Two U.S. food companies have received the go-ahead to sell chicken grown from cultivated animal cells in a production facility. It’s the first time meat grown this way will be sold in the U.S.
Finally, ethical cannibalism is within our grasp.
I don’t know. I feel that the soul is part of what makes cannibalism so delicious.
Gonna wait a bit because I wanna make sure there aren’t any crazy unforeseen side effects on humans, but this is a tremendous step forward for several environmental and ecological problems and I’m ready for a minimal-kill future.
Anyone have any ideas on price versus kill meat? Especially longterm?
Exactly where my head is. Assuming it is currently expensive since it is new and such little supply. But I’m wondering 5+ years down the road… Is it likely that it will be less expensive than traditional counterparts?
Bioreactors are much less efficient at producing meat than their biological equivalents. They are essentially huge buckets of liquid with nutrients without proper heart/lungs, circulatory/respiratory system that can evenly distribute oxygen and remove CO2, so you need to be constantly shaking and mixing… which doesn’t help with the heat that the reactions produce. You need to keep a constant temperature… and you also don’t have an immune system to protect from bacterial growth that could contaminate the whole batch.
This is much more expensive, more risky for health and less environmentally friendly than naturally grown meat. Natural biological organisms have evolved across millenia to be extremelly efficient at what they do. You just can’t compete using current tech.
I don’t think we would be able to get a cheap sustainable alternative to traditional meat without essentially replicating the way animals grow. And at that point, I wonder if killing an artificially designed animal is any better.
Personally, i think protein from breeding maggots is the more realistic and sustainable source of meat at the moment… starting from a simple lifeform and adapting it is likely more viable.
I don’t get how it could be less environmentally friendly than traditionally grown meat from cows or whatever. Cows need to support not just the meat growing systems in the their bodies, but everything else…and they need to live for years, with constant food and land.
This is an interesting comment and a point of view I haven’t seen before. Do you have any source materials for the information in the first two paragraphs? I’d like to read more, from sources I can validate. Not that I disbelieve you particularly, I simply want to see the info from a more scientific source than social media.
And as for
i think protein from breeding maggots is the more realistic and sustainable source of meat
YUK I don’t think that will sell very well. There will be more than enough resistance to lab grown “meat”.
As someone who works in a dairy manufacturing facility, you really aren’t making sense.
You’re describing fairly straightforward industrial processes.
There is bacterial growth in every single food manufacturing facility in the world. It’s unavoidable.
That’s why there is constant, and I mean constant cleaning. Stainless steel or silicon are used for any surfaces that the product touches, there is a TON of QA testing done specifically for allergens and bacteria. All factories are held to regulatory standards, I can’t imagine this operation would be any less safe and compliant.
I’m interested too. Long-term with economies of scale, hopefully no kill.
But idk about now, or inour lifetime. Like we’ve been farming for a long long time. And at least for a while, the most efficient things for producing animal protein, are … Animals.
I think this will be targeted to (relatively) rich people who want to cosplay being vegetarian and vegan. Tbh I’d try it.
Really looking forward to this! Don’t care if they find out it gives you cancer. I smoked cigarettes for decades and you can’t dip those puppies in mango hab sauce straight out the air fryer!
I wonder if it would be considered vegan? Technically not harming an animal, right?
It depends on whether you consider the conditions under which the original cells were donated as part of the product.
To be honest it feels like making perfect the enemy of good if the initial cell lines able to support billions of cows worth of meat without killing those cows at the sacrifice of a few cows in the first place. But there are plenty of idealists out there who would reject that train of thought, so oh well.
But we’ll get there either way.
Some lab grown meat companies have figured out how to do it without any animal cells, but it’s a fairly new development. Requiring actual animal cells is just v1
Things move quickly though, there is already non-animal whey being created that is chemically equivalent to dairy whey using the same process they use to make insulin. Check out Coolhaus. They also make cream cheese and a babybel cheese with it I think
I can see how you can make fake meat without animal cells - but this class of food is ‘lab grown meat’. When you don’t have animal cells it’s no longer lab grown animal meat.
edit: I guess there is a difference between using animal cells during ‘production’ and during ‘development’. I CAN see how the former can be achieved, but not the latter.
@GordomeansPhat Difficult to say… hopefully it will be possible to trace the animal donors.