Cell-cultured meat industry veteran (and dropout) here. If Singaporean companies are able to make a viable business out of cell-cultured meat, that would be fantastic, and a boon to the world. Some skepticism is warranted, though. It's very difficult to do this at scale, and that's regardless of unit price. Cultivating the meat that sells at a mass-market price is the real challenge and one I wouldn't bet on anytime soon, not even by 2030. The technical challenges are too many to list here, some of which are not public knowledge. Besides, the once-touted environmental advantages have turned out to be marginal at best.
One way this business might make sense would be to sell boutique cell-cultured "specialty" meats, like scallops, veal, and wooly mammoth (yes, it's been seriously considered). They're not nearly as price-sensitive, and the scale is smaller. Here's hoping we can ease the burden on endangered populations and mitigate the inherent cruelty of some of those industries with cell-cultured alternatives.
Surprisingly France and the UK are high up there, despite being geographically distant industrialized countries (e.g., not primarily based on agriculture). I wonder if this is because this is showing dollar value imports and these places export high cost food products? ... is it just champagne from France?
1) It's a small island, but it's also a major trading port. Which means its whole economy is already geared towards importing food from neighboring countries.
2) On the other hand: no domestic industry to disrupt! No domestic farming groups lobbying against meat substitutes, which may push research/distribution furhter along.
They're also big on future-proofing and environmental awareness in general as they have a very long term stable government that looks 10-100 years ahead.
At what point does the high-effort labmeat become more economical for Singapore than importing meat? I suspect this is the nontrivial bit of the equation, massive quantities of imports are already inbound every single day.
There may be some aspect of geopolitical independence here as well, if they're dependent on imports for luxury foods (like meat) then they're more exposed to higher prices and external supply issues (which might be health related, scarcity, or some kind of politically caused scarcity).
I must respectfully disagree. Geopolitical independence is fundamentally less of a concern for luxury goods. You not being able to get a fancy steak is not a national security threat.
Meat is actually a "superfood" that gives you both energy and the building blocks your body needs to keep working. We don't need it in developped countries but in times of trouble when importations might be impossible, meat is not going to be a luxury.
In the Sinosphere food of Chinese origin can be viewed with suspicion due to the known environmental degradation of Chinese farmland, as well as the many food adulteration scandals.
Malaysia makes a lot of sense; there is a lot of cuisine overlap, it is right next door, and Singapore actually started its modern life by getting kicked out of Malaysia. (That whole saga is interesting; as far as I know Singapore may be the rare example of a country unwillingly becoming independent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_in_Malaysia)
Given we are talking about meat I thought your linked plot looked weird (Australia was way too small). Then I realised that you have to select 'Animal' rather than 'Food Products' to see just meat imports, with the expected suspects being there (Aus, NZ, Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia).
I'd pay some pretty silly amounts of money to eat reasonably accurate replicas of otherwise unobtainable meats. I doubt I'm the only one. I feel like East Asia alone could easily fuel such an industry.
A few years back I saw a great article that listed out some fairly reasonable criticisms of Cell-cultured meats. Wasn't one of those "but think of the farmers!" type things. More a list of the hurdles to over come.
The one thing it raised was that cultured meats do not have any sort of immune system. Thus if they are not produced in, what amounts to, TSMC level sterile environments there is the potential of entire batches being rendered useless as bacteria have a feast. There was also a lot of issue with scale, things I am sure you are aware of.
For specialty meats, yeah it makes sense.
But for pure scale I am a bit more hopeful on things like Precision Fermentation of yeasts as being a much more viable meat alternative. Turns out things like Quorn were way ahead of there time in that sense.
This is exactly right. I saw enormous batches turn to bacterial sludge on a regular basis, which is exactly what you’d expect even in very clean environments. The fundamental problem is that bacteria are specifically evolved to infiltrate and infect; and, they multiply orders of magnitude faster than vertebrate muscle cells.
> The technical challenges are too many to list here, some of which are not public knowledge
I'd love to know the major ones, or whatever you can share.
I'm much more optimistic about lab grown meat than most people. In fact I would love to invest in some lab grown meat companies. The more I know the better.
Idk. I would love to taste real mammoth. But with the lab grown “mammoth” i feel there is just too many knobs they can tweak, and without a reference who knows how authentic it would be. Basically the company making it would be strongly incentivised to squeeze some strange yet acceptable flavour profile. You don’t want everyone to think it tastes too much like a cow, because how do you justify the price point then. But you also don’t want it to taste so gamey or weird that people refuse it. Both would be financial ruin for the company. So instead of getting how a real mammoth tasted you would get some taste balanced to feel exotic yet acceptable.
I bet the taste would depend more on the tastes of the team making it than the actual flavour profile of a mamoth.
From that point of view, you could just have your flavor scientists whip up some MSG and garlic and make "Mammoth In A Biskit," zero actual mammoth required.
You would win that bet. I can tell you that chicken meat coming out of a bioreactor tastes nothing like chicken meat from a chicken - and in fact it’s revolting. There are several additional steps needed in order to make it palatable.
The way I was thinking about it is that how meat tastes depends very much on the excretion system of the animal removing waste products from the tissues. And those functions (the lymphatic system, the circulation, the kidneys, the bowels, the lungs) are not present in the lab grown meat tissue. We are obviously providing those functions artificially but I wouldn't be surprised if these artificial attempts are "worse" than the real deal at their job. After all the real chickens spent millions of years co-evolving these support functions with their tissues.
Plus what the tissue is fed! Some say they can taste if the cow was fed corn vs grass. Whatever the lab grown meat is fed must be even bigger difference from the original.
> There are several additional steps needed in order to make it palatable.
Makes sense. I wasn't even thinking about those, just the growing conditions. But of corse! And I bet while these were developed there was a ton of "prepare, taste, spit it out in disgust, adjust" cycles. With extant animals in theory at least you can do it scientifically by having blind taste tests comparing the real meat with the lab grown one. With mammoth, or anything else extinct, we would be guessing and making things up even more.
To think no one in history has ever tasted mammoth burger—milled flour bread buns wouldn't have coexisted with Neolithic mammoth hunters, that was an expensive specialization of the agriculture era.
(Or perhaps Neolithic people would pity us and our culinary traditions—the bland, meaningless ennui of takeout fast-food. The true enjoyment of mammoth steak, we shall never know, is what it tastes when you've chased it down yourself for three days on foot).
Maybe this is more of a philosophical question, but to me “lab-grown mammoth muscular tissue” is not “mammoth meat” if it hasn’t lived a mammoth’s life. I doubt it would taste the same as the real deal. Of course it’s as close is we’re going to get, most likely.
Lab grown human flesh would remove the health risks around cannibalism but I assume the taboo would remain. Otherwise I'm imagining tasting menus of an extreme variety of creatures extinct, endangered or just previously hard to fit into the supply chain.
I’m now imagining the lab grown meat companies driving exotic animals to extinction so that they could corner the market on their meat and drive the prices up.
i was reading an interview once & the researcher, if i ain't mistaken, was excited more about the new possibilities of vegetal cultures than animal; do we have any movement towards that already or it's still stuck @ "not enough market"?
Definitely there are some exciting advances in vegetal protein, as well as fungal protein. It’s still difficult, but (in my opinion) the difficulty there is the inertia of consumer tastes, and the food distribution business. They’re not trying to fight things like thermodynamics and cellular biology, which are far more formidable opponents.
Two examples of non-meat protein advances: fungal-derived cheeses, and protein extracted from duckweed.
Singapore is a follower. Whatever they're in to happened elsewhere 2 years before.
More broadly, it's not really about cell-cultured meat. It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever which can be ingratiated in to the food supply chain anywhere. The huge success in culturally normalizing the consumption of 'beef balls' and similar '<highly processed, derivative, nominal protein identity> balls' in markets like Thailand to my critical eye largely stem from the beef ball factories of Shantou in Guangdong. Make no mistake: those people are making bank selling total bunk for real bucks.
Poverty will be the driver.
Economically, it's hard to pass up plants. They've literally evolved over millions of years to produce the goods using almost nothing in resource terms. Somehow the world just needs to learn to love Indian food and stop expecting protein and lipid dense meals.
> Singapore is a follower. Whatever they're in to happened elsewhere 2 years before.
> [...]
> It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever
Personally I follow fermentation based (bacteria based) proteins with interest, potentially they can have an even smaller footprint than plant based protein.
Like Solein ( https://solarfoods.com/solein/ ), which has now been accepted as safe for human consumption in one country: Singapore.
potentially they can have an even smaller footprint than plant based protein.
Maybe one day - the potential of fungi is amazing. It's a whole world that is fundamental to ecology and comparatively poorly understood or mapped. However, I remain skeptical at present once you factor in one or both of the lab costs (steel vats, process control, power consumption, thermal systems, and lab employees) and the raw inputs (fermentation doesn't happen on thin air).
By the time you've grown the raw input, why not just grow a food crop?
I feel virtue-signalling regulatory moves are meaningless. Case in point: many markets are totally unregulated, by your logic they're ahead of the curve. I don't disagree.
It's a bacterium in this case, not a fungus. It can metabolize hydrogen and use CO2 to build the proteins. They electrolyze water using solar power to create the hydrogen, so it sort of does happen on thin air, but of course some minerals need to be added as well. The product is basically a powder consisting of dried bacteria.
I don’t think so. A soy plant has tons of evolutionary baggage tied to its protein synthesis. It has to reproduce, out compete other life for resources, be hardy enough to survive both pests and pesticides, and it evolved in a resource constrained environment.
For life generating protein is a byproduct of other goals. It seems possible that we can do better.
You're not wrong about the economics. Access to large amounts of high-quality protein (regardless of whether it's plant or animal derived) is increasingly going to divide the rich and poor. We can easily grow enough crops to provide everyone with enough calories (distribution problems aside), but people can't maximize performance and healthspan eating mostly grains and starches.
Sure but most people aren't in to resistance training. They're in to high fructose corn syrup, processed foods, and sedentary lifestyles. I wondered which product generates higher returns: protein powders or statins? Actually according to Google the former is USD$28B and the latter is only USD$20B at the moment. I'd expect the latter to grow and the former to shrink.
The corn syrup thing is a US-only thing, isn't it?
The rest of the world seems to use sugar from beets/sugar cane/coconuts?
Correct me if I'm wrong, I base the above statements on a rant by an American coworker about how the corn lobby managed to somehow force American food producers to exclusively use relatively high calory corn syrup as a sweetener as opposed to much lower calory sweeteners.
The short version is it's because of steep subsidies on corn as a crop. We have tons of the shit, and artificially cheap at that. It goes into foods as itself, foods as corn syrup, corn flour, and a substantial amount is converted to ethanol for fuel.
Corn syrup is kind of a bogeyman in some circles because it contains a slightly higher fraction of fructose than sugar produced from beets or sugar cane. There might be a little something to that as fructose is metabolized through a different pathway than glucose and there is some correlation at the country level between consumption and diabetes rates. But with sugar it's really more the quantity that matters rather than the composition.
Were you attempting to post a different link? That study points a pretty strong negative correlation with corn syrup.
...Diabetes prevalence was 20% higher in countries with higher availability of HFCS compared to countries with low availability, and these differences were retained or strengthened after adjusting for country-level estimates of body mass index (BMI), population and gross domestic product (adjusted diabetes prevalence=8.0 vs. 6.7%, p=0.03; fasting plasma glucose=5.34 vs. 5.22 mmol/L, p=0.03) despite similarities in obesity and total sugar and calorie availability. These results suggest that countries with higher availability of HFCS have a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes independent of obesity.
Not just statins but diet drugs like wegovy. I suspect that people's addiction to corn syrup will be solved medically, not with willpower or lifestyle changes.
I fear that people will eat less corn syrup but only because they're eating less overall. I'd love to see people put the money they save into higher quality food, but history suggests otherwise.
The corn syrup based foods are cheap, tasty, and really easy to eat. It's too bad they have no nutrients besides calories.
Which is why water desalination tech is one of their major exports. They mastered the technology out of survival need (Malaysia constantly threatening to cut off water supply) and are exporting it now.
By your standards, most of the world outside the US does not innovate, which makes sense since if they did, the tech would be bought up by a US company anyways
No, not really. There are some unique facets to Singaporean culture that heavily discourage innovation. This isn't the case for most of the rest of the world.
Many of the cultured meat companies are going about this the wrong way from an economic standpoint. They often try to make the new chicken nugget, a low cost mass produced food that may seem easy to replicate, because it is already so processed.
This is were Vow, and a few others are going the high-end, foods that haven't really existed before, with their Japanese Quail Parfait. Similar to how Tesla started with the roadster, and then went to the S, 3, Y, etc etc.
Imagine creating a cultured cavier or foie gras. Sold in small quantities to those who want the experience, social signaling, and opportunity to make a small difference. The companies won't make money on these items, but they can cover a higher percentage of their cost, and learn how to scale. Then move into less rare, but still coveted foods, etc etc
I feel like the superrich don't really care about their CO2 costs, in fact, the more wasteful, maybe the better the social signal. But I guess there are different categories of superrich.
not superrich, but I avoid foie gras because of the horrible animal welfare component. If you get it to a price palatable for michelin 1 star restaurants, it
s definitely going to get adopted
We already have these and they’re delicious. I’m unconvinced kaviar has a market. But your core point, that these firms should go high and trade replicating for expanding, is correct.
I think there is a key difference between cultured caviar, and kaviar (by which I'm assuming you mean imitation caviar, not the swedish fish roe spread).
A high priced cultured caviar isn't just trying to be a replacement for the expense of real caviar. In fact, as I'm suggesting it (which you are agreeing with) is that because it does not harm fish in the process, it can be priced higher. This can't be done with imitation caviar, whose entire purpose for being is cheaper.
Though, it is in some ways a marketing move. It's not quite the difference between fake leather and vegan leather, but it isn't that far off.
Meanwhile, in Florida: the beef protection racket bans it. Recall what happened to Oprah in 1996 when she dared to express an opinion about beef during the global mad cow scare.[0] And, also the existence of beef libel laws in multiple states.
The cultured meat industry needs better lobbyists or the beef industry is going to squish them.
> 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.
> “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
I've posted this comment before, but the linked article is relevant to every story about lab-grown meat as the entire concept is a fantasy, or less charitably, a scam.
I can easily believe it's a fractal of hard, but I cannot believe it's a fractal of no, and absolutely not as a question of thermodynamics.
It's clearly possible to make muscle cells (and other components of meat) reproduce rapidly: cattle exist.
It's clearly hard, or we'd have already have all this plus vat-grown organs and (affordable) vat-grown leather.
And some (non-meat) cells are already convenient to grow in vats (you just don't want to get all your protein from nutritional yeast and/or spirulina).
"1000 ways to not make a lightbulb", or whatever the real original Edison quote was — what's the number, 90% of start-ups fail?
The "no" in this context is addressing whether cultured meat will ever be economically viable at scale, not just scientifically possible. The article suggests a compelling argument against this viability, in that the breakthroughs needed for commercially viable cultured meat would also revolutionize the far more lucrative pharmaceutical industry. The fact that these advances haven't been achieved in pharma, despite massive financial incentives and decades of research, is strong evidence of their fundamental difficulty or impracticality.
For instance, even the most efficient cell lines used in pharmaceuticals aren't efficient enough for low-cost production of bulk cell mass. This implies cultured meat companies are attempting to solve problems that have long eluded a much larger, better-funded industry. The absence of these breakthroughs in pharma, where the financial rewards would be enormous, suggests they may be fundamentally unattainable with foreseeable technology.
This I agree with; it's just… well, I'm 40 now[0], and a lot of biology that can be done today involved technology that was not foreseeable when I was born.
So, yes, pharmaceuticals getting the hard problems solved first, sure — I'd say that I'd know not to invest in vat-meat startups until pharmaceuticals companies have solved problems I'm oblivious to except for the logical impossibility with such a test.
While drug discovery may be the most lucrative opportunity overall, production costs remain significant in pharma, especially for biologics and cell therapies, and breakthroughs in these areas are well worth pursuing. CAR-T treatments, which use similar technologies to cultured meat, have manufacturing costs of $95,000-$156,000 per dose [0].
For generics and biosimilars, more efficient production could be a major competitive advantage. The fact that we haven't seen breakthroughs in this area, despite clear financial motivation, suggests these are not easily solvable problems.
CAR-T treatments are expensive because they’re individualized. The process has to be repeated per-individual. That’s completely different from lab-meat.
I was responding to the parent poster's assertion that the only area worth focusing on in pharma is drug discovery, but you're right that CAR-T is very different. Monoclonal antibodies are a more apt analog. Key economic drivers in monoclonal antibody production include fermentation titer and overall yield, as highlighted in the article "Process economics of industrial monoclonal antibody manufacture" from ScienceDirect [0]. These same factors—cell density and yield—are also critical for lab-grown meat production.
The persistence of process-related challenges in both industries, despite significant financial motivation to solve them, underscores their complexity. This relates back to the "fractal no" concept from the original article, where each obstacle in cultured meat production is composed of many smaller obstacles. Importantly, monoclonal antibodies can sell for thousands of dollars per gram, orders of magnitude more than meat, yet even with this immense profit incentive, the pharmaceutical industry hasn't solved these bioprocessing issues. This suggests that cultured meat production, with its much lower profit margins, faces an overwhelming set of challenges,
The phrase "not a question of $x" does not mean $x can't be asked at all, but that the question is unimportant.
In this case, cows exist, therefore thermodynamics is resolved to "yes you can make a cow for at most the cost of a cow, in the general case", and I don't need to show detailed working to know that. Existence proofs make it obviously "not a question of" any law of nature, including thermodynamics, that we can't reproduce that existence proof synthetically.
This doesn't tell me how to do it, how to make it cheap enough for anyone to care, what the actual ultimate limits are, etc.
As someone who has zero stakes in this (well beyond the planet) and limited knowledge in the biological sides of this.
This feels incredibly dismissive? Sure I will concede that most likely the 9 year timeline mentioned in that article is incredibly optimistic and very likely will not come to fruition.
But I think it is also naive to think, regardless of how much you know on a particular subject, that there are not solutions to problems that have not been developed yet or that there are already examples to those problems that are not public knowledge (it even mentions that the paper was written with NDA knowledge).
Then it is even more naive to try to paint a "wall of no" seemingly in a way to shut down research on this subject.
Just look at the silicone chips allowing us to have what once would have been considered a super computer in our pockets compared to when computers were tubes. Of course at that time anyone suggesting that a personal computing device would even be possible would likely be laughed out the room, the core technology didn't even exist to think that maybe some day it would be possible.
Are these companies and that paper making lofty promises that may be borderline lying to investors, maybe. But I don't think we should be saying it is impossible at this point in time.
Fusion might be good comparison here. Yes we can make it happen, yes we have multiple solutions. But still even with decent investment we are not near economical energy production. And it is not like we have not tried reasonably.
Somethings are just rather complicated at scale and both cultured meat and fusion belong to this category.
That I agree with, which is why I mentioned that the 9 year timeline is likely too ambitious.
But there is a difference between it being very complicated and likely relying on technology (or a fundamental understanding of something we don't know about) we don't have yet, and a "big no" and "never". Which is what this paper seems to be saying (reinforced by the comment I was replying to also saying "never").
That is the part of this that bothers me. Yeah we should admit that it is going to be very hard (if not impossible) and we should examine the reality of the timeline claims. But we should not be discouraging the research on both of these topics at this time by making claims that it will never happen.
I wouldn't bet against it ever happening, mainly because there is already a pretty advanced highly scalable meat manufacturing biotechnology process called, you know, the actual animal. Wouldn't recommend betting against a thing that already exists, it's not like fusion where we don't have small viable energy producing reactors yet (the sun doesn't count). Timeline though? Who the hell knows. Progress in biology has been unbelievably fast over the past few decades in a really unpredictable way (sometimes rapid improvements in existing technologies, sometimes unexpected breakthroughs that open up new horizons). Maybe the core challenges to replicating what animals do will take another 30 years to figure out, maybe a breakthrough will happen in the next two months, who knows. But a bunch of random chemical reactions kicking around for 3 billion years figured out how to make meat so don't think it's unreasonable to think we'll be able to figure it out too.
Right, and I think thats why the article bothered me and I made this comment.
We can criticize the timeline and the promises made to investors, that is incredibly valid.
But "never" is naive.
The only time I am really comfortable with saying "never" is something like, we will never travel faster than the speed of light. That seems to be fairly well proven at this point in time and if we ever fight a loophole around it, likely the core law will remain true.
Yeah, and it's especially naive when in addition to animals existing, the tech involved happens to be an area of enormous societal importance for health reasons (plenty of investment), the problem happens to be somewhat existential (climate change is getting tons of funding right now), and the science of biology is advancing at a frankly extraordinary rate.
Even GFI, the tech hype bros in that article that's being responded to, is showing a pretty big lack of vision. "This gradual progression is necessary; you can’t just throw a small amount of cells into a large bioreactor and hope they’ll start dividing. Cells are “fastidious,” Hughes told me, and have strict metabolic requirements for growth, including oxygen tension." <- pretty comfortable saying that under those constraings, 100% agree on the fractal of nos. But like, yeast and other things we grow in bioreactors aren't that picky. The hype bros want to try and convince people it's happening now so they're pitching some nonsense vision of mass manufacturing based on tech that obviously can't scale, and taking their vision of how things are going to work as ground truth is kinda silly. Almost by tautology, a successful bioreactor based approach is going to be one that uses bioengineering to create cells that don't need that sort of pickiness. It doesn't exist yet, sucks for the hype bros, but how sure are you that nobody will ever figure out how to engineer yeast to work as meat so you can use bioreactors from defunct breweries or something?
The first cow genome was only published 15 years ago - at least wait for biology and medicine to plateau and for the incentive of fixing climate change to go away before convincing yourself it's never gonna happen!
> and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
This elides over the cost differential and where that "cheaply enough" wall is. Animal grown meat is currently rising in costs and will continue to rise in costs as both demand is rising and the habitat for those animals is constricting due to climate change. How much cheaper does lab grown meat and how much more more expensive does animal grown meat need to be before it becomes viable. From what I've read they are closer than this argument assumes.
another classic case of differential accounting - if the climate adaptation cost attached to farming was charged in the price of meat, maybe the no would be on the other foot.
It seems like all the arguments there are predicated on the "meat" being actual muscle cells in a vat, though. Wouldn't it be just as likely that the successfully engineered food ends up being just, like, kelp with GM'd amino acid byproducts or something? Or chicken-of-the-woods with more random proteins thrown in? (I mean as long as they don't kill the culture, it doesn't matter if it benefits the host organism.)
I'm sure that's all harder than it sounds. But I doubt it's the same "wall of no" as muscles in a vat.
I wish I could get back the five minutes it took to read that stupid article. The argument for the second half is “his report seemed really technical to us and nobody has ever cited it in the four years since it was published so it’s a massive conspiracy by every scientist ever because everything he said was so right.”
Either every single company is wholesale lying about key parts of their processes and outputs…or this is just another hitpiece by Big Ag with exaggerated claims.
The NYT carried another opinion piece by the same author this year[1] along with a number of reader rebuttals[2], including this one from Mindy Kursban:
> It is surprising that in his obituary for cultivated meat, Joe Fassler spends so few words on the viability of the science and cites more chief executives than scientists.
> Just recently, the chair of Tufts University’s biomedical engineering department, David Kaplan, who has published more than 1,000 peer-reviewed papers, told[3] a room full of cultivated meat scientists that progress over the past five years gives him “complete confidence that we’re going to get to where we need to go.”
> There are many eminent scientists all over the world who share Dr. Kaplan’s view, but readers would not know that from reading Mr. Fassler’s essay, which argues that cultivated meat is a project of Silicon Valley “dreamers with a fancy prototype, a pitch deck and a good amount of natural charm.”
> This groundbreaking science may be taking longer than initially thought, but it’s making strides, so it’s a shame that Mr. Fassler spends so little time exploring it.
Ruminants are actually very efficient protein generating machines.
They (like us) have been evolving under thermodynamic pressures for millions of years, I would like us to be able to not have to produce them to have high quality protein/fat/etc, but I haven't seen anything to say it's remotely possible.
We only sequenced the first cow genome 15 years ago and plenty of plants and fungi produce high quality protein/fat/etc - it's not like we're starting from scratch the whole point of bioengineering is that we can cheat using stuff nature figured out for us. It's certainly not scientifically impossible. In the zero interest rate hype cycle over the past couple years plenty of startups convinced themselves that they could totally make it work with cell culture and stupid expensive bioreactors and media and stuff since that was the only tech that was 'ready' even though at best all you can get is an overpriced lean meat only replacement for ground beef, and this article seems to take for given that this approach === meatless meat. I think it's useful to keep the questions of 'are these tech bros going to figure out how to make producing meat in class 8 cleanrooms viable' and 'are bioengineered animal-free meat replacements going to happen in the next few decades' seperate
I have had a somewhat dystopian idea (on the surface level) that is actually much more humane than our current systems.
Why don't we work, via CRISPR or aggressive evolution, to get to the point where something like a cow is much closer to a meat worm? Imagine if we could get the brain down to something where it's basically like a mollusk, to remove most of the ethical issues with slaughtering something as sentient as a cow or a pig. Then imagine if we could breed away the legs and such, and get this thing to the point that it's just a long tube of the most tender cuts of meat. Whole worm of ribeye and fillet. And it can just be suspended in a factory, hundreds of meat worms high, with food being pumped in their mouth, and excrement being swept up.
Again, sounds insane, but I want my meatworm future.
It sounds like a decent idea. It doesn't really resolve the problems with calories in vs calories out, though (ie. by and large you still need just as much feed). It also might not be cheaper - lots of meat agriculture largely leaves the animals to themselves before slaughter, which this obviously wouldnt be capable of.
You're also proposing a fairly massive genetic engineering project to get to that point too - I suspect there are many other problems on the chopping block that would be possible if/when we're capable of making those kinds of changes to organisms.
The idea does solve the moral qualms (if we ignore the squickiness of creating an artifical being in a much degraded state from its origin)
This is a pretty interesting philosophical question, and I think it basically boils down to whether you are fundamentally a positivist or not. Meaning that if we remove the sensory organs of a being (I.e., remove its ability to feel pain) that means it loses any ethical value.
If you agree with this viewpoint, then the idea of “beef worms” or “chicken fruit” makes sense. But if you question positivism and think that beings have another form of value that isn’t merely the sum of their sensory impressions, it gets much more complex.
its interesting how i imagine most people have a sort of visceral intuitive repulsion to this concept, but it really is a moral upgrade over the current factory farming situation as far as i can tell.
Can someone explain how lab grown meat releases less greenhouse gasses? Seems like much more energy inefficient than the old fashion way. Are there any figures available that go into the thermodynamics of it all?
When talking about beef specifically, the problem is that cows produce a disproportionate amount of methane, which is a disproportionately powerful greenhouse gas. If you don't want to give up meat but do want to make a dent in your emissions, even just eating pork or chicken instead is an improvement. There might be ways to reduce the emissions of cows in the future (different feeds, gut biome interventions, bioengineering), but right now these are science fiction.
As for the energy inputs themselves, the notion of grass-fed beef often gets trotted out as a way to make beef more eco-friendly, but in practice this mostly amounts to greenwashing. Most beef is not grass-fed, and most places in the world that raise cows are not suited to pure grass feeding.
And then there's the land use aspect. When we're clearcutting the Amazon in order to satisfy the world's demand for beef, we've fucked up.
> There might be ways to reduce the emissions of cows in the future (different feeds, gut biome interventions, bioengineering), but right now these are science fiction.
I thought there's already research showing that seaweed in the cow's diet drastically reduces methane emissions.
Yes, just 2% of diet as seaweed essentially eliminates methane emissions. But there's no price on methane emissions for the farmer so no incentive to do so.
> cows produce a disproportionate amount of methane, which is a disproportionately powerful greenhouse gas.
Can somebody explain run through these quickly, I'm not sure which parts are wrong and how much they're wrong:
1. the constituents in the methane came from the food the cows eat?
2. the food got it from the atmosphere?
3. cows don't increase methane constantly, rather it's the marginal volume of feed required to sustain every new cow on the planet less the ones slaughtered? I.e. the growth in new supply?
4. Eliminating cows raised for meat would stop the increase in methane due to increase in supply and it would result in a one-off net reduction in atmospheric methane in time proportional to what cows were releasing, assuming the food continues to grow?
5. What happens when the food the cows are no longer eating dies, does anything get released then?
Not my field, so assumptions and simplifications follow. Animal feed mostly grows from absorbing carbon dioxide, not methane. Cows (and other grazing animals) produce net positive methane because their gut microbiota ferment the animal feed, producing methane. So, to keep methane in balance, something in the local grazing biome needs to absorb methane. Otherwise, cows can increase proportional atmospheric methane.
Assuming no fossil fuels provide the carbon, the whole thing is indeed carbon neutral.
However, from a green house gas perspective, plants consume Co2 (moderate green house potential), and either due to rotting or as part of digestion, methane does get produced. Which has a high green house potential. Not in identical proportions to the co2 consumed of course, cows and rotting plants also produce co2.
So think of part of the problem being some co2 being converted into a more problematic green house gas (methane) with a lot of steps in the middle.
Also people being jealous of that tasty steak that is a byproduct of the process.
4: I'm not sure I follow the question, but methane has an atmospheric lifetime of about 12 years, so it would probably fall, but I'm not sure how much by
5: Some mixture of CO2, methane, and carbon sequestration; at this scale it's worth considering which crops are grown and how they are used precisely to minimise that kind of impact
The idea is that cows, and all the infrastructure around raising them, are a huge source of greenhouse gasses, while just cultivating cow meat eliminates everything not directly related to producing a hamburger. More recent studies [1] cast doubt on that and even suggest as you do that cell-cultured meat may be more environmentally damaging, not less.
One of the main factors: generating the growth media for the cells is by no means carbon-free, and some of the ingredients are very very carbon intensive to produce.
Carbon intensive. Most of them are agriculturally sourced, and fossil fuels/feedstocks are not likely to be widely replaced in agriculture for several decades, at least.
Nobody talks about the thermodynamics because right now it's terrible (also why the economics is terrible - nobody can get anywhere the $3/kg of chicken breast).
However, theoretically lab grown meat could be a big win on the thermodynamics front, and whoever solves that will have a far easier time getting the economics working too.
I think it's more an issue of resources rather than raw energy. If this can be produced using much less space, locally to consumers, and using clean energy then it's a net gain.
What I'm interested in is where do the raw materials come from? I suppose this needs a number of "ingredients", including proteins, that must be sourced from somewhere.
That’s actually super hilarious given the conglomeration that has occurred already anyway.
Turns out you can just skip both the incredible engineering problem of lab grown meat and the incredible political problem of “banning meat” and even people who are apparently paranoid about corporate/government control will just go right along with it.
Yeah, that already happens in the current world with current corporations. You just don't notice because you're too busy consuming.
And I dont mean this in an angry environmentalist way. There are a lot of people who dont pay attention to their current food chain and don't know just how tightly most of the brands are controlled by a select group of companies.
So before jumping to future conspiracies, look at what you're in now:
One would so assume, but I saw a statement that whole classes of medications(?) seen as promising in the 90s were a no go because of the exact same fundamental bioreactor scaling issues. I’ll try to find the reference.
I think we are re-inventing the wheel of using biochemical process to grow protein. Current meats have millions of years of evolution. Sure the types eaten most are not bred out of efficiency. Why don't we choose other starting points, possibly insect, e.g. grasshopper or maggot and grow them in the lab?
I like the idea to start with the most efficient specie but other animals/vegetable we eat are in fact already very bred out for efficiency. So much that some very efficient ranchs choose to slaughter babies caws at birth because they are “milk bred” male or “meat bred” female and not economically viable.
What are you specifically denying ?
1) the increase in temperature on the planet
2) the danger from increase temperature?
3) the human origin of temperature increase?
Enlighten us with motivation why you think a ton of studies on each of this items is wrong.
Or even the fifth-grade science project you can do. Fill a soda bottle with air, a soda bottle with CO2, put them in the sun, then measure their internal temperature. You can do it with your kids in an afternoon.
You had the hottest year on record last year. You're in for the hottest summer ever this year, and next year will also be the hottest on record, and the one after that - maybe when it's 132F outside you'll realize something's wrong?
Cell-cultured meat industry veteran (and dropout) here. If Singaporean companies are able to make a viable business out of cell-cultured meat, that would be fantastic, and a boon to the world. Some skepticism is warranted, though. It's very difficult to do this at scale, and that's regardless of unit price. Cultivating the meat that sells at a mass-market price is the real challenge and one I wouldn't bet on anytime soon, not even by 2030. The technical challenges are too many to list here, some of which are not public knowledge. Besides, the once-touted environmental advantages have turned out to be marginal at best.
One way this business might make sense would be to sell boutique cell-cultured "specialty" meats, like scallops, veal, and wooly mammoth (yes, it's been seriously considered). They're not nearly as price-sensitive, and the scale is smaller. Here's hoping we can ease the burden on endangered populations and mitigate the inherent cruelty of some of those industries with cell-cultured alternatives.
Singapore is a rich nation with tiny amounts of land, so it might make sense there even if not other places.
Huh... I figured that china would account for most of their food imports, but that's not actually the case.
https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/SGP/Yea...
Surprisingly France and the UK are high up there, despite being geographically distant industrialized countries (e.g., not primarily based on agriculture). I wonder if this is because this is showing dollar value imports and these places export high cost food products? ... is it just champagne from France?
Edit: oh my god it is champagne (or more generally spirits: https://tradingeconomics.com/singapore/imports/france)
Two points to consider, one against and one for.
1) It's a small island, but it's also a major trading port. Which means its whole economy is already geared towards importing food from neighboring countries.
2) On the other hand: no domestic industry to disrupt! No domestic farming groups lobbying against meat substitutes, which may push research/distribution furhter along.
Singapore has the most expensive meat in Asia ( https://www.picodi.com/sg/bargain-hunting/meat-prices-2023 ) and I guess depends mostly on Malaysia for fresh meat.
They're also big on future-proofing and environmental awareness in general as they have a very long term stable government that looks 10-100 years ahead.
May you share some more knowledge or source regarding their environmental awareness ? Thanks
At what point does the high-effort labmeat become more economical for Singapore than importing meat? I suspect this is the nontrivial bit of the equation, massive quantities of imports are already inbound every single day.
There may be some aspect of geopolitical independence here as well, if they're dependent on imports for luxury foods (like meat) then they're more exposed to higher prices and external supply issues (which might be health related, scarcity, or some kind of politically caused scarcity).
I must respectfully disagree. Geopolitical independence is fundamentally less of a concern for luxury goods. You not being able to get a fancy steak is not a national security threat.
Meat is actually a "superfood" that gives you both energy and the building blocks your body needs to keep working. We don't need it in developped countries but in times of trouble when importations might be impossible, meat is not going to be a luxury.
Sure, but it's not going to make people happy. (tongue in cheek) Unhappy people can be a national security threat.
[dead]
Isn’t part of the point that they are importing their staples and luxury, rice as well as steak?
Not in times of scarcity (with a recent example being the pandemic).
> high-effort labmeat become more economical for Singapore than importing meat?
When you would be able to import the labmeat ingredients for at least 8x times the result weight of the imported meat.
Where S. would get these ingredients domestically?
In the Sinosphere food of Chinese origin can be viewed with suspicion due to the known environmental degradation of Chinese farmland, as well as the many food adulteration scandals.
Malaysia makes a lot of sense; there is a lot of cuisine overlap, it is right next door, and Singapore actually started its modern life by getting kicked out of Malaysia. (That whole saga is interesting; as far as I know Singapore may be the rare example of a country unwillingly becoming independent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_in_Malaysia)
Given we are talking about meat I thought your linked plot looked weird (Australia was way too small). Then I realised that you have to select 'Animal' rather than 'Food Products' to see just meat imports, with the expected suspects being there (Aus, NZ, Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia).
I wonder how much of the French/UK imports are resold as duty free good’s especially champagne, spirits and LVHM luxury items.
Most people in Singapore try to food from China if possible.
I'd pay some pretty silly amounts of money to eat reasonably accurate replicas of otherwise unobtainable meats. I doubt I'm the only one. I feel like East Asia alone could easily fuel such an industry.
> Cultivating the meat that sells at a mass-market price is the real challenge and one I wouldn't bet on anytime soon, not even by 2030.
Given the money going into lobbying states to make it illegal in the US, I can only assume that it must have some chance of success.
> the once-touted environmental advantages have turned out to be marginal at best.
Would love to see an article about this if you have one. Just curious is all.
Here’s one: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.21.537778v1....
Decent summary: https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/lab-grown-meat-carbon-foot...
Thanks king
A few years back I saw a great article that listed out some fairly reasonable criticisms of Cell-cultured meats. Wasn't one of those "but think of the farmers!" type things. More a list of the hurdles to over come.
The one thing it raised was that cultured meats do not have any sort of immune system. Thus if they are not produced in, what amounts to, TSMC level sterile environments there is the potential of entire batches being rendered useless as bacteria have a feast. There was also a lot of issue with scale, things I am sure you are aware of.
For specialty meats, yeah it makes sense.
But for pure scale I am a bit more hopeful on things like Precision Fermentation of yeasts as being a much more viable meat alternative. Turns out things like Quorn were way ahead of there time in that sense.
This is exactly right. I saw enormous batches turn to bacterial sludge on a regular basis, which is exactly what you’d expect even in very clean environments. The fundamental problem is that bacteria are specifically evolved to infiltrate and infect; and, they multiply orders of magnitude faster than vertebrate muscle cells.
> The technical challenges are too many to list here, some of which are not public knowledge
I'd love to know the major ones, or whatever you can share.
I'm much more optimistic about lab grown meat than most people. In fact I would love to invest in some lab grown meat companies. The more I know the better.
> wooly mammoth (yes, it's been seriously considered)
Hell yeah. I'm not really a fan of the lab grown meat aspect but I'd try a wooly mammoth burger.
Idk. I would love to taste real mammoth. But with the lab grown “mammoth” i feel there is just too many knobs they can tweak, and without a reference who knows how authentic it would be. Basically the company making it would be strongly incentivised to squeeze some strange yet acceptable flavour profile. You don’t want everyone to think it tastes too much like a cow, because how do you justify the price point then. But you also don’t want it to taste so gamey or weird that people refuse it. Both would be financial ruin for the company. So instead of getting how a real mammoth tasted you would get some taste balanced to feel exotic yet acceptable.
I bet the taste would depend more on the tastes of the team making it than the actual flavour profile of a mamoth.
From that point of view, you could just have your flavor scientists whip up some MSG and garlic and make "Mammoth In A Biskit," zero actual mammoth required.
You would win that bet. I can tell you that chicken meat coming out of a bioreactor tastes nothing like chicken meat from a chicken - and in fact it’s revolting. There are several additional steps needed in order to make it palatable.
Makes sense and thank you for the confirmation.
The way I was thinking about it is that how meat tastes depends very much on the excretion system of the animal removing waste products from the tissues. And those functions (the lymphatic system, the circulation, the kidneys, the bowels, the lungs) are not present in the lab grown meat tissue. We are obviously providing those functions artificially but I wouldn't be surprised if these artificial attempts are "worse" than the real deal at their job. After all the real chickens spent millions of years co-evolving these support functions with their tissues.
Plus what the tissue is fed! Some say they can taste if the cow was fed corn vs grass. Whatever the lab grown meat is fed must be even bigger difference from the original.
> There are several additional steps needed in order to make it palatable.
Makes sense. I wasn't even thinking about those, just the growing conditions. But of corse! And I bet while these were developed there was a ton of "prepare, taste, spit it out in disgust, adjust" cycles. With extant animals in theory at least you can do it scientifically by having blind taste tests comparing the real meat with the lab grown one. With mammoth, or anything else extinct, we would be guessing and making things up even more.
To think no one in history has ever tasted mammoth burger—milled flour bread buns wouldn't have coexisted with Neolithic mammoth hunters, that was an expensive specialization of the agriculture era.
(Or perhaps Neolithic people would pity us and our culinary traditions—the bland, meaningless ennui of takeout fast-food. The true enjoyment of mammoth steak, we shall never know, is what it tastes when you've chased it down yourself for three days on foot).
Maybe this is more of a philosophical question, but to me “lab-grown mammoth muscular tissue” is not “mammoth meat” if it hasn’t lived a mammoth’s life. I doubt it would taste the same as the real deal. Of course it’s as close is we’re going to get, most likely.
I don’t doubt your feelings here but this is one step away from saying “the suffering/tragedy is the point.”
Lab grown human flesh would remove the health risks around cannibalism but I assume the taboo would remain. Otherwise I'm imagining tasting menus of an extreme variety of creatures extinct, endangered or just previously hard to fit into the supply chain.
Arthur C Clarke got there some 60 years before you: https://bestreadables.com/short-stories/arthur-c-clarke-the-...
I’m now imagining the lab grown meat companies driving exotic animals to extinction so that they could corner the market on their meat and drive the prices up.
Weird to think about, but maybe a sideline in medical applications can offset r+d. useful as grafts?
Depending on where tastes go, you could even have celebrity meats.
Swiftie Burgers. Kardashian hot dogs. Nixon ribs.
Eat the rich?
PM me if you will. Been around the ground zero of lab grown meat in the mid in the last decade, and I am curious what is/was happening there.
i was reading an interview once & the researcher, if i ain't mistaken, was excited more about the new possibilities of vegetal cultures than animal; do we have any movement towards that already or it's still stuck @ "not enough market"?
Definitely there are some exciting advances in vegetal protein, as well as fungal protein. It’s still difficult, but (in my opinion) the difficulty there is the inertia of consumer tastes, and the food distribution business. They’re not trying to fight things like thermodynamics and cellular biology, which are far more formidable opponents.
Two examples of non-meat protein advances: fungal-derived cheeses, and protein extracted from duckweed.
Singapore is a follower. Whatever they're in to happened elsewhere 2 years before.
More broadly, it's not really about cell-cultured meat. It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever which can be ingratiated in to the food supply chain anywhere. The huge success in culturally normalizing the consumption of 'beef balls' and similar '<highly processed, derivative, nominal protein identity> balls' in markets like Thailand to my critical eye largely stem from the beef ball factories of Shantou in Guangdong. Make no mistake: those people are making bank selling total bunk for real bucks.
Poverty will be the driver.
Economically, it's hard to pass up plants. They've literally evolved over millions of years to produce the goods using almost nothing in resource terms. Somehow the world just needs to learn to love Indian food and stop expecting protein and lipid dense meals.
> Singapore is a follower. Whatever they're in to happened elsewhere 2 years before.
> [...]
> It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever
Personally I follow fermentation based (bacteria based) proteins with interest, potentially they can have an even smaller footprint than plant based protein.
Like Solein ( https://solarfoods.com/solein/ ), which has now been accepted as safe for human consumption in one country: Singapore.
So they're not always behind the curve.
potentially they can have an even smaller footprint than plant based protein.
Maybe one day - the potential of fungi is amazing. It's a whole world that is fundamental to ecology and comparatively poorly understood or mapped. However, I remain skeptical at present once you factor in one or both of the lab costs (steel vats, process control, power consumption, thermal systems, and lab employees) and the raw inputs (fermentation doesn't happen on thin air).
By the time you've grown the raw input, why not just grow a food crop?
I feel virtue-signalling regulatory moves are meaningless. Case in point: many markets are totally unregulated, by your logic they're ahead of the curve. I don't disagree.
It's a bacterium in this case, not a fungus. It can metabolize hydrogen and use CO2 to build the proteins. They electrolyze water using solar power to create the hydrogen, so it sort of does happen on thin air, but of course some minerals need to be added as well. The product is basically a powder consisting of dried bacteria.
It does seem like hubris to think we’re anywhere near being able to design a protein synthesis process that’s more efficient than a soy plant.
I don’t think so. A soy plant has tons of evolutionary baggage tied to its protein synthesis. It has to reproduce, out compete other life for resources, be hardy enough to survive both pests and pesticides, and it evolved in a resource constrained environment.
For life generating protein is a byproduct of other goals. It seems possible that we can do better.
You're not wrong about the economics. Access to large amounts of high-quality protein (regardless of whether it's plant or animal derived) is increasingly going to divide the rich and poor. We can easily grow enough crops to provide everyone with enough calories (distribution problems aside), but people can't maximize performance and healthspan eating mostly grains and starches.
https://peterattiamd.com/lucvanloon/
Sure but most people aren't in to resistance training. They're in to high fructose corn syrup, processed foods, and sedentary lifestyles. I wondered which product generates higher returns: protein powders or statins? Actually according to Google the former is USD$28B and the latter is only USD$20B at the moment. I'd expect the latter to grow and the former to shrink.
The corn syrup thing is a US-only thing, isn't it?
The rest of the world seems to use sugar from beets/sugar cane/coconuts?
Correct me if I'm wrong, I base the above statements on a rant by an American coworker about how the corn lobby managed to somehow force American food producers to exclusively use relatively high calory corn syrup as a sweetener as opposed to much lower calory sweeteners.
The short version is it's because of steep subsidies on corn as a crop. We have tons of the shit, and artificially cheap at that. It goes into foods as itself, foods as corn syrup, corn flour, and a substantial amount is converted to ethanol for fuel.
Corn syrup is kind of a bogeyman in some circles because it contains a slightly higher fraction of fructose than sugar produced from beets or sugar cane. There might be a little something to that as fructose is metabolized through a different pathway than glucose and there is some correlation at the country level between consumption and diabetes rates. But with sugar it's really more the quantity that matters rather than the composition.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2012.736257
Were you attempting to post a different link? That study points a pretty strong negative correlation with corn syrup.
Being someone who moved to Australia, I'm so glad HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) is almost nowhere to be found here.
It actually contains less fructose than cane sugar, it just has more fructose than normal corn
>The corn syrup thing is a US-only thing, isn't it?
No, corn syrup is used in food and drinks all over the world.
Personally, I have nothing against corn syrup so long as the sweetness actually tastes nice and appropriate for what I'm consuming.
Corn syrup is also a lot better than artificial sweeteners which all taste like hot garbage and make me literally ill.
The United States accounts for approximately 55 percent of the global consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/495946/consumption-share...
So what about the remaining 45%?
What's the consumption rate for RoW - per capita - compared to the US?
Does it matter? So long as that (or any non-US) number is larger than zero the argument that "corn syrup is US-only" is patently false.
What I meant was "putting corn syrup in most food as the preferred sweetener" is a US-only thing, not "only the US uses corn syrup".
Mexico. Ok, just joking, they like real coke without HFCS
Not just statins but diet drugs like wegovy. I suspect that people's addiction to corn syrup will be solved medically, not with willpower or lifestyle changes.
Side note: "in to" should be one word - "into".
I fear that people will eat less corn syrup but only because they're eating less overall. I'd love to see people put the money they save into higher quality food, but history suggests otherwise.
The corn syrup based foods are cheap, tasty, and really easy to eat. It's too bad they have no nutrients besides calories.
Fear? Corn syrup will easily lead to early death through obesity. Any reduction would clearly be a positive.
> They're in to high fructose corn syrup, processed foods, and sedentary lifestyles.
The problem is that US government subsidies for corn and soy have created an entire class of products that are cheaper than any alternatives.
If we removed those subsidies, there would be far less incentive for companies to use them.
> It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever which can be ingratiated in to the food supply chain anywhere
We have at least some options for this already. Mycoprotein is one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn#Production (apart from the plant isolates)
Singapore also has great universities. Research into this area fits Singapore well.
The entire culture of the country is much more oriented to being a fast follower though. They do not innovate.
Which is why water desalination tech is one of their major exports. They mastered the technology out of survival need (Malaysia constantly threatening to cut off water supply) and are exporting it now.
By your standards, most of the world outside the US does not innovate, which makes sense since if they did, the tech would be bought up by a US company anyways
No, not really. There are some unique facets to Singaporean culture that heavily discourage innovation. This isn't the case for most of the rest of the world.
Many of the cultured meat companies are going about this the wrong way from an economic standpoint. They often try to make the new chicken nugget, a low cost mass produced food that may seem easy to replicate, because it is already so processed.
This is were Vow, and a few others are going the high-end, foods that haven't really existed before, with their Japanese Quail Parfait. Similar to how Tesla started with the roadster, and then went to the S, 3, Y, etc etc.
Imagine creating a cultured cavier or foie gras. Sold in small quantities to those who want the experience, social signaling, and opportunity to make a small difference. The companies won't make money on these items, but they can cover a higher percentage of their cost, and learn how to scale. Then move into less rare, but still coveted foods, etc etc
"Do you like the foie gras?"
"Is it artificial?"
"Of course."
I feel like the superrich don't really care about their CO2 costs, in fact, the more wasteful, maybe the better the social signal. But I guess there are different categories of superrich.
not superrich, but I avoid foie gras because of the horrible animal welfare component. If you get it to a price palatable for michelin 1 star restaurants, it s definitely going to get adopted
> Imagine creating a cultured cavier or foie gras
We already have these and they’re delicious. I’m unconvinced kaviar has a market. But your core point, that these firms should go high and trade replicating for expanding, is correct.
I think there is a key difference between cultured caviar, and kaviar (by which I'm assuming you mean imitation caviar, not the swedish fish roe spread).
A high priced cultured caviar isn't just trying to be a replacement for the expense of real caviar. In fact, as I'm suggesting it (which you are agreeing with) is that because it does not harm fish in the process, it can be priced higher. This can't be done with imitation caviar, whose entire purpose for being is cheaper.
Though, it is in some ways a marketing move. It's not quite the difference between fake leather and vegan leather, but it isn't that far off.
> The formulation of its new product uses just 3% cultivated chicken in order to sell at a lower price point so more people can try it, he said
So it’s 97% normal chicken, but 3% cultured? That doesn’t seem too interesting.
No, the rest is plant-based (wheat- and soy-based protein), like traditional vegan meat alternatives. https://www.goodmeat.co/butchery
Meanwhile, in Florida: the beef protection racket bans it. Recall what happened to Oprah in 1996 when she dared to express an opinion about beef during the global mad cow scare.[0] And, also the existence of beef libel laws in multiple states.
The cultured meat industry needs better lobbyists or the beef industry is going to squish them.
0. https://www.texastribune.org/2018/01/10/time-oprah-winfrey-b...
See https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca... for a thorough exploration of why lab grown meat will never happen...
> 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.
> “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
I've posted this comment before, but the linked article is relevant to every story about lab-grown meat as the entire concept is a fantasy, or less charitably, a scam.
I can easily believe it's a fractal of hard, but I cannot believe it's a fractal of no, and absolutely not as a question of thermodynamics.
It's clearly possible to make muscle cells (and other components of meat) reproduce rapidly: cattle exist.
It's clearly hard, or we'd have already have all this plus vat-grown organs and (affordable) vat-grown leather.
And some (non-meat) cells are already convenient to grow in vats (you just don't want to get all your protein from nutritional yeast and/or spirulina).
"1000 ways to not make a lightbulb", or whatever the real original Edison quote was — what's the number, 90% of start-ups fail?
The "no" in this context is addressing whether cultured meat will ever be economically viable at scale, not just scientifically possible. The article suggests a compelling argument against this viability, in that the breakthroughs needed for commercially viable cultured meat would also revolutionize the far more lucrative pharmaceutical industry. The fact that these advances haven't been achieved in pharma, despite massive financial incentives and decades of research, is strong evidence of their fundamental difficulty or impracticality.
For instance, even the most efficient cell lines used in pharmaceuticals aren't efficient enough for low-cost production of bulk cell mass. This implies cultured meat companies are attempting to solve problems that have long eluded a much larger, better-funded industry. The absence of these breakthroughs in pharma, where the financial rewards would be enormous, suggests they may be fundamentally unattainable with foreseeable technology.
> unattainable with foreseeable technology
This I agree with; it's just… well, I'm 40 now[0], and a lot of biology that can be done today involved technology that was not foreseeable when I was born.
So, yes, pharmaceuticals getting the hard problems solved first, sure — I'd say that I'd know not to invest in vat-meat startups until pharmaceuticals companies have solved problems I'm oblivious to except for the logical impossibility with such a test.
[0] aaaaaaa
The limits in pharma aren't production, they're figuring out which 10% of drugs will get through all the clinical trials.
While drug discovery may be the most lucrative opportunity overall, production costs remain significant in pharma, especially for biologics and cell therapies, and breakthroughs in these areas are well worth pursuing. CAR-T treatments, which use similar technologies to cultured meat, have manufacturing costs of $95,000-$156,000 per dose [0].
For generics and biosimilars, more efficient production could be a major competitive advantage. The fact that we haven't seen breakthroughs in this area, despite clear financial motivation, suggests these are not easily solvable problems.
[0] https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/car-t-manufacturi...
CAR-T treatments are expensive because they’re individualized. The process has to be repeated per-individual. That’s completely different from lab-meat.
I was responding to the parent poster's assertion that the only area worth focusing on in pharma is drug discovery, but you're right that CAR-T is very different. Monoclonal antibodies are a more apt analog. Key economic drivers in monoclonal antibody production include fermentation titer and overall yield, as highlighted in the article "Process economics of industrial monoclonal antibody manufacture" from ScienceDirect [0]. These same factors—cell density and yield—are also critical for lab-grown meat production.
The persistence of process-related challenges in both industries, despite significant financial motivation to solve them, underscores their complexity. This relates back to the "fractal no" concept from the original article, where each obstacle in cultured meat production is composed of many smaller obstacles. Importantly, monoclonal antibodies can sell for thousands of dollars per gram, orders of magnitude more than meat, yet even with this immense profit incentive, the pharmaceutical industry hasn't solved these bioprocessing issues. This suggests that cultured meat production, with its much lower profit margins, faces an overwhelming set of challenges,
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15700...
> absolutely not as a question of thermodynamics.
it "absolutely" is, anything that exists, is fundamentally a question of thermodynamics, it's unavoidable.
The phrase "not a question of $x" does not mean $x can't be asked at all, but that the question is unimportant.
In this case, cows exist, therefore thermodynamics is resolved to "yes you can make a cow for at most the cost of a cow, in the general case", and I don't need to show detailed working to know that. Existence proofs make it obviously "not a question of" any law of nature, including thermodynamics, that we can't reproduce that existence proof synthetically.
This doesn't tell me how to do it, how to make it cheap enough for anyone to care, what the actual ultimate limits are, etc.
I don't think they were denying thermodynamics. Merely denying that it trumps economics.
Economics itself is a product of thermodynamics.
As someone who has zero stakes in this (well beyond the planet) and limited knowledge in the biological sides of this.
This feels incredibly dismissive? Sure I will concede that most likely the 9 year timeline mentioned in that article is incredibly optimistic and very likely will not come to fruition.
But I think it is also naive to think, regardless of how much you know on a particular subject, that there are not solutions to problems that have not been developed yet or that there are already examples to those problems that are not public knowledge (it even mentions that the paper was written with NDA knowledge).
Then it is even more naive to try to paint a "wall of no" seemingly in a way to shut down research on this subject.
Just look at the silicone chips allowing us to have what once would have been considered a super computer in our pockets compared to when computers were tubes. Of course at that time anyone suggesting that a personal computing device would even be possible would likely be laughed out the room, the core technology didn't even exist to think that maybe some day it would be possible.
Are these companies and that paper making lofty promises that may be borderline lying to investors, maybe. But I don't think we should be saying it is impossible at this point in time.
Fusion might be good comparison here. Yes we can make it happen, yes we have multiple solutions. But still even with decent investment we are not near economical energy production. And it is not like we have not tried reasonably.
Somethings are just rather complicated at scale and both cultured meat and fusion belong to this category.
That I agree with, which is why I mentioned that the 9 year timeline is likely too ambitious.
But there is a difference between it being very complicated and likely relying on technology (or a fundamental understanding of something we don't know about) we don't have yet, and a "big no" and "never". Which is what this paper seems to be saying (reinforced by the comment I was replying to also saying "never").
That is the part of this that bothers me. Yeah we should admit that it is going to be very hard (if not impossible) and we should examine the reality of the timeline claims. But we should not be discouraging the research on both of these topics at this time by making claims that it will never happen.
I wouldn't bet against it ever happening, mainly because there is already a pretty advanced highly scalable meat manufacturing biotechnology process called, you know, the actual animal. Wouldn't recommend betting against a thing that already exists, it's not like fusion where we don't have small viable energy producing reactors yet (the sun doesn't count). Timeline though? Who the hell knows. Progress in biology has been unbelievably fast over the past few decades in a really unpredictable way (sometimes rapid improvements in existing technologies, sometimes unexpected breakthroughs that open up new horizons). Maybe the core challenges to replicating what animals do will take another 30 years to figure out, maybe a breakthrough will happen in the next two months, who knows. But a bunch of random chemical reactions kicking around for 3 billion years figured out how to make meat so don't think it's unreasonable to think we'll be able to figure it out too.
Right, and I think thats why the article bothered me and I made this comment.
We can criticize the timeline and the promises made to investors, that is incredibly valid.
But "never" is naive.
The only time I am really comfortable with saying "never" is something like, we will never travel faster than the speed of light. That seems to be fairly well proven at this point in time and if we ever fight a loophole around it, likely the core law will remain true.
Yeah, and it's especially naive when in addition to animals existing, the tech involved happens to be an area of enormous societal importance for health reasons (plenty of investment), the problem happens to be somewhat existential (climate change is getting tons of funding right now), and the science of biology is advancing at a frankly extraordinary rate.
Even GFI, the tech hype bros in that article that's being responded to, is showing a pretty big lack of vision. "This gradual progression is necessary; you can’t just throw a small amount of cells into a large bioreactor and hope they’ll start dividing. Cells are “fastidious,” Hughes told me, and have strict metabolic requirements for growth, including oxygen tension." <- pretty comfortable saying that under those constraings, 100% agree on the fractal of nos. But like, yeast and other things we grow in bioreactors aren't that picky. The hype bros want to try and convince people it's happening now so they're pitching some nonsense vision of mass manufacturing based on tech that obviously can't scale, and taking their vision of how things are going to work as ground truth is kinda silly. Almost by tautology, a successful bioreactor based approach is going to be one that uses bioengineering to create cells that don't need that sort of pickiness. It doesn't exist yet, sucks for the hype bros, but how sure are you that nobody will ever figure out how to engineer yeast to work as meat so you can use bioreactors from defunct breweries or something?
The first cow genome was only published 15 years ago - at least wait for biology and medicine to plateau and for the incentive of fixing climate change to go away before convincing yourself it's never gonna happen!
> and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
This elides over the cost differential and where that "cheaply enough" wall is. Animal grown meat is currently rising in costs and will continue to rise in costs as both demand is rising and the habitat for those animals is constricting due to climate change. How much cheaper does lab grown meat and how much more more expensive does animal grown meat need to be before it becomes viable. From what I've read they are closer than this argument assumes.
another classic case of differential accounting - if the climate adaptation cost attached to farming was charged in the price of meat, maybe the no would be on the other foot.
It seems like all the arguments there are predicated on the "meat" being actual muscle cells in a vat, though. Wouldn't it be just as likely that the successfully engineered food ends up being just, like, kelp with GM'd amino acid byproducts or something? Or chicken-of-the-woods with more random proteins thrown in? (I mean as long as they don't kill the culture, it doesn't matter if it benefits the host organism.)
I'm sure that's all harder than it sounds. But I doubt it's the same "wall of no" as muscles in a vat.
I wish I could get back the five minutes it took to read that stupid article. The argument for the second half is “his report seemed really technical to us and nobody has ever cited it in the four years since it was published so it’s a massive conspiracy by every scientist ever because everything he said was so right.”
Either every single company is wholesale lying about key parts of their processes and outputs…or this is just another hitpiece by Big Ag with exaggerated claims.
> See https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca... for a thorough exploration of why lab grown meat will never happen...
The NYT carried another opinion piece by the same author this year[1] along with a number of reader rebuttals[2], including this one from Mindy Kursban:
> It is surprising that in his obituary for cultivated meat, Joe Fassler spends so few words on the viability of the science and cites more chief executives than scientists.
> Just recently, the chair of Tufts University’s biomedical engineering department, David Kaplan, who has published more than 1,000 peer-reviewed papers, told[3] a room full of cultivated meat scientists that progress over the past five years gives him “complete confidence that we’re going to get to where we need to go.”
> There are many eminent scientists all over the world who share Dr. Kaplan’s view, but readers would not know that from reading Mr. Fassler’s essay, which argues that cultivated meat is a project of Silicon Valley “dreamers with a fancy prototype, a pitch deck and a good amount of natural charm.”
> This groundbreaking science may be taking longer than initially thought, but it’s making strides, so it’s a shame that Mr. Fassler spends so little time exploring it.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/09/opinion/eat-just-upside-f...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/opinion/lab-grown-meat.ht...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGzXAuiYKGU
all we need to do is break the second law of thermodynamics, what's the big deal?
Last I checked the cow doesn't have a problem producing steak and thermodynamics applies to that too so not sure what the argument is here
Ruminants are actually very efficient protein generating machines.
They (like us) have been evolving under thermodynamic pressures for millions of years, I would like us to be able to not have to produce them to have high quality protein/fat/etc, but I haven't seen anything to say it's remotely possible.
We only sequenced the first cow genome 15 years ago and plenty of plants and fungi produce high quality protein/fat/etc - it's not like we're starting from scratch the whole point of bioengineering is that we can cheat using stuff nature figured out for us. It's certainly not scientifically impossible. In the zero interest rate hype cycle over the past couple years plenty of startups convinced themselves that they could totally make it work with cell culture and stupid expensive bioreactors and media and stuff since that was the only tech that was 'ready' even though at best all you can get is an overpriced lean meat only replacement for ground beef, and this article seems to take for given that this approach === meatless meat. I think it's useful to keep the questions of 'are these tech bros going to figure out how to make producing meat in class 8 cleanrooms viable' and 'are bioengineered animal-free meat replacements going to happen in the next few decades' seperate
I have had a somewhat dystopian idea (on the surface level) that is actually much more humane than our current systems.
Why don't we work, via CRISPR or aggressive evolution, to get to the point where something like a cow is much closer to a meat worm? Imagine if we could get the brain down to something where it's basically like a mollusk, to remove most of the ethical issues with slaughtering something as sentient as a cow or a pig. Then imagine if we could breed away the legs and such, and get this thing to the point that it's just a long tube of the most tender cuts of meat. Whole worm of ribeye and fillet. And it can just be suspended in a factory, hundreds of meat worms high, with food being pumped in their mouth, and excrement being swept up.
Again, sounds insane, but I want my meatworm future.
I know lots of problems with lab grown meats are that:
1.) they have no immune system and are therefore incredibly finicky when it comes to infection. meat worms can still have an immune system
2.) they don't produce the necessary hormones for growth. meat worms can still produce hormones
3.) hard to get the proteins and fats to grow together. meat worms would absolutely love to be fat
It sounds like a decent idea. It doesn't really resolve the problems with calories in vs calories out, though (ie. by and large you still need just as much feed). It also might not be cheaper - lots of meat agriculture largely leaves the animals to themselves before slaughter, which this obviously wouldnt be capable of.
You're also proposing a fairly massive genetic engineering project to get to that point too - I suspect there are many other problems on the chopping block that would be possible if/when we're capable of making those kinds of changes to organisms.
The idea does solve the moral qualms (if we ignore the squickiness of creating an artifical being in a much degraded state from its origin)
This is a pretty interesting philosophical question, and I think it basically boils down to whether you are fundamentally a positivist or not. Meaning that if we remove the sensory organs of a being (I.e., remove its ability to feel pain) that means it loses any ethical value.
If you agree with this viewpoint, then the idea of “beef worms” or “chicken fruit” makes sense. But if you question positivism and think that beings have another form of value that isn’t merely the sum of their sensory impressions, it gets much more complex.
its interesting how i imagine most people have a sort of visceral intuitive repulsion to this concept, but it really is a moral upgrade over the current factory farming situation as far as i can tell.
The best thing about traditional meat is the evolved immune system and kidneys.
Can you elaborate on the immune system ? Doesn’t heat destroy every celles responsible for the immune system ?
Can someone explain how lab grown meat releases less greenhouse gasses? Seems like much more energy inefficient than the old fashion way. Are there any figures available that go into the thermodynamics of it all?
When talking about beef specifically, the problem is that cows produce a disproportionate amount of methane, which is a disproportionately powerful greenhouse gas. If you don't want to give up meat but do want to make a dent in your emissions, even just eating pork or chicken instead is an improvement. There might be ways to reduce the emissions of cows in the future (different feeds, gut biome interventions, bioengineering), but right now these are science fiction.
As for the energy inputs themselves, the notion of grass-fed beef often gets trotted out as a way to make beef more eco-friendly, but in practice this mostly amounts to greenwashing. Most beef is not grass-fed, and most places in the world that raise cows are not suited to pure grass feeding.
And then there's the land use aspect. When we're clearcutting the Amazon in order to satisfy the world's demand for beef, we've fucked up.
> There might be ways to reduce the emissions of cows in the future (different feeds, gut biome interventions, bioengineering), but right now these are science fiction.
I thought there's already research showing that seaweed in the cow's diet drastically reduces methane emissions.
Yes, just 2% of diet as seaweed essentially eliminates methane emissions. But there's no price on methane emissions for the farmer so no incentive to do so.
> cows produce a disproportionate amount of methane, which is a disproportionately powerful greenhouse gas.
Can somebody explain run through these quickly, I'm not sure which parts are wrong and how much they're wrong:
1. the constituents in the methane came from the food the cows eat?
2. the food got it from the atmosphere?
3. cows don't increase methane constantly, rather it's the marginal volume of feed required to sustain every new cow on the planet less the ones slaughtered? I.e. the growth in new supply?
4. Eliminating cows raised for meat would stop the increase in methane due to increase in supply and it would result in a one-off net reduction in atmospheric methane in time proportional to what cows were releasing, assuming the food continues to grow?
5. What happens when the food the cows are no longer eating dies, does anything get released then?
Not my field, so assumptions and simplifications follow. Animal feed mostly grows from absorbing carbon dioxide, not methane. Cows (and other grazing animals) produce net positive methane because their gut microbiota ferment the animal feed, producing methane. So, to keep methane in balance, something in the local grazing biome needs to absorb methane. Otherwise, cows can increase proportional atmospheric methane.
Well yes, but the same grass that these cows eat....would rot and release methane eventually anyway? Is that not correct?
Not quite correct - the grass may rot due to non-methanogenic organisms and/or be eaten by something.
It is correct.
Assuming no fossil fuels provide the carbon, the whole thing is indeed carbon neutral.
However, from a green house gas perspective, plants consume Co2 (moderate green house potential), and either due to rotting or as part of digestion, methane does get produced. Which has a high green house potential. Not in identical proportions to the co2 consumed of course, cows and rotting plants also produce co2.
So think of part of the problem being some co2 being converted into a more problematic green house gas (methane) with a lot of steps in the middle.
Also people being jealous of that tasty steak that is a byproduct of the process.
1/2: Grass turns CO2 and water into sugar and oxygen, cow eats grass and turns sugar and oxygen in to methane and CO2 and more cow.
(Via intermediary step of some of their stomachs being bioreactors filled with bacteria, oh the irony).
3: Sure, but demand is still going up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beef_production_1961_2021...
4: I'm not sure I follow the question, but methane has an atmospheric lifetime of about 12 years, so it would probably fall, but I'm not sure how much by
5: Some mixture of CO2, methane, and carbon sequestration; at this scale it's worth considering which crops are grown and how they are used precisely to minimise that kind of impact
I wonder if anyone tried to capture methane produced in this way
The idea is that cows, and all the infrastructure around raising them, are a huge source of greenhouse gasses, while just cultivating cow meat eliminates everything not directly related to producing a hamburger. More recent studies [1] cast doubt on that and even suggest as you do that cell-cultured meat may be more environmentally damaging, not less.
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.21.537778v1....
Can you condense the argument for us? Why can't the supply chain be decarbonised?
One of the main factors: generating the growth media for the cells is by no means carbon-free, and some of the ingredients are very very carbon intensive to produce.
Do you mean energy intensive or carbon intensive?
Carbon intensive. Most of them are agriculturally sourced, and fossil fuels/feedstocks are not likely to be widely replaced in agriculture for several decades, at least.
Nobody talks about the thermodynamics because right now it's terrible (also why the economics is terrible - nobody can get anywhere the $3/kg of chicken breast).
However, theoretically lab grown meat could be a big win on the thermodynamics front, and whoever solves that will have a far easier time getting the economics working too.
I think it's more an issue of resources rather than raw energy. If this can be produced using much less space, locally to consumers, and using clean energy then it's a net gain.
What I'm interested in is where do the raw materials come from? I suppose this needs a number of "ingredients", including proteins, that must be sourced from somewhere.
One of the larger issues is the methane byproduct, i.e. they fart. It isn’t just about energy.
Burps, actually. Even harder to capture if you were going to try.
I think the end goal is control of food production:
1. Introduce artificial meat that only large corporations can make
2. Ban natural meat as artificial alternative exists
3. Jack up the prices and profit
That’s actually super hilarious given the conglomeration that has occurred already anyway.
Turns out you can just skip both the incredible engineering problem of lab grown meat and the incredible political problem of “banning meat” and even people who are apparently paranoid about corporate/government control will just go right along with it.
Most of the meat consumed in the US already comes from a large corporation. 99% of it is factory farmed.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farm...
Reality is the opposite with the agriculture and beef lobbies influencing government and cultured meat facing outright bans
however, agriculture and beef lobbies don't demand a ban on small farms and individual cattle raising.
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A perpetual goal of all civilization has been control of food production, without which we reliably starve to death.
I mean yeah. You can basically judge political/economic system by how many famines they have.
Yeah, that already happens in the current world with current corporations. You just don't notice because you're too busy consuming.
And I dont mean this in an angry environmentalist way. There are a lot of people who dont pay attention to their current food chain and don't know just how tightly most of the brands are controlled by a select group of companies.
So before jumping to future conspiracies, look at what you're in now:
https://capitaloneshopping.com/blog/11-companies-that-own-ev...
https://xtalks.com/food-industry-by-the-numbers-leading-food...
I eat some of the above foods, so I'm not some anticorporate person.
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Always heard cell cultured meats don’t scale to industrial size.
Maybe that's true with today's technology. But that stuff tends to improve, especially if you invest money/research.
One would so assume, but I saw a statement that whole classes of medications(?) seen as promising in the 90s were a no go because of the exact same fundamental bioreactor scaling issues. I’ll try to find the reference.
Not the original reference I was thinking of, but close enough:
https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...
I think we are re-inventing the wheel of using biochemical process to grow protein. Current meats have millions of years of evolution. Sure the types eaten most are not bred out of efficiency. Why don't we choose other starting points, possibly insect, e.g. grasshopper or maggot and grow them in the lab?
I like the idea to start with the most efficient specie but other animals/vegetable we eat are in fact already very bred out for efficiency. So much that some very efficient ranchs choose to slaughter babies caws at birth because they are “milk bred” male or “meat bred” female and not economically viable.
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What are you specifically denying ? 1) the increase in temperature on the planet 2) the danger from increase temperature? 3) the human origin of temperature increase?
Enlighten us with motivation why you think a ton of studies on each of this items is wrong.
Or even the fifth-grade science project you can do. Fill a soda bottle with air, a soda bottle with CO2, put them in the sun, then measure their internal temperature. You can do it with your kids in an afternoon.
You had the hottest year on record last year. You're in for the hottest summer ever this year, and next year will also be the hottest on record, and the one after that - maybe when it's 132F outside you'll realize something's wrong?
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