I’m not exactly what you would call concerned about meat as a food source. I’m fine with it. But anything that can break the need for industrial farming is a damn good thing imo.
I’m eager for a good product to come to market so I can at least try it. So far, there hasn’t been one that’s available that’s priced well enough to be a viable choice, nor that matches expectations of taste. Textures have gotten good though.
But I think a sausage format is a great place for cultured meats to break into because there’s a wide range of ingredients with different flavors already. We’re used to sausages being fairly varied in taste and texture, so adding a new type is less of a “new food” barrier. Tbh though, it’s gotta be better than veggie sausages, those are pretty meh at best.
It’s expensive and not without issues now, but it’s a new technology. But it’s also harder to market for the masses, who may indeed prefer the animal to the bioreactors for their own prejudice. I do not expect cultured meat to be cheap and available anytime soon.
I’ve been waiting for that for so long. Just hope governments and people give it a fair chance instead of jumping rashly negative conclusions just because it is lab grown. So is beer, and cheese, and most other things we consume.
Italy’s politicians in a fantastically backward and utterly brain farted move has made “synthetic meat” outlaw, for study, production, sale and consume, like already some months ago, just to please the local (read: national) farmers lobby. Or at least they adverised as they did… forgive me I kinda lost hope and interst as well.
Gotta love the totally-not-neofascist Meloni government :(
This stuff was basically ready to go minus scaling up two decades ago. They were still working on adding marbling and texture into steaks that could fool you in a blind test, but amazed it’s taken this long to get to sausages.
I think you got your timing wrong. The first prototype of cultured meat was presented 2013 and costed about 250.000 € back then. “Minus scaling up” was and is a pretty big issue.
Ok can it be translated to meat on the table with costs and impact being less than actual pig slaughtering? I wouldn’t even mind the taste being a little different
Still won’t stop the “alpha male” types from hating it because they base their entire personality around doing what they think wi make other people mad.
I see the sustainability argument, but it doesn’t address my main concern, which is that it sounds yucky. Still, I’ll eat lab sausage before I eat cockroach patties so 🤷
In a lot of ways, it is just as gross as alcohol. It’s made in large batches in a vat using tiny little organisms that assemble the final product. With alcohol the organisms typically being yeast, and meat being the actual cells.
tiny little organisms that assemble the final product
That’s what breathing and walking animals/meat are.
What are your thoughts on yoghurt, bread and sauerkraut? Since you don’t like alcohol because it gets made by fermentation, I wonder what you think about those.
Since you don’t like alcohol because it gets made by fermentation
You misunderstand. I like alcohol, but I was merely making a comparison between something commonly accepted as being hygienic enough (alcohol) with something less accepted (lab meat).
They’re both equally “gross”, which is to say not really gross at all. But to answer your question, not a big fan of yogurt, but I like bread and sauerkraut.
Sustainable sources of real meat without killing animals are very welcome! Good luck to them because killing things to eat meat is the worst.
My hope is that these alternative meat industries also factor in job creation opportunities for people who are working in conventional meat production right now—if there’s populist pressure towards moving for more lucrative and safer jobs in lab-manufactured meats, that would be help reduce pressure from farm industry lobbyists, I think.
But the above is a secondary goal (and maybe the responsibility of another party), and shouldn’t distract from the primary goal of researching methods to create sustainable, cruelty-free lab-manufactured meats!
Than you have to wait a bit. At this juncture in time, vegan alternatives have yet to gain popularity, and those are mashed plants. This is quite a step up. If you feel like making a difference don’t wait for this and reduce the .eat consumption altogether regardless of its origin.
people who are working in conventional meat production right now
The industry is ripe with conditions that at least approximate human trafficking and anything lab-grown sounds like basically completely automated, and where it isn’t you need highly skilled professionals. Not of the “is dexterous and can learn to make a clean cut fast” kind, but of the “degree in cell biology” kind.
Jobs for people without advanced education are getting rarer and rarer, that isn’t going to change, and don’t look to industry to change that they have the exact opposite incentive. If, OTOH, you introduce something like an UBI soon you’ll have a gazillion people getting into pottery or knife or furniture making or whatnot, again doing actual crafts because it’s economically feasible because you don’t have to sell your stuff for prices only rich people can afford just to make a living.
Honestly you will not need a college degree to run a bioreactor. It won’t be automated because it’ll consist of cleaning, taking out the outputs and refilling the inputs. You do for inventing the reactor, but not for running it.
Whoever’s overseeing many of them will need a degree, but labor will mostly still be labor.
If, OTOH, you introduce something like an UBI soon you’ll have a gazillion people getting into pottery or knife or furniture making or whatnot, again doing actual crafts because it’s economically feasible because you don’t have to sell your stuff for prices only rich people can afford just to make a living.
Fair point. If I’d had the time for it, I’d be encouraging or supporting my local representatives for working on this.
okay, but what’s the resource consumption like? that’s the major issue with meat farming - it takes all the resources necessary to grow food for the animals, and also all the resources necessary to keep and grow the animals themselves. If you need more meat in the same timeframe you can always just raise more pigs.
I mean, theoretically this makes only the parts we want to eat and makes it directly instead of an offshoot of all the other biological processes like growing to the right age and ratio and growing the parts needed to keep it alive all that time. So my ass pull non educated thought process would assume the end result should require faaaaarrr less energy assumption for the same amount of meat?
I mean what don’t we eat/ use? I hate to imagine a world with only boneless wings. or not having a ham bone to make soup with after easter. my dogs would miss their dehydrated chicken feet. my stock would miss the chicken backs and necks and etc. shame we can’t just raise headless animals.
That’s a definite yes. A 2011 study found that clean meat produces 78 to 96 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions, uses 99 percent less land and between 82 and 92 percent less water. Research at the Good Food Institute has concluded that a cell culture the size of one chicken egg can produce a million times more meat than a chicken barn stacked with 20,000 chickens, according to Emery. Energy costs, too, are much lower — and no animal parts are wasted, he adds.
“We won’t be growing the bones and the skin and the intestines that take up resources,” Emery says. “We’ll be vastly more efficient in the land we use.”
How much will it cost?
Experts say cost is the main obstacle standing between consumers and clean meat products.
In 2013, the first clean burger cost $325,000. While the price has decreased dramatically since then, current estimates range from $363 to $2,400 per pound, making it much more expensive than regular meat. (A pound of conventionally produced lean ground beef costs less than $6. Organically raised beef typically costs about a dollar more.)
JUST’s Birdie says the company is pushing hard to drive down production costs. “How do we make these products in order to compete with the price of a Big Mac?” she asks.
The biggest expense, she says, is protein used to feed the cells as they grow. In an effort to improve cost efficiency, JUST has developed a robotic platform capable of screening thousands of proteins to find the best at spurring growth, she says.
And this was from a decade ago. I imagine they’ve improved the resource need quite a bit since then.
Cannibalism has been directly linked to the transmission of brain-related diseases. Although I’m sure further testing would be needed because that may not be the case with lab grown meat.
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