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.
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.
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.
You're right and I think the commenter was sprouting bollocks. Reddit used to be plagued with comments like that which are simply meant to cast doubt, and aren't based on facts.
Yeah that comment does not make much sense. Our bodies have to function every day moving around and doing things. The lab grown stuff just needs to make cells. It should be much closer to growing fungus or yeast.
It seems the crux of the issue is that current technology uses pharma-grade growing medium, which is very expensive and has a bigger footprint, and the hope is that scientists can figure out a "food-grade" medium that would have lower emissions. Since costs are also affected, I'm sure companies have a lot of incentive to look for a more efficient way.
The technology is still relatively young, so I'm on the board of "wait and see".
It’s a complex, precise, energy-intensive process, but the output of this single bioreactor train would be comparatively tiny. The hypothetical factory would need to have 130 production lines like the one I’ve just described, with more than 600 bioreactors all running simultaneously. Nothing on this scale has ever existed—though if we wanted to switch to cultivated meat by 2030, we’d better start now. If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
All of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator. That’s where things get complicated. It’s where critics say—and even GFI’s own numbers suggest—that cell-cultured meat may never be economically viable, even if it’s technically feasible.
[...]
Humbird spent more than two years preparing his analysis for Open Philanthropy. The resulting document, which clocks in at 100 single-spaced pages with notes and appendices, is the most comprehensive public study of the challenges cultured meat companies will face. (An abridged, formally peer-reviewed version has since appeared in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering.) Their future doesn’t look good. Humbird worked off the assumption that the industry would grow to produce 100 kilotons per year worldwide—roughly the amount of plant-based “meat” produced in 2020. He found that even given those economies of scale, which would lower input and material costs to prices that don’t exist today, a facility producing roughly 6.8 kilotons of cultured meat per year would fail to create a cost-competitive product. Using large, 20,000 L reactors would result in a production cost of about $17 per pound of meat, according to the analysis. Relying on smaller, more medium-efficient perfusion reactors would be even pricier, resulting in a final cost of over $23 per pound.
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".
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.
How much does it cost to maintain such a factory compared to how much does it cost to keep livestock for the same amount of produce?
I didn't say it's not possible to culture it, I'm saying it's more expensive and less sustainable. The food industry is huge, current livestock production is already among the largest CO2 producers. So if we want to replace them we should choose an option that is cheaper and produces less waste, not more. Otherwise the costs of food as well as the CO2 levels are gonna skyrocket.
It's hard to compare with current bioreactors because for making it our primary meat source you'd need a scale that hasn't existed ever before in the pharmaceutical industry. The cell density needs to be relatively low, so you need huge tanks for tiny amounts. Also.. meat cultures are particularly sensitive to both bacterial AND viral infections. Meat production is slow and the smallest contamination at the start can very easily make the end result not up to standards.
“A key difference in the CE Delft study is that everything was assumed to be food-grade,” Swartz said. That distinction, of whether facilities will be able to operate at food- or pharma-grade specs, will perhaps more than anything determine the future viability of cultivated meat.
The Open Philanthropy report assumes the opposite: that cultivated meat production will need to take place in aseptic “clean rooms” where virtually no contamination exists. For his cost accounting, Humbird projected the need for a Class 8 clean room—an enclosed space where piped-in, purified oxygen blows away threatening particles as masked, hooded workers come in and out, likely through an airlock or sterile gowning room. To meet international standards for airborne particulate matter, the air inside would be replaced at a rate of 10 to 25 times an hour, compared to 2 to 4 times in a conventional building. The area where the cell lines are maintained and seeded would need a Class 6 clean room, an even more intensive specification that runs with an air replacement rate of 90 to 180 times per hour.
The simple reason: In cell culture, sterility is paramount. Animal cells “grow so slowly that if we get any bacteria in a culture—well, then we’ve just got a bacteria culture,” Humbird said. “Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event.”
Viruses also present a unique problem. Because cultured animal cells are alive, they can get infected just the way living animals can.
“There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick,” Humbird said. “Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”
If even a single speck of bacteria can spoil batches and halt production, clean rooms may turn out to be a basic, necessary precondition. It may not matter if governments end up allowing cultured meat facilities to produce at food-grade specs, critics say—cells are so intensely vulnerable that they’ll likely need protection to survive.
This is referencing a very in-depth paper by PhD, PE, Chemical Engineer David Humbird.
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.
Awesome, this is great news for animal welfare. I haven't eaten meat in years though, and don't miss it as the alternatives are so good. However, I am very much looking forward to decent cheese (Roquefort) made from lab grown milk, as vegan cheese is shite.
I wonder if, in the very distant future, people will be able to grow their own meat at home from a small sample. And if so, whether anyone will try making burgers from themselves, when they get a cut or a scrape.
It looks like their first release is at some fancy restaurant in San Francisco. I would love to try it but I'm sure it will be packed for forever. I'll wait until it hits the shelves
Add comment