Lab-grown salmon hits the menu

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/lab-grown-salmon-hits-the-menu-at-an-oregon-restaurant-as-the-fda-greenlights-the-cell-cultured-product-180986769/

by bookmtn • 11 months ago

171 322 11 months ago

smithsonianmag.com

arjvik2• 11 months ago

A handful of states, including Florida and Alabama, have banned or are considering bans on the creation and sale of the alternative protein.

Ouch. Red states are pro-deregulation, until laissez-faire innovation offends their beliefs.

tomp3• 11 months ago

It's not about beliefs. It's about slippery slopes.

As we've seen with incandescent light bulbs and plastic straws, "free market" is only temporary, until the "bad" thing simply gets banned.

They're just pre-emptively banning artificial meat, to prevent real meat from being banned!

MostlyStable2• 11 months ago

If that's the goal, why not pass a law saying that real meat products are not allowed to be banned?

delecti2• 11 months ago

Is this meant to be a straw man or a steel man of that position?

The idea of preemptively banning something so it can't become better than the status quo seems ludicrous.

trenchpilgrim3• 11 months ago

That makes as much sense as banning cars to protect the railroads

BurningFrog• 11 months ago

"We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

henry2023• 11 months ago

[flagged]

hx8• 11 months ago

Sometimes politicians beat the drum about free markets when they want to privatize currently public services. Sometimes politicians beat the drum about free markets when they want to modify regulations to favor their favorite businesses. It's always treated as some fantastical force that will magically provide efficient solutions.

Sometimes the most efficient solution is to collaborate in the way only a government can organize. Sometimes regulations do more good than harm. If someone cannot articulate exactly why their proposal is a good idea and instead relies on repeating myths then be wary.

user3939382• 11 months ago

Free market presupposes no regulatory capture which I’m pretty sure is inevitable under any framework

mapt12• 11 months ago

To make their product, the food company’s scientists collect living cells from Pacific salmon and grow them in cell cultivators that mimic the inside of a wild fish—controlling factors like temperature, pH and nutrients, per their website. After harvesting them, the team incorporates plant-based ingredients to make the hunk of cells taste, feel and look like salmon fillets.

So... Like a wild fish, but with NO IMMUNE SYSTEM WHATSOEVER, which requires your sterilization protocols to be effectively perfect.

NASA has tried and failed to get their sterilization protocols to perfection levels for Mars landers, and consistently failed despite using basically zero organic materials.

We're going to cook this stuff, yes, sure (aren't we?)... but the squick is rational. And the problem gets inherently worse at larger scale production.

throwaway889900• 11 months ago

Their advertising of it being like a sushi cut then makes this possibly dangerous marketing then, no?

margalabargala• 11 months ago

No, not really, because the parent comment is freaking out about a problem that doesn't exist.

It's not going to be possible to grow a thing that looks like a piece of salmon but is secretly riddled with viruses and bacteria.

Either the lab gets their sterile technique right and they wind up with something that looks like salmon, or they get it wrong and you wind up with bacteria slop. Things that look like salmon can only become so if no bacteria and viruses are present.

mvdtnz5• 11 months ago

It's certainly not marketed as though it's going to be cooked,

Our saku is sushi-grade and is perfect for dishes like sushi, crudo, and ceviche

https://www.wildtypefoods.com/our-salmon

bangaladore• 11 months ago

Because from a quick search this isn't what people refer to when they think of lab-grown meat/fish. This is some mix of stuff that includes some amount of material that is lab-grown. It won't behave like you expect Salmon to.

arrosenberg• 11 months ago

Can you explain why this situation is any different than regular meat? I.e. Fish immune systems don’t stop parasites from being present in the meat, flash freezing is what kills the parasites.

goda902• 11 months ago

This obviously varies by animal, but some meats are safe to eat raw or undercooked if the animal was healthy because the meat doesn't have lots of pathogens inside it. Flash freezing won't kill bacteria or viruses that the immune system of an animal might.

mapt12• 11 months ago

Parasitic worms are huge, complex multicellular animals that co-evolved to sometimes survive the immune system response to their presence; Freezing kills them because they are huge and the scale of ice crystals severs important body parts. Living bacteria, living fungi, spores from these, viruses, and importantly heat-resistant toxins produced by these, are what I'm worried about.

One of modern humanity's oldest activities is fermenting carbohydrates in large bioreactors into alcohol, yogurt, and pickles, but there are a lot of things that turned out not to work in that history.

When we try to fabricate, say, monoclonal antibodies using large cultures of multicellular tissues for pharmaceutical work, the price ends up coming out to millions of dollars a kilogram.

I am implicitly skeptical of the protocols of a protein tissue culture that has to be produced at the ~$30/kg price level.

Could you eat it and not die? I'm sure!

But could you feed people with a billion meals worth of batches and have nobody die? I'm less sure! My understanding is that tissue culture failures are frequently the bane of a biologist's research program.

LeifCarrotson• 11 months ago

Fish immune systems sole reason for being is to stop parasites from being present in the meat while the fish is alive. They're literally swimming through a soup of arthropods, plankton, algae, bacteria, and viruses that would love nothing more to turn their meat into more of themselves. There's always a bigger fish that is trying to eat them, yes, but the smaller critters want to eat as well!

Freezing doesn't kill the parasites, it slows the clock that started ticking when the fish was killed. It's not pasteurization, like what's done to canned tuna. It just slows the clock when you refrigerate or freeze the fish, but does not reset it to zero. And of course, if you're eating fresh fish that was healthy when it was killed, there's no need for an intermediate freezing or pasteurizing step.

This situation is different because the "clock" starts when the cell cultures are removed from the donor salmon. The whole blob/tank/plate/catalyzing surface (I'm not sure what the design is, I wish they had more documentation) on which the product grows for the whole time that the product is growing is vulnerable to a single bacterium that would grow out of control, like an immunocompromised human might be killed by an ordinary illness that most people would shrug off in 24 hours.

zzzoom2• 11 months ago

Don't worry, if you catch any disease you can use any antibiotic that still works after spraying farmed salmon willy-nilly for years.

mapt12• 11 months ago

Antibiotics only work on live bacteria, and only sometimes. "Any disease" is a much broader category.

fastball• 11 months ago

What? The requirements for this are nothing like what is required for sterilization of a Mars rover. NASA's goal is to not have a single iota of foreign organic material on rovers, which is obviously not even close to what is required here. The only thing you need to worry about with this stuff is whether there are any dangerous bacterium in it (e.g. salmonella), which can be readily monitored and avoided without herculean effort. And unlike real salmon, parasites and viruses won't have much opportunity to gain a foothold.

MostlyStable2• 11 months ago

The lack of an immune system is not a health and safety risk, it's a business risk. An infected batch won't get served to humans it will just die/fail and need to be thrown out. Fighting infection is one of the reasons that lab-grown meats are so expensive. I have seen reasonably convincing technical analyses which claim that it would require pretty massive technological innovations (that are not anywhere on the horizon so far) to make any lab-grown meats economically viable. That's very likely the reason for the fact that (as pointed out in another comment), this is not pure salmon, it's salmon mixed with vegetable product. That was almost definitely a cost-saving measure.

My personal guess is that the first actually economically viable lab-grown meats will be of endangered/extinct animals that the extremely wealthy will be willing to pay the exorbitant costs that it takes to create them for the novelty factor.

mapt12• 11 months ago

There are very likely degrees of infection which are not obviously spoiled, but which have health consequences if consumed. The locus at which the antibiotic/etc protocols are mostly but not entirely effective.

If they're actively pushing into the market, that means they're selling _something_ at maybe $30-$100/kg. Would you trust that something, knowing what you know of animal tissue bioreactors? Would you trust a restaurant serving thousands of meals of that something?

Relevant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZGPjvFkLzUW

themafia3• 11 months ago

An infected batch won't get served to humans

https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/recalls-public-health-...

"Produced without inspection" and "processing deviations" account for a lot of recalls.

Spivak• 11 months ago

You're describing the sterilization process that's necessary for cheese production, it's crazy intense, but it's also a known quantity that we've been successfully doing for years and years and years. Listeria is no joke. I wouldn't worry about this any more than you worry about our other food you find at the grocery store.

bowmessage18• 11 months ago

From https://www.wildtypefoods.com/our-salmon :

"We harvest the cells from our tanks and integrate them with a few plant-based ingredients..."

Gross. This should not legally be allowed to be marketed as salmon, at all.

tyleo2• 11 months ago

This is also the part that bothers me the most. I don’t think it’s gross but I wish we had a full hunk of meat you could get in a lab. I’d try it. The products with plant based ingredients are less interesting to me.

jazzyjackson3• 11 months ago

To grow a hunk of meat without spoilage you need an immune system that basically just requires the rest of the animal

teaearlgraycold2• 11 months ago

They don't say much, but my guess is the plant ingredients are there to give the white stripes. The cells are probably just a homogeneous pink mass without it.

mvdtnz5• 11 months ago

"It's true that our salmon represents innovative science, but first and foremost, it's just really good fish".

It's certainly not fish.

lelandfe• 11 months ago

It is especially not just fish.

NoGravitas4• 11 months ago

"Mostly fish" (in the same way that scumble is mostly apples)

Klonoar9• 11 months ago

If the cells came from salmon, and it's made to look like salmon, I don't particularly see why we can't call it salmon.

mvdtnz5• 11 months ago

If I make a fish potato cake in the shape of a snapper can I call it "snapper"?

pstuart2• 11 months ago

"cultivated" is a reasonable label for these things. So "cultivated salmon" is a concise and accurate description of what is being served.

Teever• 11 months ago

Because consumers have a reasonable expectation that the foods that they buy and eat are called the words that they've come to expect them to be called and not some sort of laboratory grown facsimile.

mapt12• 11 months ago

Could we call it "Fermented salmon tumor"?

conradev2• 11 months ago

It took a lot of digging to find which plant based ingredients, but they include color and flavor:

https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...

bowmessage18• 11 months ago

Thank you for the link. Canola and sunflower oils, soy, and "natural flavors". Definitely skipping this one.

I wish they'd just sell the fish cells, alone. Would love to try that.

neurostimulant• 11 months ago

In addition to water and cell-cultivated salmon, our saku contains fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae, soy (an allergen), potato starch, konjac (a root vegetable), beta-carotene and lycopene (natural colors), carrageenan (an extract from red seaweed), and natural flavors.

So, basically a salmon-flavored jelly? I'm actually ok with this as long as there is no harmful substances involved. I wonder how's the texture once it's cooked or grilled.

GloriousKoji2• 11 months ago

The large majority of the final product is salmon cells so I think it counts. I don't see how this is too different from fish paste products like imitation crab or chikuwa.

wakawaka282• 11 months ago

It needs to be clearly distinguished somehow from natural product, just like other "alternative" products.

mapt12• 11 months ago

Surimi is not mostly fish, it is mostly soy, wheat, various starches. Fish (blended Alaskan pollock usually) is a minority of material in most packagings.

This came as a shock to me. The macronutrients don't lie, though. Fish is protein and a little fat, carb content is fractions of a gram, and these labels are telling me that there's more carbohydrate than protein.

The ingredient labels that the FDA allows, do find a way to lie. If you read a ten-ingredient label that says "Ingredients: Beef, wheat flour, corn flour, oats, textured vegetable protein, canola oil, vegetable oil, xanthan gum, carageenan, salt", and tell people that this is the highest-percentage ingredient to the lowest-percentage ingredient ordering, most people will assume it's >75% beef, but all the label is saying numerically is that it's >10% beef; If every other ingredient was in the 9.0 to 9.9% range then the beef input would be around 1/6th of the material. Add more ingredients and this can be manipulated even more.

I also don't think this is comparable. Blended Alaskan pollock had an immune system before it hit the cold chain.

dekhn3• 11 months ago

"Engineered salmon product"?

wakawaka282• 11 months ago

"Phish" lol

derefr3• 11 months ago

Look more closely. Here's their actual ingredients list (from https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...):

In addition to water and cell-cultivated salmon, our saku contains fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae, soy (an allergen), potato starch, konjac (a root vegetable), beta-carotene and lycopene (natural colors), carrageenan (an extract from red seaweed), and natural flavors.

Think about why each of these things are in there:

• Fats — because the parts [tissues] of the salmon that we eat, have not just muscle cells contained in them [the part that tastes + mouthfeels + cooks like salmon], but also fat cells (adipocytes), to contribute the taste + mouthfeel + cooking properties of "fatty tissue" [which is how we expect salmon to be] vs "lean tissue". And sure, the people creating this thing could have another tank growing "salmon-derived adipocytes", with some hormone bath to trick those adipocytes into absorbing and metabolizing nutrients from the environment to grow heavy with fat... but why bother? (That actually sounds dangerous, in fact — you might end up eating big doses of fish hormones trapped in the fat.) At the micro level, a little sphere of fat is a little sphere of fat; you can use a salmon adipocyte, some other kind of adipocyte, or even just a skin of sodium alginate, and the taste and texture of the result will be identical, as long as the fat inside the bag has identical properties (glyceride chain length, mostly).

• Natural colors and flavors — weirdly enough, because salmon grown on its own wouldn't look or taste fully like salmon. The look and flavor of salmon comes not just from what the salmon itself produces via the action of its cells/proteins/DNA, but also from "impurities" — things the salmon eats, that end up depositing into the salmon's tissues over time. Like how eating shrimp makes flamingos pink. Salmon without those things is white, and missing some of the sweetness we associate with salmon. (You can even notice this in salmon meat from different conditions; wild-caught salmon usually gets more of these nutrient sources than farmed salmon, so wild-caught salmon is often a much deeper reddish-pink color than the orange of farmed salmon.)

• Starch, maybe carrageenan (and the implicit ingredient, water) — together, a simulacrum of (slightly-viscous) salmon blood. Using water alone wouldn't work; it's too thin, it'd just run out of the muscle tissue like a water from a sponge, desiccating the tissue over a span of minutes. You need some thickener to prevent that. (I suppose you could make salmon blood plasma + platelets. Might be more nutritious if you did. Not sure how you'd get it into the tissue reliably, without any kind of circulatory system in there. And it probably doesn't make much of a difference to taste or texture even if you did. But this might still be a v2.0 goal of theirs.)

• Soy and konjac (and also maybe carrageenan here) — a simulacrum of connective tissue, i.e. collagen. This is likely the matrix holding the cells in place. There's no such thing as "cells stacked directly on other cells" that actually stays together; there needs to be some non-cellular tissue matrix that the cells slot into. (Compare/contrast: "meat glue." Is a chicken nugget chicken?)

Why not actual collagen as a matrix, or maybe, say, gelatin? Why not ground-up shrimp as a colorant instead of beta carotene + lycopene? Why vegetable oils instead of animal fats? In all these cases, probably because their goal with these ingredients seems to be to only build this salmon out of plants + cells, rather than any animal byproducts. An unstated premise here seems to be that they want to design the process such that no matter how far it gets scaled up, there's no point at which it would be more economical to switch one of the ingredient sources from "make it in a bioreactor" to "get it from an animal byproduct sources", and at even further scale, "drive animal slaughter to get said byproduct as the product."

AFAICT, this is almost the closest thing you will ever be able to get to something you can call "salmon" — or maybe more specifically, "animal-harm-free salmon" — that can be created solely in a lab.

(To get any closer, you'd need to get pretty mad-science-y. You could, in theory, genetically engineer a... tree, or what-have-you, that would metabolically synthesize the salmon blood plasma, the salmon connective tissue, the salmon-prey-species tissue trace impurities, etc.; and also act as a host to a commensal salmon cell population; eventually putting all that together inside a fruit or something. Pluck and peel the fruit, and inside — salmon muscle matrix tissue, fully cellularized, with solutes. [Though probably with the tree's vascularization, rather than salmon vascularization.] We're probably 50 years from understanding genetic engineering well enough to do that; and even then, it'd probably be operationally impractical, due to salmon muscle tissue rotting at any temperature a tree would grow at. But that product would technically be "closer to salmon", I guess.)

bowmessage18• 11 months ago

Why not actual collagen as a matrix, or maybe, say, gelatin? Why not ground-up shrimp as a colorant instead of beta carotent + lycopene? Why vegetable oils instead of animal fats?

Simple answer: they're cutting corners -- increasing shelf life, decreasing production costs, and overall increasing profits, like many of the big food corporations operating today.

kbelder• 11 months ago

It seems to me more feasible to engineer salmon (or cows, etc) with no, or severely curtailed, brains. That would remove most ethical issues with meat-eating.

burkaman• 11 months ago

I don't really care if it's called salmon or not, but why is that gross?

OsrsNeedsf2P• 11 months ago

It's gross because it's so misleading

idiotsecant2• 11 months ago

Why is it any more gross than, for example, meatloaf?

colechristensen6• 11 months ago

All of the things in meat loaf are recognizably food.

Meat, bread, eggs, dairy, onion, herbs, spices.

Industrial food has a lot of things which are much less recognizable as food.

Degrees of separation from something alive which I'd like to eat to the ingredient matters to plenty of people.

aperrien• 11 months ago

If it tastes good and reduces harm to salmon, I'm in.

pparanoidd• 11 months ago

You don't stop to think about health in your food at all?

oceanplexian• 11 months ago

Not allowing something to exist is a really strange way of conceptualizing reduction of harm.

I'm perfectly fine eating something that was alive, so long as it was treated with respect and was killed humanely. Doing so connects you, a living being, to other living beings that are part of the circle of life, which live and die the same way you and I will.

morleytj2• 11 months ago

It's not exactly the same, but given that much of it is for coloring, I feel the comparison should be drawn that basically all farmed salmon in the US is specifically fed food containing astaxanthin to give it a more pleasing coloring, the same as the purpose of the beta-carotene added here.

mvdtnz5• 11 months ago

How is that relevant to this discussion?

kamaal• 11 months ago

>This should not legally be allowed to be marketed as salmon

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their correct name

- Confucius

They need to call this tankcellfillet or something on those lines. Companies must not be allowed to get away to slap the tag healthy on clearly harmful foods and get away.

lovich• 11 months ago

I’m all for regulations on truthful marketing, but you made a big leap to

clearly harmful foods

NoGravitas4• 11 months ago

Someone else suggested "engineered salmon product", which seems reasonable to me.

baby3• 11 months ago

Honestly what is sold as salmon shouldn't be legal. I've completely stopped buying and eating salmon.

cyberax3• 11 months ago

Gross.

Want something even grosser? Go catch a salmon and then look at how many parasites are in _every_ fish.

If you have ever eaten salmon, you've swallowed tons of parasites in all stages of their lifecycle.

bowmessage18• 11 months ago

I have caught many salmon.

The parasites are part of the circle of life and are in no way gross to me.

Sorry you feel that way.

oulipo• 11 months ago

Killing salmon is gross too...

layer8• 11 months ago

Sometimes it’s net.

lopis5• 11 months ago

Do you have a better name than Lab-grown salmon, that describes what this product is to the average consumer?

jzackpete2• 11 months ago

you mean artificially colored canola soy extrusions, with an unspecified (i.e. very small) quantity of chemically replicated salmon cells? how about counterfeit biohazard salmon?

alexose2• 11 months ago

Hey, I just went to Kann to try it. It was very… smooth

arjvik2• 11 months ago

Similar to sushi-grade salmon?

alexose2• 11 months ago

It's a little hard to describe. Flavor-wise, I thought it was great. Very clean, savory taste with no fishiness. The texture wasn't right, though. Too smooth and consistent, I guess due to the lack of connective tissue. Still incredibly impressive and exciting technology.

Also, the dish itself was really cool. Kann served it as sashimi, along with a bunch of small pickled things and a hunk of smoked watermelon.

unsnap_biceps3• 11 months ago

in a good way or a bad way?

themgt• 11 months ago

We’ve worked hard to ensure that cultivated salmon cells are the first ingredient in our salmon saku (after water). After we harvest our cells, we integrate them with plant components to create the desired texture and flavor of a traditional salmon fillet.

In addition to water and cell-cultivated salmon, our saku contains fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae, soy (an allergen), potato starch, konjac (a root vegetable), beta-carotene and lycopene (natural colors), carrageenan (an extract from red seaweed), and natural flavors.

Hmm. They also compare their place to a microbrewery but I can't find any photos of the actual production process, generally a point of pride for a microbrewery. It sounds less like "lab grown meat" than literally "lab grown cells" + other stuff to mimic aspects of meat texture/flavor/color.

https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...

janalsncm3• 11 months ago

Lab grown meat solves a ton of issues: animal welfare, environment (both CO2 and clearing land for agriculture), food safety, and potentially cost too. It can’t come fast enough.

skybrian• 11 months ago

Maybe someday, but for now, it's very expensive, and that suggests that it's also using lots of environmental resources.

joha4270• 11 months ago

Alternative explanations (pick and chose any you like)

* High demand but limited supply

* Unable to externalize costs that wild/farmed fish doesn't pay

* R/D investments that needs to be recouped

* Small production with a lack of economy of scale

Oh it could obviously be this is a terrible product where its more important to appear environmentally friendly than to actually be so. But lets see where it is in a decade, with my current limited data it looks like a step in the right direction.

cogman10• 11 months ago

CO2, food safety

I'm not 100% sure either of those has been proven out.

I could see CO2, but it sort of depends on how much power the bioreactor and sterilization consumes and how much methane is release. Granted, it'd be easier to capture those and easier to place these reactors in or near a grocery store, for example, for immediate delivery.

Food safety is almost certainly going to be a bigger problem. The big problem with bioreactors is they are cultivating the ideal substance for very nasty bacteria/fungus/etc to flourish in. Bioreactors do not have immune systems. That means keeping things absolutely sterile is of the utmost importance. I'm sure when the initial products are produced safety will be pristine. However, what happens when the CEOs of these companies decide to cut back? Heck, what happens when the new guy forgets to do a sterilization cycle or runs it short?

A major issue is these will be regulated by the FDA which has a history of doing a poor job of keeping food safe. I'd feel better if it were under the jurisdiction of the USDA.

unsnap_biceps3• 11 months ago

Looking beyond just eating the output, encouraging research into bioreactors and effective sterilization is a great path towards lab grown organs for humans. Imagine a world where getting a heart transplant isn't a lottery anymore. This is a worthy path for research imho.

janalsncm3• 11 months ago

You bring up a good point, a future steak factory will be a lot more centralized than the distributed system of farms we have today. So an outbreak in one would significantly disrupt the market, at a minimum, and in the worst case cause a mass outbreak. The flip side is that a factory has a higher ceiling for cleanliness and disease surveillance. I would be wary of foreign lab grown meat for this reason.

throwaway422432• 11 months ago

Their first additive after water and salmon cells is canola derived so any environmental or food safety claims should factor that in.

Canola is often sprayed with neonicotinoids and the oil processed with solvents like hexane.

I'd personally prefer to get my omega acids from real salmon.

schuyler2d• 11 months ago

Just balance that as well with what chemicals and elements show up in farmed salmon and wild salmon (heavy metals, micro plastics, PBDEs,...)

Not saying one's better, just that all our food sources have higher and lower quality steps before market.

swat535• 11 months ago

Animal welfare can be solved with regulations and CO2 contributions is debatable.

I’m not sure about the cost savings either, at least right now it doesn’t seem feasible.

Innovation is fun but I think the best way to tackle all your points is to keep the pressure on legislation.

Intralexical2• 11 months ago

IDK. Some might say that the "eat" in "meat" is incompatible with welfare.

__turbobrew__2• 11 months ago

All of those things are solved by eating legumes as well. I would rather eat protein rich vegetarian food over lab grown meat. I still eat meat but maybe only once a week, I really enjoy discovering what other cultures have created for meat free meals. Hell, hundreds of millions of Indians are vegetarians, and I would much rather cook and eat Indian food over eating some abomination of nature which only exists due to human’s destructive diet tendencies and lack of discipline. I also refuse to eat beyond meat either as those meat substitute products are very processed and far from their natural state.

KempyKolibri12• 11 months ago

I'm not sure I understand this argument. The point is that there are some serious issues with the production of meat that are not (or may not be in future) issues with lab grown meat.

It's true that you could solve this by only eating legumes, but you then go on to say you don't even eat only legumes yourself, you also consume meat. So for those times where you do consume meat, lab grown meat would solve the issues that come with that.

Totally get that you may have dietary/taste preferences that preclude consumption of these meats, but that sounds different to the OP's point that they potential solve a lot of issues with our current food supply.

exabrial2• 11 months ago

I'm already picky with processed food. This takes the cake on the highest form of processed available.

Hard no from me, not even once.

mr90210• 11 months ago

I would think that much more people would share the same beliefs. Why would I want to eat lab grown salmon?

I’d rather eat non-lab grown salmon once a month or once a quarter than eating that f—— aberration.

presentation• 11 months ago

Because some people eat salmon more than once a month, care about the environment or animal welfare, and don't think that processed foods are inherently disgusting.

chilldsgn• 11 months ago

Same sentiment from me. I'd rather pay more and eat the real thing.

lopis5• 11 months ago

This seems more akin to fermentation

exabrial2• 11 months ago

This is more akin to "pink slime"

alberth• 11 months ago

There’s a whole industry for cell-cultivated meat since the FDA approved it a few years ago.

Salmon is just one example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat

walterbell• 11 months ago

Recent HN comment on "Beyond Meat headed to Chapter 11 bankruptcy", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44935141#44935280

  About 10 years ago I became more aware that reducing my consumption of meat was good for the world. This was good for Beyond Meat’s prospects.

  About 5 years ago I became more aware that reducing my consumption of ultra processed food was good for me. This was very bad for Beyond Meat’s prospects.

esperent2• 11 months ago

Lab grown meat isn't necessarily ultra processed (in the sense that it should be automatically assumed to be unhealthy, of course there's a lot of processing involved). At least, I don't know enough about it to jump to that conclusion.

Beyond Meat and Impossible burgers definitely are ultra processed though.

mvdtnz5• 11 months ago

According to Wikipedia,

An ultra-processed food is a grouping of processed food characterized by relatively involved methods of production. There is no simple definition of UPF, but they are generally understood to be an industrial creation derived from natural food or synthesized from other organic compounds.

This disgusting salmon-flavoured soy bean paste certainly qualifies.

jfengel• 11 months ago

Reading the commonly-cited definition of "ultra processed":

         Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). Group 1 [un- or minimally processed] foods are absent or represent a small proportion of the ingredients in the formulation. Processes enabling the manufacture of ultra-processed foods include industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; application of additives including those whose function is to make the final product palatable or hyperpalatable such as flavours, colourants, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers; and sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials. Processes and ingredients here are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-(h)eat or to drink), tasteful alternatives to all other Nova food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals.

I'd say that it doesn't really fit any of the usual categories. It's definitely produced by technical means using uncommon ingredients. But it's not hyper-palatable -- that is, it's not designed to make you eat large amounts of it.

So I guess it depends on how well it ends up fitting into the diet. If we end up eating it the way we eat salmon -- a few times a week, in reasonable quantities, with a similar nutritional profile -- then it's not a concern. If it ends up going into a product that you eat by the bagful, then it could be a concern for the same reason other ultra-processed foods are.

david_draco• 11 months ago

The words "good" and "very bad" indicate that the world is less important to that person than themselves. I'd be okay with a bit of personal harm if it helps against climate change.

Ultra-processed food does not have an agreed-upon definition, and is the new "junk food" with the pretense of being more scientific. Is bread and pizza ultra-processed food? Studies do not agree on their definitions, sometimes including ingredient lists, sometimes not, sometimes it is required that the product is made in small shops with love and not in large factories. The mechanism of how ultra-processed food are supposed to cause harm remains undefined.

mjevans• 11 months ago

I was extremely dismayed when that supermarket simulator game that got popular on Twitch called 'pizza' something along the line of 'frozen dessert pie'...

At least the way it tends to get made in the US, a sugary pastry that's stuffed full of sugar, carbs, fats and cheese? Ok yeah, my favorite foods are _all_ terrible for me and I can't eat them anymore. This makes me very sad.

dfxm12• 11 months ago

If one is truly worried about both, they don't have to eat beyond meat though. They can eat rice and beans. Eating rice and beans instead of both conventional and beyond meat is bad for beyond meat, too, I guess.

abdullahkhalids2• 11 months ago

Ultra-processed food does not have an agreed-upon definition

The United Nations Food and Agriculture authority have designed the NOVA classification of food[1, 2], which includes ultra-processed food as a category.

[1] https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/527...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

baby3• 11 months ago

Ultra processed food is food you wouldn't be able to make at home from whole ingredients. It's easy to make bread and pizza.

parasti• 11 months ago

I read "cancer" in between the lines of that comment. So the characterization of (potentially) that backdrop as "a bit of personal harm" feels wildly overassuming.

dokyun• 11 months ago

The words "good" and "very bad" indicate that the world is less important to that person than themselves. I'd be okay with a bit of personal harm if it helps against climate change.

Yeah, no shit? We're not ants in a colony. I think you're pretty stupid if you're alright with harming yourself while achieving nothing. If you wanna risk your life for a cause then take direct action, eating processed slop and pretending to feel good about it is only gonna make both your world and mine shittier.

timeon4• 11 months ago

One does not need to eat these "ultra-processed" foods when reducing meat consumption.

pacifika2• 11 months ago

You can debate semantics / definitions or make an assessment and get most of the benefit.

glenstein13• 11 months ago

Characterizing meat alternatives as "ultra processed" has been a propaganda coup for the meat industry, allowing for an equivocation between categorically different nutritional profiles of products like Twinkies and Pringles on the one hand, and meat alternative products which have absolutely nothing to do with refined starches, sugars, or trans fats on the other and which in fact have better cardiovascular outcomes, cancer outcomes and environmental impacts than the meats they are replacing.

They're both ultra processed in the same way that a jellyfish and a California Redwood are both carbon based life forms.

dyauspitr• 11 months ago

Meat alternatives are stupid. Soy bean chemically mangled until it tastes like meat is an abomination. Either have real lab grown meat or change your perspective and eat like the South and East asians do, making vegetarian meals incredibly delicious.

ajross• 11 months ago

This seems likely true, but at the same time the actual science has been (1) pretty conclusive on the "processed foods are bad" top-line result yet (2) really, really bad at isolating exactly why that top-line result holds. Yes, high glycemic index foods and trans fats are bad, and high sodium is bad for at least some at-risk people. But they aren't bad enough to explain the processing result. So waving away Beyond/Impossible as safe because they don't have the stuff you list is potentially premature.

Frankly I think the bigger reason these don't seem to be working out is that they aren't having the actual impact desired. The price isn't coming down. And if the price remains at higher-than-meat levels the ecological impact (which is what I personally care more about) is probably not where it needs to be either.

I mean, let's be blunt: all this dithering about health effects and environmental externalities isn't actually going to change anything. Make a burger for the price of a bean dip, however, and the market will beat your door down even if they claim not to care about the hippy nonsense.

buu7005• 11 months ago

Well it's not like they're "ultra-processed" because they're meat alternatives. I get most of my protein from Meati (mycelium), eggs, tofu, cheese, and whey/plant/collagen protein powders, none of which I would characterize as ultra-processed[1]. I'm just not sure how you could justify calling plant-based meats non-ultra-processed under any useful definition of the term.

Although I'd also add that UPF avoidance is more of a useful heuristic than an inherently reliable indicator of something's healthfulness. It's not like it's physically impossible to use complex industrial processes to create a product with high-quality nutrition that aligns with a given consumer's desired macros.

I don't personally believe that plant-based meats as we know them are as healthy as meat, but that doesn't mean they couldn't theoretically be, and it doesn't mean lab-grown meat can't be (although I'll let other people be the guinea pigs on immortalized cells and check back in next century).

Edit: 1: Except the powders. Turns out that they're on the low end of "ultra-processed" based on the Nova classification system, whereas Beyond/Impossible Meat is more firmly in that category. See comment below.

abdullahkhalids2• 11 months ago

meat alternative products ... have better cardiovascular outcomes, cancer outcomes

Beyond meat type meat alternative products have simply not been around enough, and not consumed by enough people to enable any sort of studies that show they are better. It takes many years, sometimes decades of tracking tens of thousands of people through their lifetimes to establish any reasonable certainty that something is better than the other.

energy123• 11 months ago

I wish people could see through labels and categories, but it seems they can't. It's so lazy to stamp X with label Y and expect the reader to think differently about X because of your decision to apply the category Y.

scoofy• 11 months ago

It really is funny and sad:

"Ultra processed foods are killing us"

Meaning: stop eating sugar cereals, doritos, frappuccinos, sweet granola bars, cheesy crackers, candy, and salted, processed deli meats

Popular interpretation: stop eating vegetarian meat alternatives

boston_clone• 11 months ago

Educate yourself. This is nothing more than Richard Berman's propaganda to allow more bullshit in this country.

Big tobacco, drunk driving, union busting, questioning global warming, the list goes on and this man is likely responsible for some of the most detrimental misinformation campaigns in modern history.

https://sentientmedia.org/big-meat-rebrand-disinformation/

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berman_(musician)#Hiatus...

aussieguy1234• 11 months ago

Salmon farming is causing huge environmental damage in Tasmania.

https://goodfish.org.au/species/atlantic-salmon-tassal/

They've taken what was a pristine harbour untouched by humans and turned it into a sewer for salmon effluent. There is a prehistoric fish, the maugean skate, that is likely to go extinct if the salmon farming continues.

spamjavalin• 11 months ago

Good - humans need to stop killing things, stop burning things to make money.

aglavine• 11 months ago

Isn't obvious they should first offer exotic food.

I mean, 'Whale' meat or 'Caviar' or 'Foie Gras' instead of ordinary 'Salmon' would find far more market.

lopis5• 11 months ago

Why would you think that? It's much more urgent to replace commonly eaten foods like beef, chicken and fish than foods that for most people are little more than a curiosity.

With that said, vegan caviar has existed for years make of algae, and it's honestly not far from the real thing.

aziaziazi• 11 months ago

Agree. Foie gras also is very well replicated with vegetable ingredients.

KempyKolibri12• 11 months ago

I think the world would be a better place if everyone went vegan.

However, I’m not convinced that vegan activism via pointing out that many people’s behaviours are at odds with their stated ethical preferences is particularly effective.

I suspect this is because many vegan activists make the assumption that people have ethical preferences which then drive their behaviour. For many (most?) people, though, I think they act the way that feels good to them and then come up with justifications for it post-hoc, even if those justifications are illogical.

As such, I live in hope that lab-grown meat will be tasty and cheap enough that people switch across and stop consuming animal products, which will give humanity the space to look back and see the abhorrent nature of animal agriculture for what it is and ban it outright.

With any luck, we’ll view our current generation’s treatment of animals with the same confusion we feel when we consider our forebears’ tolerance of slavery.

Bring on the cultured salmon!

lordofgibbons2• 11 months ago

I think the world would be a better place if everyone went vegan.

Strongly disagree. I absolutely hate that animals have to be killed for us to eat meat. And the industrial scale cruelty of factory farming gives me existential dread. But I have yet to see a healthy looking vegan person.

I've lived in a couple of very liberal cities with vegans, and every single one I met looked... just sick and unhealthy.

But I think we're on the same page w.r.t the best end-goal. I can't wait for cultured meats so we can stop inflicting so much cruelty on farm animals.

KempyKolibri12• 11 months ago

Eh, I think there are several reasons to favour the empirics we have on the subject over anecdotal experiences, which are going to be coloured by problematic biases (toupee fallacy, etc).

When we look at the data on the subject, both in terms of shorter term RCTs looking at biomarkers and longer term observational data, vegan diets seem non-inferior to the other top-tier dietary patterns we see for lifespan and healthspan (med, lacto-ovo vegetarian etc).

That said, I’m sympathetic to the view that with currently available foods one does have to be more mindful of diet than when on an omni diet - I think that’s true. But when an omni dieter looks unhealthy we just say “that guy looks rough” and when we see a vegan who looks unhealthy we say “vegan diets make you look rough”.

SlowTao• 11 months ago

Just out of interest, in what way do you see them as unhealthy? Mostly that the concept of health can vary wildly.

I would also say that i have seen the complete opposite to you, alas this is all anecdotal.

shlant4• 11 months ago

But I have yet to see a healthy looking vegan person.

This anecdata is so wrong and only serves to degrade the conversation. I can only imagine you have some sort of bias that convinced you this was worth sharing.

There are a wide range of people who are vegan with various aesthetics, just as with any diet. There is also a selection bias as veganism can attract people who have health issues that they are treating with diet. Your judgement of the efficacy and impact of a lifestyle being based on some people you've met tells me your way of thinking about the world is deeply flawed and shallow.

jpdenford• 11 months ago

There are plenty of replies raising the issue of empirics vs anecdotal evidence. However to add to the anecdotal, there are many top level vegan athletes out there - Lewis Hamilton, Venus Williams to name a couple of particularly famous ones. It’s worth looking up though as it does show that it’s at least possible to be vegan and much healthier than the average person (depending on your definition of healthy I suppose).

NoGravitas4• 11 months ago

As such, I live in hope that lab-grown meat will be tasty and cheap enough that people switch across and stop consuming animal products, which will give humanity the space to look back and see the abhorrent nature of animal agriculture for what it is and ban it outright.

Agreed. Replicated meat is the ideal.

"I shall try some of your burned replicated bird meat!"

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/2d56c6ef-8b4d-4d7b-926f-e6c4c47...

sokka_h2otribe• 11 months ago

Salmon is next to chicken as the highest calories out: calories in for farming. They're efficient

I suspect lab grown salmon is a bad idea on those economic grounds.

egberts1• 11 months ago

A recently bought salmon meat tray revealed hundreds of parasites oozing off its surface.

K, no thanks,

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe4• 11 months ago

It is important to not that nuts and dark chocolate usually fit the ultra processed (or sometimes just processed) food definition. This poses real problems in studies because they are roughly a net benefit health wise so authors have the choice between excluding them from the study (which misleadingly worsens claims about processed food being bad) or keeping them in (misleadingly softening how bad they are).

Lab-grown salmon hits the menu

Related Stories