No-kill, lab-grown meat to go on sale for first time
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
There's always some risk in innovation, but it seems like synthetic nutrition is an absolute minefield. It's not just the raw complexity of the field, either. It's also that much of nutrition is junk science, even in the peer-reviewed literature.
On a more conspirational note, I also can't help but to notice that the agro-dietary industry is a pretty low-margin business. It seems like driving up profit margins requires convincing people that existing foods are somehow unsuitable, and that "innovative" products are therefore needed. I think vegan and ecological sensibilities are being instrumentalized to this end.
In any case: this anonymous internet stranger plans on skipping the lab-meat fad.
The argument is that we're taking a major public health risk on the basis of low-quality science, in an industry with a questionable track-record.
This isn't just a new food product. This is more directly comparable to a new pharmacological compound, and ought to be treated as such.
Are we? (I really don't know the answer to this.) What's the science behind it and what are the gaps in it? This is the first time lab-grown meat is being sold and so far it's happening only in one country on the planet.
An argument would be evidence for this claim about "low-quality science".
Comments upon comments of fear-mongering, and not a single one has managed to reference a scholarly work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
>Prions are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein. They characterize several fatal and transmissible neurodegenerative diseases in humans and many other animals.[3] It is not known what causes the normal protein to misfold,
A lot of them take years to even be discovered once your infected and we're still not sure what causes them to misfold.
We're making proteins in a lab, have done only a few years of study on the safety and have approved them for human consumption. We may not see or understand the consequences for decades.
> According to Beyond Meat's website, ingredients for its plant-based patties include water, pea protein isolate, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein and other natural flavors, including apple extract and beet juice extract (for color)
Safety concerns with respect to innovation are understandable. But they should be grounded. We know things like pea protein don't hurt us.
It's the non-mostly other stuff that worries me.
You're right, it is a (literal) cut-throat business. But the price of synthetic meat has been falling exponentially [1]. Hopefully it'll drop far below traditional meat. This is not a product you'd want to adopt if you're interested in high margins.
> I think vegan and ecological sensibilities are being instrumentalized to this end.
Organic is a better example. It's simply a marketing concept designed to capitalize on the appeal to nature fallacy. It's not healthier or cheaper or better for the environment [2]. Veganism is different: it's the practice of abstaining from the use of animal products.
[1] http://www.rosiebosworth.com/blog/2017/8/2/price-will-trump-...
[2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/httpblogs...
Whether it's better for the environment is much less clear; the USDA organic requirements are pretty watered down, and modern pesticides responsibly applied are pretty safe, but synthetic fertilizer, as typically applied on commercial scale farms, is pretty darn bad for ecosystems.
True. It's a big problem. However, the biggest environmental problem _right now_ is habitat loss. As in, massive habitat loss has already happened. We won't feel the really bad effects of climate change for another 100 years. Clearing forests also contribute to climate change.
> Habitat loss is perhaps the greatest threat to organisms and biodiversity.[5] Temple (1986) found that 82% of endangered bird species were significantly threatened by habitat loss. Most amphibian species are also threatened by native habitat loss,[6] and some species are now only breeding in modified habitat
So how do we reduce habitat loss? Well, clearing habitats for agriculture is the principal cause of habitat destruction [1]. So we should try to be efficient with the land we have. Unfortunately organic farming does the opposite [2]:
> The Oxford meta-analysis of 71 studies found that organic farming requires 84% more land for an equivalent amount of harvest
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_destruction#Impacts_on...
Based on the responses, I just want to make this clear: this is NOT a comprehensive comparison of organic and conventional agriculture, nor is it intended to be. That post would be miles long and far more complex. My overall belief is that there shouldn't be a dichotomy in the first place - there are a variety of methods and practices that a farmer can use, each with its pros and cons. The main point here is that something "organic" isn't intrinsically better than something that isn't, and that you have to approach all kinds of agriculture critically to achieve optimum sustainability.
I thought so... I would be surprised if the main point (that organic food is not healthier pesticide-wise) applies to all organic labels.
It's not clear what exactly are you referring to with "organic", as one can refer to both agricaltural products and processed food.
At least in relation to processed food, I do read and compare labels, and very often, there are 1. less additives 2. natural additives as opposed to chemical ones 3. less refined ingredients.
This alone is a big deal, and just based on this, organic as a whole is definitely healthier.
I can't talk for processes themselves, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were higher standards in the food chain (e.g. less freezing time, no freezing at all etc.). As a matter of fact, you'll often read that organic is tastier; I personally don't find it so, but that could be very well the cause. Again, organic food is preferrable here (I'm not using "healthier" in a strict sense here).
I'm not based on USA though, which may have looser food standards.
I'm referring to both, and more. All of it. Here is the definition from wikipedia [1]
> Organic food is food produced by methods complying with the standards of organic farming. Standards vary worldwide, but organic farming features practices that cycle resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity. Organizations regulating organic products may restrict the use of certain pesticides and fertilizers in the farming methods used to produce such products. Organic foods typically are not processed using irradiation, industrial solvents, or synthetic food additives
>This alone is a big deal, and just based on this, organic as a whole is definitely healthier.
This is the appeal to nature fallacy I referred to originally. Just so we're on the same page [2]:
> The appeal to nature is a logical fallacy that occurs when something is claimed to be good because it’s perceived as natural, or bad because it’s perceived as unnatural.
> For example, a person using an appeal to nature might suggest using herbal remedies when treating a serious medical condition, despite what research says on the topic, simply because they perceive the herbal remedies as more natural than modern treatments.
> It’s important to understand this kind of fallacious thinking, since it frequently plays a role in people’s internal reasoning process, as well as in debates on various topics. As such, in the following article you will learn more about the appeal to nature fallacy, and see what you can do in order to counter people who use it, while also making sure that you won’t use it yourself.
The linked page has many examples, you can find more here [3]. In response to your points in particular:
1. Additives aren't healthy or unhealthy. It simply describes a category of food. Anything can be an additive: sugar, salt, apples, uranium.
2. The meaning of "natural" and "chemical" isn't well-defined here. Everything in nature is composed of chemicals and chemicals are natural. The meaning you're giving to these words are basically natural is good and chemical is bad. If not, please provide a rigorous definition of the two words.
3. Refined probably refers to "processed"? It's similarly vague, allowing anyone to make it mean whatever they want. So if we go with the definition:
> "Processed food" includes food that has been cooked, canned, frozen, packaged or changed in nutritional composition with fortifying, preserving or preparing in different ways. Any time we cook, bake or prepare food, we're processing food
Then no, it's not bad to process food: [4], [5]. Some forms of processing may be bad yes, but please specify what you mean.
> but I wouldn't be surprised if there were higher standards in the food chain (e.g. less freezing time, no freezing at all etc.)
Again, which standards? My point being that standards enforced by organic farming _are not_ about improving taste, cost, or health. Of course they claim that, but there is insufficient evidence for this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food
[2] https://effectiviology.com/appeal-to-nature-fallacy/
[3] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature#Examples
[4] https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/not-all-proce...
If one compares a significant range of non-organic food products with organic ones, the latter will correlate with lack of some ingredients, or replacement with comparable ones. This can be verified easily by anybody who lives in a country with a meaningful presence of the organic market/brands (I'm not sure what's the situation in USA; I wouldn't be suprised if the average presence is negligible).
Considering that nutrition is "not really" a science, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that if something has been approved by the food institutions (e.g. FDA), they don't have a negative impact on the body, therefore, organic and non-organic food products have essentially the same.
For the same reason though, the opposite is also reasonable.
If I can choose between, say, packaged bread with and without, say, hydrogenated fats and corn syrup, I prefer the latter, but as I wrote, I don't think that who chooses the former is wrong, ignorant, or so.
Regarding the standards, the same principle holds. Enforcing, there's not absolute truth about, say, crops rotation and forbidding antibiotics/hormones (this are some of the rules dictated by organic organizations) can be believed or not (I don't doubt there's straight snake oil in some practices). There was an Scientific American article on HN correlating modern agriculture practices to lower nutritional properties of crops, therefore practices mandated by the organic standards have a sense, but I doubt that there is a rigorous scientific investigation on this, so anybody can be reasonably reject the argument.
Dunno, seems stupid to me.
Is lab-grown meat going to have anything like that variety?
We have a long history of thinking we've identified all the important ones, only to make new discoveries of important things, whether it's omega-3 fats, or compounds that fight free radicals. It remains to be seen whether lab-grown meat will be equally nutritious.
Don't most of these kinds of things wind up being marketing jargon which later gets largely debunked? Taking antioxidants as an example, we manufacture most of what we need already, you only need trace amounts of nutrients like vitamin C to satisfy the rest of your needs. Attempts to supplement those sources further with "superfoods," pills, etc have approximately zero affect on any metric of interest.
On the contrary. Artificially large doses of antioxidants disrupt signaling systems, preventing exercise recovery and wound healing. They are simply not a good idea.
However, the parent comment is mistaken in thinking that we don't understand nutrition reasonably well, and might 'miss' something in artificially cultured meat.
The science of nutrition is still in its infancy, with very basic questions still unanswered, and we're very, very far from having catalogued all the nutrients in meat and vegetables and understanding their effects on our body.
I mean, even with macro nutrients, just look at the flip-flopping and debates over the past few decades on saturated fats, trans fats, carbs vs fats, etc. Then when you get to micronutrients, we don't even know what we don't know.
You can see the other comment I made on how, for example, we know chicken soup helps fight colds, but don't have the slightest idea what compound is responsible. Will lab-grown chicken do the same?
Even calling those compounds "nutrients" in the first place is a bit circular. If something hasn't had enough of an effect on any of our observations to warrant further investigation, or else if all the evidence points to it being largely inert, then it probably isn't much of a nutrient. We've almost certainly missed a thing or two here or there, but pointing to a list of compounds in meat that aren't in a nutrition book and assuming those must be nutrients of some kind doesn't seem like a productive activity.
> I mean, even with macro nutrients, just look at the flip-flopping and debates over the past few decades on saturated fats, trans fats, carbs vs fats, etc. Then when you get to micronutrients, we don't even know what we don't know.
The implication seems to be that macronutrients should be easier to reason about, so if we don't know much about them then we can't know much about micronutrients. In practice though, macronutrient composition doesn't matter much and doesn't have strong effects, whereas many micronutrients are easily testable. The flip-flopping hasn't been one of a vast scientific consensus, but rather small amounts of scientific research and a vast marketing machine.
> You can see the other comment I made on how, for example, we know chicken soup helps fight colds, but don't have the slightest idea what compound is responsible. Will lab-grown chicken do the same?
That seems like a moving goalpost (or a misunderstanding on my part as to what your position is). Is "a reasonable understanding of nutrition" a large enough body of knowledge to tailor a body composition to one's favourite activities and keep it healthy for its normal lifespan barring medical events (aging, cancer, colds, loss of limb), or is it a perfect understanding of every interaction things we can consume might have with our body or any other organisms we're hosting?
Mildly off-topic: We know that chicken soup probably eases cold symptoms, and so do hot water and hot tea. Even assuming a compound is medicinally responsible in the first place doesn't seem like a great starting point.
Both sides of that are completely false. We have gigantic gaps in basic nutrition knowledge, and the idea that we have a strong idea of all existing important correlations is similarly completely and utterly incorrect.
The idea that flip-flopping is due to a "vast marketing machine" is also completely disingenuous. I'm not talking about pop science articles, I'm talking about disagreement between scientists.
I seriously don't know where people get this idea that human nutrition is this advanced science where we know most of the answers. I can only assume it's wishful thinking? It would be nice if we did... but we really don't. And there's a good reason for it, which is that it's incredibly difficult to ethically perform decades-long controlled experiments with nutrition in people to provide definitive scientific answers, for the obvious reasons.
Not in the slightest. I've explicitly said we have "a reasonable understanding of nutrition" and not even vaguely implied that we know everything. Am I misunderstanding you that poorly too, and is that why we seem to be in such disagreement?
TIL. That's fantastic.
I pulled up the nutrition of chicken and salmon. For chicken, I'd say "not really;" it's protein, fat, some B-6, and the rest of the micronutrients are <10% of the RDA per serving. The main notable nutrient difference between chicken and salon is more B-12.
Except for B-12 and omega 3 fatty acids, meat isn't where you're going to get micronutrients.
Just a super-quick Google search reveals, for example:
> Dr. Stephen Rennard of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. He conducted laboratory tests to determine why chicken soup might help colds, beginning with his wife’s homemade recipe, handed down by her Lithuanian grandmother. Using blood samples from volunteers, he showed that the soup inhibited the movement of neutrophils, the most common type of white blood cell that defends against infection. Dr. Rennard theorizes that by inhibiting the migration of these infection-fighting cells in the body, chicken soup essentially helps reduce upper respiratory cold symptoms. The researchers couldn’t identify the exact ingredient or ingredients in the soup that made it effective against colds.
The idea that we understand and have catalogued all the compounds in meats (or vegetables) and fully understand how they improve our health is far, far from true.
I'm not talking about "magic" compounds or anything... but just that our body functions optimally on a wide variety of nutrients, of which we study only a relative handful.
Even for things we know of, like how important the iron in beef is -- would lab-grown beef contain it as well? Would it come "by default" or would it have to be specifically included?
[1] https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/the-science-of-chi...
I don't think most of the world views animal husbandry as having inherent cruelty in the first place.
And one often finds that the relationship to food is different outside of the US. It's somehow less of a commodity and more of a meaningful tradition. You'll be hard-pressed to convince Frenchmen to let go of Limousin beef, for example, and in a manner that's markedly different from Texans defending their meat.
While you're right that there might be more attachment to 'traditional' and overall high quality meat, there's still a big movement for cruelty free meat as you can see by the impact of associations like L214 for example, or the fact that there was an increase of 25% for the vegetarian market in 2018
I just happened to come across a mean farmer in my language bragging about a “tadpole massacre” in their ricefield that happens when the field is drained in an appropriate season, a very conventional, not at all industrial, pesticide free, yet apparently a cruel method for unwanted animals, used to produce entirely vegetable products.
Conventional ethical vegetarianism don’t offer a consensus around such animal cruelty involved in vegetable produces, it’s completely out of sight and out of scope.
I believe this is a solved issue in trains of philosophy/religions from India, where some groups of people have practiced partial vegetarianism for millenniums, which I suspect to be the actual upstream of various vegetarianisms, and the layman’s versions of it say you should accept the sin, reasonably try to minimize harm to all life, and leave animal processing to (enslaved) butcher classes. The slavery part is kind of creepy, but the former two parts solves this classes of controversies beautifully.
As you can see, most, if not all, known branches of vegetarianisms are specifically crafted rebellion movement against certain parts of western agriculture, and I think thus they are moot in other contexts.
But go visit a family owned ranch in Wyoming and tell me those cows don't have it just as good as the elk grazing alongside them.
Also, for the cows, chickens, pigs, etc themselves, the options are a life under husbandry or no life at all.
I would like to see meat substitutes become good enough to displace the low quality stuff (fast-food, etc), but a world without high-quality natural animal protein is a dull one...
Sci-Fi reader part of myself wonder if there could be some information theory aspect to a perfect-mess of meat, that the food must grow within a context relevant to the consumer, i.e. a perfect piece of meat or a carrot from 100 years in the future or past is not perfect to us in present.
We just need to consume less and go back to more natural production of what we do eat.
I don't know for the US, but in France 82 % of poultry, 90% of pigs et 99 % of rabbits come from mass production.
So if you live in the city and cannot really know the origin of what you eat, you can bet it's been mass produced.
I think that's why there's such a hype around vegetarianism and veganism right now : not so much because eating animal is an absolute evil, but because most animal products available do not come from a family owned ranch in Wyoming but from places like this one : https://animaux.l214.com/poulets/elevage-poulets-duc-yonne-2...
If they could be raised in humane, unlike mass production conditions, then one could argue convincingly that it's better than not doing it all from a purely compassionate viewpoint.
It's still tremendously wasteful of land and resources, but that's a separate concern to address.
Fears of trichinosis decades ago led to pork being overcooked for a long time. I did sous vide pork chops for my parents and they said it was the best pork chop they'd ever had, but still weren't crazy about it. They just don't like pork, after a lifetime of eating it overcooked.
I've done chicken breast at low temp and ended up with a mushy piece of meat i didn't care for. Chicken breast is good in a relatively narrow band of temperatures, where it's neither mushy nor dessicated, and often you still need to crisp the skin. Technology has made it easier to get in that band.
It would be cool to do steak tartare at home, though!
As a vegetarian, I have to wonder who the target market for this is.
Meat substitutes that don't use any animal cells whatsoever have existed for a long time, and many of them are pretty convincing, and even when they're not they often delicious in their own right.
It's cheese that I find to be the last great frontier as far as substitutes go. There just isn't even a remotely passible substitute for many cheeses.
Not everyone is convinced that being vegetarian is an option for them, and they don't have to be so convinced with this option.
99% vegetarian, 1% pescatarian here and I agree with your statement, but I'd add milk and eggs to that list. There is no substitute for eggs at the moment AFAIK and despite many probably pointing me to all the oat/nut/soy milk replacements none of them comes even close to real milk for me. I can tolerate a bit of oat milk with my coffee every now and then, but can't have a bowl of cereal with milk substitutes. Just doesn't taste right. Also I'm concerned about the much higher glucose intake from oat milks than real milk.
It depends on what form you're using the eggs in.
I don't think there's any substitute for hard-boiled eggs, or sunny-side-up fried eggs, for example.
However, tofu-scrambles make a good substitute for scrambled eggs, in my experience.
There are also a million substitutes for eggs in baking.
"despite many probably pointing me to all the oat/nut/soy milk replacements none of them comes even close to real milk for me"
Ok, they might not taste like milk per se, but I find some soy milk and other nut milks taste much better than ordinary milk.. though different. Many of them do tend to be sweeter, and I personally like that.. they taste more like a dessert to me, which I'm usually fine with.
Glucose is a problem, but there's no reason they couldn't use sugar substitutes, of which there are many (though unfortunately some of the best, like tagatose, are still pretty expensive).
Have you tried allulose? I can't get it in my country, but it sounds better than others.
I have, actually. It's ok, but I find it a lot less sweet than sugar, so I have to use maybe 2x to 3x as much as I would regular sugar.. add to this that it's probably 10x as expensive as sugar and it is just way too expensive for me.
Not to mention that at least the brand I tried was a lot finer than ordinary table sugar, and was closer to powdered sugar in consistency. This is ok for some applications, but not others.
I found tagatose to be much, much better, as it's virtually indistinguishable from sugar for me. It's also way more expensive than sugar, but at least it's comparable to sugar in sweetness, so you only have to use about as much as you'd use of regular sugar.
Tagatose also doesn't have any weird aftertaste to it, unlike stevia, for instance. Overall, it's by far the best sugar substitute I've ever tried, and would highly recommend it.
Does Tagatose caramelise? That's one of the things xylitol won't which is frustrating for some recipes.
But unfortunately, meat protein has some of the highest biological value, outside of egg whites/whey/dairy proteins.
When you factor in how cheap low-grade meat is, it winds up being incredibly economical to just eat a bunch of $2/lb chicken and whatnot. Especially if you're trying to eat upwards of 200-250g of protein a day, it gets expensive fast.
So I have sort of accepted this hypocritical double-standard, where I recognize that what I am doing is not entirely ethical but at the same time it's too practical for me to give up. Plus, I love meat.
Lab-grown meat at somewhere near the price of regular meat has been a dream for me because then I get to have my cake and eat it too. Don't have to give up meat, or try to substitute non-meat proteins for it, and no actual sentient being has to suffer and die in order for me to continue doing so.
Huge win-win, can't come soon enough.
I would eat the plant-based stuff if someone could prove comparable biological value and the price was the same or only marginally higher, too.
I really don't care, as long as it tastes (doesn't even have to look) like meat, and the bodily effects are identical.
By what standard?
When I looked in to this for myself, it seemed like it's very unlikely for vegetarians to have protein deficiencies as long as they ate enough calories to sustain themselves and ate a decent variety of food (which they should be doing anyway, to stave off other health issues).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_value
The tl;dr is that it boils down to amino-acid profile. There are 9 Essential Amino Acid's (EAA's) that human body can't synthesize from other amino acids.
A food's biological value is determined (primarily) by it's amino acid profile. It's also not just about the overall amount, but also the ratio, since the way that amino acid absorption works is on a first-come-first-serve basis and so the proportion matters almost as much as composition.
There's a list of common foods and their biological value on that page if you're curious.
> "When I looked in to this for myself, it seemed like it's very unlikely for vegetarians to have protein deficiencies as long as they ate enough calories to sustain themselves and ate a decent variety of food (which they should be doing anyway, to stave off other health issues)."
Ah, yeah. For the average person, it doesn't matter. You can pretty much eat anything and be alright. The grand majority of people have god-awful diets and seem to function just fine.
I recreationally bodybuild so my dietary requirements are kind of an edgecase scenario.
As for bodybuilding, there are some vegetarian and even vegan bodybuilders out there. Have you looked in to how/what they eat?
[1] - https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-protein-combining-myth/
[2] - https://www.treehugger.com/myth-complete-protein-4858275
This is probably going to sound gross, but for me it's the allure of not having to bite into bone fragments or tendons. I'm one of those types of people where if there's an eggshell, piece of bone, stem, or anything else that's an unintended guest in my food, I will find it.
I don't mean for this motive to sound selfish, but it would be nice to be able to enjoy something of the sort (e.g. ground beef) without it becoming meat-flavored chewing gum.
Joking aside, I think the potential for a high degree of consistency in terms of texture and flavor would be another bonus.
I can't name a brand for you off-hand, but whenever I've bought vegetarian ground-beef substitutes at grocery stores, I've never once had this issue. They all tasted pretty much exactly like ground beef.
In my experience, that particular substitute is not a challenge.
There are also some pretty great vegetarian hamburger substitutes, like Boca Burger.
It's not. Some of the TVP products are pretty decent (and surprisingly so). And honestly, it's off-putting enough that it'd be worth using a substitute for. I eat hamburgers only rarely, so most of my ground beef consumption is in other dishes that are heavily seasoned enough that using a substitute is no problem (e.g. taco meat).
Otherwise, my problem is if I'm fixing chicken breasts for something and miss some connective tissue when I'm preparing it. I can guarantee with near certainty that if I do, I will be the one to find it. :)
(Sorry to gross you out if you're vegan.)
This is true. Unfortunately, where I live, all of the grocery chains have reduced or eliminated their own butchers. The one that I can think of off hand that is still in town was good for a while, and contamination is unlikely, but the quality of their sources seems to have diminished over time.
I'm honestly half-tempted to go back to grinding my own, which probably sounds unnecessary. But hey...
As somebody who hasn't eaten meat for years, I've long used "fake meat" substitutes because I originally missed normal meat, but the idea of eating actual meat (even lab-bred) triggers a disgust reflex now; I'll stick with the fake stuff.
As a meat eater, this is very interesting to me. I try to be as environmentally responsible as I can when it comes to meat, but its still all bad really. I cannot go more than a few days tops without animal protein, or I start to get weird cravings. Could I eventually get past it? Probably, but not interested in doing so. But I certainly am interested in more environmentally friendly options, if they are safe and economical.
Have you tried many vegetarian meat substitutes?
When I talk to meat eaters about this, many of them haven't tried many at all, and if they had tried anything it's maybe one product ten years ago.
The world of vegetarian meat substitutes has exploded in recent years, and there is just so much variety these days, many of them are really incredibly delicious and I'd stack them up against most meat any day.
Ok, they might not be 100% accurate, and tend to lack the blood, veins, gristle, skin, fat and bones of authentic meat products, but I think most people can live without those, if not even actively want to avoid some of that.
I also probably don't have the correctly balanced diet when I have done that in the past. And I have found a protein heavy diet is what my body prefers, and carbs are not super great for me. End up heavy and tired. And the vegetarian / vegan stuff we have done in the past have been far to carb heavy for me.
And I love cheese. Mac and cheese, alfredo, things like that. And I have yet to find a substitute that is acceptable to me in the cheese department. Although I have been able to cut back on the dairy the last few weeks, so its possible I could eventually cut it out. That just hasn't been on my priority list.
It's effectively a prototype. As noted in the article, the next version won't use this.
That would be amazing. Looking at the prices for vegetarian and vegan meat substitutes, I can't see it happening. : They are more expensive than meat. It appears that we need a lot more competition in these markets.
You'd remove the incentives to choose one over the other but less people will be able to eat. That's dangerous.
More over, you'd remove the new tech's incentive to become cheaper. I think cheaper food is always better for everyone.
Ideally it should scale a lot better than the real stuff.
Pricing in the negative externalities of meat is the best way to address this, which has a started goal of reducing the consumption of environmentally harmful meat.
It enables meat that is sustainable to be priced competitively and to shift consumption, but we should be very honest -- the goal of any pigouvian tax is to reduce the consumption of the harmful product.
Thus, meat should become more of a luxury, which means yes, it would be less accessible to the poor. But with billions becoming richer and demanding more meat consumption, the path we are on is entirely unsustainable.
The aim is only to nudge the scale rather than tax the farmed meat out of existence.
If we want to make sure meat products stay available in large quantities to everyone so you can have bacon for breakfast, a sandwich with deli slices for lunch, and a burger for dinner every day, you can take that subsidy money and put it toward lab grown meat instead.
Personally I'd like to see some of it redirected to vegetables though. Cheap meat and expensive vegetables isn't the ideal outcome even if it comes from the lab.
For the soy at least.
The issue is really eating processed crap off the shelves than the ingredients as per se, e.g. does any get obese from fresh pasta?
I wonder how many different chickens they sampled from the cell bank. Does their entire product trace back to a single "Eve" chicken sample from the cell bank? For comparison, I read (in "Diet for a New America", I believe) that one ground beef hamburger includes cells from about one thousand different cows.
If they just need cell samples, I wonder how different the process would be to grow human meat in a lab. There might be a niche novelty market for "human burgers"!
Right now, we use unskilled labor (cows) to perform chemical reactions with biomass (grass) to produce milk. I find it surprising that we can't do the same but significantly cheaper and cleaner with vats.
I'm not talking about plant substitutes like oat or almond extracts, I mean actual milk that's produced using the same process that cows perform internally.
A machine that transforms grass to milk sounds extremely skilled to me.