Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years (2015)

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I am really really excited about lab grown meat making it into the mass market and ultimately becoming cheaper than traditional meat. The environmental benefits will be insane; how much of the earth is currently devoted to either raising animals or growing feed to feed animals? If we can centralise the production of meat, suddenly we have huge swathes of land that, perhaps naively, I hope can be reforested.

Am I the only one here who probably wouldn't buy artificial meat? I'm not a massive meat eater, but when I go shopping, I tend to buy better quality stuff without caring too much for the price. I'd give it a try, but would probably still buy "the real deal".

> Suddenly we have huge swathes of land that, perhaps naively, I hope can be reforested.

Those plots would still be owned by farmers, and planting trees on them would bring in close to zero revenue.

I will eat whatever is delicious. For example I find "The Loving Hut" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_Hut) pretty yummy and even though I'm a meat eater if I'm near a Loving Hut I'm happy to choose it because of taste.

If fake meat is yummy and doesn't have any bad side effects (gas) I'll be happy to eat it. If I can't tell the difference between it and a real burger I'll be happy to switch. If I can tell the difference, if it's yummy I'll still eat it, just as a separate type of food.

As an example fishballs, meatballs, and various kinds of things made from ground meat of all kinds are common.

https://www.google.com/search?q=fishballs&tbm=isch

https://www.google.com/search?q=%E3%81%8A%E3%81%A7%E3%82%93&...

Heck, other processed meats are very common throughout western cuisine as well. Just walk into any deli section and look 100s of them.

My point being even if they never get the burger a 100% the same as real if it's delicious they can sell it to me as yet another processed product and like sausage/pâté/terrine/galantine/ham I'll eat it.

> Those plots would still be owned by farmers, and planting trees on them would bring in close to zero revenue.

There are lots of farming subsidies out there. Even subsidies for letting the land return to (and maintain it in) its "natural" state.

Source: Family members do this in Iowa.

Why are you assuming that the meat grown in a vat in perfect conditions with a chosen ratio of muscle to fat, perfect marbling, in the ideal size, with absolutely no additives would be worse than something grown naturally?

Personally I'm assuming I won't see that in my lifetime. I suspect lab-grown meat will be good enough for fast food/processed food use within 2 decades, perhaps eventually something as good as a cheap, frozen supermarket steak/chicken breast, but I doubt we'll see something that can hold it's own against high end meat within 5 decades.

Honestly I suspect the fake meat people will produce something I'd want to eat instead of a really nice steak before the vat meat people.

You'll probably change your mind. If/when synthmeat becomes both economical and palatable, it will rapidly become socially unacceptable to eat real meat.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Totally disregarding the morality of eating meat, there are many examples throughout history of things that were previously considered morally acceptable that are now frowned upon or are outright banned. Your prediction seems like it could very easily come true.

I'm not sure about the social aspect of it, but I can see it becoming more of a "real meat for special occasions or if you're rich enough". Demand for real meat, especially for processed meat products, will drop.

It will probably be similar to having real fur coats, vs faux fur. Distasteful in some social groups, but other people still do it.

You don't need to go all the way to "socially unacceptable".

All that needs to happen is for the synthetic meat to test better than regular meat.

test, or taste? Have there been cases of things where the artificial equivalent is better than the original?

'better' is questionable and largely undefinable, but certainly lots of cases where the artificial equivalent is more popular. Although in most of those cases price is a big factor.

Yeah, taste

Just like it has become socially unacceptable for the wealthy avoid tax? Or to burn coal for energy? I'm not sure I believe that. Might be good for the planet, but it very much sounds like wishful thinking to me.

If there are two products, one being the original and the other being artificial, I assume there will always be a market for the original. It'll just lead to a price increase.

I would compare it to how it became socially unacceptable to own slaves. The number of individuals who think it is unacceptable to treat animals as commodities, and use them for palate pleasure or convenience is rapidly increasing, and I believe it will hit critical mass in the coming decades; specially as alternatives become more accessible.

I'm looking for alternatives. If you can create something that reacts to heat like meat and provides the same or a similar flavor profile, and that contains similar macronutrient ratios, then I would jump ship.

As it is, whey doesn't have the right flavors and cookability, tofu doesn't have the same flavors and has a lot of carbohydrates, and mushrooms don't have any protein in them.

Wouldn't that completely depend on the quality? Sure if it ends up being slimy crap then you'd avoid it, but what if they manage to engineer it so each cheap steak is Kobe-beef quality?

Trees are enormously expensive for large trees, tree farmers do make decent money.

Probably not as much as other forms of agriculture, though.

But people who refuse to eat lab meat will eventually die off. I mean, there are still people buying newly harvested fur, but they seem to be few and far between. Real meat will probably carry a social stigma as soon as fake meat becomes just as good or nearly as good.

I doubt that. Thousands of years of cooking tradition will not disappear any time soon. If it's cheap enough, lab grown meat will mostly occur in heavily processed food because the consumers of that food don't give a shit about what they eat anyway.

I do a lot of home cooking. For something like a nice steak or a whole roast chicken, I would probably stay with the real thing,

But for spaghetti bolognese, a good stew, anything where the meat is minced or cut into bite sized pieces, I would go for lab-grown like a shot, assuming the quality, taste and texture were there.

People are still using real vanille, whereas in most products a sort of vanilla essence is used. I think it might turn out the same with meat; the people who can afford it will get it, others will get the lab grown meat?

I would expect that a similar thing that happened when humans went from hunter-gatherer to agrarian. Exponentially more humans. We'll need that land to house all those people.

If there's a larger benefit to planting trees, then it would make sense for the government to offer incentives to plant trees, so they could make money.

I imagine that would be a one time subsidy, not annually?

Depends, if the benefit is from having them remain there then an annual tax credit or similar seems reasonable. You probably don't want a situation where you get paid more for annual logging and replanting then maintaining a forest in place.

You might, if the harvested wood were used for permanent structures. The whole operation would be a carbon sink.

Forest land still needs to be maintained, at least to a degree.

In the case of the Brazilian rainforest, it's not necessarily owned but just illegally occupied by the farmers.

I'm with you. I too don't eat it often but would rather buy organic, grass fed, local. I also wouldn't buy synthetic meat for spiritual reasons: I actually want to consume a real dead animal that had a soul. It is much more nourishing for me to eat animals than be vegetarian, and I don't just mean physically nourishing.

> I actually want to consume a real dead animal that had a soul.

I can't tell whether this is sarcasm or not.

If not, do you also apply this principle to other things? e.g. do you prefer your clothes to be made from baby seal furs? Perhaps toilet paper made from the wood pulp of ancient sequoias?

I think it was very well written sarcasm.

Probably some religious non-sense.

I'm currently looking at my bag of Cheetos and there is a largish 'warning'/statement on the back that says : "Produced with Genetic Engineering." Economics aside, I think you are going to have to put something like that on every unit of lab-meat that is sold, if not those words exactly (depends on the tech). People, for some reason, have gotten onto the 'Organic = Better' bus. Lab-meat is going to have to go against that zeitgeist. We already know that people will pay a lot more for 'organic' beef burgers, so I think we can say that the ethical issues are not in fact issues for most consumers, the health ones are though. Lab-meat, for most American consumers, is a no-go. Say McD's uses lab-meat, and they can undercut the price of a 'cheeseburger' by, what, 25%? A lot of people are still going to go to BK, as their marketers will gleefully and truthfully advertise that their burgers are 'real.' Outside of Sodexo, frozen dinners, and HotPocket, the only people that are going to buy lab-meat products are the dreadfully poor ones. A large market, unfortunately, but not one that you can reap big margins from.

>If we can centralise the production of meat

Sounds like a huge disease risk.

You should tour a factory farming operation. Lab grown meat could be as safe as vaccine production; both done in controlled, sterile environments.

EDIT: Seriously though, don't do the tour if you ever want to eat meat again. Doubly so for walking a slaughterhouse floor. There are some things you cannot unsee.

I can't upvote this enough. If you're worried about disease, you do not want to see where your meat comes from. There's no way lab meat could ever come close to this scale of filth.

(not talking about $50/lb locally slaughtered meat of course)

I don't doubt that the factory is going to be a grim sight. I was more thinking about the centralization aspect, which would cause massive damage if the lab covering an entire state or country was contaminated.

My point was that they're both centralized, but you have far more control over a lab setting (http://i.imgur.com/KW1LrLg.jpg) than something like this: http://i.imgur.com/SDUbUBQ.jpg

A factory is not going to produce a states worth of meat. Possibly a small city's worth, but Americans eat 1 billion pounds of meat per year an this stuff is going to take at least hours if not weeks to grow.

I think you are off by quite a bit on how much meat Americans eat.

214.8 lbs per capita per annum * 318 million people = ~68 billion lbs per annum

See: http://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/sta...

There are 50 states. So, a states worth of meat should be around a billion pounds. Granted, some states have a relatively tiny population.

Every farm animal has vaccine production built-in, so it does not matter.

This is not true. They can produce their own antibodies, but will still become infected.

Most of these infections are easy to detect and cure with vitamins and antibiotics. For billions of lbs of meat consumed monthly in USA, how often this is the problem? Diseases are not a (massive) problem when animals already have quite effective immune system.

> how much of the earth is currently devoted to either raising animals or growing feed to feed animals

Probably just as much of the Earth as will be needed to run this operation. Power, plant mass, and people aren't free resources.

It feels that way, but estimates look quite promising. If lab grown meat ends up using 1% of the land needed for animal production that would make a huge difference! http://phys.org/news/2011-06-lab-grown-meat-emissions-energy...

The energy required to sustain and grow a life form (the cow) is orders of magnitude greater than the energy in the final product (steak). A lab can improve on that ratio.

Not even close. Cattle are labor and space intensive as well as guzzling feed and water. All of the latter has to be shipped via trucks and pipes.

Ethical considerations won't take this far. Need it to become cheaper than real meat the day that happens it will take off on its own. Meat or cattle raising plays a big role in the worlds methane production decreasing that would be huge achievement as with more people getting out of poverty every year meat production and consumption is increasing.

I could see another angle in the meantime, which is exotic lab grown meats. I'd be interested in trying bald eagle meat or polar bear or any number of animal meats where it's either illegal or impractical to culture full animals.

Presumably you can also make meats that scale disproportionately with the size of the animal, like sparrow burger or lobster steak.

I see another advantage: it may be safe to do things with lab-grown meat that aren't safe with farm-grown. Tuna without overfishing concerns. Swordfish without the mercury. Chicken that can be served medium rare. Or ground beef for that matter.

On top of that, this approach to meat offers extreme customizability. Imitating what comes out of a cow in terms of fat, protein, flavor, is where they've got to start. And the first cars had fake horse heads. Eventually they can optimize for health or taste in a way nature can't. Fois gras times ten.

If this approach becomes truly economical, I would expect it to destroy traditional meat the way cars destroyed horse-drawn carriages: through sheer superiority of performance options.

Yes, or human.

It's actually a fun question to ask people, whether they would eat a synthetic meat that was designed to taste like human meat. You will perhaps understandably get a lot of weird looks and squirms.

I'm not sure if you can call it "designed to taste like human meat" when it's actually human meat that just wasn't produced in a human, though that's another interesting breakdown.

Ethical considerations have all but removed cage eggs from supermarkets where I live, despite them now being around a third the price of free range eggs. If an issue gets enough visibility and there's a halfway viable alternative, don't discount slacktivism and squick factor as a significant economic force.

Solar was the ethical choice but it didn't really take off till it reached parity with other sources of electricity production. Electricity cars are the more ethical choice and last few years people are paying more for it but it will only take off when it comes into parity with gasoline cars.

Solar panels and electric cars are a large up front cost for a very long range, abstract benefit. Buying more ethical groceries is a small up-front cost for an immediate warm-fuzzy.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, most people are tragics for sacrificing the long term to boost the short term - witness the ubiquity of credit card debt.

I'd guess vat-grown beef would fall more into the free-range egg scenario than the solar-panel scenario (although probably with less emotional baggage since beef cattle are generally pictured as happy cows eating grass in a field, whereas cage hens are pitiful to behold.)

you claim this but personally I am a big meat eater but I find the factory farming system disturbing. I would definitely only buy lab meat if it was available for even double the price of animal meat.

You are rich enough to pay more for healthy food. You probably come in the 1% of the richest people in the world this comment is for the other 7 billion people that cant afford to pay more for food.

As a vegan, I feel the day fast approaching when I must choose whether I'll eat this "vegan" meat or not. Either way I'm rooting for them on behalf of the environment and all the animals caught up in our current industrial food system.

I'm vegan too. My reason for being vegan is entirely on the basis of sustainability. If lab meat is produced in a sustainable fashion then I'll be all for eating it.

I really doubt lab grown meat will ever be as sustainable, as a normal plant based diet.

I wouldn't be so sure, it takes a lot of water to grow food.

Economies of scale. I think the product will become financially viable faster if it has wide-spread vegan support.

One would only be on-board with that assuming they were on board with the whole of the product. So first you'd need to make the argument as to why a vegan should be behind this product, besides "more people can afford it if all vegans buy it."

Also, that only works if it has competition, otherwise, if it were that popular and there were no competition the producer would have good reason to raise the price knowing the market could bear it.

One nitpick (was going to be two, but I mentally nitpicked my own nitpick) economic theory suggests that if the artificial meat industry had a decreasing long run marginal cost with increasing quantity then the price could actually decrease as a result of greater demand.

I predict synthetic meat will be hugely successful simply because it avoids all the gross parts of dead animals. No blood, no connective tissue, no risk of abscesses or parasites, no worries about cross-contamination, the exact same size every time. If I can buy a sterile and perfectly uniform slab of synthetic muscle and marbled fat, to me that's a better product than natural meat. I don't even care if it tastes slightly worse. Put some ketchup on it and it'll be good enough.

"Inferior" technology very often wins because of convenience. People preferred LCDs to CRTs long before they'd caught up with CRT image and motion quality. Touch screen phones are more popular than those with physical keyboards. More people use ballpoint pens than fountain pens despite the higher writing pressure and lack of flexibility in ink choice. Synthetic meat can be the ultimate convenient meat and that's enough to make up for a lot of other flaws.

I'm not so sure. The problem is that any kind of processed real meat, like almost all other processed food, tends to be absolutely horrible from a culinary point of view and is often bad from a health-related point of view, too.

It seems unlikely to me that lab-grown meat would fare better in that respect than, say, processed compressed chicken remains that are sold as an ingredient in a vast variety of processed food.

I also don't think that lab-grown meat will have substantially less potential for biological contamination.

I'm confident contamination won't be an issue for consumers because AFAIK no current or proposed synthetic meat has an immune system. This means it will have to be grown in sterile conditions. Contamination will be a huge problem for producers, but they'll have to figure out a solution because the cost of losing whole batches would be too much if they don't.

The problem is that any kind of processed real meat...

The aim of this is that it doesn't produce something that needs processing though. The aim is to produce something that is identical to just plain, real meat. There's no cooking or preparation involved - the only difference is that instead of being grown in a cow it's grown in a vat.

It's unclear what methods they're using to make these burgers, but often you need many animal-derived products to culture cells. Fetal bovine serum, growth media, all of these have animal products in them. If they make an ethical argument, then they'll have to solve that too. They might have, but it's not clear in the article.

I saw in a documentary that with only a sample of the skin they can grow like 10k burguers, and the animal won't even notice, it's like an injection. I don't remember the doc but it seems pretty ethical IMO.

It's not just the initial cells, the growth medium contains a lot of animal products - even culturing human cells for research uses lots of bovine products.

Reminds me of Frederik Pohls "The Space Merchants" published 1952 where he describes a huge mass of cultured chicken breast cells fed with algae

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002

Interestingly, the original experiment that spawned these stories (Alexis Carrel allegedly kept a culture of chicken heart alive for 20 years) was never replicated, and it's suspected that fresh cells were added to the mass to keep it going.

Attempts to replicate it lead to the discovery of the Hayflick Limit, which observes that most animal cells can only divide a limited number of times before dying.

The ethical argument for the adoption of artificial beef is always brought out during these stories. But they forget to mention that the lab grown meat only contains lean meat cells and in order to make it taste good they need to add animal fat. As in, fat from farmed and slaughtered animals.

Human fat. Just build the meat lab next to a liposuction clinic. Problem solved.

In fact, if you build a burger joint there as well, you've got a perfect Fat Cycle. People can go to the clinic to get their flab hoovered off, then head into the restaurant and eat it all back in burger form.

Thanks Tyler.

A couple of days ago, I got a DVD-R in my mailbox. When I looked at was on it, it appeared to be a list of conspiracy theory videos. The file names of several of these alleged that aborted fetuses (human) were used in the meat industry, by McDonalds specifically.

I decided not to watch them.

At least its fat neutral

Shouldn't creating artificial fat be easier than creating artificial meat?

(I confess I have the impression that it would be easier based on a mere hunch... fat just seems less "complicated")

With zero knowledge on the subject my guess would be that they've focused on the protein structure and not the fat structures in their efforts. I suspect there are a lot of similarly shaped fat structures that taste differently which makes it seem like a similar but different problem.

In short, my guess would be that they need to focus on that after they solve this problem. The value of the meat is probably higher than that of the fat though so the ordering makes sense.

Can't you use plant fat?

Yep, or just cook in butter.

Well, that's animal fat. Which is his complaint that this will still require raising cows.

Traditional butter is made by churning milk, so while a cow is still required, it doesn't need to be slaughtered to make the burger.

I wonder if it would be possible to cook it in soy butter?

Dairy cows are typically slaughtered before 5 years of age and are sold as beef; at that age they are considered 'spent' and no longer meet production standards. Also, they must be forcibly impregnated in order to produce milk, and their male calves are either slaughtered for veal or raised and slaughtered for beef. Supporting the dairy industry is supporting the slaughter of cows.

There are plenty of choices for more 'organic' and 'animal friendly' and 'cruelty free' and what have you milk. While the cheap milk is indeed farmed at high intensity and not very animal-friendly to put it mildly, it doesn't have to be that way. Whereas a burger - well you have to kill the cow to get one.

Don't kid yourself. There is no animal friendly way to produce milk on any economic scale. Even if "organic" farms didn't forcably impregnated the cows (which most of them still do), they still take away the calves and hand them over to the veal industry.

Yes yes there's always a true Scotchman argument to be made about how something isn't 'really' animal friendly, but between being butchered for meat or being milked when living on a pasture, using butter to fatten up artificial meat would be a huge improvement in animal welfare.

I know it's culinary heresy, but unless you're eating it raw (like spread on a piece of baguette) it doesn't matter much what kind of fat you cook with in most preparations. If you were to take 99% lean ground beef right now and soak it with a few spoons of olive oil or canola, it would probably be pretty rich and moist.

The kind of fat does matter for cooking and flavor. Different smoke points, water contents, caramels, etc. Much as crisco was developed in the early 20th c as a vegetable-based substitute for lard, someone could develop something crisco-like but specifically formulated to be marbled together with vat meat, and to sizzle within roughly the same parameters as steak fat.

Given that soy butter is marketed as similar to peanut butter, and has about 1/3 the fat of butter, I'm gonna go with "probably not and what were you thinking?"

(I mean, sure, it's possible to cook your lean beef in peanut butter, so fine, technically "yes it's possible")

Peanut butter isn't a butter though. It's just a spread with a confusing name. In dutch it's called "peanut cheese". Doesn't make it a cheese.

Presumably referring to the soy and vegetable oil based vegan butter replacement products.

Lots of methane from all those cows that we will raise and look after.

Is Avocado butter a thing yet?

do you think there will be a way to replace actual animal fat over time with another source? Is it cost holding it back or is it scientifically infeasible?

A US company called Modern Meadow is trying to do the same thing, but is starting with a more commercially viable first product: leather. This seems like a better way to develop the technology stack you need to crush the cost so that you can make it available for food.

Sounds like a job for a Kickstarter. They'll make a lot of money, maybe create some new science and then when they fail they can close up their shop without a single repercussion.

That's pretty good, but even if you buy now it will just be obsolete in a week.

This is year-old blogspam. bigthink.com spins every article out into nine self-linked articles, and also leaves out all the interesting details. Also they don't source the $11.36 figure, and all the other sources I've read give prices to about 1 significant figure, not to four, so I suspect that's made up.

If you're interested in this subject, read this WP piece from 18 months ago, or this BBC piece that was the actual source for TFA from 13 months ago, both of which contain more up-to-date facts than TFA.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/20/meet-...

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34540193

Or, for more background, here's the 3-year-old piece from Time that raised a lot of discussion, and which gives the context for the price drop.

http://science.time.com/2013/12/16/the-triple-whopper-enviro...

Or you could read this, from 6 months ago. Note that it looks like a bit of a biased piece to me, but it appears to be directly sourced, rather than just regurgitated. It also is specific about Mosa's price targets, saying that they think that $29.50/lb will be their launch price, and they speculate that $3.60/lb seems like an achievable goal for later (currency not specified, though probably they mean USD, but note that the company is not American).

http://www.takepart.com/feature/2016/05/23/cultured-beef

"Also they don't source the $11.36 figure"

And did I miss it, but are we to assume that's $11.36/lb? Some other unit?

Generally, random numbers like this come from unit conversion. My guess is that it started at $100/kg.

$100 per kg = $11.34 per 1/4 lb burger

You get $11.36 per 1/4 lb if you use 2.2 lb = 1 kg, instead of the exact conversion.

I assumed 1/4 lb burger, just because it's the common burger size that provides the most favorable comparison. It's a bullshit comparison though. A burger is more than just a patty, and upscale burgers (which they are targeting with prices like that) rarely are just a 1/4 lb of meat. I initially thought the $11.34 price was pretty good, because I eat $10 burgers all the time, but a 1/3 or 1/2 pound burger made with this meat would cost about $50 in a restaurant.

The best argument for this burger is that the moral cost of killing a cow is much higher than the added price of the artificial meat. I'd find that argument pretty convincing, but I don't make enough money to be that moral.

> a 1/3 or 1/2 pound burger made with this meat would cost about $50 in a restaurant.

More than that. A 1/2 burger would cost, using the 30% food cost rule of thumb for restaurant pricing, nearly $80 assuming that everything other than the patty had no food cost.

I didn't realize the rule of thumb was 30% for a restaurant. I've always worked in retail, where a 100% markup is always a good rule of thumb.

Restaurants aren't reselling packaged goods, they are also assembling from raw, so there is both amortized cost of production equipment and labor costs associated with production that retail lacks.

> The best argument for this burger is that the moral cost of killing a cow is much higher than the added price of the artificial meat. I'd find that argument pretty convincing, but I don't make enough money to be that moral.

There's also the effect of cattle on the environment. They are the largest producer of greenhouse gasses by far. I personally have no moral issue with killing animals, but the effects on the environment have made me switch to Chicken (which is better for the environment and leaner) but I would gladly switch to biocattle.

Wow. That's pretty good speculation! Respect!

All I know is I would have been marked off on any exam if I would have left something like that.

Yes, that's bad. We've changed the URL from http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/answering-how-a-sausage-gets-ma..., which points to the BBC piece.

Reverse sticker shock as clickbait, there's a new one.

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