Startup claims to have created first test tube meatball | Hacker News Reader

Startup claims to have created first test tube meatball

dailymail.co.uk

29 pointsTrisell27 comments

I am excited to see start-ups tackle new forms of food production. However, I am worried that it is going to be similar to how the diamond industry has been able to defend themselves from manufactured/synthetic diamonds.

You can see the arguments being very similar here with animal cruelty, purity of the food and pathogens, etc. Synthetic diamonds don't have the flaws of regular diamonds, much less expensive, don't have the same toll on humans and our planet. Yet, the diamond industry has positioned them as not real and most people will gladly pay more for the "real deal".

I am optimistic that there is an inevitability to this market, but the first generation of start-ups are going to bear the additional cost of being the educators. It may be decades until the "educator tax" has been paid. From a product perspective this makes for a very unattractive market. The opposite dynamics of network effects. Where the early entrant has significantly higher barriers to entry than later entrants.

>However, I am worried that it is going to be similar to how the diamond industry has been able to defend themselves from manufactured/synthetic diamonds.

I think the difference is that diamonds are inherently a luxury good.

I don't think that Michelin-starred restaurants or families who buy organic grass-fed beef are going to switch to synthetic meat anytime soon.

But, unlike diamonds, the vast majority of the meat market is cheap, price sensitive, and commodified. I think a two dollar synthetic meat burger is a much easier sell than a twenty thousand dollar synthetic diamond.

A huge amount of change is possible even if synthetic meat gets zero traction at the premium end of the market.

Maybe.

However, You can see the same debate being played out around genetically modified foods. Fear is being created about the products. As opposed to diamonds that are worn on the outside, these are things being put in your body. I think it is fair to expect that the PR campaign from entrenched food companies will be significant here.

Yeah, the diamond industry has done a pretty good job of portraying manufactured diamonds as fake and worthless, so most jewelry and diamond dealers won't deal with them. When my wife lost the diamond from her ring a couple years back it was impossible to find one, and some jewel dealers seemed offended that I would ask for such a thing.

It's really unfortunate, because the diamond industry is notoriously evil (blood diamonds, De Beers, etc), and science is awesome. We really wanted a "science diamond"

Diamond jewelry is a luxury good whose primary purpose is to signal wealth. A "discount diamond" inevitably fails at that purpose.

With diamonds, unless you are a professional and are looking through a magnifying device, you cannot tell the difference. If anything, the synthetic looks clearer and better. I have done the test myself.

If you can't tell the difference, how does it impact signaling value? If you are optimizing for signaling value, synthetics are better since you can afford a larger and clearer one.

The signaling value comes from the cost of the diamond. "Wasting" a lot of money on something so impractical proves you have wealth to waste, and spending a lot of money on a gift to a loved one proves that person is valuable to you.

Pay less for a synthetic and admit it, and you've signaled a lack of sufficient wealth to buy a real diamond.

Pretend a synthetic diamond is real and you're deceiving people.

Either way the synthetic diamond is signalling something undesirable (to the target market for diamonds) precisely because it costs less.

...using tons of FBS (fetal bovine serum) in the process.

FBS is essentially a magic mix of animal growth factors, and no good serum replacement exists for cell culture.

That is the issue. Not only is it essentially a magic mix made of meat, but it's also extraordinarily (and irreducibly) expensive compared to every other component/process. Whoever fixes the 'FBS Problem' will do well - but until then, these unfortunately seem to be fancy, expensive experiments.

The bottom line, so to speak:

> As of right now, it costs about $18,000 to produce one pound of Memphis Meats' ground beef, compared to the $4 a pound in most US grocery stores, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

These figures are obviously a little fuzzy when not broken down to account for subsidies, equipment/research costs amortized over different populations/periods, etc., but that's a pretty big gap to cross.

If you make anything in a testing laboratory, it's going to be extreme. It's a whole other process (even profession) to make industrial quantities of something for production. I think the market demand will be considerable for a tasty protein source.

I don't see what the preference is over plant-based imitation meat products, which are already in the same price range as animal-based meat products.

Some of the plant-based products may have a marginally different flavor or texture, but ground beef in particular is remarkably identical to the "real thing," in my experience.

Overhead costs yo.

Meatballs is relatively easy; the challenges are in producing something with a meat-like bite at a competitive price.

For the first, I think http://www.foodnavigator.com/Market-Trends/Plant-based-meat-... (research group at https://www.wageningenur.nl/en/newsarticle/Steak-from-vegeta...) is a lot more advanced.

Looking at all the controversy surrounding GMO foods, many of which have had decades of scientific study, it does not portend well to getting the general population to accept this. In addition, if you do get this accepted, any food-borne illnesses related to this (even if not the fault of the producer) or allergies will result in tons of bad publicity.

As some posters have already mentioned, this is not a field where you want to be the first.

Ironically, while at least some of the motivation for this is to prevent animal suffering, once we figure out how to grow meat directly, we will have little use for many livestock species and this could actually cause them to greatly decrease in numbers if not disappear entirely. I'm interested to see what we do with pigs, etc if we aren't going to eat them.

The comic you just thought of: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3105

The actual vegan response: http://ethicalvegan.net/read/will-animals-go-extinct-if-the-...

It comes down to "Stop thinking about extinctions when the factory ranching system is a bunch of concentration camps."; that is, they never deny that their policies would lead to extinctions, they just insist that ending the cruelty is a more important way to frame the debate.

Subsidiary question: Is it really extinction if the gene line is preserved, but never allowed to ramify into an actual organism?

Farming takes up a huge amount of land. If all that land is allowed to go wild thousands of species not just domesticated ones will have a chance to come back if they are already not extinct. So decrease of domesticated animals does not automatically mean it will be bad for the animal kingdom or earth as whole.

Pigs would likely become pets that are smarter than [most] dogs and more sociable than [most] cats.

It wouldn't take many generations to breed them to be friendly and docile rather than fast growers. Maybe a few more to better adapt them for housebreaking or litter training.

They would also continue to be used in medical research and truffle hunting, of course.

I imagine many of these species will still live in other parts of the world, even if they go extinct in the US.

I showed this article to a coworker who pointed out an interesting idea - that this technology could be used to produce meat in Space, or on Mars. Interesting thought.

It will be in your MacDonalds burger as soon as they manage to make it produce 1 kilo of meet for a dollar.

And this could actually increase the meat content of Taco Bell's taco filling. (It's supposedly 88% beef.)

Is that bad?

I don't think so...

Should be first tested rather than tasted. If it is safe for health or just another MacDo-KFC like....

$18,000 is a hefty chunk of change for something I'm gonna throw in my crockpot for 8 hours.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com