I don't think Beyond Meat is lab-grown meat, as far as I'm aware it is not made from actual animal cells but just a mix of plant-based ingredients like the ones listed.
> Producing meat in the lab “will never be done with anything remotely like the economics you need for food,” Pat Brown, founder of the plant-based meat company Impossible Foods, told the Post last year.
Whether correct or not, this kind of reporting always seems silly to me. You're not interviewing an impartial expert on the subject, you're getting a quote from a direct competitor. Of course, they're going to say something along these lines. This important nuance will be lost on most readers.
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
You entirely missed the context of that quote, which was preceded by "vegan meat replacements today, meat grown from cells tomorrow."
"Cell-grown meat" isn't what Beyond or Impossible are doing - what they are doing is "vegan meat replacements," replicating the taste of meat using vegetable sources. Neither company is trying to grow real meat from cell cultures in a lab, which is what you're talking about.
The "lab-grown" term is [EDIT: sometimes and apparently incorrectly] used for plant-based meat substitutes like Impossible Burger. It probably shouldn't be, but it is.
I, too, used to confuse Memphis Meats with Impossible Food / Beyond Meat.
It's just that news of lab-grown meat and outfits like Impossible Food kinda sprung up at the same time in the news within the last 5 years and it's easy to confuse the endeavors. In fact, I see this misconception enough that I think IF/BM benefit from the confusion.
> Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition.
And survive in a very complex and hostile environment, adapt to changing conditions, procreate, and build all the structure and tissues and organs that requires. That's a lot of energy that bioreactor-grown steak doesn't have to expend. At scale, and with some genetic optimization thrown in, can we do better? I don't know for sure, but I don't think it's an impossibility, given that most of the current meat supply is already grown in factories.
> 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.
Thanks for posting that. I read through it, it seemed like the main arguments against lab grown meat were:
1. It will take a lot of investment, it's unclear if it will produce enough to matter.
2. It might not get close to real meat in taste and texture
3. Lots of people wouldn't switch even if it tastes like real meat.
This was disappointing because I was expecting an analysis of the greenhouse gas contribution of lab grown meat. I didn't see anything (long article with lots of charts, I could have missed it). This is the key issue to me, will lab grown meat significantly help. I am fine with some meat substitutes, I want healthy and tastes good, lots of veg food is like that without trying to be meat.
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.
> We already use several processes that are similar to lab grown meat. Ie beer and cheese are a bunch of cells dumped into a growth medium. Hell bread rises because of yeasts in a growth medium.
"Similar" is not the same. In all those cases you cite, you're using non-animal cells that are very close to wild to modify existing food in relatively minor ways.
If "meat" was bacterial sludge or yeast blocks, it would be a lot more practical to grow in a lab, but it's not. Meat is things like chicken muscle cells, which are not evolved to grow outside the support of a complex organism.
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.
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.
reply