Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

Here's a decent article https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/05/how-to-prepare-raw-fish-...

Not to mention, they probably haven't realized the economies of scale yet at all.

I'd be glad too, actually.

In other words, the fact that we have biological systems that are achievable by breeding natural stock is a backstop against producing "food" that did not co-evolve with us. No guarantees, of course, which is why it's a heuristic and not a hard-and-fast rule, but I'd much rather have meat from living animals that have to survive than lab-produced meat that we have reductively arrived at by trying to mimic the observable properties of meat from biological organisms.

GMO presents significant challenges to this, as does clonal propagation of mutant varieties of fruit trees, both of which result in things that, while not necessarily bad, have developed outside the range of what natural variability could produce as viable systems.

So yes, I would argue significantly more heavily processed; edible plants need to be biologically viable in order to be useful for food production. That is not a guarantee that it will be safe or good, but as a heuristic I think it's a solid one, since the changes are within the bounds of the variability that is achievable through natural reproduction.

I think there's a significant qualitative difference between cheese, for example, of any variety, and "processed cheese" which is designed to mimic cheese properties but make it uniform over time and region by substituting simple chemicals (i.e., reductive by definition) for ingredients which came about by co-evolution in our ecosystems.

"Improving the nutritional value" is exactly what I am railing against. The idea that we understand human nutrition in any quantitative way is not realistic. It involves attempting to reduce complex systems to a small set of things that we can understand (making the system more "legible") is dangerous and represents a huge failure of what James C. Scott calls "high modernism".

By the time that we figure out that one of the nutrients presented is harmful unless it is accompanied by mediators naturally present in real foods it will be too late to fix these processes.

Yes, it has the striped pattern, but the texture looks completely wrong. Compare their image now with e.g. https://i.redd.it/12cdw2wb55p01.jpg. It's superficially similar; the 'early tasting' picture you link to looks _better_ from a texture perspective, to me.

That doesn't mean it's not tasty, but I would not choose this over the real thing (traditional preparation? idk).

I'm going to assume a non-zero amount. So my view is the aim with all ethics-based dietary choices with the motivation of avoiding harm to animals is basically to optimize for least animals killed per calorie per 'sentience' unit or whatever.

All food choices are inherently non-zero in animal suffering and I don't think it's reasonable to hold lab grown meat to any higher standard.

As to salt you do have a point.

So theoretically this will have a very similar nutritional profile to farmed or caught salmon. At least thats one of the goals of the lab grown meat sector.

It fact, it might even have a better nutritional profile because it won't be exposed to ocean contaminants like mercury and plastic.

It's true that for most people, the main malnutrition is a surplus of calories. If they're deficient in something, it's likely to be dietary fiber, and perhaps vitamin D. Salmon has none of the former, but it would be interesting to know how this stacks up in the latter.

I would imagine the imitation meat patties are worse in some ways than a turkey patty.

We got used to vegetarian = healthy because for a while it meant grain, veggies and fruits. But today half of the vegetarian/vegan processed food is as bad as regular processed food.

I'll take an halloumi/spinach patty burger over a beyond meat burger every day

I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist, but it appears that processed food has a host of negative effects according to recent studies (for example https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-find...). Now you can pick apart these studies, but ultimately we “know” very little about nutrition for certain, which is why there are so many conflicting studies.

What concerns me about fake meat products and why I won’t consume them is that they are heavily processed. In my limited experience, eating whole foods from fresh, organic suppliers is the way to go. I’ll let someone else be the guinea pig for processed foods.

>I would have expected that lack of colouring as well for lab-grown salmon meat.

In my comment, I wasn't referring to lack of coloring. I was referring to lack of fat. In fact, more fat means less color overall, and I'm saying that's desirable. Why? Because in my experience, wild-caught salmon sushi doesn't sell as well, even in areas where patrons have higher than average disposable income and higher than average health consciousness.

This is the same issue you often see with grass-fed steaks vs. industrial steaks. Grass-fed steak is healthier for you by a lot of measures, and depending on your pallette, tastes better. I love my grass-fed steak. (I love my BeyondMeat and Impossible Burgers too.) But many people find it to be too "gamy" and that includes the handful of chefs I know. They aren't putting it on menus. Most people are unaware that "grass-fed" beef is actually "finished" on grain instead of grass in order to offset what would be and even more gamy taste than they're getting.

Now, I'm not saying that wild-caught salmon is gamy, but it does have a distinct taste, and is comparatively lean. Farmed salmon is like that dramatically marbled USDA prime steak. It's practically a different fish, it's a less healthy fish, and arguably a less ethical fish too, but it's what people most often choose. Imagine two ham and cheese sandwiches, but only one has mayo. Even people who think they don't want fattening mayo still prefer the sandwich with mayo. There are more analogies I could give with butter or lard or beef tallow. I don't need to prove this, just look at Paula Deen.

Wildtype, as the name implies, and as the pictures indicate to the discerning eye, is trying to me more like wild-caught salmon. There's a niche for salmon sushi rolls, a sub-niche for wild-caught salmon rolls, and a sub-sub-niche for people who want a lab-grown version of that. The point of my earlier comment is that I would rather see them target a market that's one less level of niche deep, and that's the theoretical holy-grail marbled looking high-fat farmed-style "USDA Prime" kind of lab-grown salmon, which I would rather eat, and I expect most other customers would rather eat too.

I just want to finish this comment with a disclaimer that I in no way mean to belittle the pioneering folks behind Wildtype, nor disparage any health, environmental, or ethically focused enthusiasts here who are really excited about this. It is exciting and great that Wildtype and other companies like this are doing what they do. I feel that it's important to say it, because my previous comment seemed to have struck a nerve, and that wasn't my intention.

I don’t agree that we can stack-rank priorities, and I hate many of the ways in which people say, “maybe they should put their energy into something else first,” but I suppose that’s exactly what I’m implying here.

It’s entirely possible that trying to make things like this work will illuminate some of those exact mysteries. I think I’m just worried what happens in between those two events.