Lab meat to transform meat industry in 2021

https://www.iol.co.za/business-report/companies/lab-meat-to-transform-meat-industry-in-2021-12750778

by x43b • 9 years ago

60 78 9 years ago

iol.co.za

shaunxcode• 9 years ago

what is the holdup? how are we not just throwing government dollars at this industry??

lucidguppy• 9 years ago

Somebody is throwing money at the politicians.

jdavis7033• 9 years ago

Because a headline like "Lab grown meat kills hundreds" could set the industry back a century. There's also the fact that ranchers, pig farmers, meat packers and the rest of BigAg don't want their businesses disrupted. And then add in the anti food-tech people (the ones who complain about Soylent et. al.) and combine that with the anti-vegeterian folks and you have a whole lot of opposition.

As a current vegetarian I'm excited to start eating these lab grown meats, but I also want the industry to do it safely and intelligently.

marricks2• 9 years ago

I think throwing money would help, especially with testing.

It’s not like thrown money needs to go just to scaling....

kemiller• 9 years ago

Complaining about Soylent per se doesn’t make you anti-food tech generally. Soylent has legitimate serious issues. But I agree with you that we need to approach it sensibly.

whb07• 9 years ago

because a government bureaucrat does not have the experience/skill/knowledge to invest in such projects. That is what the private investors and markets are for.

hunta20972• 9 years ago

Animal farming is such a historical constant, I wonder what the unintended consequences of artificial meat are?

How does this ride with the trend for more organic and natural produce? Will artificial meat only be a suitable alternative in cheap or fast foods?

JoeAltmaier3• 9 years ago

And my favorite: is lab meat vegetarian? is it vegan? Its certainly not cut from some animal, and nothing got killed to obtain it.

Havoc• 9 years ago

It is whatever the marketing department says it is.

KitDuncan• 9 years ago

It depends on whether Fetal Bovine Serum is used to grow the meat. If it is, it's neither vegan or vegetarian.

nkoren• 9 years ago

Vegetarian of 36 years here: I won't have any qualms about eating it.

tuna-piano2• 9 years ago

And this is where vegeterianism/veganism can turn into a religion. Where people start looking for rules as opposed to using logic of why something should be this way. It actually reminds me a lot of how very observant Jews treat the rules for Kosher food.

If you're a vegetarian for ethical or environmental reasons, I'd think lab grown meat is probably totally ok to eat. If you're a vegetarian for health reasons, not sure why you can't eat meat a few meals a month?

peatmoss• 9 years ago

I’ve heard it posited that oysters should be on the menu for vegans (one’s who are vegan for ethical rather than dietary choice reasons). The rationale is that oysters specifically have no nervous system in the way that, say, a clam does. In fact, from a capacity to suffer standpoint, they’re roughly equivalent to a carrot.

The other thing is that oyster farming improves water quality and the environment. So, vegans—go crazy I guess!

cryptoz• 9 years ago

Animal farming is such a historical constant, I wonder what the unintended consequences of artificial meat are?

I know what you mean, but animal farming at the scale we currently do is not a historical constant. The unintended consequences of having 7B humans eat meat every day is a much bigger concern that not eating real meat every day.

Our current meat consumption accelerates global warming, drives wild inefficiencies in the market, and is a hell for the animals themselves. (Edit: Also represents disease vectors in humans, see shared farm resources and things like e. coli).

We need to move to lab meat to avoid the distaster that eating meat is bringing.

Zenst• 9 years ago

Yes, large swaths of forest are being cleared for cattle rearing/production and animals also produce much methane as cows do as an example.

Whilst this may help, it will take many years/decades until the trust is there and indeed trusted backing and for some that will not change.

For me, I forsee artificial milk production as a more accepted avenue and if we can develop a process in which we chuck grass in at one end and get milk out of the other as a bigger opportunity and one in which would aid the environmental impacts in a more positive way. Until then we will still have cows, even with artificial meat.

But artificial meat, will take ages until it is accepted by the public, for me, it is when the likes of McDonalds adopting it that will be a key marker in progress and that is a long long way off as it stands.

marricks2• 9 years ago

So much of this current animal at system isn’t a historical constant. Even eating this much animal protein isn’t normal.

Even if you neglect the animal suffering inherit in the system all the farm land freed up by not raising an animal for its flesh would do wonders for the environment.

Worrying about “unintended consequences” of solving some problems over how many problems it causes is crazy.

CPLX• 9 years ago

Worrying about the unintended consequences of replacing our diet with synthetic substitutes is most certainly not crazy.

DoofusOfDeath• 9 years ago

I tentatively hold to the theory that human population generally expands until some resource constraint is barely satisfied in the good years, and becomes a tragedy on the bad years.

So my guess is that freeing up farmland will potentially result in even more human population, just shifting the odds of which particular tragedy will next befall us.

hunta20972• 9 years ago

I'm not worried about it - I'm fascinated to see how it plays out.

How long before other complex food proteins can be synthesised and mass-produced without the need of specialist farms?

nkkollaw4• 9 years ago

I don't know how to feel about this.

I'm definitely worried that no one knows what weird diseases this could cause years from now, and if any research pointing to cancer or other problems has been kept secret (like it's been done before in so many cases).

For sure, intensive farming is bad for everybody (besides the farmers, perhaps), and anything that will reduce it is good news IMHO.

As for how I'd feel eating lab meat, we only eat meat because most of us haven't seen how animals are kept, what they're fed, and how they're slaughtered (I have at my dad's organic pig farm and it's nothing pretty--and I can't imagine how intensive production looks). So, I guess meat coming from a lab is just as gross/weird as the above, I would probably try it and even get used to it.

I'm sure vegetarians will love it--or at least the ones that do it for the animals--as they'll finally be able to eat meat, which is unarguably personal preference but IMHO about 100 times better-tasting than imitation meat (like those burgers you buy at the grocery store).

I suspect if it's cheaper I'll get it served at some fast food restaurant, so I'll have a chance to try it.

lprubin5• 9 years ago

If you're ever in NYC, let me know. I'll take you on a tour of vegan cuisine that will knock your socks off.

nkkollaw4• 9 years ago

I'm in Poland--otherwise I'd love to, but I'm not saying it's not good, just that I don't like it.

I can take you to some BBQ place that will take _your_ socks off, too. You know, to each his own :-)

cangencer• 9 years ago

Care to share a list of some recommended places?

danharaj2• 9 years ago

I'm a meat eater but in my experience vegetarian or vegan good that merely tries to imitate meat dishes always sucks, but cuisine built around the ingredients available can be amazing. For example, i think south Indian vegetarian food is good enough that if I had it every day I wouldn't mind not eating meat.

If you use enough "umami bombs" in cooking then you can make very savory veg* dishes. My faves are soy sauce and yeast extract and I'm also not above using MSG.

Tbh I think meat is an addiction. Even if veg meals satisfy me and meet my caloric needs I still crave it!

notyourwork• 9 years ago

I agree, Indian food is the one that doesn't make me miss meat.

eric_h• 9 years ago

My faves are soy sauce and yeast extract and I'm also not above using MSG

If you're putting yeast extract in, you are absolutely not above using MSG, as that's pretty much what makes yeast extract so tasty (and used in many processed foods so they don't have to say that they added MSG to their product).

As an aside - I bought a big ole bag of MSG a while back, and it's great to toss into sautéed vegetables.

icebraining2• 9 years ago

Even if veg meals satisfy me and meet my caloric needs I still crave it!

Meat has more than calories - you might be missing the other components in your vegetarian meals.

user5994461• 9 years ago

>> As for how I'd feel eating lab meat, we only eat meat because most of us haven't seen how animals are kept, what they're fed, and how they're slaughtered ...

Children in the developed world might not know but you only have to go as far as their grands parents to find out. They typically had a farm and had to kill the animals themselves.

lprubin5• 9 years ago

Factory farming today is a pretty far cry from grandpa's small family farm.

icebraining2• 9 years ago

we only eat meat because most of us haven't seen how animals are kept, what they're fed, and how they're slaughtered

This is often said, but I doubt it very much. I think it should be shown to everyone (including in school), and it would probably lead to some positive changes, but I doubt it would significantly reduce the number of meat eaters. We can look at the people working in the industry: are they all morally deficient or desperate for work? Not as far as I know.

nkkollaw4• 9 years ago

Whenever I watch documentaries about the food industry, I find myself unable to eat meat for at least 10 days.

I bet that if we were reminded somehow (like for cigarettes), lots of people will eat a lot less meat.

mozumder• 9 years ago

Do they include nerve cells or a nervous system? How "conscious" are these?

Hasz• 9 years ago

As far as I'm aware, they're just culturing muscle tissue. There is no nervous system, and it is certainly not conscious.

physcab2• 9 years ago

I’m a meat-eater but my wife is vegan. We’ve been following Impossible Foods for some time and got to finally try one of their burgers last month.

As a meat eater who is vegan at home, I think it’s a decent alternative compared to other vegetarian meat-like products, in fact far superior. But it’s definitely not a replacement for the real thing.

I have been pretty impressed with the steady innovation in vegetarian / vegan options that give me as good alternatives compared to non. For example, Miyokos cheese is incredible, and far better than any cheese I used to typically eat, and it’s dairy free.

I used to eat Boca burgers when I’ve had to and they aren’t great. I’m excited for better options to come into the market.

gnicholas4• 9 years ago

I was also underwhelmed by the Impossible Foods burger, which was a better imitation of meat than other patties, but not necessarily tastier.

The bigger surprise to me was that Impossible Foods does not apparently control how restaurants prepare their burgers—in fact, the restaurant where I ate it even had an Impossible Foods chili. I would have expected IF to put pretty close restrictions around how you cook and present their foods, to make sure that people don't have a bad experience and assume it's the fault of the "meat".

jkarneges5• 9 years ago

Chili, interesting. I tried breaking up a Beyond Burger patty so I could use it as ground beef filling for burritos/pasta. It was pretty much a disaster. Even when cooking the burger normally there is very little room for error, compared to real beef.

I think the end-game for these companies should be to produce a chuck substitute that is malleable rather than being restricted to patties. And of course it shouldn't ruin easily.

nkozyra• 9 years ago

Same. I thought the impossible burger was fine but wished if just ordered a traditional veggie burger.

I understand the desire to appeal to meat eaters, but it's never going to be a match. And close but no cigar leads to an uncanny valley of the palate.

Meanwhile, there are much tastier vegetarian burgers that abandon any desire to taste like meat.

So I see "meatish" as nothing but a curiosity for the time being.

Lab grown meats married with meatless agencies, meanwhile, could bridge the gap better while we wait for it to become a more affordable process.

exit3• 9 years ago

can you express in what way they fall short of the real thing?

gnicholas4• 9 years ago

In my experience, the patty lacked the density of meat and tasted a bit like peas/alfalfa sprouts. I don't mind either of these things, but I wouldn't want a hamburger to taste like them.

I would certainly eat one again if the price came down, but I'm on the sidelines for now. For background, I order veggie burgers more often than beef burgers when given the choice, but I have never been a vegetarian.

physcab2• 9 years ago

I had read a lot about their synthetic process in reproducing heme, which gives meat the iron-y taste. They also had some marketing videos about how they introduce fat, because real chuck has different degrees of leanness. So I was expecting something close to meat, with maybe some weirdness in texture.

In reality, it was much closer to a Boca burger but tastier. Basically if you take a burger and remove 50% of the juice and , 25% density, the crumble, and cook it well done. If it were in the grocery store, I'd still buy it over Boca, but my expectations of it being like-meat but healthier were not met. I wouldn't serve it to real burger loving carnivores.

I'd say its kinda false advertising, but I get why they did it...it definitely got us intrigued.

FreeRadical• 9 years ago

Hopefully this will positively impact antibiotic usage.

ourmandave• 9 years ago

Apropos to nothing, pigs outnumber people in Iowa 7 to 1 (21.2M hogs vs 3.1M people).

tuna-piano2• 9 years ago

Imagine a future, lets say in 2040, where lab grown meat is cheap and tasty.

-Will future children look back at our current acceptance of the treatment/killing of animals like we look at societal acceptance of slavery? The pictures/videos of some of our factory farms are unbelievable.

-Will laws be imposed for the killing of mentally capable animals such as pigs and cows? Some states already outlaw killing/eating certain animals (dogs+cats)[1], and cruelty to animals is illegal almost everywhere. But what is a more cruel punishment than death? I'd rather be tortured and then live the rest of my life than be murdered today.

-We can all live perfectly happy, long lives without killing animals today... so why is it okay to kill them today just for our own enjoyment?

(I'm not a vegetarian but am ethically conflicted)

[1]https://inhabitat.com/killing-dogs-and-cats-for-meat-is-stil...

mrkstu3• 9 years ago

Quite simply because there is not ethical imperative to stop- and its about nourishment rather than just enjoyment.

Do we have an ethical imperative to stop cats from killing birds? All complex animal life on this planet consumes other living cells in order to survive, it is just a matter of scale and type.

This is especially true for animals that exist so that we may consume them. Hundreds of millions of chicken live only so that we may be nourished- similarly for cows, sheep and so forth.

Raising them in a minimally harsh and 'humane' environment can be an ethical good but that their lives are shortened by our 'harvesting' process is irrelevant, since they exist only due to that need to begin with.

Now killing an animal and discarding the resultant bounty- that is unethical and wrong, unless needed to ameliorate some other harm.

exit3• 9 years ago

Raising them in a minimally harsh and 'humane' environment can be an ethical good but that their lives are shortened by our 'harvesting' process is irrelevant, since they exist only due to that need to begin with.

are you saying it's always preferable to create a life, as long as its conditions pass some threshold of being humane?

many would disagree. you might value minimising suffering above maximising happiness, for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism

lprubin5• 9 years ago

"Raising them in a minimally harsh and 'humane' environment"

The vast majority of meat eaten in the developed world comes from factory farms where the treatment of animals is pretty horrific. If you don't believe me on how bad it is, watch the movie Earthlings. It's free on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrlBSuuy50Y

swombat• 9 years ago

I used to feel conflicted about this, much like you, and then one day it made sense to me that I just didn’t need to feel conflicted about this - I went vegetarian. Now I no longer feel like every bite of my meals is conflicting with my sense of integrity and ethics.

jkarneges5• 9 years ago

We can all live perfectly happy, long lives without killing animals today

(emphasis mine)

I think the moral argument is relative (progress-based) at best. Slavery was never essential to survival, but consuming other animals so far has been, or at least it was until only very recently. Being a healthy vegan is mainly possible today thanks to advancements in science and food production. I think our children will give us a moral pass in the same way we give it to cats that still eat mice.

mping• 9 years ago

And what about old civilizations such as Indians or Chinese? There has been religious vegetarian sub groups for a long time (Jain, Buddhist, Hindu, etc). Not vegan, but at the time there was no CAFOs either.

kjksf2• 9 years ago

This is a very thin article. Wired has a few in-depth articles on the subject:

- https://www.wired.com/2016/10/nerds-cattle-food-technology-w...

- https://www.wired.com/story/the-impossible-burger/

- https://www.wired.com/2016/07/lab-grown-meat-coming-win-hate...

- https://www.wired.com/story/navigating-the-uncanny-valley-of...

The reality is that currently lab grown meat is extremely expensive (thousands of dollars per pound) and we don't even know if we can bring the cost down to a level competitive with cows.

Impossible Foods, however, is already making an impact. They make "burger" meat purely from plants by mixing thing up and adding fake "blood".

They're already shipping (there are 8 restaurants in SF alone that offer their burgers, https://www.impossiblefoods.com/locations/).

People seem to like their stuff (reportedly in some restaurants their burgers outsell the real beef burgers).

They just finished their first large scale factory (1 million pounds per year) and are ramping up distribution across US.

Cost-wise, they're already comparable with organic beef and there's a clear path to make them cheaper than beef by increasing the scale.

In terms of impact and transforming meat industry, Impossible Foods seems to be in much better position.

gnicholas4• 9 years ago

Cost-wise, they're [Impossible Foods] already comparable with organic beef and there's a clear path to make them cheaper than beef by increasing the scale.

We buy organic ground beef for around $7/lb at Costco. A restaurant I talked with said they pay $11/lb for Impossible Foods "meat". Do you consider these prices to be comparable? Or are you aware of restaurants paying much less than $11/lb?

To be clear, I understand prices of IF will come down—I'm just trying to get clarity on current pricing, since a 40% price difference is material for restaurants.

rflrob• 9 years ago

Once you've established that people are willing to pay a $2-5/lb premium to ensure that their meat is organic, I think another similar premium for non-meat meat is reasonable to call "comparable", especially when the alternative is thousands of dollars per pound.

kjksf2• 9 years ago

To be honest, you have more inside information that I do, so thanks for that pricing tidbit.

(my info comes from an interview with the CEO where he didn't say the exact price, just compared it to the price of organic beef)

It looks like there's a solid premium on their "beef", good to know.

That being said, it certainly beats thousands of dollars for lab grown meat.

The important thing is that it's commercially viable at current prices.

I think Impossible Foods deserves credit for picking the right "go to market" strategy.

Kind of like Tesla started with a sports car, they started by supplying gourmet burger chains.

At $10+ per burger, the cost of raw material is clearly acceptable for the restaurant, or else they wouldn't be buying.

freeflight2• 9 years ago

Unless this stuff is cost-competitive with the cheapest meat out there, it won't change anything.

The vast majority of people still buy their food solely based on what's most affordable, with little to no room to account for "ethical reasons" beyond that. In that regard, "organic" or "ethical" often amounts to paying double if sometimes quadruple the price of "regular" products.

If artificial meat can undercut regularly produced meat, price wise (without tasting too bad), then that could be a real game changer, but until that happens it will remain only interesting to the fringe demographic of people with too much disposable income. Which isn't that big of a demographic and as such will never have the potential to enact the desired environmental impact change.

codetwelve• 9 years ago

Yes, everything is expensive in the beginning until it's not. We knew this of things like solar energy and other renewables. It needs to be worked on, early adopters will support it then it will take off when the price starts to drop and production goes up.

I dislike comments like this that seem to just be dismissive of a new technology without adding any real insight. Everyone knows things are expensive in the beginning so what's the point of saying it's not going to work unless it's cheaper than real meat. It's really obvious.

Furthermore, oil has tried to undercut their prices to fend off other forms of energy (specially renewables), people and countries are still choosing renewables as a way to the future because it makes sense.

An alternative to raising livestock with clean meat is something that also makes sense and I think quite a lot of people are eager to proceed with this alternative.

freeflight2• 9 years ago

Yes, everything is expensive in the beginning until it's not.

Some things will always stay more expensive than their cheaper alternatives, case in point: Organic farmed meat vs mass farmed.

The former will always stay more expensive than the later because you can produce that much more meat on the same space, you can produce it cheaper by feeding lesser quality food to the animals.

Is the resulting meat a "better meat"? No, but it is the cheaper meat and that's still what the vast majority of consumers are looking for.

I dislike comments like this that seem to just be dismissive of a new technology without adding any real insight.

It wasn't meant to be dismissive about the technology, merely pointing out that as long as this ain't cost competitive it will just be another niche solution for the "Let's feel better about ourselves by throwing money around" crowd and we already have plenty of those.

Silicon Valley/SF is a microcosmos on its own, some things might work there, yet rarely do these things scale up outside of that niche-customer market, but that's exactly the kind of solution we need if we want large parts of humanity to change their ways about how they treat animals and animal products.

milansm• 9 years ago

What I look forward to the most is it will make majority of the farmland obsolete (land is mostly used for growing food for animals anyway). As someone who's living in the area (in Eastern Europe) where there's no decent forest in 100km radius, due to everything being turned into farmland, I can't wait for the era when forests will reclaim those lands.

When I cross a bridge on Danube and take a look from the hight (the bridge is quite big and tall) at the countryside I live in, all I can see is a farmland. And I can't help but imagine that only 200 years ago there were forests there, as far as you can see.

But once the meat is grown in the lab, I hope that it would stop making financial sense to farm the land for animal food.

jkarneges5• 9 years ago

What about lab dairy?

It's completely counterintuitive, but factory farming practices for dairy are arguably as bad if not worse than what is done for meat, and dairy even supports the meat industry (veal).

I know there are fake options like Daiya, but it's just not the same.

Lab meat to transform meat industry in 2021

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