A lot of it is human factors.. operators using proper PPE etc. Now we have a global population that understands all of that better.. maybe that moves the baseline.
It seems like it should be possible, eventually, to use a bioengineered organism to grow the tissue (and just cut down on unneeded things like extra brain matter, or eyes, etc), and let immune systems deal with bacteria and infections.
I mean, that's what evolution has already come up with as a solution to this problem. What we would need though is an organism that's far more symbiotic, where we provide security, and food, and protection from the elements, and it provides lots of tissue and hopefully at a good rate if return for input calories (and why not flavor while we're at it).
It's not that far a stretch from some of our domesticated animals, at least with the symbiotic relationships involved. We would just need to ramp that up to 11 and optimize out the parts that we can do more efficiently at scale or that we don't want (like cognitive function and much more than a pain response to keep it from hurting itself).
Huh. Fascinating line of thought. What if we genetically engineered a cow that basically had no brain besides what was necessary to be alive? Would it be more ethical to kill it? Would it even be an animal?
It'd be nice to have something like lab-grown unfertilized chicken (or other bird) eggs. Not the same as meat, but it's kind of close to the goal: a biological protein source that's completely unconscious and doesn't require any death to create. It'd be very difficult, but nature already did a lot of the work there.
I imagine it might be much tougher to design a full animal without a brain. You'd always be on the line between it not being able to stay alive due to loss of functionality, or, in the other direction, possibly having some degree of thinking/consciousness. This on top of the fact that we'd need a far better understanding of brains and genetics to ever hope to engineer such a thing.
If it did exist, I think it'd not only be more ethical to kill it but that it'd be (hypothetically) completely ethical. I don't think it would be an animal. It gets a little weird, though, because one would have to also accept that you could hypothetically use a similar process to create brainless humans and that it'd be fine to kill and eat them if you wanted to. Or do whatever else you wanted to them. That human also wouldn't be an animal.
It may not be that we'd have to design the full animal, and it may not be it has to not have any brain.
Modifying an existing organism might be much easier, and removing higher functions might be enough, depending on what we know now or later about the brain.
Is what makes eating an animal and a plant different for most people what constitutes their mass, or how we perceive them to think and feel? Making them not think and feel (and at the organism level, not the removal of that potential in an individual after birth) may be a path forward.
As a hypothetical, to bring it back to humans, and divorce it from reproduction which might have emotional baggage in many peoples reasoning, imagine a person with a tuberous growth that was removed, but we can cause it to continue to grow outside the body. If it's confirmed safe to consume, are there ethical problems with that person eating their own cells? What about other people?
>As a hypothetical, to bring it back to humans, and divorce it from reproduction which might have emotional baggage in many peoples reasoning, imagine a person with a tuberous growth that was removed, but we can cause it to continue to grow outside the body. If it's confirmed safe to consume, are there ethical problems with that person eating their own cells? What about other people?
I don't see why there would be. I think there'd just be psychological (perhaps biologically/socially-ingrained) "disgust" problems. It's not unethical to eat your own skin tags or to eat other people's skin tags, but most people won't find the idea appetizing (unless they're on the brink of starvation, perhaps).
>Modifying an existing organism might be much easier, and removing higher functions might be enough, depending on what we know now or later about the brain.
It still sees like it'd be very hard to know for sure, though. Obviously I'm no expert, and perhaps no one, including experts, can say such a thing with confidence, but I suspect that consciousness is integrated way too deeply in animal brains to the point that you can just remove some of the more modern/advanced parts and get rid of all of it.
For example, if you lobotomize a human (i.e. sever many/most connections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain), you remove most of the higher functioning capability, but they're probably still conscious.
I think you'd either have to change so much of the brain in so many ways such that it'd be very easy to mess something up and prevent it from staying alive for long, or you'd have to risk that you're just making dumber/less sensitive and reactive yet still possibly conscious beings.
I'm way more optimistic about the dead tissue growth idea (unfertilized eggs, tumors, etc.), or perhaps some other route entirely that hasn't been discovered yet. Maybe in a few centuries they'll devise a way to make humans fully autotrophic, with some layer of cells injected into the skin + some mechanism to use photons and air molecules as fuel to generate needed compounds, so you'd just need an hour of sunlight exposure per day to get all the energy and nutrients you need.
In The Restaurant at the end of the Universe, Douglas Adams envisaged a genetically engineered cow that was intelligent enough to tell the restaurant-goers that it wanted to be eaten.
“You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?” whispered Trillian to Ford.
“Me?” said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, “I don't mean anything.”
“That's absolutely horrible,” exclaimed Arthur, “the most revolting thing I've ever heard.”
“What's the problem Earthman?” said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump.
“I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing here inviting me to,” said Arthur, “it's heartless.”
“Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten,” said Zaphod.
“That's not the point,” Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. “Alright,” he said, ``maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just ... er ...”
I think I read once that blind chickens get less stressed in a factory farm environment, so would it be more ethical to develop a strain of blind chickens?
Ethics are only part of the equation. In terms of energy use and carbon emissions, such a system would not be a big improvement. Though I personally would find it valuable just for the ethical reasons.
It might be a large step up. Not devoting calories to systems that aren't needed because of symbiosis could yield a large gain, and depending on the calorie input feedstock and waste output, carbon emissions might look very different. What does the carbon output of a whale or large fish look like in comparison to cattle?
Ultimately, with an approach like this it might be best bit to think of it as "modified cow/chicken/pig" but instead survey different animals to find some that already have fast and/or efficient growth phases that might already have some benefits.
I understand this is a hard sell for a lot of people, even if you just look at swapping out staple meats which this might require. Ultimately, we're probably served better by a bunch of different options than one giant monoculture of meat production, so there may be a place for everything.
I suppose that true breakthrough would be a development of a plant or fungus "base" that would be able to create animal cells.
So something like bamboo rhizome constantly growing an meat trunk, using either photosynthesis & minerals (plant-based) or plant mush (fungus-based) as source materials.
its typical though to spike cell culture media with antibiotics to avoid bacterial contamination. i did a ctrl-f within the OP article as well as the 50 page pdf but i haven't seen 'antibiotic' mentioned at least. I suppose its always possible you get some bateria thats resistant to your antibiotic, but people have been using penstrep in their media for decades now and that hasn't been a huge concern thus far at least in lab environments following sterile technique.
Agreed, this was one of my first thoughts as well and it’s not discussed at all. Why not just dose with antibiotics? Too expensive? Regulatory issues (seems unlikely as all our livestock are already hopped up)? Consumer groups will balk?
I don't think resistant bacteria is going to be an issue if you switch to other antibiotics. People have been using these antibiotics in media for decades and decades in cell culture already and this hasn't been a huge issue in this setting at least.
Does it have to be a batch process? Can you have a continuous flow system where pathogens rate of travel is lower than the flow of nutrients and cells?
Does the system have to rely on vats of cells? Can you make a believable meat substitute with GMO plants producing the raw materials which are constructed with bioprinters?
Can we genetically engineer, say, a cow with a functioning immune system but with no brain or other un-consumed organs such that it is amenable to mass culturing? (Edit: Sorry, just saw sibling post says exactly this)
I feel like the article is well informed and mostly correct. It's also the type of thinking that, while correct 99% of the time, prevents innovation by focusing on what can't be done. I think every engineer knows cynicism is correct 99% of the time. It's that rare chance when it's not, when you push against what seems like a law of reality and break through, that we achieve what we didn't think was possible.
I have no doubt, given this article, that the current approach to lab grown meat will fail. I am not so sure about artificial meat in general, however.
If rapid sterilization is a requirement of the process, than it makes sense to embedded it into the design. The 100 ton reactor could have electric heating elements surrounding it on every side, or magnetic loops that induce heating to the stainless steel vat. Do a dry pre-heat at 500K to vaporize any leftovers then fill it with clean water and bring it to a boiling point, establishing slight positive pressure against any pores or leaks. And voila, you have a sterile 100 ton reactor with zero bacteria.
Similar sterilization systems would be installed on all ingress ports, using heat, ultraviolet or gamma ray, depending on the nature and heat sensitivity of the input, with slight overlap between the different systems.
Since you are culturing organic life from dead raw materials, and life is so sensitive to heat, gamma rays etc., it seems relatively simple to make sure nothing alive enters other than what has been grown in upstream reactors. Recursively apply these principles down to the last cell inserted into the process inside a (small) clean room.
What you’re describing (at least the heat aspect) is referred to as “Sterilization in Place” and it is standard practice to design into bioreactors already. Contamination still happens. In general you’re right though, the concept of continuous automated sterilization will need to be reimagined, but like many of the topics addressed in this article, a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked.
The description linked talks about a distinct sterilization phase, where hot steam is passed trough the installation prior to use. It seems exactly like the type of situation described in the article, where small welding gaps allow bacteria to stay alive - I would imagine, especially if the surrounding metal has enough thermal mass. My suggestion was a bit more nuanced, heat the very body of the reactor + reaction medium; but I could be venting hot air.
Nonetheless, it's not a fundamental, thermodynamic limit, it's not like bacteria spontaneously materialize inside vats above a certain volume. It's a technical problem to solve, it seems solvable and once you solve it, all 100 ton reactors can use that design.
I'll try to answer as best I can. I have done cell culture in a research lab, specifically mammalian cells (human and mice), which is what's needed for meat. Typically, the cells get fed with nutrients, but also something called FBCS, fetal bovine calf serum. This is the blood of unborn cows, and it is required because of a mix of growth factors and hormones the cells also need (the article mentions this too). Now imagine doing this for growing meat, it does not make sense to me, since you'd need the calf serum to begin with. Maybe today the required factors have been defined, but would have to be made with biotechnology, prohibitively expensive (think insulin and cancer drugs). So just from this perspective, it sounds like a no-go. Mammalian cells have to be babied, unlike yeast (beer, bread) or bacteria (yoghurt). Yeast genome = 12 Megabases, Human genome = 3 Gigabases, vastly more complex and difficult to grow.
Pat Brown, the founder of Impossible foods, who was trained as an MD and clearly has the background to judge this is also pointing out the fundamental issue [0]. Anyone who says that he has a vested interest I can just tell that I have worked with Pat, and the first thing I was told about him was that "he's the real deal.". He really is.
When we remove subsidies and start pricing in the negative externalities (water, soil, carbon) of raising animals for meat, the calculus will certainly be different. It may well be different enough to make lab-grown meat the more cost-effective option.
The field is also remarkably young, and scientific innovation has a pretty robust history of being non-obvious until after it has happened.
But that's the thing, who will price those negative externalities?
Anyone in a poor country (with access to fertile land and water of course), with little to no education, will always be able to raise animals without a lab.
Basically for it to have a real impact over plant based meat, it will have to be cheaper then cattle meat - else it will just become luxury food for those who can afford it.
Most definitely, but again I think that would just render meat more expensive. You need to get rid of subsidies and help the shift to something else, that something else needs to be more attractive.
This should have been going on for the past decade or so.
>As a big fan of the idea of manufacturing meat in an environmentally sustainable way (and without having to resort to raising and killing animals), reading this article felt as if someone was throwning a bucket's worth of ice-cold water on my face.
Indeed. But the problem isn't that lab-grown meat is too expensive. It's that the industrialized murder of hundreds of millions of sentient beings EVERY SINGLE DAY (and that's only counting the land-based animals!) for the pleasure of our taste buds has been made cheap.
Eating meat should be at least 1000x more expensive than it currently is. Or more correctly, it should be exactly as illegal as killing a human being and eating them currently is. But more expensive would be a fine starting point -- it would work better with the principles of human freedom, and it would make it possible to make the living conditions of our food better. Plus it would make lab-grown meat more viable.
As it currently is, we are forcing these sentient beings into horrible conditions, and committing genocide every day. If we count sea-based creatures, we are killing a number equal to the total human population every 2-3 days.
While all the problems presented in the article are true, none are fundamental.
What is true is that there is no chance of sustainable production of lab-grown meat in 10 years and it is doubtful whether 20 years might be enough.
All the problems described just show that the current approach of trying to grow isolated muscle cells in an artificial device does not have chances to be efficient.
While most parts of an animal are not needed to grow meat, there remains a need for some simplified circulatory system, excretory system, respiratory system (this is the easy part) and digestive system (e.g. to transform the proteins from food into the amino-acids needed by the cells).
Currently the functions of these missing systems are implemented by extremely expensive and inefficient artificial devices.
As the article says, it is very unlikely that these bioreactors could ever be improved to have performances similar to a living animal.
So what is needed is not an artificial bioreactor with muscle cells, but a genetically-modified simplified animal, something worm-like made mostly of beef-like muscle but containing the required systems for feeding and growing.
Even better would be a plant growing some muscle tissue instead of fruits, but designing something like that would become possible only even further in the future.
Currently we do not know enough to modify an animal to grow only the organs that we want and in the shape that we want.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that sometime in this century and probably in its first half, we will reach the point when we will have this ability (unless humanity destroys itself before that, which unfortunately is something that cannot be completely dismissed).
The article is nothing but a hit piece, very likely funded by meat industry. I don’t see any theoretical reasons argued here. You cannot write off future potential based on current state of technology. It’s like you will look at mainframe and say that there will never be a computer in every home. The thing that matters is rate of change over time.
Write’s Law dictates that as the total production capacity increases, cost exponentially declines. This law is the driver of Moor’s law and it is exactly why we can enjoy so many modern conveniences ranging from TVs to refrigerators that was initially affordable to only ultra rich. The cause of this law is believed to be the fact that far many more brains looks at various parts of production pipelines and optimizes it relentlessly. Cultured meat factories may look expensive today but over next couple of decades, they can become norm compared to traditional industry.
Reminds me of all those articles from ~20 years ago saying that solar power will never be cost-effective [0].
There'll be a series of incremental improvements, a couple of sudden "aha" shifts in thinking, and suddenly it's not only cost-effective, but massively better.
[0] searching for one now, I can't find an example, which is interesting. Did I mis-remember, or have they all been pulled down?
Solar power isn't cost effective, which is why there's now an energy crisis in Europe ... it became a lot cheaper, but it didn't reach the point of making economic sense for it to replace other forms of power at scale, largely due to fundamentals outside of the semiconductor industry: lack of reliable sunshine, lack of sufficiently cheap batteries, etc.
I used to live in Western Australia. Vast areas of land with extremely reliable sunshine, and very little other uses [0].
The storage problem is being solved, battery tech is hot and getting hotter (kinda pun intended).
The transmission problem is still being worked on - there are unconventional options for cheap, plentiful solar power, like extracting hydrogen from seawater and then shipping the hydrogen to power plants near where the power is needed.
The costs used to be prohibitive because the panels were so expensive. But the tech for solar panels has progressed hugely (and quickly) and this is no longer a factor.
Solar power plants will never be a drop-in replacement for fossil fuel plants, for the reasons you describe. But that doesn't mean we can't replace fossil fuel plants with an energy system that uses solar power for generation.
The same will happen with vat-grown meat. One by one the difficulties will be overcome and the commercial problems will be solved. What we end up with will probably not look anything like our current meat industry. But it will replace our current meat industry.
[0] apologies to the indigenous people who have "used" this land for tens of thousands of years and would probably disagree with this statement.
Western Australia is the absolute best case possible for solar panel cost effectiveness though. You can't generalize from that to it being cost effective everywhere. Lots of people live in places like Europe where there often isn't strong sunshine, and there isn't a lot of available land. And as for being solved, well, that's my point. Batteries have been around for over a century. They haven't gone through some sort of exponential progress explosion that renders them "too cheap to meter". They improve but only incrementally and it's simply not enough.
Serious critics of solar (and wind) power where never about price[1], they were about about availability and, as expected, with the growing share of wind and solar in the electricity mix the grid is getting more and more disturbed when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine for a few days.
[1] in fact, price is a terrible metric when talking about electricity because you can't (realistically) store it, even today. Price only make sense when you have a bunch of fossil fuel power plant sitting idle, waiting for the break-even price to happen before adding their power to the grid.
If it's a hit piece it is easily the longest and best researched hit piece I've ever read. It's mostly a summary of Humbird's report and the people it's "hitting" end up agreeing with basically everything in it by the end of the article, only arguing that where there's a will, there's a way.
The idea that any imaginable technology will become efficient enough to be competitive on useful timescales is wrong. In my lifetime battery storage for the grid and nuclear power are all examples of technologies that were once predicted to become highly efficient and widespread. Flying cars and moon bases are examples of tech people in the 60s and 70s frequently assumed were just around the corner but which never even got off the ground. Decades on nuclear is being killed by massively increased costs, and batteries have become more efficient but the gains have been incremental rather than exponential. They are still nowhere near being cheap or abundant enough to switch the grid to windmills.
Engineering challenges are real. Improvements are usually not exponential. Computers are an exception, not a rule, and even there the exponential growth story is complex and not ideal: the era of big chip performance improvements stopped decades ago and since then it's all been incremental improvements for anything that doesn't trivially parallelize, which is most stuff.
Finally, you're comparing lab grown meat to TVs and refrigerators. That's not a valid comparison. Those machines had no competition, they enabled huge, immediate quality of life wins that couldn't be obtained in any other way. Lab grown meat is - in the absolute best case - identical to normal meat. It doesn't improve quality of life in any way. It's basically an indulgence, a psychological prop that rich people can pay for to feel virtuous. For everyone who already feels virtuous enough and isn't interested in charitable giving, lab grown meat has no purpose, and especially, it's easy to rationalize away any small amount of guilt felt (e.g. better for the cow to have had a nice life in a field than never having lived at all, nature is full of predators that are nastier than us, scientists are lying about climate change, etc). So there just isn't the growth market that benefited things like TVs.
I know this was mostly an aside, but the comment on grid battery storage isn't quite right. This hasn't been widely publicized beyond people working in the industry, but the efficiency of battery storage actually has improved exponentially in the last 20 years. The cost of leading edge NMC battery packs has fallen from $1000+/kWh in the mid-2000s to around ~$100-150/kWh today. Most industry insiders believe grid-level battery storage can be cost effective somewhere in the $50-100/kWh range. So, pretty close.
off the cuff claims made by executives, like "there will never be a need for more than, like, 5 computers in the whole world" are different from calculated engineering limits though. While faster-than-light travel may be possible someday, it's beyond our current technology (though there are some interesting theories at the edge of physics). Fundamental engineering limits tend to be harder to work around. eg despite all our scientific advances, cars engines are still lmited by the Carnot cycle. Moving to electric cars doesn't get rid of that limitation, just makes us subject to other limitations (currently, battery technology).
> To be fair, the traditional meat industry already benefits from enormous direct and indirect government subsidies
and then ignores the impact that that has. In the EU, CAP subsidies are absolutely enormous [0], and are only slightly smaller in the US [1]. - Between the two, that's $115 billion dollars per year on farming subsidies, which is roughly 40% of farm income in both the EU and the US.If it's acceptable to prop up the farm industry, why isn't it acceptable to prop up the manufactured meat industry?
I wonder if we would have heard similar analysis decades ago in regards to solar panels or other technologies that have surprised us as they’ve scaled up.
Some people confuse energy efficient with market viable
Many products are way more expensive than the energy required to mine them. Gold, Bitcoin, Kobe Beef, etc. etc. etc.
Science is not economics.
You need to create a market for cruelty free meat.
200 years ago, slave labor would have been the most "cheapest option" and any system to replace it would have been economically unviable.
The point of veganism, vegetarianism, or animal rights in general at any level is a moral issue, not a utilitarian one.
If it costs more to be a more moral society we will do so.
> For cultivated meat, though, FBS is anathema. Cultured animal protein can’t really be “meat without slaughter” if it’s dependent on an ingredient that’s intertwined with the current, grim realities of commodity beef production.
Meat with LESS slaughter would still be better than the current situation. Numbers matter.
I too plead guilty of not having at all a deep expertise in this area.
But this makes me think of the myth of AI achieving "General Intelligence", ie an intelligence adapting to life and all its messy complexity, like humans do.
Everybody thought it would be a piece of cake in the 1970s, and then the science just didn't followed.
Now with neural networks, and GPUs, this myth is back on the table, but all researchers in the field continue to claim "AI is nowhere near General Intelligence"
A little off topic but people like Kurzweil and Moravec have always made fairly sensible predictions that we'd get AGI around 2030 plus or minus a bit. The fact that some fools said it would be a piece of cake in the 70s or whenever doesn't really prove it's a myth.
My phd is in the physics of complex systems, so its not exactly this area but the arguments in the engrxiv paper linked in TFA seem robust to me. In my mind there is an abstract question and a concrete question which illustrates the hardness of the problem.
The concrete question is, were there historical examples which showed the feasibility of this kind of endeavor? I dont think so. In fact there is a recent counterexample. Biofuels. They were big in the last hype cycle. George Church, the Tom Knight of Harvard, got involved in Joule, which is now dead. Biofuels was a much simpler pipedream than todays lab grown factory and yet… we are back to designing batteries, which are far simpler than algae.
So after this bubble bursts, I predict that we will be putting our money in making jellyfish tasty. it will be a step up from making yeast or algae tasty for sure.
Another prediction would be uh the second coming of 6502… of amino acid manufacturing.
The abstract question is, is it possible to design a large scale self replicating machine that runs more efficiently than evolution can give us? Again, no historical examples.. but I see the current deep learning “success” as a victory for evolution, not design…
My guess is, if we want to make lab grown meat work we might as well solve the easier problems of immortality and general AI, first.
Chinese cuisine already includes jellyfish. A bit bland, but not bad, and surprisingly good texture. Make them more tasty and you might be onto something. No idea bout nutritional value though.
Haha based on your tip I went for a wikipedia dive.
“ The Japanese company Tango Jersey Dairy produces a vanilla and jellyfish ice cream using Nomura's jellyfish.[12][13] Consuming echizen kurage is potentially dangerous if the toxic part is not thoroughly cleaned and cooked.”
> is it possible to design a large scale self replicating machine that runs more efficiently than evolution can give us?
Transistors miniaturization may fit under that category. We created something that every year doubled down the scale, augmented performance and reduced energy costs; and for that we needed those previous transistors. I don't think natural evolution has done any other process that fast.
"Fly larvae farming" periodically makes the rounds as a "get rich quick" scheme. I saw someone selling setups in the 80s, and some old dude came up and told him how they did it in the 30s.
As a chemical engineer, what I can comment (without having enough time to read the whole report) are the following short facts:
We cannot continue our uncontrolled population growth without increasing the effect our average lifestyle has on the environment.
Whether lab based meat is attainable or not, (currently, and at this scale) we cannot continue to eat a meat-centric diet without impacting the environment much in the same way that we cannot have a chocolate-cake based diet without gaining weight or eventually having malnutrition.
In order to have more average 'freedom' of choices when it comes to our diet and lifestyle, we need to agree to decrease the population so we can lessen or revert the impact we have.
Some may snarkily say that if we don't do it, mother nature may do it for us.
I've no expertise on the technical area, but if the headline says "will never be cost-competitive" in a climate change related story then that pretty much means that it does make sense economically, but that it requires taxes/subsidies to price in externalities.
Because, if it just plain didn't work, the headline would say "This just plain doesn't work".
If it was so inefficient in terms of carbon input/output that it would a net-negative, then the headline would say "This would work but not be helpful to climate goals"
So by a process of elimination, the headline indicates that it does work, and it does make economic sense, but that government intervention in the market will be required to get the best outcome for everyone.
Some people see this and think "okay, lets write some legislation to fix that", while other people see it and think "oh, well I guess the human race will just have to die out in some kind of mad-max apocalypse, because that's better than regulations that ensure the free market actually works as promised".
Not having a deep expertise on the technical difficulties of cultured meat, but let me point out something obvious: farmed meat is usually heavily sponsored by the public through taxes and it's toll on the environment, on healthcare, on the future, etc. is paid for by others.
The true cost of meat is far, far greater than what you pay for it. If this cost is ever charged to the consumer, then the comparison with cultured meat will look very different.
I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I'm somewhat familiar with the principles. In general, I think the article is correct in most of its claims, however, I also think it's a bit too pessimistic and narrow-minded.
I agree that the bioreactor model is probably not going to scale well, the requirents are simply too extreme for it to be affordable. However, there are other methods that could hypothetically be developed. As the article points out, contamination is a huge problem because cell cultures don't have immune systems. But who is to say we can't create an immune system.
I've never been too optimistic about the prospects of cell cultures for meat production. However, perhaps with more advanced cloning and genetic engineering techniques, we won't need to rely on cell cultures.
One greusome, but potentially workable, solution might be to create "deconstructed animals". That is to say, harvest entire organ systems from live animals, or clone artificial ones, and use them to support muscle tissue that is periodically harvested. This way, you have all the necessary biological functions, including an immune system. Certainly, developing such a system at an industrial scale would be incredibly difficult, but probably still easier than getting cultures to work.
Another potential model, which has already been explored somewhat, "meat doping" where you take a substrate derived from plant matter and dope it with animal stem cells. Getting this to produce a meaty texture would be tricky, but in terms of flavor and nutritional profile it should work. This gets around the problem of muscle cells growing too slowly, and reduces the duration for which the a given batch must be kept sterile.
"Is there anyone on HN with deep expertise in this area who can comment on this article's scientific accuracy?"
Yes, I do. But I wont do it since beside me expertise I would have to take at least several weeks of full time to dig through the scientific literature and potential patent situation.
"Most of us have a limited appetite for 50-dollar lab-grown chicken nuggets."
This is where I become skeptical. We are not talking about fusion energy, something that does not violate physical laws but has not been able to work net energy positive in a man made setting. We are talking about something that has been shown it can be down.
NO ONE, in my experience, who is pushing any number of "radical improvements" (EVs, plant-based foods, etc.) has EVER TAKEN a thermo class or econ class to even being to grok reality of it. (I'm an engineer with an MBA who's founded 5 tech companies including roles of CTO and CFO)
Most propaganda spewed by the MSM doesn't even pass the simplest thermo or econ litmus tests of viability.
> Is there anyone on HN with deep expertise in this area who can comment on this article's scientific accuracy?
Yes but that's not me. Instead, if we skip the biology stuff because our technology there is still in its infancy (CRISPR is utterly amazing, but rather limited, compared to things we can build in the varios engineering disciplines.) And also because I didn't study advanced biology in college.
Okay, so if we take 800 million acres used for animal feed and actual grazing land[], and a heavy approximation of a total 4.8 kwh of energy from the sun per square meter for a single day, and plug in a 1200 calorie diet, we get 110^13, or that the land can support 10 Terahumans, assuming 100% efficient conversion from sun's energy to human calories. Which is ridiculously wrong. (That would be the "impossible to overcome according to the Laws of Thermodynamics and our current understanding of cell biology and chemistry." bit referenced, plus human diet is a bit more complex than pure number of calories.)
So if we can get humans to photosynthesize directly instead of having to eat food (along with the resulting efficiency losses) the Earth can support another few orders of magnitude more humans than there are today by reusing the land that's already being used support cattle. (It's only a small if*. Totally feasible. I only need a few million dollars in funding but we'll have that figured out in a couple years, tops.)
>New studies show cultivated meat can have massive environmental benefits and be cost-competitive by 2030
I don't understand the fixation that environmentalists have on meat. Methane farts is a trivially solvable problem with cheap dietary supplementation and otherwise the carbon footprint of a cow is negligible compared to a host of other, far more pressing pollutants. And what little deforestation happens to make pastureland only happens once. What am I missing?
One thing: The massive monoculturing of soy and other grains required to feed the cattle? That eclipses the deforestation used for animal pastures (the article goes into this in some detail.)
Not eating meat is easy to do and easy to signal. It has also been repeated so much that people don't question it.
Just like many ecologists are against nuclear power for political (and not environmental) reasons, there are also lots of vegetarians/vegans leveraging the ecologist movement to push their ideals.
Is an analyst of today trying to figure out if lab grown meat can succeed different from an analyst in 1970 trying to figure out if something like an iPhone will ever be viable?
I mean... the mother of all demos was 1968. Moore's law was also fully active with truly exponential growth in the number of transistors per dollar and per watt for years at that point.
Those computer guys in the late 1960s / early 1970s were looking far into the future for how computing would evolve, and their predictions were largely accurate. If anything, the trajectory of computer progress has been one of the more predictable things in the last 50 years.
"Those computer guys in the late 1960s / early 1960s were looking far into the future for how computing would evolve, and their predictions were largely accurate."
This is survivor bias — you're familiar with the "computer guys" who made accurate predictions, because they were lauded for being on the right side of history. There are plenty of people who predicted the opposite in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc; e.g. there is only a world market for "maybe" five computers (IBM president, 1943); there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home (DEC founder, 1977); the Internet is a fad and will collapse by 1996 (3COM founder, 1995); etc etc.
Agreed, miniaturization took a giant leap forward moving from valve's to transistors. Even in the 1980s Bell Labs said that in the future we will receive our telephone signals through the air and our TV signals through a wire. An accurate 30 year prediction.
Considering that the first cellphone was in 1973, predicting the ubiquity of mobile phones in the 1980s is like predicting that the internet is gonna be a big deal in 2010.
Those early cell phones were more like radios on boats and required an operator to complete a call. It wasn't at all clear in the mid-70's that cell phones would take over landlines because of the spectrum requirements of those early radios.
My point, though, is that bold people surely did make such predictions and there were naysayers as well. Just like the lab grown meat discussion.
Maybe, but the sake of venture funding a 40 year horizon is irrelevant. An analyst in 1970 would have easily concluded that a iPhone would be impossible for the next 10 years. Maybe possible in 50 years is as good as impossible for a venture backed artificial meat companies that needs to turn a profit in the next 20 years.
After reading the linked-to Humbird paper, I'm not so sure I agree with the glum outlook. A huge chunk of the cost seems to be macronutrients, which currently, yes, are very expensive. But even the report mentions emerging technologies such as plant protein hydrolysates that could be done much cheaper at this scale. The problem seems to be that nobody has ever had any reason to look into optimizing costs at this insane scale. I don't think we should just assume that means it won't get much cheaper once we do.
The point about cattle taking 25 calories in grass to produce 1 calorie of meat is true but in most places, those cattle get their nutrition from grazing grassland that has no arable value. The grass grows with no human intervention and they wander around and feed themselves. Humans can’t eat grass. So it’s not really “inefficient” in that sense.
93% of a beef cattle's lifetime diet consists of food that is not in direct competition with the human food supply, such as grasses or agricultural waste (cornstalks and such).
Corn is grown to feed humans, the humans eat the corn, but not the corn stalks. The corn stalks are fed to cows and pigs. There is no competition there.
I've wondered about this since so much alfalfa and corn are specifically grown on arable land to feed cattle. What fraction of beef calories is derived from non-arable grazing lands?
There is also the extensive use of water to irrigate pasture in arid areas just to feed cattle. That water could be used more efficiently. to grow food directly.
97% of cattle is grown on feedlots, not grass [1]. So massive amounts of corn and soy are wasted (as the original article notes growing soy for cattle feed leads to massive amounts of deforestation)
97% of the cattle is grown on feedlots, not grass IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. So massive amounts of corn and soy are wasted IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (as the original article THAT EXCLUSIVELY TALKS ABOUT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA notes growing soy for cattle feed leads to massiva amounts of deforestation)
I fail to see how this is the case, but perhaps I'm missing the point you're trying to make? What you're referring to is about colonialism, whereas here the USA is very much incentivized to work within its own borders, on its own food industry. It just so happens that climate change is a global problem as well, and the USA being a large rich country it has more causal influence on the outcome of climate change.
No it's not. The US must lead in reducing environmental destruction and emissions because it leads in producing environmental destruction and emissions (per capita.)
Why does per capita matters? The resources of the Earth are limited, and don't rise with the population. Focusing on the per capita means that we shouldn't take into account overpopulation because they don't consume much, for now. That doesn't sound right.
Presumably 97% of cattle are dependent on feed imports. After all, it means the huge non arable grasslands of the USA that people pretend are super important aren't enough to feed them.
> Getting China to stop coal would be more effective than getting the USA to stop beef.
Fighting climate change is not a game of "what would be more effective" and ranking solutions (especially in between countries), it's a game of "what are ALL the things we can realistically do". Both _must_ be done.
> Fighting climate change is not a game of "what would be more effective" and ranking solutions (especially in between countries), it's a game of "what are ALL the things we can realistically do".
I don't agree. We have limited time and energy to act. Getting people to stop beef in countries where it's not a problem is a waste, compared to using that time and energy to focus on a more important problem. I think focusing on moral imperatives instead of the most efficient actions is actually dangerous, as it's a denial of the reality we live in.
> Getting people to stop beef in countries where it's not a problem is a waste
It's a problem. Most americans consume way more meat than what they could possibly need and they do it because they've heard they need lots of protein which could come from many other sources besides dead animals.
Again, America is not the only country in the world and is not the country that I was talking about when I said "beef in countries where it's not a problem".
> Most americans consume way more meat than what they could possibly need and they do it because they've heard they need lots of protein
I doubt that's true. Meat has always been rich people's food, especially beef, and people like consuming like rich people.
> which could come from many other sources besides dead animals
Is the problem ecological or moral here? If the dead animals were more efficient than the other sources (which they sometimes are), would it still be a problem?
Most americans are consuming 100+ grams of protein a day (its very likely all of that coming from meat - I don't know anyone who consumes a lot of beans).[1] Average person needs about .36 grams of protein per pound of body weight.[2]
When they are grazing on non-arable land and the alternative is to produce no food at all here.
About proteins, from the article you linked (the Harvard one):
> For a relatively active adult, a daily protein intake to meet the RDA would supply as little as 10% of his or her total daily calories. In comparison, the average American consumes around 16% of his or her daily calories in the form of protein, from both plant and animal sources.
> Based on the totality of the research presented at the summit, Rodriguez estimates that taking in up to twice the RDA of protein "is a safe and good range to aim for." This equates roughly to 15% to 25% of total daily calories, although it could be above or below this range depending on your age, sex, and activity level.
I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion that Americans are eating too much proteins, considering the article is not saying it, or even saying the opposite.
Most americans would not meet suggested exercise levels for "relatively active" even if that was at the 30 min. per day level.
16% is 60% more than 10%. Most americans are consuming meat for at least 2 meals a day, possibly 3 for those who are eating sausage or bacon for breakfast.
The general point is that americans consume way more meat than what they actually need. This has been promoted heavily in the high protein diet fads recently. Educating people on what they actually need for a healthy diet would go a long way and cost a lot less than alternatives like lab-grown meat.
Your article suggested that you could aim for 15-25% and not 10%. 16% is at the bottom of that range. I don't understand what point you're trying to make here.
People eat more meat than they need. Most people would be healthier if they consumed less of it or none and substituted vegetables/beans/nuts for those calories while still getting proper amounts of protein from non-meat sources.
Reducing meat consumption reduces a bunch of other consumption of resources letting people get their calories more efficiently.
> Meat is considered one of the prime factors contributing to the current biodiversity loss crisis.
> the livestock sector is a major stressor on many ecosystems and on the planet as a whole. Globally it is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases (GHG) and one of the leading causal factors in the loss of biodiversity, and in developed and emerging countries it is perhaps the leading source of water pollution.
> farmers would reduce their land use of feed crops; currently representing about 75% of US land use, and would reduce the use of fertilizer due to the lower land areas and crop yields needed. A transition to a more plant based diet is also projected to improve health, which can lead to reductions in healthcare GHG emissions, currently standing at 8% of US emissions [1]
What's not to understand? Stop eating meat. We don't need lab-grown meat. We don't need meat substitutes.
I don't understand why you're mixing a health claim that you failed to prove with an environmental claim that I agree with. If your point is that using arable land to grow cattle or cattle feed is a waste, then I agree with you. If your point is that we should stop eating meat for health reasons, then I wasn't convinced by what you showed me, and disagree with you. If your point is that we should stop eating meat for moral reasons (as in animal rights), then I disagree with you. If your point is that we should stop eating all meat for environmental reasons, then I disagree with you, as not all meat has the same impact, and I think we should avoid blanket statements like that, especially when they are mostly based on what happens in the USA and not around the world. If your point is that we should stop eating meat that has the most ecological impact, like American or Brazilian beef, then I agree. If your point is not any of those things, then I failed to understand it.
China emits less than half the greenhouse gases per capita irt the US. The US should begin by emitting at the rate of China, then we can all reduce together.
Why? If China wants to emit more greenhouse gases per capita, they could reduce their population and maintain the same emissions on the country level. What you're proposing is biaised in favor of countries with large populations.
Cows aren't feed the seeds of corn. They eat the part of the plant we don't eat. If we didn't feed that to animals it would just go to waste. It's upcycling useless leaves and stems into milk and meat.
50% of the surface area of Denmark is dedicated to growing feed for pigs, and we import a lot as well. All that land could be used for growing food for people directly, or for other things. Since there's basically nowhere in this country where you're more than five kilometers away from some sort of settlement, almost all of it is interesting for other developments as well. So at least here, some of us would very much like agriculture to change.
That Wikipedia page is weird. The paragraph reports it as the corn production for 2019 but the link says it was retrieved in 2014. The current page has no numbers (but a video). A link to https://www.iowacorn.org/corn-production/production/ shows (for Iowa corn), 44% ethanol/fuel, 25% feed, 18% exports, 4% food and industrial.
I'm patiently waiting for the west to realize that insects are the future of protein. I will gladly munch down a handful of crickets, even before they're prepared to look appetizing. "Beyond" and "Impossible" meats, lab grown meats, and black bean patties are neat projects, but not the future. And movies like Snowpiercer that shows the horror of flavorful, nutritious, and sustainable bars of crickets (edit: cockroaches) really aren't helping.
You can turn lots of things into a powder that contains protein, that doesn't mean they should be eaten. Would you try baking "protein-rich goods" with dried semen?
I'm having difficulty discerning what your position on the social/culture barrier is.
Is it that the West has failed to realize a future in insect-consumption that other regions/cultures already have? Or that this future won't be realized unless the West in particular embraces consumption of insects?
Insects are only eaten by people who are so extremely impoverished that's their only alternative, sort of like Haitian mud cakes. Nobody sane will willingly touch them.
I'm struggling to find a real source, however glancing at nutritional facts of cricket powder, it appears that protein makes up 3/5ths of its mass, versus 1/4th for black beans.
I think you'd have to factor in the resource input required to create that mass of crickets vs beans/pulses/etc. I realize crickets are pretty efficient but they could end up being very similar. I also don't have good sources for this.
Ok, you eat bugs, I will stay with grass-fed beef like normal people. Meat is not a "problem" and it doesn't need "solving", and I will not eat insects, that's absolutely disgusting.
A dead carcass / decaying flesh is "normal" but bugs are where you draw a line? That's kind of interesting, and almost certainly cultural rather than logical.
We're not automatons that you can throw any random mix of protein and carbohydrates into as fuel, and food choices are not "logical". Being forced to eat insects like an animal is humiliating and disgusting. Regular meat is delicious. Most people will never consider eating bugs, they're synonymous with disease, filth, and poverty.
Please don't straw-man here; I never said you can throw a random mix of protein and carbs together as fuel. A plant-based diet is recognized by dieticians around the world as suitable for virtually all stages of life
Meat is a problem, too - for your health and for the environment - not to mention the animals themselves.
Meat is more nutritious and more tasty, and it's great to eat either seasoned and not. What is definitely not beneficial for health is a heavily processed and salted mush of plant based meat facsimile, or whatever frankenmeat they're trying to conjure in those labs. It's also another step towards you being more heavily dependent on enormous multinational industries.
Meat is still a problem, for all the areas I've listed above. If you're willing to neglect that reality for something tasting good, you're absolutely right that food choices aren't logical (at least in your personal case).
You're also welcome to provide evidence that something like Beyond beef is less healthy than it's flesh counterpart. With zero cholesterol in any plant-based product, though, I have a feeling you're going to encounter some difficulty.
A steak or chicken breast or pork chop is a fundamentally different thing than anything you can get from bugs. Culturally they might be interchangeable sources of protein, but you can't get a steak from crickets or grubs.
Like it or not, steak is normal, and good eats to a majority of the west.
Look at how hard vegetarians and vegans have worked for decades and decades to try to convince people to replace foods they like with other types of food that they already eat but just don't like as much. The amount of success they've had is small, and the amount of backlash high.
With insects you're trying to convince people to replace foods they like with foods they literally find disgusting and have never eaten in their lives. Yes I'm sure it makes sense on paper, but I think you're drastically underestimating the cultural barriers on this one.
I'm waiting for the same thing, but with fungi. Mycelia alone are protein rich and love to literally grow in giant vats. Culturing fungi is well understood and massively scalable compared to culturing animal cells.
I don't understand why people are looking to insects over legumes for protein. Legumes are widely cultivated and socially and culturally acceptable. Protein is pretty much a solved problem.
Agree, and I don't understand any of this lab-grown meat hype when there are so many plant based alternatives. It doesn't seem that lab grown meat will be cheaper or have a better carbon footprint than plant based foods.
Have you seen the kilo prices of editable insects? I can by a pack of crickets for 20 dollars for 26 grams at a domestic online store. There are 453 grams in a pound!
A cheaper option is buffalo worm flour at just over 100 dollars per kilo.
"Beyond" and "Impossible" meats have already undercut insect prices tremendously on super market shelves.
I mean, beyond/impossible already are a pretty good simulacrum of some kinds of meat. If what you're trying to do is simulate meat, I don't think you're going to do better wth insects. If what you're trying to do is just have good protein, we already have tons of options, starting at beans. But sure, insects is another. (I ate a bunch of Brood X cicadas this summer, they were tasty. They did not make me think they were beef or chicken).
I think the idea of lab-grown meat in the OP is supposed to be a much better simulation (I mean, arguably not a simulation at all) than impossible/beyond, and be able to simulate whole pieces like a steak or piece of chicken not just ground meat.
But yeah, that's a question I have, with plant-based meat like beyond/impossible already being way better than I would have predicted a few years ago... what's the point of spending so much money on the "moon shot" of vat-grown meat, instead of just doing more with the plant-based approach that's already working well?
Needing to fake meat mouthfeels will hopefully be a short trend. Beyond/impossible requires so much processing to produce a patty (and in the process, potentially losing nutrition), versus mashing beans or grinding insects.
Beyond/impossible "meat" are a mess of extremely heavily processed ingredients infused with a mix of low quality enzyme-treated plant protein broth. Doesn't sound like anything anyone sane would want to touch, but then again most people don't read labels on food, and in some countries (USA) most of the disturbing details (such as inclusion of GMO) are legally allowed to be hidden from the consumers. There's no shortage of reports of these things stinking, bubbling, falling apart, dissolving, and behaving in many other unappetizing ways. Most people will stick to regular meat, which is healthy and delicious.
Right, and vat-grown meat will require even more resources, as per OP, if it were even possible.
If people were or could become happy with beans or even ground insects, there would be no purpose to it at all. But when we have plant-baset meat simulation already, there already is no purpose to it.
> In all this, it would be so good to know we have a silver bullet. But until solid, publicly accessible science proves otherwise, cultured meat is still a gamble
The article is written as if this lab-grown meat was expected to solve the worlds problems. There are more factors in play. I appreciate other sides of the coin argument, but this is a strange one..
Basically this seems to be saying that this is a no-go at the moment and possibly forever. We’re going to need innovation on top of innovation on top of innovation to make this work…if it can be done at scale. To me though I think we’re looking at the wrong problem. Why scale the technology up? Could we just build smaller facilities…like a lot of them that serve as local hubs that cultivate and grow for an area? You know…like a farm? Go to your local “farm” to get the meat. If the hump is scale…stop scaling get smaller.
I’m cynically assuming the answer to why this won’t work is that there’s no money in it so no one would fund it.
Honestly, I think conventional vegetarian food manufacturers will produce quality substitutes far before lab meat is even a rate luxury, much less commonplace. Beyond Meat is already excellent.
Scaling back labmeat targets to simple liquid slurry gravies that could be used as flavor additives to fakemeat products seems more achievable.
I agree. As a vegetarian, I think those alternative products are very good and close enough to meat for burgers, sausages, nuggets etc. How is lab grown meat going to compete?
I'm not even vegetarian and I've replaced most of my meat consumption with plant based alternatives because they taste great. There are some things that aren't there yet but I can't imagine it'll be long.
There is a decent chance this article is correct but I also dislike part of article's focus.
The part I dislike was focusing a lot on the size of the reactors needed in order to replace the US meat production. It is a bit unfair to compare the size of a bioreactor to a meat packing plant without considering the size of all the (organic?) bioreactors... livestock. There are ~30M cattle in the US at any given time so the volume is considerable. To ignore the infrastructure and space that livestock use is making the implicit claim that livestock are 'free' instead of 'cheaper currently'.
Considering how efficient meat production is (at the expense of everything else), we can basically make a single head of cattle as our standardized unit to evaluate the cost & thermodynamics.
Basically at scale is a engineered bioreactor cheaper than the natural blood & bones bioreactor? Certainly not upfront unless small scale bioreactor in a bag technology... oh wait that exists [1]. Sucks that pricing isn't easy to get but I think it is still more expensive than fixed/reusable vessels at least over time.
It's really hard to know without having more knowledge about the specifics of but I think there's a lot of unexplored areas that makes these projects worthwhile.
>Basically at scale is a engineered bioreactor cheaper than the natural blood & bones bioreactor?
No, it's not. That's what the whole article is about. It won't be cost effective, not even at that scale. Plus, it gives some other physical/pragmatic reasons on why it may not be even possible to do it (disregarding costs).
It was a question. My main disagreement is not the outcome but rather that there was never a real cost breakdown of lab vs natural. Personally I found the article's structure makes it a bit hard to follow and even more difficult to formulate a good response.
It seems you missed the point of the article - which is that given some of the fundamentals underpinning the growth of cells out of the body, with our current and mid-future predicted levels of technology, it is not going to be possible to produce economical meat in a lab anytime soon.
As a no name angel investor, I’ve seen a few of the companies in the report. But also others that are changing the assumptions. So yeah, if you think you are going to produce meat by replicating in vats used for vaccines, then you are going to have problems. There are other paradigms that are more likely to be disregarded out of hand from someone with decades of knowledge, but can work if someone with a bit of naïveté goes forward anyhow.
I mean, AI researchers when I was in college laughed at using any kind of neural network.
And they were right, if you had a short timeframe.
I do think the timeframes are, uh… optimistic like a new SPAC with no revenue.
you can't leave cows unattended. they wander off, get injured, fall ill, might be stolen, and all kinds of things. if they don't eat well enough they might not be worth slaughtering. you can either keep them in cages and attend to them there, with all the distasteful complications that brings, or herd them in large pastures at the cost of very difficult and dangerous skilled labor.
it will certainly require some training to attend to a bioreactor but assuming an eventual working model they seem much less problematic than a wandering animal, and would probably suffer less and get sick less than lots of caged animals.
you have absolutely zero understanding of the nature of raising beef cattle. Which, for many subsets of cattle rearing, can basically be left to their own devices. From where I sit currently I can see our 150 head comfortably munch their way through oats and pasture into which they were introduced4 months ago, and where they will stay for at least another 4 months, with minimal human intervention until the next calving season comes.
There is very little that is difficult and dangerous about the labour required to herd cattle a couple of times a year, unless you are talking about the gyrocopter cowboys in far north queensland and the Northern Territory, of whom a better description would be crazy or insane
Feedlotting is more labour intensive, but then the beef is more expensive because in some markets it is considered of a higher grade, and they may weigh more
This is wrong. Cattle farming is not a labor intensive industry which is why high wage first world countries like USA, Australia, France, Germany are among the top producers and western countries export to places like Indonesia and China competitively with Brazil and India other big beef exporters with lower cost of labor.
> you can't leave cows unattended.
Of course you can. There are remote areas that essentially let cattle roam freely over thousands and thousands of acres and bring them in as little as once a year for maintenance (branding, medication, castration, selling, etc). No fences, no roads, rarely ever being seen aside from routine checks of water points (which is becoming less common with remote monitoring equipment).
> they wander off, get injured, fall ill, might be stolen, and all kinds of things. if they don't eat well enough they might not be worth slaughtering.
> you can either keep them in cages and attend to them there, with all the distasteful complications that brings, or herd them in large pastures at the cost of very difficult and dangerous skilled labor.
There is not much dangerous skilled labor at all. Difficult, yes like a lot of manual labor. Dangerous and skilled no outside of some rare cases like the use of helicopters to drive cattle in aforementioned remote areas with terrain sometimes not even accessible to motorbike so helicopter and horse is used. Importantly even in those situations, the amount of labor required per value of beef produced is simply not very high.
And those aren't really the options. Feedlots are increasingly used (what distasteful complications?) but most of the world's beef is not produced that way, and where those are used it is often as a finishing step after a free-range life to improve consistency and make up the last bit of weight.
People need to directly interact with each cow at different times. Bio reactors however aren’t inherently limited to the size of cows and the 770lb version mentioned provides about 75% more meat than the average cow (440lb meat + skin, bones, etc)
But even that’s really just the first attempt, breweries are a reasonable comparison long term and batch sizes get huge.
Muscle cells can't tolerate shear forces yeast can, are much more easily poisoned by their own wastes, have a doubling time 12+ times slower, require sterile pharmaceutical-grade amino acids as a feed stock (which themselves cost $100+/kg), etc etc.
Humbird says commercial cell culture bioreactors don't get any bigger than 25 m^3, and have to be run in a clean room. Doesn't sound much like any brewery I've seen.
With plenty of investment you might get 2x better on any one of those metrics, but in order to compete with cows you have to be 100-1000x better on every single one.
They frequently refer to the bioreactors as fermenters because they are mechanically quite similar which was my point. Also that 25m3 is in comparison to 200-1000m3 vessels used commercially. They also note sufficiently sterilizing a 200m3 vessel is viable, but due to various assumptions about cells used reach 25m3. However their analysis is frequently referring to mammalian cells while chicken is a commonly consumed meat source.
They address one of your criticisms right at the beginning: “The replacement of amino acid media with plant protein hydrolysates is discussed and requires further study.”
It’s a solid analysis in the short term, but optimizing cell lines can significantly change some of these numbers.
Well the long and short of that is the infrastructure and space usage of livestock etc. aren't ignored, they're part and parcel of what the cost of bringing meat to your plate is. Can't say what exact breakdowns are, likely the answer is "it depends" on the meat and cut/grade/etc but there will be industry reports and such so I'm sure you can find something. The fundamental point here is that the analysis says that at no point soon does a bioreactor get cheaper than livestock, and will likely remain significantly more expensive for a long time if these promised magical breakthroughs do not occur (and I say promised since they're looking for investment, so if they don't then it's a massive loss on everyone's parts).
Humbird estimated $17-$40 for a pound of ground meat by 2030. Future Meat has already reached $18 for cultured ground "chicken" but as the article points out is unlikely to go lower. Currently, ground beef costs about $4 per pound. $4. That's how much everything, from infrastructure to land use to feed to water to labour to delivery costs for the same ground beef you'd get from livestock as you'd get straight out of the bioreactor (which they said was 70% water and 30% basically ground meat). A round steak costs about $6 per pound if you're lucky, and often higher. Going for steak with meat cultures this would drive the price well beyond $17 since you'd need to do a LOT more work in processing it.
Livestock has been scaled out very efficiently by ignoring all the environmental damages it causes. Since the whole point of this is to not "cut corners", they're already on the back foot, and the article explains many of the concerning avenues they are considering to even try and get close to dropping the price.
Ultimately, livestock has been optimised, and isn't getting cheaper, quite the opposite. Prices are slowly rising for meat. But the "hidden" cost is the environmental damage (a damning cost at that). Scaling out the bioreactors physically with higher capacity is how you'd drop the cost of cultured meat at the same volume, fewer larger reactors being more efficient than many smaller ones, since the pharmaceutical industry has failed to make game changing breakthroughs in the other approaches to making more efficient cultures that would meet this need in recent years (though, as mentioned, Future Meat has done just this, but would still need economy of scale to get competitive).
They could scale up tomorrow with ten thousand times as many reactors without making a real dent in their efficiency, simply replicating what they already have, and still be forced to sell at cost like Eat Just or sell at an unjustifiable price. Current cost according to the article is typically between $10k and $22k per pound. That's obscene. Getting down to $17 per pound, or even close such as Future Meat with it's incredible $18 per pound, is still a losing battle. After all, even if we removed subsidies and doubled the price of meat, that's still significantly cheaper than ground meat cultures, let alone being processed.
Meanwhile, plant-based alternatives and such are already reaching the point of being cost competitive, with $6 per pound for a Beyond Beef burger, and an average price of $9 per pound for meat alternatives, and some people are already switching. So if there's anything that governments should focus on, it's the one that's clearly successful (and in way more volume) and just about a similar win in terms of soy/grain usage and similar.
Is the article perfect? No. Is it correct? Most likely. I don't think the focus is off, though I do think that there's some ground work that could have been done, showing breakdowns of costs and such in a clearer way, though clearly it's prose in the end while the reports speak for themselves. Talking about the story of the analysis and what it actually means for the likely future of meat culture. Hopefully I've collected those points you were looking for a little bit here, though not being an industry expert naturally I've been unable to trivially procure breakdowns for how much is labour costs per pound etc., so mostly it's a denser version of the factoids in the article and what's readily available online.
Appreciate your response but disagree with the premise that
> That's how much everything, from infrastructure to land use to feed to water to labour to delivery costs for the same ground beef you'd get from livestock.
There are a ton of subsidies provided by the government that are not accounted for in this cost. Water rights, land, delivery all are accounted for differently and I would not say with any measure of confidence that they are all represented well in the consumer cost. There is also the large externalities that are completely not accounted for like carbon emissions.
It is sort of like comparing electric cars vs gas back when people would comment how cheap oil is and ignore the wars fought over it and the environmental devastation wrought from its production.
Subsidies simply offset the cost, they don't magically make those portions of it disappear. If you were to remove them, then by some estimates the price would go up anywhere between 30% and 180% for meats, because that's how much the subsidy covered. Subsidies at any point changes the end result as the price change percolates without subsidy, the primary point of them being to cover variance (such as harvest quality and weather) and to offer incentives to the customer, which incentivises business by artificially opening the market. Meatonomics puts a $4 Big Mac at roughly $11 in "societal cost", including environmental and health.
In the end, if the seller wants the same margins as before, then they'll raise by exactly as much as the subsidy covered. Even if it's the higher amount and a bit over double the price, that's perhaps $10 for a pound of ground beef. That's practically half the price of cultured meat, and about the price of meat alternatives; meat alternatives being currently a high margin business as companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are trying to increase R&D and production to meet demand, so they could actually drop prices now, they just won't since they have nowhere near the supply.
Adding similar subsidies to meat culture products would simply narrow the gap, fundamentally they are more expensive and that's even with the "optimistic" estimates Humbird gave. Reminder that Future Meat is an impressive $18 per pound for chicken cultures, whereas actual chicken runs about $2 per pound. Meanwhile, meat alternatives around $9 per pound TODAY will improve by 2030 to be much more cost competitive than meat cultures seemingly will be able to, unless they can manage all these frankly miraculous breakthroughs and get as cheap as chicken (based on the $5.66 per kilo figure, or little over $2 per pound), which seems unlikely.
As I saw it put nicely elsewhere, removing the subsidy would result in a "more accurate, divorced-from-government cost of their inputs and externalities which affect the health of everyone, to include the consumer and the planet at large."
> There are ~30M cattle in the US at any given time
That number is the count of full grown cattle, 31M. When you include calves, it's 98M total in the US. It isn't easy to realize just how nauseating that truly is.
There's roughly 330M people in the US. One cow will feed 2300 people 3oz of beef, which is the most meat one may eat in a sitting and still be considered healthy (though I personally disagree, no amount of red meat is healthy IMO). 360M / 31M comes out to around 10 people per cow, which will feed them once a day 3oz for 230 days. So the US has enough beef to serve every man, woman and child a a 3oz steak serving once every 38 hours, all year long.
Of course, nothing close to this amount is actually consumed, and at least 23% of it is entirely wasted in production, 7.1M cattle annually are effectively turned into garbage before product can hit store shelves.
You’re forgetting that the US exports beef, and also turns it into other products such as dog food. You also need to feed people all over again next year, and it’s not like we’re all eating <1 year old cows.
14% of US beef is exported, but if the beef industry disappeared overnight, no one would starve as a result, and neither would the ~70M dogs in the US, which are omnivores btw. And typically slaughter occurs between 12 and 22 months, so it's more accurate to snark "it's not like you're all eating >2 year old cows."
I’m sure I eat, on average, at least 6 oz/ day. I estimate I eat anywhere between 50-100 kg/ year or somewhere between 5-10 oz a day. Probably closer to around 7. Or about three times your estimate.
This is known as fatalism, and included in this is the clearly false belief that we as individuals have no power to influence our future nor the outcome of our actions. Life is indeed short, but this is not a justification for nihilism, a mistaken belief system that is ultimately harmful to the individual and society. We need all the help we can get, and the Universe will be poorer and less interesting without you. So please consider sticking around longer and effect this by treating yourself and your body better. Undoubtedly there are those that love you and that you love, and you have a duty to do so to yourself and them, at the very least.
Apparently my original point was entirely lost here, which was not to say, "hey, you can't eat beef!" But to say, ffs, this is an insane amount of excess! We don't need 31M cattle, we'd probably do just fine on the 7M that get turned into garbage, and maybe they wouldn't be if there were less of them and more care given, if, say, humanity could somehow precede profit. But please do not deceive yourself, most eat beef because they were programmed to by the beef industry marketing drilled into them since childhood, which taught us that meat was an essential nutritional staple, which was always false, but it helped to sell a lot of beef and continues to help warm things up for everyone everywhere.
Also, I didn't decide anything. Science decided that all those cows are the source of upwards of 4% of US greenhouse emissions, and science also decided that eating beef massively increases risk of type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, colon cancer, and, uh, oh yeah, death. And though there would be no greenhouse emissions nor any health risk to you or others in so doing, I have decided neither you nor anyone else anywhere should eat my toenail clippings.
Please accept my humble apology for offending you and any others with my sincere attempt at being truthful. It was not my intent in the least to evoke your ad hominem. I do appreciate that you recognized and acknowledge my argument as sound despite unfortunate self-righteousness of which I admit I was unaware. If you could see yourself to overlooking my error, I will endeavor to be more careful next time.
Unless it spoke only to my argument and not towards me personally, then by definition, yes. But I can take it, I'm made of sterner stuff, so no harm done.
This is a talking point for the environmental left, but it's not really true. Ranchers don't get cash subsidies (most other crops do). Farmland, including pastureland, is generally taxed at a lower rate than other lands, but that's because we usually want to disincentivize conversion to other uses. Likewise, sometimes there are NRCS grants available, but those are for things like wetland investments or fallowing ground. Public land grazing rates are lower than what you'd typically pay for private lands, but public lands generally have very low value/productivity with huge tracts of unfenced ground requiring relatively large investments to retrieve and drive cattle, and with a much higher mortality rates. Even if public land grazing were marginally less expensive, only a very small portion of cattle are fed on public lands -- I think it's something less than 2%. People like to distort the meaning of "subsidies," to cast disfavored industries in a negative light, but cattle are no more subsidized than housing or roads or cars or computers or any of the other things that make life better.
And some of these crops are used in finishing lots.
> but cattle are no more subsidized than housing or roads or cars or computers or any of the other things that make life better.
I think it’s questionable that cattle make “like better”. They are an inefficient form of food who suffer when we kill them, and we don’t need to eat them to eat delicious, nutritious food.
Do you have any evidence or a link explaining what these subsidies are? I have been unable to find anything that is not supremely partisan. The only subsidies I can find to support this are FEMA disaster relief and some grants that encourage ranchers to do certain conservation practices.
Maybe it's different in your country, but in the USA, meat production is heavily subsidized by the federal government, and the environmental externalities (carbon and otherwise) generated are not exactly priced in, either.
From what I've looked up It seems like BLM land is cheaper than private land. The current fee of $1.35 per animal unit month for 2021 is the minimum that was set in 1981. So to me it looks like we are giving the farmers cheap land. [1] [2]
However, I also read an article [3] that seems to indicate that the complete opposite was true as farmers who use BLM land have to maintain it which made public land cost $1.20 more than private (2011). However, I don't really trust this that much as the guy who wrote it was a farmer and on the "Public Lands Council" which is a pro ranching organization. [4]
Sorry I don't really understand what your saying. I simply found some interesting links that I thought people would find useful. The first two links are trying to show that the farmers are getting really cheap land (AKA government giving subsidies to them) as the current price is the minimum set in 1981.
The third link is just a counter argument to that says although the land looks cheap in reality its more expensive because of land maintenance.
However, I don't trust that article a lot as it was written by a rancher that is in a pro ranching organization so there is a big bias.
I guess my confusion was - the original post was about farm subsidies for the beef industry. I do not believe BLM price reductions count toward that, as a vast, vast minority of beef ever interacts with those properties.
While they are a subsidy, I do not believe they are relevant at all to the argument. That's my point, I guess.
Corn, bean, and other row crop subsidies, sure. But BLM is just a distraction, I think.
A 2013 estimate of annual meat subsidies puts them around $38bn[1], whereas a 2019 industry estimate of annual sales sits at a bit over $217bn[2]. You're free to make your own judgement as to what constitutes "heavily," I suppose, but to me, that first number seems like a substantial portion of the second one.
Edit: The $38bn appears to also include egg and dairy subsidies, but Americans appear to spend substantially less per annum on those commodities compared to meat[3][4], such that the federal subsidies still appear to make up a rather large fraction of the (retail value of!) annual consumption.
So, people/companies heavily invested in the animal meat production do research and find out that artificial meat production will be economically unfeasible. Just like GM found out electric cars unfeasible or Shell/BP/etc - solar/wind energy. Back then at Sun the Linux/x86 was also considered a joke. Just like ARM at Intel. ...
The artificial meat will be not only cheaper, it will be healthier. You will be able to customize it for your health and well being. And human civilization stopping killing other sentient beings - the impact of that is hard to estimate. For example it will allow to develop various empathy related areas of our mentality which are currently naturally suppressed. That will tremendously affect all aspects of human society.
> The New York Times, 1903: "Man won't fly for a million years – to build a flying machine would require the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanics for 1-10 million years." The Wright Brothers made their first powered flight 9 days later.
There is a meaningful difference between a physicist reporting on thermodynamic and biological challenges to a technology and a newspaper making breathless and unsubstantiated claims about a technology.
This article reminds me of the fever over insect apocalypse.
Techy types love to imagine swarms of tiny drones taking up the job of pollinating our plants when the bees die off.
I can only imagine that anyone thinking like this has never kept bees or simply watched them in amazement as they do their job, entirely undirected and uncoordinated by us. The ultimate low tech solution, working reliably and consistently for millenia.
Lab-grown meat feels the same to me. Yes, it seems clear we shouldn't continue consuming pasture and methane intensive foods like beef.
But does that mean we try and replicate that product by hurling science at it - trying to do ourselves what nature already has worked out? At huge cost in $$ and in distraction while we take our eye off of the more important things?
I'd say as humans we would be better off getting a little pragmatic about this and a bit less arrogant about our ability to re-shape nature.
Instead of looking for artificial beef, how about just substituting chicken every second time we eat? That would move the needle enormously on environmental impact. And requires no new technology at all.
Same goes for elaborate carbon capture technologies. Why even bother when our planetary economy continues to incentivise people burning fossil fuels in unimaginable quantities?
Future Meat Technology can already produce cultured meat at roughly the prices quoted in the article ($4/100g, which would be $18.14/lb). It seems unrealistic that the industry would have already reached its lowest price point considering large scale facilities are just now being made.
I really want to believe that. How does it taste? I can't find reviews. Their homepage[1] claims they've broken the "$5 cost barrier" but doesn't say whether that's per pound or chickenoid nugget.
Not true, only the most efficient and market driven solutions are based around pigeovian taxes. Plenty of inferior solutions involve onerous regulations or huge subsidies, but because republicans pop a new blood vessel whenever they hear about climate taxes the inferior solutions are the only ones that are politically palatable right now.
Most of the world doesn't have "republicans", we just don't want to pay an ever increasing amount of taxes on everything that will be wasted by corrupt politicians. The government can absorb any amount of taxes and very little of it is spent in a way that I approve of. We already have to give over 65% of what we make to the government, I want nothing more than to be left alone.
carbon taxes under most systems are revenue neutral. Here in Canada, most people recieve more back then they payed in, because the highest income brackets emit disproportionately.
When I buy energy produced by coal, and the coal emissions contribute to children contracting asthma, my transaction is creating external costs that I don't pay. These negative externalities are unjust and inefficient. Pigouvian taxes such as a carbon tax work to price in the cost of these negative externalities, thereby changing behavior to reduce that form of injustice.
There is a better solution to the problem: edible insects.
The first reaction most people have is that the public in developed countries wouldn't eat insects, but people once thought lobsters were gross. Changing people's tastes is not as large of a barrier as most people think.
If society is going to spend lot of money to spend on the problem, we should start investing it in the cultural shift to eating insects and see how far it can be taken via "influencer" and celebrity culture. It's a much easier problem than the alternatives.
"Influencers" and billionaries will probably happen before the rest of the public does.
Billionaires should get on board before someone else does.
> By 2030, the global industry for edible insects, sold whole or in a smoothie-ready powder, will grow from sales of $1 billion to $8 billion, according to a report from Barclays and Meticulous Research.
The global food market is worth trillions of dollars. People in many countries eat insects. It doesn't have to start with people in the US who have never really given serious consideration to it.
I've traveled a lot and seen how people's perceptions of foods change when they are exposed to new things. I don't think edible insects is a huge stretch if it were done in the right way.
Many great ideas sound ridiculous at first. That's why most people don't build new things. Convincing people that insects are a good food source is far less of a challenge than what many successful companies have done (or hope to do).
I have tried eating insects.The taste is fine, but I don't like the crunchiness of it. On the other hand I did try meat substitute and they are much more palatable
It will take time for people to get used to it. You don't necessarily eat something like a "bowl of crickets", but you can grind them up and add to dishes, like protein smoothies.
I think the point is that if it's that expensive, some other alternative is likely to win. There are other meat substitutes, which are already having some success.
Expensive technologies win a lot of market share only if no other alternative can work, and even then their use will be minimized.
It's actually smarter than the slavery statement. Slavery wasn't just cruel and sick; it was also economic insanity, the biggest waste of potential in at least America's history. People, educated, free and motivated to innovate, are our greatest asset.
(Innovations do break through, of course, even from people denied those things. But even the richest elites would be better of if nobody had to overcome those barriers.)
Such drama. We've evolved over millions of years brains so large that we now think that eating food is murder. Our "monkey" ancestors are laughing at us.
There's a criminal trial going on in downtown San Jose as we speak, of someone who also applied lessons from elsewhere to a place where they don't fit: Elizabeth Holmes & Theranos.
Her responses whenever someone challenged her were similar to most of the commenters here: "first they say it's impossible, then you change the world." She was thinking of computers and her idol, Steve Jobs. She would never talk about blood tests and accuracy, only about how cool it would be to change the world.
Unfortunately, Moore's Law does not apply everywhere. "Hard sciences" are hard. We have it easy in software. Boundless optimism is only appropriate in certain domains, not in all of them. Most of us on Hacker News (not all of us, I'm sure) have spent our lives in the domains where it is.
Boundless optimism seems inappropriate anywhere outside of religion, but ridiculous mind-blowing optimism, at least, seems to me and many others warranted by recent advances in biotech.
Not for her, though. There was that pesky fact that blood tests already exist, and people were going to compare her results to theirs. And "ridiculous mind-blowing optimism" led to a lot of people losing their money, people who now appear on the government's witness list for her trial.
And then we have President Clinton announcing that the success of the Human Genome Project was going to lead to countless breakthroughs in medicine. I've taken a bunch of UCSC Extension classes in bio, so I know it's certainly helped. But it wasn't like Moore's Law kicked in all of a sudden.
There's certainly progress, you're right. But doing things on a gigantic scale takes gigantic amounts of time.
Maybe the real future of factory meat is figuring out how to grow animals that don't have an appreciable amount of brain aside from the minimal bits required to sustain life. Could certainly alleviate the moral concerns a bit, even if it doesn't really solve the efficiency problem.
No thanks. I really enjoy eating meat and can source it from environmentally responsible sources in addition to raising my own pigs for meat. The "Lets stop eating meat" is a hollow path forward. How about instead we eat more meat that is raised in ways that increase the fertility of the land and capture more carbon? it's totally viable if you are willing to spend more...
As a meat lover who cares little for the welfare of animals, you're completely right. It's the only rational solution, especially in the medium term. But nobody wants to hear that sustainable solutions will actually make for worse quality of life (this applies to a lesser extent to renewables as well, where people assume that we can maintain the same uptime standards we enjoy with fossil fuels at a similar cost level.
But at least in that case we're talking maybe 1.5-2x the cost, rather than dozens or hundreds as with lab-grown meat!).
This is a great idea I've never encountered before. And it could be very low-tech: just breed selectively.
I suspect the flaw is that substantial brain functioning is hard or impossible to get rid of without damaging the animal's meat output. For one thing, good hygiene has got to be cognitively demanding, especially given the tight quarters we raise farm animals in. Poor coordination could lead to broken bones and infections. Stupider animals might even be more prone to fighting, which would be no good at all.
My hot take is that meat eating will be the smoking of my generation. I say this as a proud degenerate meat eater myself. It's been shown to be rather unhealthy; beef is terrible for the environment; and most animals are raised in profoundly unethical environments. I've noticed more and more people my age going vegetarian or low-meat and I can't say I blame them. As much as synthetic meat is tempting, the solution might just be to stop eating meat altogether.
And I'm 180, eating meat is natural - and has been part of human diets for, since, forever.
Humans have been eating eat longer than driving, flying, and more.
Beef isn't terrible for the enviornment, is that companies are looking at one side of the sustainability of their organization and are running profit first. There's most likely reasonable ways to improve land use, or even increase cost of meat to make it better for the enviornment.
People your age, can't compare 1:1, people my age are doing keto, high protein date, carnivore diet, fasting / one meal a day and protein is on there, vs soy.
Stopping eating meat is not a solution itself. Especially for the world.
Especially for emerging economies and such, hah. The last bit really, IMO is just so short sighted and assuming that everyone in this world has a choice in their diet, what they eat and to tell them "no, meat is bad." is laudable at best.
I dunno, frequent, daily meat eating is a relatively new phenomenon for 99% of the population. For a lot of history your worker would eat carbs, vegetables and a tiny morsel of meat. Meat is affordable due to grain subsidies, massive industries and vastly underpaid workers. Sure, there was a period before that where hunting was a primary food source, but it's not like humans need to eat meat.
Appealing to nature is also a little suspect. There's a lot of things that are "natural" that we don't partake in due to changing ethics and mores.
I'll concede that comparing it to smoking is not entirely accurate. Smoking is a very binary relation; you are either a smoker or not. It's much more likely that people in 50-100 years will be light meat eaters, i.e. eat meat once or twice a week.
Emerging economies may eat more meat. They may also smoke more. I agree that it's not always productive to demand that an emerging economy follow the rules of a developed economy. But a lot of these emerging economies will not be so emerging in 50-100 years. It's quite possible the populace will reduce their meat consumption as education and concern about the environment increases.
You analogized it to smoking - there is no safe amount of smoking, it will kill you, sooner, and more unpleasantly.
You can consume meat safely, consuming only meat is bad for you in the long run, but a balanced diet is good. Broadly, we need to eat less meat, our meat consumption needs to look like it did 80 years ago, not like it does now.
I’ll tack on here there is also a difference between muscle meat and organ meat.
Organ meat has been a staple of traditional diets in every culture, but for some reason(s) its reviled in the modern western diet.
Muscle meat is much higher in saturated fat (red beef in particular). That’s really what ends up giving people cardiovascular disease on top of excess sugar consumption and a sedentary lifestyle.
Yeah and I concede that smoking is not exactly like meat eating in that smoking is exceedingly binary. However I stand by my prediction that future generations will look back on how much meat we eat with a generous amount of disgust or shock. Heck, I already do this. I don't understand how people can eat nothing but meat and carbs and feel okay. Doesn't it hurt their digestion?
Like, anyone who tells you "everyone must be a vegetarian" is in my opinion, a fool.
Meat should cost a bit more, and we should feed our meet sources as naturally as possible, cows from grass, pigs from offal (and other sources, pigs will eat anything), and less factory farming of poultry - quite arguably poultry should cost 2-3x more.
Similarly, if folks want to lose weight, the best answer is just to eat less, and I say this as a fat person.
I agree but important to note that "less" really just means similar to what people ate a few generations ago or what some people still eat today, like around the Mediterranean and Italy. Eating vast quantities of meat has never been normal. Traditionally an entire family would consume one large animal a year (like a pig) and a few smaller ones like chickens. The bulk of the diet should be vegetables.
Its extremely hard to get protein from just plants and fortified foods - cost wise and the amount of food you would have to consume vs protein rich meat.
You don’t “need” any specific foods as long as you meet micro/macro/caloric/fiber nutrition requirements. Some people like the taste and preparation of meat. The problem is the amount,type and quality of that meat.
I can assure you it’s very very…very.. easy to get enough protein. I have been gaining muscle while just barely caring about what plants I eat. Cheap too. I spent about the national average on food costs for the month.
The modern American diet consumes about double the protein needs.
For a plant based diet one only needs to invest maybe a day or two of research to figure out what foods to eat to get enough protein.
Nah it's super easy to get enough protein just from plants. Lets say your 160 lbs, which translates to about 58 grams of protein daily [1]. Then lets take a look at some high protein plants: https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/19-high-pro...
You can trivially hit daily protein goals with just a few cups of various beans, and thats ignoring things life tofu, seitan, leafy greens, etc.
Besides, we know folks can get enough protein from plants alone, as there are many plant-based athletes and bodybuilders.
There are certain nutrients -- like B vitamins -- that people have a hard time getting enough of from plants. It's not hard to get enough protein. It is hard to get enough of some other things.
That's common knowledge. It isn't something I need to prove.
B vitamins need to be supplemented for most people, plant-based or otherwise. Almost all livestock is supplemented, too, which is how most people who meat get any B-12 at all.
As for anything else, because you imply there are other vitamins that are lacking in plant-based diets, the onus to provide proof is definitely on you.
I'm a fan of the carnivore diet, and I hate this push for "fake meat" with a passion. Corporations are ruining the quality of meat (hormones, feed composed of "non-foods" like corn, soy, and other proinflammatory nonsense, poor treatment, destroying land quality unsustainably); and then other faceless corporations are taking advantage of this, starting a highly aggressive marketing campaign against meat and in favor of their future products, with the obvious goal of banning real meat altogether one day, preventing one from raising animals themselves, solidifying this false dichotomy between corporate fake-meat and corporate "real"-meat. With the current push, all across Europe, to ban perfectly good cars from being driven, it's obvious that the "moral emergency" of climate change will inevitably lead to governments feeling entitled to tell us we can't eat foods we evolved on, and have eaten for hundreds of millenia. Hard to think of something more dystopian. To be hurriedly replaced with unproven, non-Lindy, lab meat with zero long-term health studies, or other vegan foods (which, in today's worls, sadly isn't taken by most people to mean healthy vegetables, but mostly sugar-laden monstrosities; corporations love sugar, and sugar is a plant!)
Current vegans might rejoice, but all the ex-vegans and other dieters who switched to keto or carnivore and experienced immediate and (sometimes) lifechanging health benefits will be very, very angry at this prospect.
Meat has been forbidden for peasants for much of human history, it increases testosterone levels, enhancing upper body strength and promoting disregard for authority. So there's now a huge push against access to meat for the lower classes (that is, anyone except the top 1-5%).
My take is the opposite. There is some incredible work going on at smaller regional farms using cattle to increase grasslands and provide a sustainable source of protein. Farming in a way that doesn't vilify the cow. CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) meat will be the smoking equivalent in the future, but making the distinction between "dirty:" beef and sustainably raised beef is important.
I think you're generalizing a little bit too much, if you're talking about excess red meat and beef then yeah I would probably agree with you, but if you're consuming healthier sources such as lean chicken and fish then I haven't really read any papers suggesting that they have adverse health effects.
Do you mean in terms of PR ala "big tobacco lobbied and biased the social perception (and scientific enquiry) of its products", or do you mean in terms of personal harm?
b/c I'd find it hard to believe meat could be as harmful because, morality aside, smoking is very personally unhealthy, systematically.
Given the environmental impact, I'd sooner compare it to fossil fuel consumption, or (micro)plastics disposal.
The fact that the CE Delft report used some random cheap fertilizer off of Alibaba as their price estimate for macronutrient feed is a really bad look. Makes me think there's a lot of borderline fraudulent overhyping going on to attract money and investment.
There is, very obviously. They're exploiting the fact that most people are lazy and dumb. "You don't need to look into the details. You don't need to give up eating meat when lab-grown is just around the corner. Invest in the future!" While in reality cutting down on meat consumption or even going vegetarian/vegan would be the better option. Plant based meat-replacement products are another promising option.
There are so many examples of such hype. Take the recent peddling of psychedelic drugs as a treatment for everything. Companies collect a lot of cash with the investment hype forming around this. But of course all your mental health problems don't magically disappear with DMT. It's this exploitative society and our lifestyles that make more and more people sick. It's ultimate the same Peter Thiels who also sell you the cure that are part of the problem in the first place.
Tbh this is less of a red flag than it looks like. An academic researcher doing this type of analysis doesn’t usually have access to commodity pricing data, much less the ability/clout to engage in a serious discussion with suppliers to determine the true bulk price at the scale they’re interested in.
I remember similar stories about solar panels and wind energy decades ago, and they are definitely viable now. The lab grown meat industry will either have to wait for a break through or for meat prices to sky rocket. Both are probable in the next few decades.
There's a difference between the natural progression of technology, manufacturing capability, and economic and efficiency improvements brought about by large scale manufacturing. The path to cheap solar panels was relatively straightforward 10 years ago. The argument this paper makes (convincingly IMO) that the path to these efficiency improvements for cultured meat are still TBD.
> "I remember similar stories about solar panels and wind energy decades ago, and they are definitely viable now. "
I remember similar stories about ubiquitous hypersonic air travel and colonies on the moon decades ago and they are definitely still not viable now.
There is no guarantee that the necessary breakthroughs are going to occur (and the article does make it clear that a lot of breakthroughs are going to be needed) and it's wishful thinking to believe otherwise.
I went vegan decades ago and these sorts of discussions always crack me up. I understand that for a lot of people (myself included at one time) giving up meat sounds absolutely impossible to imagine. But in reality, it is very simple. These days there are so many readily available plant-based products. There isn't really a NEED for lab-grown meat except in the sense that people think they need to eat meat. It might be a better plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising to deprogram people from that way of thinking.
I really doubt that is an effective way to spend the money, it might not be hard to go veg(an), but so far it's really hard to get people to go veg(an).
Occasionally I hear animal welfare researchers and activists on the 80,000 Hours podcast report their actual modeling and computation where they seem consistently to come to the conclusion that changing minds is not an effective use of money and effort at the margin.
I’m torn on this topic. I personally would not be a customer of lab meat. However if someone is going to eat meat it’s much better for the environment if they eat lab grown meat. On the other hand, they are not experiencing the health benefits of eating a plant based diet.
In the end, I’m neither in support or oppose to this research. I do wonder if the investment is better spend on Beyond or Impossible (which I am not a customer of either.)
Exactly. As long as we are supplementing B12 (easily done) there are no other nutrients that we are short on. Here is a link to some vegan athletes and a snooker player. https://www.greatveganathletes.com/
From an environmental perspective, we actually do need to eat meat, just not the cow. Humans can't eat the only plants which can grow in marginal land areas, whereas goats and other hardy livestock can and then themselves be eaten by humans.
So the optimal diet to feed the world sustainably, currently, includes animal protein. Pure vegan is a luxury choice under that model.
That’s cool that it works for you, but it seems like it will be difficult to win over hearts and minds (and stomachs) with your smug sense of superiority oozing from every word.
It's actually not THAT difficult to win people over. At least slowly. In the past 20 years the USA has gone from less than 1% vegan to 6% vegan. I used to have to go to the hippie grocery store to get things like Soy Milk, now they are everywhere. Restaurants have vegan options, etc. It's a very slow revolution, but it is definitely taking place. It is unfortunate that it is hard to talk about (even in a discussion about lab-grown meat) without people being offended. Some people are more open minded about hearing it than others, and at this point I don't take it personally.
The problem is that we are not having the same conversation. I am talking about torturing animals and you aren't. I'm not trying to talk down to you, but it's impossible for it to be seen any other way. Sometimes there is a right and a wrong.
The difference is that I am not asking you to take anything on faith. I am saying it is wrong to torture animals, and you (most likely) agree with me. Some people think it is fine to kill animals for food, but most people would not DIRECTLY treat animals the way our food production factories do. So there is a lot of mental gymnastics involved. But that's not the same as religion. You can go to a factory farm and see animals suffering.
I absolutely understand why people are so resistant to being told that eating meat hurts animals. I wasn't born vegan, and I grew up eating the typical American diet and ignoring where my food came from.
Wait, so you mean if you take linear projections of today's outputs and costs and extrapolate into the future it seems impossible? No shit. This is basically the case with every interesting technology project. There will no doubt have to be innovations in the approach, the equipment, etc. But in reality all we are talking about is mixing fluids and maintaining some temperatures. All of which is done at massive scale for chemicals, oil and gas, etc. I don't have strong claims to make regarding cultivated meat, but the kind of thinking behind this article is rampant. If the money is there, then this can no doubt be scaled up for far, far cheaper than the author envisions.
Maybe you should RTFA before commenting. The people who did the detailed analysis in the article have extensive experience doing exactly this thing and even using the most optimistic projections still found that it's just not feasible.
The article makes a bunch of points about economics, and those may be true now, but there are many products widely available today that were at one point considered impossible to produce at significant scale.
That said, I think the article raises a few fundamental limits that probably cannot be currently overcome: 1 - animal cell division times are far too long, and 2 - animal cell cultures would be highly susceptible to viral and bacterial contamination, which could completely kill an entire culture. It seems like we could genetically engineer our way out of these problems, but a tractable solution is probably decades away.
So what? Meat is too cheap anyway - it’s subsidized beyond reason and healthcare costs are crazy. Give it time and there’s a non-zero chance we won’t have an economy to care about due to climate change. This is a good step even if it’s ‘costly’.
We've been hearing that line for the last 50 years. Bacon and eggs cause/cure cancer depending on the week of the year. Meat remains one of the healthiest and most nutritious things you can eat, the problem is a wild west of cancerous additives and unrestrained processed foods in countries like USA.
I wonder if lab-grown meat is also carcinogenic.[1]
Funds directed at educating the public on the amount of protein they actually need instead of high-protein diets would go a long way towards reducing energy consumption and emissions to help the climate. Lab-grown meat seems like the wrong direction when there are numerous good protein sources already.
I suppose this is a bad time to mention that commercial airlines would all have to close down years ago if it wasn't for the tax free fuel they get to use.
If something's useful enough we can make it happen regardless.
Only international fuel is duty-free for obvious reasons. Domestic fuel is taxed, though the states (IL, GA) with large hubs have curiously low taxes on kerosene.
An exemption when everyone else is taxed on the same commodity is a subsidy - the untaxed people/companies are free-riding on the rest of the infrastructure/services/etc. for which the other taxpayers are paying.
The result of giving a $100 tax exemption/credit is literally the same as no tax exemption/credit and sending a $100 check to the subsidized entity (except for the reduced overhead & bookkeeping on both ends).
You have to go into really fringe circles to find support for lab grown meat. I mean really fringe -- like people who think vegans are too conventional. Most people are absolutely disgusted by the idea[1], and so you are not going to get a lot of popular support for subsidizing this industry via the taxpayer.
At the same time, VCs are supposed to be unconventional. This is perfect for VCs, so that is the appropriate funding route for the lab meat and bug meat industries.
Anecdotally, I have had the exact opposite reaction. Many people I know are fine with something that can reasonably substitute the taste with the same or lower cost, and comparable nutrition.
I'm not sure subsidies will catch on, but it's less radical to suggest eating artificial meat than to suggest veganism.
Once I can’t tell the difference in taste (and Impossible is already there for utility hamburgers and other low/mid-grade ground beef uses) and price (Impossible is terribly uncompetitive here), I’ll happily switch.
I’m not sure that’s a majority view, but I think it’s going to be a > 25% view. If it’s 25% cheaper, it’ll be a 50% view.
> When we split the poll results out by income, participants in households earning over $75,000 per year were nearly twice as likely to say they’d purchase cultured meat (47 percent), compared to those in households earning less than $25,000 per year (26 percent).
That’s not as fringe as you’re claiming, and seems to be more a price concern.
It’s also mostly abstract for now. Get it on the shelves and some positive reviews and I’d expect opinion to shift.
Plenty of brown rice, soy, nuts, beans etc for people to stop eating meat altogether if they actually needed more protein (they probably don't). ¯\_(?)_/¯
Maybe we should direct funds towards advertising meat-free and the benefits of not consuming carcinogenic meat instead of all of this meat replacement. [1]
You can eat all the inferior substitutes, I'll stick to grass fed beef every day. There's no replacement for animal protein, it's the healthiest thing you can eat. Meat is well known to increase testosterone levels, promoting all sorts of beneficial effects on your metabolism and mental well being.
I wouldn't say eating meat is the healthiest thing you can eat.
It seems like most people need fiber for a diverse and resilient gut biome.
But the dangers of cholesterol are largely overblown.
Sugar, oxidation, insulin levels, and stress play a far more pervasive roles.
Statins are largely ineffective for preventing heart disease except for a small percentage of older white males.
There's also a low causal relationship between dietary cholesterol and the cholesterol found in your blood.
And most cholesterol in the human body is produced in the liver.
The biomechanics of the body are complex and difficult, but one underrated aspect of being able to produce meat in a lab is you would be able to repurpose that technology to produce human organs for people who need new kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, etc.
It's a very valuable technology, even if you're not interested in eating it.
As a vegan Hindu it makes me sick thinking about making a food have the taste and texture of a dead animal. But I do understand the desire to keep eating what is familiar
The other day I decided to try a beyond burger for a change. I had to throw it away because I could not eat it, because eating something even close to meat was unappetizing.
lol thanks. I read that totally backwards, and after having that burger tonight i concur with the commenter. They're pretty damn good, I'd happily eat another
This was said as a current meat eater, but if I keep down this recent ethical veganism youtube rabbit hole i might not be that much longer
I think it's hard for me to say exactly without a side by side comparison, partially because this one had different toppings than my normal burgers do, but it seems fairly comparable in flavor and I would buy these again. I've also had an impossible burger a few years back at a nicer restaurant and that was good too.
I think both are to the point that if I didn't know what I was eating and didn't deeply try to analyze and compare, I could eat one without any idea that it's not meat.
I'm now somewhat interested the next time I see my family to see if I can pull off a ruse of making burgers for dinner from these and see if anyone even notices, particularly my brother who would say there's no way you could trick him XD
The problem with all non-animal sources of protein is their ratio of protein to carb+fat. I eat ~.8gr of protein per lb of body weight per day to maintain my muscle mass. If I had to get that protein from non-animal sources, I'd be way over my total daily calorie intake.
Tablespoon of peanut butter really isn't any more work. It's probably less.
> How many beans equal a serving of meat?
> In general, 1 ounce of meat, poultry or fish, ¼ cup cooked beans, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon of peanut butter, or ½ ounce of nuts or seeds can be considered as 1 ounce-equivalent from the Protein Foods Group.[1]
Technical minded people might want to skip the popular article and go straight to the Open Philanthropy analysis: https://engrxiv.org/795su
The punchline: muscle cells are much more fragile than yeast, don't grow as fast, and need more expensive feedstocks. The bioreactors have to be smaller and run much longer, making them vulnerable to bacterial contamination. You'll never get to the price of commercially produced bulk yeast, because muscle isn't yeast.
You could imagine tweaking the temp range and growth rate with genetic engineering or adding in an immune system. But now you're talking about decades of investment, not years.
The only thing they really mention about antibiotics is that "in the absence of antibiotics,78 a cell-culture bioreactor will readily harbor and be overcome by the contaminating microbe, which proliferate much faster than animal cells"
So, why not just spike the media with penstrep like everyone currently culturing animal cells in the lab for the past three or four decades at least?
There are also other parts of this where it seems like they are comparing technologies in the context of where they are today in the small scale cell culture world (of mililiter amounts) where everything plastic is sold for 100x what it costs Fisher or VWR to make since its government monopoly grant money that is being spent anyhow. If a company wanted to do retention filtering at scale they can do it for much cheaper than what it costs today for researchers working cell culture in academic labs.
All I'm hearing is "there are some technical challenges". Of course there are. Keeping things sterile is basically not impossible. Nature is full of animals that figured out how to keep bacteria from rotting their bodies while they are still using them.
The conclusion related to cost is based on a very narrow understanding of the problem space and is only true if you stick with the article's assumptions and presumptions.
Future Meat Technologies apparently launched a facility that produces about 500 kilo of meat per day. That company has raised close to 46 million (according to Crunchbase). They are clearly still figuring a few things out. But you could see that scale a bit. From there it is just running the kilo price of meat against that and you can calculate revenue. Lets take beef for example. The kilo price of beef would be around 10$. So this facility produces about 5K worth of beef per day. Or about 1.8M per year. It's obviously a small research facility and not some mega facility. But it's been built by a company that invented the technology to do this and that then built this first factory. All on a budget of at most 50M$. I assume they've had a few false starts and that most of that budget went into R&D rather than building the factory that is alledgedly doing this. So, that factory is a lot cheaper than 50M$ probably.
This author says its never happening and Future Meat Technologies is launching their products in the US market next year. That can't both be true.
Add economies of scale, learning effects, etc. to the mix, and you get to quite profitable state quite soon. E.g. a facility that produces a few thousand kilos of beef per day selling it at 10$ per kilo, would be earning back Future Meat Technologies' investment to date every year. Doesn't sound that far fetched to me based on what they are already doing. The only questions are what would each facility cost to make and what would the running cost be for these facilities in terms of staffing and resources. This sounds to me like it's millions rather than billions.
Like, anyone who tells you "everyone must be a vegetarian" is in my opinion, a fool.
Meat should cost a bit more, and we should feed our meet sources as naturally as possible, cows from grass, pigs from offal (and other sources, pigs will eat anything), and end factory farming of poultry - quite arguably poultry should cost 2-3x more.
Similarly, if folks want to lose weight, the best answer is just to eat less, and I say this as a fat person.
With Impossible and Beyond Meat's proven success do we really need cultured meat? Though personally I have no idea why Impossible and Beyond have been successful over existing delicious veggie burgers.
I read half the article and skimmed the rest so maybe this was addressed and I missed it.
The existing meat industry, in the US at least, is subsidized both directly and via corn subsidies. Secondly, it bears none of the costs of its externalities. If those were factored into the cost of meat used by the report it might make for a more fair comparison.
> "And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, GFI’s facility ..."
> " cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions ..."
> "Each of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion ..."
The last sentence is clearly a mistake -- the 4,000 factories in total would cost $1.8 trillion. Thus replacing all meat with those would cost $18 trillion -- less than 20% of the world's GDP. So clearly feasible, but still not realistic.
Ag is subsidized to the hilt. That’s why food is so cheap. That and borderline wages for labour.
We only subsidize commodity ag that is publicly listed in financial markets.
This is also the reason why food growing(non commodity market) farms don’t get sufficient investment or experience the benefits of cutting edge tech. Investors can see returns on already optimized markets because there is room to introduce new services and products..that is enhanced by AI and subsequently data collection on steroids.
None of this is going to end well. Hubris. We need to consume less meat, automate Ag and focus on plant based nutrition(not fake meat altho cell based vat created meat has its place).
The article contradicts this quote from The Guardian[1]:
> "While numerous companies have come up with palatable formulations, few report being able to make their products for less than about $100 for a meal-size serving."
The OP article states that prices would have to come down by a factor of 4,000. If The Guardian is right, they would only need to fall by a factor of 20 to reach the (heavily subsidized!) price of beef in the US.
Although I don't know whether lab grown meat will be cost-competitive with traditional meat in the near future, the article's thesis "Lab Grown meat will never be cost competitive with traditional meat" assumes a few key points that seem non-intuitive, and makes me wonder if the article is written in good faith:
> The cost of a lab-grown meat facility is comparable to a slaughterhouse.
The footprint and cost of a slaughterhouse does not include the footprint and cost of the places meat is actually grown. The article notes the lab is 'slightly cheaper' than a slaughterhouse - when you add in the space and facilities needed to raise cows I suspect the cost gap significantly increases.
> Lab grown meat would have to be produced in Class 8 clean rooms.
My understanding is that clean rooms have much higher standards than other food processing facilities. Cell cultures today are grown to be studied in tiny amounts so small amounts of contamination need to be strenuously avoided. If we're instead concerned with the volume of production, I'd expect any amount of dirtiness below the incredible filth of a slaughterhouse is likely a win.
> There will be no advancements in cell density of lab-grown meat.
The article assumes lab grow meat will continue to be grown as a single cells in culture. While this is the state of the art today, I'd expect many companies and labs are hard at work on denser strategies. As the article capitulates, cultivated meat could be economically viable "[when] companies can make cells grow beyond certain widely recognized biological limits. Higher cell density means more meat per batch, which in turn means the number of bioreactors can fall, and the size of the clean room can shrink."
All together, I think lab-grown meat is a lot less of a certain-failure than the article seems to suggest.
>Without scale and centralization, cultured meat will be no different from any other food production method: expensive.
Honestly, one of my takeaways was to consider investing in this Future Meat company.
The above quote conflates two kinds of scaling: scaling the reactor (which Future Meat said they can't do) versus scaling the process. You don't need to build a bigger reactor if you can just build a really big machine that makes small reactors. And the great thing about this approach is that a huge bioreactor-building machine (poetically bioreactor-reactor) is invulnerable to contamination, heretofore the biggest problem in lab-grown meat.
The natural comparison is to a car: building a single car will never be economically viable and never has been. But building 10 million cars is absolutely viable.
Honestly, I've been making Impossible burgers at home on brioche buns, butter lettuce, and nice tomato and they're better than pretty much any burger I've ever had (Beyond is 2nd runner up for sure and still super good). I don't want Lab-grown meat and I think it's pretty gross, and I'm a massive carnivore.
I don't think ideas like veganism and lab grown meat are really about "saving the planet." I think most people have a lot of guilt and body horror for various reasons and would like to imagine there is somehow some perfect answer out there.
Saving the planet from climate change is the latest rally cry for people wanting to identify as do-gooders. For most such people, appearances matter more than reality.
Eating less meat than most Americans typically eat is probably a wise move for both your health and the planet. But extremes of this sort seem unlikely to really be the miracle solution people want.
If cost is any kind of meaningful proxy for resource use, I have difficulty imagining that the current prices cited in the article have any hope of ever becoming some kind of meaningful positive impact on human carbon footprint.
We can simply make factory farming illegal. We could cut out the factory farm middleman and raise, slaughter, or livestock ourselves.
We could have the state operate sprawling lab installations spanning thousands of miles.
It would be true moral progress- reducing the need for animal suffering- the people would be uplifted and less immoral.
When there is a moral society, there is a strong society. When there is a strong society- there can be world domination and the destruction of all geopolitical adversaries.
Carbon taxes are a good first step. I would prefer a “qualia tax” where suffering inflicted to animals is quantified using Dennettian heterophenomenology and category theory.
From there we can assign a mathematical value to suffering imposed and calculate an appropriate taxation level.
I once had a friend propose this over dinner when I was still living in LA. He himself was in touch with many of Dennet’s students.
No you can apply an infinite negative value/infinite cost and use that to bootstrap deontological ethics.
You would do this in a mathematical system where only a single infinity exists since otherwise you might get some weird utilitarian algebra with infinities which would ruin the simplicity of deontology.
But anything less than an infinite tax on animal slaughter would be akin to outright tolerating extreme suffering of a living thing so long as someone is willing to pay for it. I can’t see any difference between an infinite tax and just banning animal slaughter.
Why would you have a carbon tax on meat? Meat is renewable, all meat you eat comes from grass being grown. Tax the oil used for transportation etc, but why tax the grass?
Forest has to be cut down (e.g. in Brazil) to create pasture land for cows to graze. More forest has to then be cut down to grow crops that serve to feed those cows.
During their lifetime cows will emit massive amount of GHG in the form of methane.
Beef has roughly 3% efficiency [1] (amount of energy consumed by the cow vs what is transferred to you when you eat it), the worst of any type of food, by far.
For every kg of beef produce, about 60kg of CO2 equivalent is released. This is compared to 3kg of CO2 eq. per kg of tofu for example [2].
> Meat is renewable
If by renewable you mean that it's a regenerating resource, sure. But how does that change anything with regard to GHG emission? Renewable process can pollute more than some non-renewable processes. Those are completly different issues.
> but why tax the grass?
The grass isn't taxed. With a carbon tax, you could buy grass and you would only pay an extra fee for the shipping that emitted CO2. But if you buy beef you have to pay for all the emissions of GHG that were necessary to get you that piece of beef.
Yeah I’ve come to believe you need global hegemony to truly abolish the industrial animal slaughter industry. Same with bitcoin mining or slavery.
If one country doesn’t enforce the ban then everyone in the industry will move there and the mass animal slaughter gets to continue.
Why do you think transferring the ability to farm animals from private individuals to a state monopoly will help reduce suffering? Is there a precedent for this happening anywhere that had a positive result: either regarding factory farming or any concentration of power solely to the state?
I’m saying the state operates meat production labs instead of traditional factory farms. The state can afford the risk of running such an operation because it isn’t tied to the market conditions a private business is. A private company couldn’t run a manhattan project or large welfare system either.
Even if the state run business operates at lower efficiency it still can afford to take risks which a private business can’t.
We're only discussing meat labs right now due to work in the private sector over the past handful of years. Government has played no role in this. The government itself subsidizes factory farming, as noted in other comments, via subsidies. Why would we want to hand over full control when they've done no good in this area at all?
Our discussion here might simply be a proxy for the never-ending free market vs planned economy debate.
I'm a vegan but also not a fan of lab grown meat, it may sway some people but ultimately plants give enough that any special meat replacement product is just a diversion from the plentiful non-meat-centric cuisines and meal choices out there. Lab grown will always be compared to farmed animals and customers will always find something to critique or some difference to latch on to.
That said... the article only gave an aside to the massive animal ag subsidies in the US. A lot less people would eat animals if the real cost was apparent. Which isn't to say people shouldn't have plentiful food options, they should, but we probably have a better use for our money the subsidizing ones which are ethically questionable, destroy the environment, and typically aren't good for you either.
How could it be? All of the dependencies on producing meat the old fashioned way already exist, having to recreate all of that in an artificial environment will of course be more expensive. A lot of costs to create meat naturally are externalities, there would be less externalities to an artificial system of meat production. It can't compete.
In space though, where you have to create the dependencies no matter how you do it, reducing them to the minimum required to produce the meat itself is a lot less intensive than creating grasslands, or growing grain, and growing living animals and keeping them alive, providing them air and water, etc. So lab grown meat is still an important realm of study because if things go well for humans we will need it.
The article is overly concerned with financial cost. Lab-grown meat doesn't need to, itself, directly displace meat through financial competition. Meat can be pushed out of the market by other factors:
--The increased world-wide food requirements making land-use more efficient for crops than resource intensive animal protein.
--Either pricing in, or social pressure towards, reducing carbon emissions can push production lower & prices higher.
Maybe other factors too, but these can, themselves, gradually shift meat out of the marketplace.
In this scenario, vat-grown meat won't be displacing traditional meat, it will simply be filling the gap left by meat as it leaved the market for other reasons.
“Clearly, I don’t think cultured meat has legs” is the best way you could possibly put it and prime headline material.
So, welp, I guess there’s no cheap meat in the future however you put it. And that’s pretty okay because the alternatives are quite good and getting better.
I culture an raise my own mushrooms. Meat seems much harder.
I would love to have a farm with some animals that I raise for meat. My wife says she "can't get to know my meat". Personally, I'd rather know they lived a good life and take satisfaction in the idea that I managed them correctly, that they served a purpose, and that I'll one day be returned to the earth for those like them to eat (my minerals in the grass, etc). Similar line of thinking with hunting - make a clean kill, maximize their use, and know that they were free and at least had a chance to live free and reproduce.
> that they served a purpose, and that I'll one day be returned to the earth for those like them to eat (my minerals in the grass, etc).
They served your purpose, not some noble purpose that matters at all to them. It wouldn’t make sense in the context of a person to kill them and say it was ok because they “served a purpose”. Animals don’t want to die for your satisfaction.
Regardless, in terms of humaneness, the aforementioned approach is a pragmatic step up from industrialised meat farming. Morally, however, the argument for killing an otherwise "healthy" animal regardless of the humaneness involved is specious at best.
I'm not sure that's a given. Animals aren't humans; they don't know what's going to happen to them. Is it really a given that it's morally worse to raise an animal on a small farm, have it live a comfortable life, and then eventually slaughter it for meat, than to have it never live at all?
Please also evaluate this in the context of humans. Should it be allowable for humans to create offspring to satisfy their "need" to reproduce then it means their offspring have to suffer working and struggling, likely without a noble purpose?
I feel like our purpose is just to ensure continued existence of our species. Anything that happens between when you were born and die are just steps to ensure you (or your kinds) are worth keeping around, ensuring the continued existence of the species.
I prefer living to not having lived. I would expect the same of most people who aren't struggling for the necessities of life. About the only seriously negative thing about it in my experience is contemplating it eventually ending. And animals don't have that, as far as I know. So I'd think an animal life largely free of pain or suffering would be a net good.
Animals are not Humans. They don't have the mental faculties that allow thinking about "purpose". The animal is satisfied as long as its needs are met, and not living in agony.
Then who decides the purpose and which purpose is just/noble? This seems to be unanswerable since we do not have counterpoints by other species. By this same logic it wouldn't make sense for people to create offspring, nor would plants be serving a noble purpose as our food.
I would like to know what are the inputs to lab grown meat. I am unconvinced that this is any better for the environment. I expect masses of soya and an inefficient process.
Question - why are animal cells the obvious option? Why can we pursue the same approach as of yeast derived heme, making an individual protein, and just add on extra genes for more types of animal proteins to get all the chemical constituents of meat?
I think it's because animal cells already know how to grow into the flavor / texture profile we're used to. I don't think anyone knows how to fake that convincingly out of constituent parts (or we'd have it already!)
This is making claims about people's current ideas, which is valid, and they may indeed be terrible investments.
But I suspect most people assume new technologies would need to be invented to make lab grown meat work. People haven't proven particularly successful at predicting what will be invented in the future, except in the very near term.
I personally suspect we'll see a lot of replacement tissues for medical use before any sort of food.
As a someone who enjoys reading the history of technology and engineering, this kind of debate happens over and over and over again. Let's give it a few decades of geniuses working on it.
> Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to displace traditional meat
Where does the (current) incendiary HN title come from?
It's clearly a bullshit statement.
Where as, yes the industry has successfully gotten a lot of suckers in, as you can see in all the comments on all HN articles with every supposed launch.
Similarly the comments are now superficially the same, agreeing with the fake title.
The article seems to be shooting down the idea in 2030 lab meat will be the same prince as animal meat. Which would be true.
But what is more interesting is in 2030 if the writing is on the wall about lab grown meat, which it should be, it will crash ever animal farm in the country. If by 2040 beef is cheaper, who in 2030 who will buy a cattle farm?
"Lab-grown" is such a vague term. There's no indication that today's tech is the best that could exist.
The purpose of lab-grown meat is to remove unnecessary parts of the animal from meat production. While many animal parts could be substituted, right now lab-grown meats have the opposite problem, that too many not-animal parts have been introduced.
What if "good" parts of the animal come back? Could disembodied guts and livers turn non-sterile grass into sterile, nutritious plasma? Could muscles grow in slabs and have slices removed regularly, protected by a working immune system?
Lab-grown meat is at the same stage as the early ornithopters.
It was not my intention - lab-grown meat is already on the market, a lot further along than those ornithopters were!
What I meant to express is that for all we know, the lab-grown meat solutions being tried today could be approaching the problem in a much too difficult manner, like the early ornithopters did in the flying-machine problem. The whole field is still in its infancy and it's very possible that many of the issues could be sidestepped with new discoveries.
Never thought of the contamination factor before. One heck of a ballon burst.
Wouldn’t a different route perhaps be more fruitful? Go for an unapologetically fake meat. 3D printed fibers, fat and protein, with raw materials made by yeast or similar process?
It wouldn’t taste the same, but we could aim for it tasking fine and keep incrementing on that year over year.
Funny how all the laypeople here are convinced the experts are wrong because word soup. Almost as if there weren't at least 2 or 3 Dunning-Kruger articles every other week.
I forget where I heard it but someone connected the concept of processed food with synthetic meat and pretty much claimed such meats are a prime example of processed food. Made me think twice about those things after hearing that.
Obviously, he's wrong. There are things we know, there are things we know that we don't know, and, thirdly, there are things that we don't know that we don't know. Anyone betting against autonomous vehicles, fusion reactors, and similar hard challenges knows about that third part and will never say "never" - instead they pad their predictions with "not soon," "unlikely," etc. In contrast, this dude went full bore and just said "no way we'll ever get below $17 per pound." Again, there is definitionally no chance that the third aspect was baked into that prediction, so he's either insanely naive or just financially incentivized to act that way. And then I found it:
> Humbird’s job is to look into the crystal ball. He’s one of the experts NREL contracts to figure out which approaches are viable at scale, how much they would cost, and ultimately if the government should fund them.
Well, if you make it your job to give yes or no predictions, then you cannot take that third factor into account, because you would make it very clear to your employer that your work is absolutely worthless. Someone could have equally hired him 10 years ago to answer: "how many man hours would it take to build a rocket that will take us to Mars?" You think he would have said: "no idea, that's too unpredictable, we have to leave this to crazy people like Elon and then just see what happens?" No, he would have happily spent the next 2 years writing a 100 page document that would spit out some random number between 10 and 10,000,000 years. And then he would lean on his PhD and call it a scientifically backed result.
It would take about 30 mins to do so diligently. I took about 5 mins and skimmed it top to bottom. What I found is a lot of statements that didn’t have any amount of humility or recognition that not all of science has been invented yet. It sounds like you took a deeper stab at it. What did I miss?
While overly wordy and negative, most of the premises of dissent seem to be well founded. The article's own summary:
> *For cultured meat to move the needle on climate, a sequence of as-yet-unforeseen breakthroughs will still be necessary. We’ll need to train cells to behave in ways that no cells have behaved before. We’ll need to engineer bioreactors that defy widely accepted principles of chemistry and physics. We’ll need to build an entirely new nutrient supply chain using sustainable agricultural practices, inventing forms of bulk amino acid production that are cheap, precise, and safe. Investors will need to care less about money. Germs will have to more or less behave. It will be work worthy of many Nobel prizes—certainly for science, possibly for peace. And this expensive, fragile, infinitely complex puzzle will need to come together in the next 10 years.*
More snippets below
Note that GFI refers to the optimistic analysis/factory proposal and Humbird is the author of the pessimistic analysis commissioned by Open Philanthropy.
> The single, hypothetical facility described by GFI would require nearly a third of <the entire capacity of the biopharmaceutical industry today>, just to make [.0002, or one-fiftieth of one percent, of the 100 billion pounds of meat produced in the U.S. each year.]
... If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis[link] by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
Each of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator.
> Humbird’s analysis ... represent the lowest prices companies can expect. ... The final product would be a single-cell slurry, a mix of 30 percent animal cells and 70 percent water, suitable only for ground-meat-style products like burgers and nuggets. With markups ... [this] becomes $40 at the grocery store—or a $100 quarter-pounder at a restaurant. Anything resembling a steak would require additional production processes, introduce new engineering challenges, and ultimately contribute additional expense.
... “The requirements for return on investment need to be set much lower than common practice in commercially motivated investments,” the authors [of GFI] write. ... It will likely need public [subsidies] or philanthropic support to be competitive.
> In cell culture, sterility is paramount. Animal cells “grow so slowly that if we get any bacteria in a culture—well, then we’ve just got a bacteria culture,” Humbird said. ... "The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”
... It may not matter if governments end up allowing cultured meat facilities to produce at food-grade specs, critics say—cells are so intensely vulnerable that they’ll likely need protection to survive.
... According to Humbird’s report, those economics will likely one day limit the practical size of cultured meat facilities: They can only be big enough to house a sweet spot of two dozen 20,000-liter bioreactors, or 96 smaller perfusion reactors. Any larger, and the clean room expenses start to offset any benefits from adding more reactors. The construction costs grow faster than the production costs drop.
For comparison, GFI’s hypothetical plant would have 130 fed-batch reactors and 430 perfusion reactors—a facility that could easily cost over a billion dollars if Humbird’s specs and prices prove to be accurate.
> In Humbird’s projection, the cost of amino [acids] alone ends up adding about $8 per pound of meat produced—already much more than the average cost of a pound of ground beef. GFI’s study, on the other hand, reports that the cost of aminos may eventually be as low as 40 cents per kilo.
Why the discrepancy? ... the price figures for macronutrients are largely based on a specific amino acid protein powder that sells for $400 a ton on ... Alibaba.com. That source ... is not likely not suitable for cell culture. ... Because they’re not intended for human consumption, they may include heavy metals, arsenic, organic toxins, and so on. ... foreign substances that aren’t consumed by the cells—or that don’t kill them outright—likely end up inside the cells.
Currently, global production of individual amino acids is far too low to support cultured meat production, even at a modest scale. ... “There can be no cultured meat scale-up without concomitant and dramatic scale-up of amino acid production,” Humbird’s report concludes.
> when GFI held an invite-only video call on the future of cultivated meat ... San Martin kept pressing. In his view, the science is essentially settled: Cultivated meat won’t be economically viable until companies can make cells grow beyond certain widely recognized biological limits. Higher cell density means more meat per batch, which in turn means the number of bioreactors can fall, and the size of the clean room can shrink.
“I’m not saying no one knows how to do it,” San Martin remembered saying. “I’m saying if someone knows, can you please share it with us?”
... “You can play with the numbers as much as you want, but unless you see the fermenters growing the cells at scale, then it’s just a very theoretical scenario,” he told me. “We don’t get straight answers from the companies. They don’t have to share with us, because we are a university—what’s the point of sharing with us? But it would be nice to know that someone has done it at scale, not in a little shaker. At scale. No one has ever published something saying we can do this at scale at this many cells per ml, and we do it using this trick and this trick.”
What’s more likely, then, is that companies are still struggling with an inherent, widely documented challenge: the cells’ tendency to limit their own growth. Like all living things, animal cells in culture excrete waste.
... Even the legendarily efficient and versatile Chinese hamster ovary cells—an immortalized cell line which has benefitted from more than 60 years of constant research and development—is “probably not efficient enough for low-cost production of bulk cell mass,” according to Humbird.
Maybe cell lines optimized specifically for food production will fare better in time. Still, the cell density issue is one of the most intractable problems this emerging industry will face. Considering that the pharmaceutical industry has already likely spent billions[link] on this very challenge[link]—sums that make the total investment seen in cell meat look like a drop in the bucket—solving it would be a stunning accomplishment.
> Eat Just is preparing to open a large-scale cultivated meat plant in Doha, Qatar, in partnership with two state-backed organizations ... And yet when I spoke to Eat Just’s CEO, Josh Tetrick, he readily admitted that there are still many unknowns—including reckoning with the same challenges Humbird outlines in his report. ... “A number of significant engineering challenges will need to be accomplished,” Tetrick said, with a bluntness that surprised me. “We have a high-quality engineering team. We have sufficient capital to be able to get after this. We understand what the challenges are, and if we’re successful in handling these challenges, we’ll put ourselves in a place where we can do this. And if we don’t, then we won’t. I think that’s just the reality of it.”
If we don’t, then we won’t. I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard a CEO so readily admit that a promised product—in this case, one that Eat Just has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to produce in the last six months alone—might simply not be possible.
... Tetrick said that the Doha facility will need to be a large facility, and that the company defines “large” as being able to produce 10 million pounds of meat a year. That’s only about two-thirds of the output of Humbird’s hypothetical facilities, and less than half of GFI’s. But those facilities are projections; they don’t yet exist. There has never been a facility on earth that can produce cultured animal cells at that kind of volume—not in biopharma, and not anywhere.
... According to Renninger, there’s a reason why the biopharmaceutical industry’s largest bioreactors for animal cell culture tend to peak at about 25,000 liters.
“It’s not so much that it’s just never been done. It’s that it’s never been done because it doesn’t make sense,” he said. “It’s never been done because you can’t. You’re just going to be producing vats of contaminated meat over and over again.”
... Sterility isn’t the only challenge that becomes more grave at larger production volumes. Bigger bioreactors all also struggle to provide all of the cells with the same amount of nutrients and oxygen. The only solution is to stir the cells more rapidly, or blow more oxygen in—but both of these approaches can be fatal. Because they lack a rigid cell wall, animal cells are prone to “shear stress”; they’re fragile little things that can are easily torn apart by rising air bubbles, cell-to-cell collisions, and rotating impellers. This need for increased stirring and oxygen has historically put practical limits on bioreactor size—a problem that remains unsolved at scales well below what Tetrick envisions.
> Eat Just ... wants to use smaller perfusion reactors that cycle out waste material, and it has developed a novel process that also allows for protein and other nutrients to be cycled back in. This approach is one factor that helps to cut down the volume of media needed, leading to what sound like impressive results: $18 to produce a pound of cultured chicken, according to a press representative.
That's the lowest real-world figure I heard in the course of reporting this story. It could also easily translate into a price of more than $30 dollars per pound at retail—and may never go any lower. In a 2019 podcast interview, Future Meat’s chief science officer, Yaakov Nahmias, admitted that, given the company’s process, there aren’t really additional economies of scale to capture. For the foreseeable future, that’s more or less how much Future Meat’s products are going to cost.
... Working with small, perfusion reactors means putting hard limits on the size of a facility; their smaller size means many more bioreactors are needed overall, which means more capital expenditure costs and a larger clean room.
That may be why, in the 2019 podcast, Nahmias said he didn’t see large-scale facilities in cultured meat’s future.
... [He] went on to imagine a scenario where farmers and ranchers pivot away from livestock and instead take on their own bioreactors, cranking out several thousand pounds of cultivated meat each year (and, I assume, paying a license fee to Future Meat for use of its tech). Others can debate whether or not that approach is practically feasible, though sterility control and the lack of specialized training would seem to be major obstacles. The larger problem is economic. Without scale and centralization, cultured meat will be no different from any other food production method: expensive.
... We already have a food system where people with enough means can pay for meat from “happy” animals. Cultured meat on a smaller scale would likely only extend that logic. Namely, that if you’re rich enough, you can pay to know that your meat didn’t die a painful death
... Based on his experience on the board of the Global Alliance for Livestock Medicines, a Gates Foundation-funded nonprofit that supports people in Africa, India, and Nepal who rely livestock for their livelihood, Wood feels that the solutions proposed by cultured meat advocates are hopelessly out of touch with the needs of the developing world.
“These are not solutions for these people,” he said. “So in this whole debate around the future of food, we’re ending up with solutions that fit wealthy, middle-class people who want more options. I’ve got nothing against it, but don’t pretend it’s going to solve world food. That’s the thing I find most offensive.”
I also think this works out. Maybe it's just wishful thinking but I feel it will.
I suspect the answer may be not culturing "animal" cells they are now but instead a genetically modified "something" (perhaps yeasts?) that grow well under lab culture and produce the same amino acid/ fat profiles. And after processing it will be close enough to "meat", maybe even better.
I believe there is a company growing milk proteins with yeasts now.
Almost there! How about growing the meat essence, say hemoglobin with yeast, and providing the fibrous structure from plants? That's exactly what Impossible Foods has done.
Just look at any of "the world in 50 years" from the 20th and 19th century and you'll notice the extremely vast majority of expected technological advances didn't mature even remotely close to what technocrats predicted, if at all.
We're in the middle of a hype cycle, we've been in hype cycles many times since the 30s. People think everything is possible, that science is an unlimited power and that we just have to work hard enough on a problem to solve it.
Technocrats of the 60s said we'd have 2 days workweek by the year 2000 thanks to automation, artificial intelligence experts of the 70s said we'd reach AGI in a decade, engineers of the 80s predicted flying cars would be the norm, 2012 Musk said autonomous cars would be there "in two years".
Some people view technology as some kind of deity, as if wishful thinking and disguised prayers were all you need
I take the opposite view - technology has progressed faster than any other aspect of our experience on this planet. From first flight to landing on the moon = 60 years. From first computers to an iPhone = 60 years. What else has changed in this world faster than technology?
I'd say going to the moon and shitting 15% faster iphones every 6 months is easy compared to fission, lab grown meat and fully autonomous vehicles. You're under the impression that we've accomplished a lot, and we did to some extent, but the vast majority of it is regular incremental updates, not paradigm shifting discoveries. Running water, central heating or the invention of fridges is more exciting to me than anything we came up with since the 60s, including going to the moon.
We have iphones, tiktok, and subscription based meditation apps sure. We're still living in the exact same ways, just with more distractions and less available time. Productivity increased dramatically but we're not doing better things, we're just doing more things. The gap between "what could be" and "what is" is filled with an incredibly huge amount of gadgets and clutter.
Also, life isn't a video game, the fact that we did ABC in the past doesn't mean we can do XYZ in the future. If you listen to Musk we'll be sipping mojitos on Mars by 2050, I'd be surprised if we have fully autonomous cars on earth by then tbh.
Lab grown meat or fission are more like "invention of the wheel -> modern electric car" rather than "og iphone -> iphone 13"
I disagree with the article's premise. Lab grown meat that is exactly like animal meat may be impossible, but this industry may discover some lab grown protein that tastes good and is more healthy for us, which is also more efficient to manufacture. There's nothing in the laws of physics that prevents such a product from being created. Seems very arrogant to suppose that just because you know the state of current technology that you can know what it is ten years from now, much less 20 years from now.
The environmental cost of livestock isn’t taken into account is it? What if they were taxed and not subsidized based on the cost to fix whatever environmental damages. I’m curious what the price per pound of meat would be then.
Paul Wood, the first source for this article and the "former pharmaceutical industry executive" who claims that "the reality" is that lab-grown meat will never work, is on the board [1] of GALVmed [2], a private sector Product Development Partnership firm that "harnesses the best available expertise and capabilities ... to develop vaccines, medicines and diagnostics for the major livestock diseases impacting small-scale [livestock owners]" [3]. He's also the guy who paid for Huw Hughes — another source quoted repeatedly by the article — for two years to come up with an analysis that claimed GFI's pro-cultured-meat study was fatally flawed.
Interesting that the article leads with Paul Wood's former work but leaves out his current livestock-focused work, in an article downplaying lab-grown meat. Wood claims to not "understand how costly biomanufacturing techniques could ever be used to produce cheap, abundant human food;" I suppose Upton Sinclair had a point about it being difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.
The obstacles for lab-grown meat are conceptually similar to the “impossible” obstacles people were claiming would prevent ever bringing the electric car to market successfully. The same kind of circumstances are being ignored and the time it took to achieve the current state of industry is being ignored. Just like the electric car, there is an enormous group of people that want to see lab-grown meat fail.
As a vegetarian and sometimes vegan for over 15 years, I’ve been amazed by the recent development in meat replacements, like beyond and impossible and hundreds of others. I wonder if faked meat can get so good to remove the lab meat market. At least for burgers i think this already is true.
Not vegan but I’ve been going through a lot of meat replacement by sheer curiosity.
A lot of them tasted to me pretty close to run fo the mill “meh” meat. But to be honest, I don’t crave mediocre meat, and somewhat feel like the vegetables used for these ersatz might have actually tasted better than the end result. I still look forward good quality, well prepared meat.
I think a lot of people wouldn’t mind switching to other protein sources that don’t taste like meat at all for everyday/every meal intake, and have actual delicious meat at rarer occasions at higher cost.
Basically, I am not sure our best shot is to try to replace meat with fake meat, and would assume most people wouldn’t bother with meat as much if the price even just reflected the environmental impact.
No one likes to hear it, because while vaccine advocates are offering free alcohol and donuts for overweight people getting shots, maybe our focus should be on health in general and the meat industry, sugar industry, energy drink companies, alcohol and tobacco industry are all dangerous and have an interest to protect their profits and publish whatever fear articles they can in order to so, just like the FDA pushes through Alzheimer drugs and approving vaccines from lobbyists that end up working at the FDA... maybe our focus in general should be on health and limiting our consumption and reliance on meat. Not only are there ethical concerns, but there are environmental concerns as well.
Well, I always felt the same about NanoPore sequencing and here we are. As a biologist it’s difficult to imagine that we can’t tackle all of these problems. Sure it may take longer than initially expected, like fusion reactors.
Maybe we’ll get there in another way, by culturing a cow that can walk but has no central nervous system? But we’ll get there.
Well, 'fortunately' I have no doubt meat will be on the future list of hate taxes to be enforced upon us. It'll be a competition between 'climate change', 'morals', and 'unhealthy', but undoubtedly these three together will be used.
Like most hate taxes it'll start with something reasonable until one day more than half the price is simply the tax.
> Most of us have a limited appetite for 50-dollar lab-grown chicken nuggets.
You don't need lab-grown/cell cultured product to make replacement chicken - especially nuggets.
There's hundreds/thousands of products that taste closer to chicken than fake beef tastes like beef - made from soy, gluten or whatever, that only cost a few dollars. You can probably tell the difference if it was served as a breast/thigh but slices/strips for salads and stir fries etc are indistinguishable.
For example Wholefoods accidently swapped some labels on real chicken and 'chickn' salads and nobody noticed.
And yes! Also think that making an artificial wagyu will be very easy and probably not harder/more expensive than any other, and $50 or even $100 dollar wagyu steak is going to be super competitive. And chicken is easy - even a completely chemical, artificial chicken made from God knows what, is hardly distinguishable from a real one so yeah, not much chance there.
even if it’s cost competitive or even cheaper, im not eating the disgusting frankensteins concoction in this article. I’d rather pay more for real meat. And if that’s illegal or sometbing then i’d rather be a vegan
Philosophicaly what's the point of negativity of a humanity scale important solution? Yes it may never work, fusion may never work too. Co2 absorbing plants neither. What do we gain by thinking this?
FINALLY an article that looks at the basic scientific fundamentals of this. Lab-grown meat, similar to carbon removal tech, is currently super hyped in the mainstream media.
Like Pat Brown, founder of Impossible usually says, paraphrasing: "There is no such thing as lab-grown meat, and there will never be. If somebody figures out how to grow cells reliably in a bioreactor, it will make much more sense to sell it as organs for use in medicine than to eat it (financially)."
It just doesn't make sense to grow meat in the lab if we can make it from plant proteins directly. Period.
What makes me sad and angry about the startups and billions of VC money that goes into this is that we need to reduce emissions NOW. We don't have time to fuck around with sci-fi tech that maybe brings down the price of lab-grown meat to a level that the top 10% of the population might afford it, in 10 or 20 years. It has been proven that there are great ways to make meat alternatives from plant proteins directly, we should invest time and money into expanding that!
On a side note, I think for a lot of people the existence of research and startups on lab-grown meat is an excuse to continue eating meat. They say that once it's there, I'll of course switch over. But they are not ready to switch over to alternatives like Impossible burgers that are just as good now.
Most people aren’t even open to reducing their meat intake a little never mind replacing it. We need solutions that allow people to continue doing what they’re doing with minimal adjustment. This is at least an attempt at that.
This is the problem I feel with a lot of the current environmental movement. It’s loud, brash, and only seems to offer unrealistic solutions for most people. It ignores the people that can’t make changes like giving up their cars, buying new electric cars, going vegan etc. It ignores that humans want a better life than the previous generation. While we all need to make personal changes (and most people are in small ways at least)the majority of the impact will be made through new technical solutions becoming more affordable and just generally better options than older carbon emitting options.
I agree. what I'm saying is that it's possible to make meat out of plants direclty, without the need for lab-grown meat. If you won't replace your burger with an Impossible burger, you also won't replace it with a lab-grown one.
I’m not so sure. I think if people hear it comes from plants in anyway (even if it tastes the same as lab grown meat) they’ll refuse it. “Lab grown meat - just like the real thing!” feels like it would have much better uptake among meat eaters.
Counterpoint: The same people would refuse the lab-grown meat because it comes from the lab and is synthetic. I mean, in most parts of the EU GMO crops aren't even allowed because people think it will make them into mutants.
I'm a "you can't convince me to eat less meat" person but I find myself voluntarily ordering an Impossible Burger when it's on the menu. It's generally within $1 of the real burger price and I truly think it tastes just as good.
It's not very close to replacing a nice steak or other more luxury meat products, but it's a really impressive start and I am rooting for them!
It's generally within $1 of the real burger price and I truly think it tastes just as good.
Especially for fast food burgers I think this would be a real option. Even as meat eater with no plans of going vegitarian I think the Burger King meatless Whopper is in no way worse the the meat version. If McDonalds, Burger King etc. made the meatless Whopper and Big Mac $0.50-1.00 cheaper than the meat version I think you would see a significant switch.
Alternately: we don’t have time to fuck around with trying to convince a significant portion of humanity to transform their diets and toss all the cultural significance that goes along with foods we’ve eaten for thousands of years. Impossible burgers are fine as far as veggie burgers go, but few would call them “just as good”.
Raise everyone’s taxes by 1% and put all the additional revenue into replacing coal plants with modern nuclear. Mixing up the goal of GHG gas reduction with all sorts of other long term poltical, conservation, and cultural ideas is only slowing us down.
The Impossible direction is really another take on the same idea. People are excited about lab-grown meat because it "shortcuts" all the animal stuff. Meat substitutes are trying to make something with attributes of meat from plants... just like these animals construct their meat from the plant-based feed.
So can Impossible or other companies figure out how to select, refine, ferment, and otherwise process plants directly into something with meat-like attributes? And do so more efficiently than lab-grown meat? It seems more than likely: even if there are many challenges in getting from the OK meat substitutes of today to a full meat substitute it still seems much easier than a lab-based cell culture process.
This is just wrong; The cell quality needed for organs vs a meat slurry are totally different. You don’t even need the cells to be alive in the final serving.
I read the linked article and the referenced paper [0] fairly closely, from the point of view of a vegetarian that wants this stuff to work from an animal suffering perspective.
Long term, I don't think there are any physical limitations argued for by the paper here, and the report doesn't change my ~50 year expectations that slaughter will be greatly reduced in wealthy countries due to tech impact (of either plant replacement or cultured meat).
But, it does present a compelling argument against "right now" technology scaling up. If anyone is selling you "we'll grow it in a bioreactor" without answering the questions of (macronutrient sourcing) and ((immunity to bacterial and viral infections) or (cell density)) then they are peddling fake news.
Why do we insist on growing meat in the lab, when it already grows on animal in a natural way?
It could be seen as a naïve question however I think it's a part of bigger trend where humans are trying to replace natural processes with cultural. Isn't the science-fiction dream to grow babies in an artificial womb and give them to parents "when they are ready".
This trend worries me. I think we should go the other way and acknowledge and accept that we are animals and part of the animal kingdom in every way.
it's because of climate change, cows and chicken use too much space, resources (water, crop), so we're burning down big regions (amazon rainforest) to have enough space. We also can't feed the whole world with meat, so we can either go all vegan or have a different way of producing meat, so why not skipping the whole animal part?
Most of the things you listed sound like simple, indisputable issues everyone agrees about. This is actually not the case. I suggest researching into this a bit further. There is a documentary Sacred Cow and a book Being Ecological by T Morton, which are a good start. Also this article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/vegani...
Leaving aside the truth in these claims, if the article linked in this thread demonstrates that natural processes are more energy efficient than labwork, the choice in a clean energy starved society should be very simple. I can't imagine why we need to mine the metals, build the panels or wind turbines, build the lab buildings and the equipment just to get a chunk of nutrients of questionable quality (drenched in antibiotics).
It is the same argument my friend, Nico [1] presents in his experiment where he is 'generating' 1kg of wheat [2] to help himself and other understand the 'claim' that we can grow things indoor and so we can go ahead and keep fucking the planet.
I don't care about lab-grown meat or other "realistic" substitutes.
Just give me no-soya plant-based alternatives, at a price that is grounded in the cost of ingredients which current ones are definitely not - [1][2] vs [3]
The TL:DR of this article seems to be "You'll never be able to make big enough bioreactors while keeping it clean enough - even a single spec of dust kills everything".
But I think that's not true. As long as you can seal the bioreactor and heat it, you need not worry about contamination.
Just put all the ingredients in, heat it up to boiling point for a few hours, cool it down, and then add your single starter cell.
The bioreactor can be as big as you like - a plastic lined artificial lake could be a good starting point.
one, from an energy perspective, there's a lot of non meat involved in growing an animal that's jut not there when growing only a muscle. All the energy the animal spend on growing and sustaining brains, lungs, a digestive tract etc is unnecessary to the artificial meat, so there's some margin for industrial production costs.
second, government may decide to force consumer hand imposing taxes and levies on livestock, if the climate situation gets bad enough
At this point, I wonder if we are just being silly.
We are never going to stop this planet's deterioration while being on it. Maybe building nice, big and posh O'Neil cylinders and moving everybody and their cows there would be less expensive and depressing than trying to merely atenuate the billion of ways in which we harm the planet. Seriously!
Most meat nowadays already comes out of labs. Because that is a much more appropriate name for all these meat factories we have nowadays. Farms are a thing of the past.
There are a lot of spaces where that doesn't really matter. A Big Mac, once covered in cheese, bacon, sauce etc. doesn't really taste like meat. Those 'instant' microwave meals don't really taste like meat. Most of the meals I was served for lunch in school didn't really taste like meat. Every hospital meal I've ever eaten didn't really taste like meat. I assume prison meals are worse than all of the above. In all these, and similar, use cases real meat could be replaced with a halfway decent meat substitute without any culinary value being lost.
My biggest gripe with lab-grown meat is the use of processed vegetable oils for fat. That stuff is killing us. The military-ag-industrial complex - which continues to obliterate our soil health and disperse roundup/glyphosate as far as the eye can see - is the nucleus of all of our health problems.
Beef is the main target here, it has much greater carbon intensity, it is responsible for methane, and it uses a huge amount of land and feed for a single serving of beef. It's just a highly inefficient process to get beef. If we focus all our efforts there, we'll yield the greatest outcome.
I think inevitably, the labs will make something, "close enough to meat". Then corporations will strip that down to the most cost effective model of that "meat". This will be sold to consumers as "green meat" or something that gives them the impression they're saving the world. The body will struggle with the amalgamation. Probably worse than a McNugget. Because even though a McNugget is filled with junk, there's still some meat (probably?).
Some disease will arrise in society that is obviously caused by consuming X "meat". And lobbyist will make sure that the public never knows.
Then we will have a massive diseased population. That a "health" industry will thrive on "marginally" treating the diseased.
Wait a second. This sounds like what we already have. Carry on.
Yeah well, it's time we need to get used to the fact that meat is a luxury, and not entirely necessary to a healthy diet. The least that could be done is reducing the sizes of portions.
Proteins can be found in many other foods, and vitamin B12 can be found in supplements.
Human can adapt to several types of diets. It's annoying because medicine and climate science and biology have to advocate for less meat, but it's very difficult to advocate against lifestyles.
This article tries to get away with a giant sleight of hand for a reader that might not be super clear on lab grown vs plant based. The overwhelming majority of fake meat is plant based, not cultured. Sure, one day we might see competitive economics from cultured meats, but claiming that it won’t happen because their factories aren’t pound for pound equivalent makes no sense. People are choosing alternatives to meat because they don’t want the Amazon further destroyed for cattle production, because they watch a video of how animals are treated (I dare you to watch one slaughterhouse video from peta), and because the carbon intensity is simply too high broadly. Plant based meat is now widely available and just about at price parity (not $50/chicken nugget as the post misleadingly suggests of fake meat when actually referring to R&D phase cultured meat production). The main “source” of perspective for the first half of the article is an “animal health” industry insider aka, meat industry representative. His career has been literally to keep cows alive long enough to kill them at the perfect time before serving them in happy meals, forgive me if I think he more than a little biased
If you’re only looking at the cost to the consumer. If you include the cost of externalities to the environment… And I guess animal suffering isn’t a cost this is going to include… And the article addresses subsidies only once, in this one hand waving sentence: “ To be fair, the traditional meat industry already benefits from enormous direct and indirect government subsidies.”
> “Cattle consume roughly 25 calories of plant material for every calorie of edible protein they produce, according to some estimates. Even chickens, the most efficient form of livestock from a feed perspective, eat 9 to 10 calories of food for every calorie of edible protein produced. Friedrich, the director of GFI, has said that’s like throwing away 8 plates of pasta for every one plate we eat.”
Beef and chicken have more than protein calories. They also have carbohydrates and fats. Reporting only a slice of the calories is as misleading as saying a 100 calorie chocolate chip cookie only has 25 sugar calories so it’s healthy.
Unless someone responds with a counter-argument, this takes away some amount of the authority this article has.
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