Seafood Without the Sea: Will Lab-Grown Fish Hook Consumers? | Hacker News Reader

Seafood Without the Sea: Will Lab-Grown Fish Hook Consumers?

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69 points1PlayerOne42 comments

Is enough dificult yet by traditional methods.

There is a limit to the tick of a meat piece if oxigen and food must rely in simple difussion. Fishes need omega3 fatty acids to survive. They are unable to synthesize it. How do you effectively feed with omega-3 the cells of an animal without stomach? I wonder also how cell excrection would be solved without a few tubes and filters to collect it. Would you eat fish fillets growing soaked in "fish urine"?

The list of challenges to solve is really long.

The more interesting goal here is changing the perception of public about what is food. There are lots of problems with fish breeding. Bad husbandry practices will produce easily a lot percentage of deformed fishes in the pool (lacking one or two eyes, lack of opercles is also common and skeletal sclerosis can produce "Z" plied fishes easily also). Those are unmarketable today. If you just say that it was cultivated in a laboratory then abismal quality products could suddently enter in a market chain and turn into acceptable or even top quality. Even better than the real thing.

But a good comforting lie is still a lie.

I have a sinking feeling this kind of synthetic food production is just a bait for health-wary consumers. After reeling in enough customers, lab-grown fish produced for profit will inevitably have to deteriorate in quality to maintain/increase revenue. Can this kind of endeavor scale? Can it be introduced to schools, for example? I'm sure some consumers will swallow the idea hook, line and sinker but I see it as just another cool concept in an ocean filled with bottom-feeders.

Well they're not suddenly going to gain in mercury content or anything so I'd expect they'll always have an edge in health.

Also, 11/10 with the fishy idioms. :)

Or just have land farms of fish: http://www.uarahfisheries.com.au/

I sea what you did there.

> I have a sinking feeling this kind of synthetic food production is just a bait for health-wary consumers

I'm a futuristic person, I like to imagine what I can do far into the future, something like: "Hey space ship, I like to have some roasted Salmon Sushi sprinkled with tomato paste to be delivered to the observation deck please. Thanks!"

And I believe synthetic food is the first step to archive that.

do you know why you want such a such thing? is it merely indulgence?

I don't think it's inevitable that quality has to deteriorate. I buy all sorts of manufactured products that are perfectly good; competition in balanced, well-run markets keeps producers in line.

And personally, I'm willing to pay extra for lab-grown. I'm sure they'll sell that as a health benefit; it's much easier to avoid contaminants. But for me it's about minimized negative externalities. I don't have to worry that I'm driving a species extinct, or contributing to some more localized eco-catastrophe.

You may pay extra, plenty might want the same for less - particularly if it becomes fashionable. We don't really have balanced, well run markets, so competition also produces cheap, profitable eco-catastrophes, either to sell a similar product for less - see US experience of beef farming. Or to turn a once wild-caught luxury food into a mass market everyday food - see almost all salmon farming. No problem - the eco-catastrophe is now someone else's problem - an externality.

I see no reason to have confidence this will be any different in terms of eco-damage or other pollution without strengthening regulation in several areas. Just being in a "lab" - which will be regular food factory once commercialised - won't remove waste, or stuff down the drains.

many global fishing stocks are being critically overexploited, and lab grown fish could help abate it. this is a much more immediate threat to food security than climate change and may be intensified in the future by ocean acidification. i don’t see why a fish lab couldn’t be run in a carbon neutral manner and it’s much better than doing nothing.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/fish-stocks-are-used-...

I think it's much harder to have negative externalities in a factory, especially a food factory, than it is operating in the open ocean, or even in, say, coastal fish farms. Food production is pretty regulated, and drain systems are much fussier about what they accept than, say, soil runoff is.

I just don't hear many horror stories about people living next to, say, bakeries.

"And personally, I'm willing to pay extra for lab-grown."

I believe this mindset amongst thoughtful consumers like yourself only do harm. Like with other trendy foods that get popularized for health or whatever reason, it incentivizes the producers to raise the prices and when consumers like yourself accept that price, it sends a signal to them. The product then becomes too expensive for regular normal people to afford, so only wealthier families can afford to eat them and get those health benefits. If it is imperative for us to make healthy and sustainable diets more widespread, we must strive to make it as accessible as possible. Same with the beyond burger stuff or any other vegetarian/vegan products.

I don't think that's how it works at all.

There are a lot of products that start as a premium offering and move downmarket as they scale. Computers and cellphones are great examples. That early adopters paid a lot for their purchases didn't prevent the emergence of less expensive hardware. It enabled it.

> After reeling in enough customers, lab-grown fish produced for profit will inevitably have to deteriorate in quality to maintain/increase revenue.

Maybe this post is just upvoted for the dad jokes, in which case, Fair Play...

But on the substance, all other food products have to compete on quality. Why this would be different needs to be explained.

Sure, it's always a balance of price and quality. But why would this particular food have a different balance than all other food products?

You're assuming fish and seafood and quality goods. Fish is known to have lots of heavy metals for instance.

> BlueNalu is not looking to replace wild-caught or farm-raised seafood, but is aiming to become a third alternative for seafood eaters.

Since they are targeting “fish that cannot be easily farmed”, the whiff I get from this idea is akin to synthetic diamonds. This lab grown fish is an alternative to the rare and high-end fish that is harder (and more expensive) to get.

This is not a cheap replacement for standard consumers buying filets at the grocery store for weeknight dinners, but a niche offer for chefs and clientele wanting the experience of eating particular fish cuisine.

It would be disingenuous to say this is going to save the oceans. Fish are useful to the environment and it would be better if their populations rose, as overfishing is causing massive oceanic destruction.

Comparing this kind of lab grown fish to lab grown beef is actually an inverse comparison because a central point of lab grown beef is addressing the issue (and environmental impact) of humans farming too many cows for beef, whereas with fish we have the opposite problem where humans have decimated the populations so much we actually need to lift fish populations.

I don't think I follow. If I had the choice of eating a wild bluefin tuna versus lab grown bluefish tuna meat, I'd eat the lab grown meat every time because... overfishing of bluefin tuna is a serious problem.

There is never a silver bullet, but if we can improve stocks of any wild fish via displacement, it's working to save the oceans.

> It would be disingenuous to say this is going to save the oceans.

Because it's only for niche expensive fish?

That's where they have to start when the technology is expensive. If and when it becomes cheaper, we might reach ocean saving levels. Or we might not.

Indoor fish farming seems like a much more practical approach to solve the problems inherent in catching wild fish to eat (and the pollution that outdoor fish farms cause), and a much more logical next step for seafood than lab-grown muscle tissue.

Lab-meat makes most sense for beef, which is an incredibly inefficient and habitat-destroying food source, and is also often served in a processed form anyway, ie as minced-beef in burgers, bolognese, sausages, etc, etc.

Many fish (Tuna being a prime example) can't be farmed. There's also a notable decrease in health and nutritional content of farmed fish.

Currently, perhaps, but many advances are being made.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-future-of-fis...

Tuna is not easy to breed, not at all, but can be farmed. I had seen tuna babies born in captivity. The tiny critters are all mouth. Is a long term effort.

It is likely more efficient to scale lab-grown fish than it is to scale farmed fish. Cell farming is currently expensive an inefficient, like any new technology. But this can be improved. Yet it will always take at least x energy input to create at most x/10 edible fish output. (https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-10-energy-rule-in-a-foo...)

The Marine Conservation Society (MSC) has an excellent Good Fish Guide if you want to find out which fish are overfished:

"Use the Good Fish Guide to find out which fish are the most sustainable (Green rated), and which are the least sustainable (Red rated)."

https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search

In the UK, supermarkets display the MSC logo on frozen fish products to indicate the fish is sustainably sourced. They did a recent Good Fish Fingers guide for 2018 (UK only):

https://www.mcsuk.org/responsible-seafood/fish-finger-guide

What is never brought up in the lab grown meat discussion is the potential to mitigate human suffering. Working a fishing boat is hard. Working a poultry plant is hard and psychologically stressful. Lab grown meat could eliminate that for thousands of people.

Lab grown meat could also eliminate jobs for thousands of people. Got any ideas how a 50-something fisherman is supposed to put those lab grown meals on his/her table once their job is gone?

No industry is safe from disruption. Governments need robust training programs and social safety nets for late career individuals in all industries in transition.

Retraining is hard and will become useless when more and more jobs are destroyed. UBI is an example of "For every problem there is a solution which is simple, clean and wrong". So what do we do?

I'm not impressed with academics who think all physical labor is torture.

NOT EVERYONE IS LIKE YOU OR WANT TO BE LIKE YOU!

Sorry for the shouting...

https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/features/W...

“The ILO is keenly aware that people in the fishing sector often face harsh or difficult working conditions: they may spend long periods at sea and are frequently exposed to unpredictable and dangerous conditions. In a number of countries, the fatality rates for persons in the fishing sector are many times greater than the national average, for example higher than those for fire-fighters or police. These rates may exceed 150 to 180 per 100,000 workers, rivalled only by such other hazardous occupations as forestry and coal mining.”

Much like cutting trees for a living, fishing - even of the net hauling and trap wrassling variety - can be very fulfilling and fun for a certain kind of person.

This wouldn't stop somebody from fishing for fun/sport, unless you're saying it's common that people use industrial fishing equipment for fun.

I'm saying some people actually really enjoy physical outdoor work over sitting behind a desk in an office all day.

I am seriously excited for this to become available to chefs. There is a rampant issue in sushi with fish fraud and this would be a clean and ethical solution.

Why do you think that this would be more ethical than allowing fishes live in the sea?

Yes, I would eat lab-grown meat (fish or otherwise).

I'm skeptical. This article makes huge claims about what they've done, but looking at BlueNalu's website, there are no pictures of the lab or actual fish that they've made. This seems like a submarine article (http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html) no pun intended.

Looks like another firm trying to pull an "impossible" - hype up something as lab grown meat, sell veggieburgers.

Impossible is plant based, not lab grown.

That was the point of the comment.

But Impossible does not and has not ever claimed to be lab grown meat.

Fair enough. I was responding to your response to GP (which claimed it did so claim before the bait&switch). I have no dog in this hunt - just tracking grammar and claims. Probably makes me a Nazi.

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