Lab meat to transform meat industry in 2021
iol.co.za
iol.co.za
- https://www.wired.com/2016/10/nerds-cattle-food-technology-w...
- https://www.wired.com/story/the-impossible-burger/
- https://www.wired.com/2016/07/lab-grown-meat-coming-win-hate...
- https://www.wired.com/story/navigating-the-uncanny-valley-of...
The reality is that currently lab grown meat is extremely expensive (thousands of dollars per pound) and we don't even know if we can bring the cost down to a level competitive with cows.
Impossible Foods, however, is already making an impact. They make "burger" meat purely from plants by mixing thing up and adding fake "blood".
They're already shipping (there are 8 restaurants in SF alone that offer their burgers, https://www.impossiblefoods.com/locations/).
People seem to like their stuff (reportedly in some restaurants their burgers outsell the real beef burgers).
They just finished their first large scale factory (1 million pounds per year) and are ramping up distribution across US.
Cost-wise, they're already comparable with organic beef and there's a clear path to make them cheaper than beef by increasing the scale.
In terms of impact and transforming meat industry, Impossible Foods seems to be in much better position.
We buy organic ground beef for around $7/lb at Costco. A restaurant I talked with said they pay $11/lb for Impossible Foods "meat". Do you consider these prices to be comparable? Or are you aware of restaurants paying much less than $11/lb?
To be clear, I understand prices of IF will come down—I'm just trying to get clarity on current pricing, since a 40% price difference is material for restaurants.
(my info comes from an interview with the CEO where he didn't say the exact price, just compared it to the price of organic beef)
It looks like there's a solid premium on their "beef", good to know.
That being said, it certainly beats thousands of dollars for lab grown meat.
The important thing is that it's commercially viable at current prices.
I think Impossible Foods deserves credit for picking the right "go to market" strategy.
Kind of like Tesla started with a sports car, they started by supplying gourmet burger chains.
At $10+ per burger, the cost of raw material is clearly acceptable for the restaurant, or else they wouldn't be buying.
As a meat eater who is vegan at home, I think it’s a decent alternative compared to other vegetarian meat-like products, in fact far superior. But it’s definitely not a replacement for the real thing.
I have been pretty impressed with the steady innovation in vegetarian / vegan options that give me as good alternatives compared to non. For example, Miyokos cheese is incredible, and far better than any cheese I used to typically eat, and it’s dairy free.
I used to eat Boca burgers when I’ve had to and they aren’t great. I’m excited for better options to come into the market.
The bigger surprise to me was that Impossible Foods does not apparently control how restaurants prepare their burgers—in fact, the restaurant where I ate it even had an Impossible Foods chili. I would have expected IF to put pretty close restrictions around how you cook and present their foods, to make sure that people don't have a bad experience and assume it's the fault of the "meat".
I understand the desire to appeal to meat eaters, but it's never going to be a match. And close but no cigar leads to an uncanny valley of the palate.
Meanwhile, there are much tastier vegetarian burgers that abandon any desire to taste like meat.
So I see "meatish" as nothing but a curiosity for the time being.
Lab grown meats married with meatless agencies, meanwhile, could bridge the gap better while we wait for it to become a more affordable process.
I think the end-game for these companies should be to produce a chuck substitute that is malleable rather than being restricted to patties. And of course it shouldn't ruin easily.
Many, this industry has quite a dilemma. On the one hand, some folks want their products to taste as much like meat as possible. But others will avoid products that taste too much like meat.
Not everyone got on board with this though. Safeway sells the patties literally next to cow meat, whereas Whole Foods puts them in the vegan section next to seitan.
It's an interesting line they have to walk.
I would certainly eat one again if the price came down, but I'm on the sidelines for now. For background, I order veggie burgers more often than beef burgers when given the choice, but I have never been a vegetarian.
In reality, it was much closer to a Boca burger but tastier. Basically if you take a burger and remove 50% of the juice and , 25% density, the crumble, and cook it well done. If it were in the grocery store, I'd still buy it over Boca, but my expectations of it being like-meat but healthier were not met. I wouldn't serve it to real burger loving carnivores.
I'd say its kinda false advertising, but I get why they did it...it definitely got us intrigued.
-Will future children look back at our current acceptance of the treatment/killing of animals like we look at societal acceptance of slavery? The pictures/videos of some of our factory farms are unbelievable.
-Will laws be imposed for the killing of mentally capable animals such as pigs and cows? Some states already outlaw killing/eating certain animals (dogs+cats)[1], and cruelty to animals is illegal almost everywhere. But what is a more cruel punishment than death? I'd rather be tortured and then live the rest of my life than be murdered today.
-We can all live perfectly happy, long lives without killing animals today... so why is it okay to kill them today just for our own enjoyment?
(I'm not a vegetarian but am ethically conflicted)
[1]https://inhabitat.com/killing-dogs-and-cats-for-meat-is-stil...
Do we have an ethical imperative to stop cats from killing birds? All complex animal life on this planet consumes other living cells in order to survive, it is just a matter of scale and type.
This is especially true for animals that exist so that we may consume them. Hundreds of millions of chicken live only so that we may be nourished- similarly for cows, sheep and so forth.
Raising them in a minimally harsh and 'humane' environment can be an ethical good but that their lives are shortened by our 'harvesting' process is irrelevant, since they exist only due to that need to begin with.
Now killing an animal and discarding the resultant bounty- that is unethical and wrong, unless needed to ameliorate some other harm.
are you saying it's always preferable to create a life, as long as its conditions pass some threshold of being humane?
many would disagree. you might value minimising suffering above maximising happiness, for example.
Unless and until we reach 'uplift' level sentience of client species the death of a husbandry animal creates no more ethical conflict than cutting down wheat.
The vast majority of meat eaten in the developed world comes from factory farms where the treatment of animals is pretty horrific. If you don't believe me on how bad it is, watch the movie Earthlings. It's free on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrlBSuuy50Y
(emphasis mine)
I think the moral argument is relative (progress-based) at best. Slavery was never essential to survival, but consuming other animals so far has been, or at least it was until only very recently. Being a healthy vegan is mainly possible today thanks to advancements in science and food production. I think our children will give us a moral pass in the same way we give it to cats that still eat mice.
But still, it's interesting to think about how for a very long time, a good number of people achieved the moral ideal here without advanced understanding of nutrition. We ruined this with factory farmed dairy/eggs.
The vast majority of people still buy their food solely based on what's most affordable, with little to no room to account for "ethical reasons" beyond that. In that regard, "organic" or "ethical" often amounts to paying double if sometimes quadruple the price of "regular" products.
If artificial meat can undercut regularly produced meat, price wise (without tasting too bad), then that could be a real game changer, but until that happens it will remain only interesting to the fringe demographic of people with too much disposable income. Which isn't that big of a demographic and as such will never have the potential to enact the desired environmental impact change.
I dislike comments like this that seem to just be dismissive of a new technology without adding any real insight. Everyone knows things are expensive in the beginning so what's the point of saying it's not going to work unless it's cheaper than real meat. It's really obvious.
Furthermore, oil has tried to undercut their prices to fend off other forms of energy (specially renewables), people and countries are still choosing renewables as a way to the future because it makes sense.
An alternative to raising livestock with clean meat is something that also makes sense and I think quite a lot of people are eager to proceed with this alternative.
Some things will always stay more expensive than their cheaper alternatives, case in point: Organic farmed meat vs mass farmed.
The former will always stay more expensive than the later because you can produce that much more meat on the same space, you can produce it cheaper by feeding lesser quality food to the animals.
Is the resulting meat a "better meat"? No, but it is the cheaper meat and that's still what the vast majority of consumers are looking for.
> I dislike comments like this that seem to just be dismissive of a new technology without adding any real insight.
It wasn't meant to be dismissive about the technology, merely pointing out that as long as this ain't cost competitive it will just be another niche solution for the "Let's feel better about ourselves by throwing money around" crowd and we already have plenty of those.
Silicon Valley/SF is a microcosmos on its own, some things might work there, yet rarely do these things scale up outside of that niche-customer market, but that's exactly the kind of solution we need if we want large parts of humanity to change their ways about how they treat animals and animal products.
When I cross a bridge on Danube and take a look from the hight (the bridge is quite big and tall) at the countryside I live in, all I can see is a farmland. And I can't help but imagine that only 200 years ago there were forests there, as far as you can see.
But once the meat is grown in the lab, I hope that it would stop making financial sense to farm the land for animal food.
How does this ride with the trend for more organic and natural produce? Will artificial meat only be a suitable alternative in cheap or fast foods?
Even if you neglect the animal suffering inherit in the system all the farm land freed up by not raising an animal for its flesh would do wonders for the environment.
Worrying about “unintended consequences” of solving some problems over how many problems it causes is crazy.
So my guess is that freeing up farmland will potentially result in even more human population, just shifting the odds of which particular tragedy will next befall us.
How long before other complex food proteins can be synthesised and mass-produced without the need of specialist farms?
If you're a vegetarian for ethical or environmental reasons, I'd think lab grown meat is probably totally ok to eat. If you're a vegetarian for health reasons, not sure why you can't eat meat a few meals a month?
Here's a train of thought to help illustrate:
I'm not vegan but I'm glad to eat lab-grow meat! Its clearly acceptable for {many reasons}.
Oh, how about meat grown from rats? Tasty and nutritious?
Uh, well, sure I guess.
How about grown from apes?
But...but...that's not...
And our new product: meat from people. Tastes like pork!
No, wait a minute, that's going too far!
The latest fad: meat from people you know! Your spouse! Your kids! Your grandmother!
Blech! I couldn't eat that!
Everybody has a different 'blech' threshold. And its all 'religion'.
What about just that I don't prefer the taste?
For instance, I would have no problem trying meat made in the lab from rats, apes or people.
But I probably wouldn't eat fish or goat or lamb, not because I have some"religious" reason for it.
If a religion can be defined as only a set of personal preferences, it seems like the entire concept of a religion is without a real clear boundary.
The other thing is that oyster farming improves water quality and the environment. So, vegans—go crazy I guess!
I know what you mean, but animal farming at the scale we currently do is not a historical constant. The unintended consequences of having 7B humans eat meat every day is a much bigger concern that not eating real meat every day.
Our current meat consumption accelerates global warming, drives wild inefficiencies in the market, and is a hell for the animals themselves. (Edit: Also represents disease vectors in humans, see shared farm resources and things like e. coli).
We need to move to lab meat to avoid the distaster that eating meat is bringing.
Whilst this may help, it will take many years/decades until the trust is there and indeed trusted backing and for some that will not change.
For me, I forsee artificial milk production as a more accepted avenue and if we can develop a process in which we chuck grass in at one end and get milk out of the other as a bigger opportunity and one in which would aid the environmental impacts in a more positive way. Until then we will still have cows, even with artificial meat.
But artificial meat, will take ages until it is accepted by the public, for me, it is when the likes of McDonalds adopting it that will be a key marker in progress and that is a long long way off as it stands.
I'm definitely worried that no one knows what weird diseases this could cause years from now, and if any research pointing to cancer or other problems has been kept secret (like it's been done before in so many cases).
For sure, intensive farming is bad for everybody (besides the farmers, perhaps), and anything that will reduce it is good news IMHO.
As for how I'd feel eating lab meat, we only eat meat because most of us haven't seen how animals are kept, what they're fed, and how they're slaughtered (I have at my dad's organic pig farm and it's nothing pretty--and I can't imagine how intensive production looks). So, I guess meat coming from a lab is just as gross/weird as the above, I would probably try it and even get used to it.
I'm sure vegetarians will love it--or at least the ones that do it for the animals--as they'll finally be able to eat meat, which is unarguably personal preference but IMHO about 100 times better-tasting than imitation meat (like those burgers you buy at the grocery store).
I suspect if it's cheaper I'll get it served at some fast food restaurant, so I'll have a chance to try it.
If you use enough "umami bombs" in cooking then you can make very savory veg* dishes. My faves are soy sauce and yeast extract and I'm also not above using MSG.
Tbh I think meat is an addiction. Even if veg meals satisfy me and meet my caloric needs I still crave it!
If you're putting yeast extract in, you are absolutely not above using MSG, as that's pretty much what makes yeast extract so tasty (and used in many processed foods so they don't have to say that they added MSG to their product).
As an aside - I bought a big ole bag of MSG a while back, and it's great to toss into sautéed vegetables.
Meat has more than calories - you might be missing the other components in your vegetarian meals.
I can take you to some BBQ place that will take _your_ socks off, too. You know, to each his own :-)
> If your only understanding of imitation meat is "those burgers you buy at the grocery store,"
If I was a vegetarian I would definitely end up buying stuff from the grocery store, not going to different really good restaurants every day.
This is often said, but I doubt it very much. I think it should be shown to everyone (including in school), and it would probably lead to some positive changes, but I doubt it would significantly reduce the number of meat eaters. We can look at the people working in the industry: are they all morally deficient or desperate for work? Not as far as I know.
I bet that if we were reminded somehow (like for cigarettes), lots of people will eat a lot less meat.
Children in the developed world might not know but you only have to go as far as their grands parents to find out. They typically had a farm and had to kill the animals themselves.
As a current vegetarian I'm excited to start eating these lab grown meats, but I also want the industry to do it safely and intelligently.
It’s not like thrown money needs to go just to scaling....
It's completely counterintuitive, but factory farming practices for dairy are arguably as bad if not worse than what is done for meat, and dairy even supports the meat industry (veal).
I know there are fake options like Daiya, but it's just not the same.