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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

> Future Meat Technologies says this facility requires 96-percent less freshwater than livestock production, as well as using 99-percent less land and producing 80-percent fewer greenhouse emissions.

Even accounting for PR hyperbole, it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do. This is a national security issue. We can choose to curse our younger generations with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future.

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> with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future

I think you're confusing a few things.

I'm very pro lab-grown meat, and I don't see why it would be either "icky" (if anything, it could be much more "pure", able to grow in controlled conditions without any pesticides, hormones or antibiotics) nor less "masculine" (a steak is a steak is a steak).

I'm very much against plant-based "fake" meat, because they're usually far from natural (tons of chemicals) and full of propaganda ("red meat is unhealthy" but conveniently conflating pure red meat with highly-processed stuff like sausages and salami, or "red meat is unsustainable" while we keep burning coal and importing plastics from China... don't get me wrong, I strongly support carbon tax, but want to be able to what to consume (drive car vs. eat steak) myself).

> they're usually far from natural (tons of chemicals)

I really object to marketing use of the word 'natural' and 'chemicals'. I don't mean to single you out - these concepts are widespread in marketing.

Plenty of 'natural' things are bad, like small pox, the Ebola virus and salmonella.

Plenty of 'unnatural' things are good, like antibiotics to treat infection.

All matter is made from chemicals. Whether a chemical like penicillin or salt is synthesised in a lab, or extracted from the ocean, holds no baring on whether that chemical is good for you.

- EDIT - Generalised the penicillin example.

I wouldn't say Penicillin is 'unnatural', there are probably better examples out there.

That's true, I just picked penicillin and salt intentionally as they both can be synthesised in a lab and in nature

Penicillin is a natural product of fungi against bacteria.

When it comes to food, I use the following criteria: could I make it myself in my kitchen? (Some "minimal processsing" like fermentation and curing therefore fall under "natural".)

I'm pretty sure the answer is "no" for most of the plant-based fake meat. It's also "no" for McDonald's burger so I'm not just hating on plants.

I understand this conversation is about Beyond Meat kinda stuff, but it's isn't no for the two oldest and most popular fake meats--tofu and seitan. And yet tofu especially gets beat up in terms of fake vs natural.

You can definitely make seitan in your kitchen, I am not disagreeing with anything you're saying though.

Tofu and seitan get "beat up" because (1) tofu is soy and seitan is gluten (many people dislike those, for various reasons), (2) they're often used to mimic (fake) meat, not made into creative meals of their own, and (3) for me personally, tofu is extremely bland.

As an omnivore, I love seitan - it's pretty common in Chinese and Japanese cuisine. I wish more vegetarian places in the US would use it, but it seems that only tofu has crossed over, which is a shame, because tofu generally doesn't have the texture and bulk of meat, but rather of soft, non-meltable cheese, and is not even as filling as that.

Lots of veg places in the US -do- use seitan. It may be your location that doesn't. It's very popular for vegan chicken sandwiches, fingers, wings, curries etc. I'm in LA tho which may be the current veg restaurant capital of the world.

It's definitely true highly processed foods correlate with poor health outcomes. This correlation is mainly because ultra-processed foods often contain added sugars, excess sodium, and unhealthy fats (source: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/processed-foods...).

There's an (open) question here of what the cause is; is this inherent to all food processing?, or is it the nutritional content of the food?

I would argue eating home-made potato chips, cookies and ice cream may lead to worse health outcomes than plant-based burgers with better nutritional benefits

I prefer the criteria "would a prehistoric person eat this?". Our bodies evolved with food you could pick off a plant and put in your mouth sometimes after applying heat. Or meat. This is "natural" food. Plenty of ingredients you buy in a modern store are processed like flour and sugar. You can make donuts in your kitchen and I'd call that one of the worst foods you can eat nutritionally.

I don't think you can dismiss the sustainability of meat-substitutes just because we as a society continue to use coal or import plastic. A bean-based veggie burger has a much lower environmental footprint regardless of those things. The major difference is that choosing to buy a meat-substitute instead of the real thing is a decision that people can individually make, even if just for one meal a week, while most of us don't have the ability to choose to close down a coal plant.

Not confusing those things, this is just a different argument against a different thing (plant based meat).

> a steak is a steak is a steak

would lab-grown steak be remotely similar to a good cut of steak? I'd guess for sausage (and other processes meat) lab-grown won't be different, but I don't think lab-grown will be able to reach real-steak level anytime soon

i don't see why not

It's more complex, but it's a matter of how soon, not if. And how soon, not if, lab-grown steak will be better than real ones, because you'll be able to tinker with the composition in ways you simply can't currently.

> sense of ickiness or masculinity

If they can keep the cost lower (2/3 or better 1/2 price) than animal meat, all of the stigma will just poof out of existence.

This is very exiting, but its a not solution to global warming (only small factor).

>> Methane has a large effect but for a relatively brief period, having an estimated mean half-life of 9.1 years in the atmosphere, whereas carbon dioxide is currently given an estimated mean lifetime of over 100 years

Still very exiting to possibly live through end factory farming.

Totally agreed - competitive flavor at superior price will make those other arguments disappear. That’s why I think we should view this as a foregone conclusion and get positioned to simply own the future, or at least not have our future owned by someone else.

...sure, like Carob was a foregone conclusion to replace chocolate:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/how-c...

As someone who actually had to eat Tiger's Milk bars as a kid, good luck at it.

We are not talking about alternative faux products, but meat fibres that are grown form actual animal tissue at the start (AFAIK thats how they do it).

In theory this should taste similar to traditional meat and in the future they will work out marbling etc

It is of course impossible to verify either way, but I am very sure these statistics of 96% savings in freshwater are total nonsense. Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc. Moreover, we have seen time and time again, the reporting of extremely high numbers for water usage in beef and milk production, but it turns out they are counting the water that falls as rain on the pasture land, or the rain/ground water used to grow the alfalfa. Should that be counted? Rain seems to be fairly renewable, but I admit that (in the extreme) society can harm ecosystems by diverting too much rain water (see Colorado River). Ground water renewability is a bit context dependent.

If the water savings is mostly nonsense, well then I also question the savings in GHG emissions. Land savings? Sure, fine, that makes sense... but farm land is orders of magnitude cheaper than land that has a fully functioning cell culture factory on it.

In the end, we will know if this works by what price it can sell at and make a marginal return. The jury is out on that one.

> Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc.

Given that this is all happening in a lab, is collecting and filtering for reuse an option?

Sure. But then you have to spend way more energy on the "filtering" part. It typically makes a lot more sense in terms of energy usage to just take tap water and run it through a polishing step (deionization and/or reverse osmosis), than to take the comparatively "dirty" water coming out of your process (dirty but not toxic) and try to clean that up.

An autoclave requires distilled water and an enormous amount of energy to operate. You could save the water but you'd potentially need to distill it again after. They use an enormous amount of energy and water overall.

The feed for the cells still has to come from somewhere too, and the growth of the cells is aerobic and generates CO2. That said, artificial meat is supposed to hit market parity price by 2026 and probably below parity after. [1] We will probably see a rapid transition to cultured meat within a decade. There are a very large number of these companies competing right now. [2]

[1] https://www.mitsui.com/mgssi/en/report/detail/__icsFiles/afi... [2] https://cellbasedtech.com/lab-grown-meat-companies

"supposed to". I am hopeful but I think we are very early here and it is going to be very difficult to actually meet these targets. We shall see.

I imagine a lot of the freshwater savings involves not needing to feed an animal. What they drink and eat takes large scale agriculture and processing operations which will be cut drastically.

But you have to feed the cells. And you can't just grow some plants and feed it to the cells, you have to manufacture a very precise blend of chemicals (amino acids, sugars, surfactants, antioxidants, etc.) at >99% purity for each one. Often extremely nasty solvents are involved in the production process. Usually, some sort of petroleum product is a feedstock. Those chemically synthesized materials are hardly green.

>but it turns out they are counting the water that falls as rain on the pasture land, or the rain/ground water used to grow the alfalfa.

Can we use that pasture-land (and the rain that falls onto it) to grow more useful crops? If so: I don't understand why that wouldn't count.

Pasture land is not, usually, crop growing land. Moreover, the rain falls regardless. You could grow no crops, and your "water usage" would be exactly the same. Why would you count it?

Regarding the weasel-worded "less land usage", most of the land that livestock use for grazing is unsuitable for conventional farming anyway. Only ruminants can properly utilize it.

> most of the land that livestock use for grazing is unsuitable for conventional farming anyway

Ah, but are most cows in the world actually grazing on pasture unsuitable for arable farming? I wasn't able to find an estimate of that number, but am willing to bet good money it's pretty low, considering that the number one driver of tropical deforestation is converting land to raise cattle, and the number two driver is soybean production mostly to feed said cattle: https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/summer-2018/ar...

>Anyone who has ever cultured cells on any scale can attest to the amount of water needed at any scale in terms of washing, rinsing, diluting, sterilizing, feeding, etc.

There is an enormous difference in scale and efficiency between a lab scale process and an industrial one. Researchers (myself included) do what gets the job done quickly, not necessarily balancing the budget at the same time.

Yes there is an enormous difference in scale. Efficiency? In cell culture? In terms of GHG or emissions or energy use? I find that hard to believe. In my personal experience (not data, but relevant), none of the manufacturing scale processes were particularly optimized in terms of GHG/energy. Rather, yield was the primary target and consistency was the very close secondary target. Sometimes, vice versa. I 10x improvement of yield can very easily lead to higher GHG emission intensity, or no effect at all, e.g.

You're foolishly projecting ideology and personal beliefs into somewhere so far removed from the consumer that it simply won't matter.

Commodities buyers don't care who's corn is ethical or who's corn is unethical. They don't care who's ground beef is manly and who's isn't. It all comes down to cost per results at the end of the day. Resource usage is just a part of that calculation. No different than the cost of shipping.

If McDonalds and Walmart can cut their existing beef with fake plant beef or lab beef without hurting their bottom line (by making their products less attractive to consumers) they will.

Will there be people who try and capture the high end market with some ideologically themed marketing in the meantime? Of course. But make no mistake, the long term goal for these new synthetic meat (both plant meat and lab meat) producers is not the high end market. It's the thousands of reefer cars that put that house brand 80/20 on a store shelf near you. Pandering to whatever the premium consumer wants to hear until you can make your product cheap enough and good enough to make real money is just a necessary part of bootstrapping that.

Putting the McDouble back on the dollar menu with the help of synthetic beef is what societal progress looks like.

I agree with everything you say here and if I communicated that the arguments against lab meat are durable, that was the opposite of my intention. What I mean to say is that it’s a foregone conclusion and we should be expediting its arrival and gaining an edge in that future.

I used to feel similarly, but now, I'm not so sure. What worries me is that lab-grown meat will allow big ag practices to continue, which will do more harm to our co2 emissions and world's soil health.

To expand on this further, there is active research and practices into sustainable farming practices that show diverse crop rotations along dense but short grazing across the land has the ability to rebuild top soil 10x than previously thought. Most importantly this top soil serves as a MASSIVE CARBON SINK.

Using this proven methods, we can leverage the world's farmland to sequester carbon while improving the health of our soil and the nurtition density of our food.

The catch is that we need the animals to restore soil health and presumably we need the business model of selling the meat to make this practice sustainable.

Further Reading:

Dirt to Soil - Gabe Brown

Alan Savory's Holistic Management Practices - https://youtu.be/q7pI7IYaJLI

https://www.marincarbonproject.org/

How many animals are we talking about in a scenario where all the animals were being used for crop/grazing rotation? I've heard about this and it sounds good to me, but without having looked into it at all, it sounds to me like something that probably wouldn't support the number of animals we're using right now for meat production?

Even if you could convert all the corn/soybean land in the United States to more regenerative methods, you probably wouldn't be able to meet the current demand for meat.

Additionally you have a logistical problem with the animals being distributed across an enormous area vs concentrated in a CAFO.

Now, you would easily be able to grow enough food for the country and possibly the globe, but meat demand cannot be sustained.

Do you have a source for not being able to meet meat demand? using which "regenerative methods"?

Gabe Brown uses 700k pounds of cattle per acre, but he moves the cattle daily. On his site, he claims the pastures are 15-40 acres. [1] So I presume 700k pounds of cattle per 40 acres would give you the figure you're looking for.

[1]: http://brownsranch.us/grazing/

Every time I read stats like this I wonder what are the externalities the PR team decided to omit. One day you hear that farmed fish are eco, the next day you find out that gigantic trawlers are depleting Antarctic oceans for feed.

I tried to google the possible environmental downsides of lab-meat (taste/health aside), but couldn't find anything. Any suggestions?

There’s the question of what sort of feedstocks they’re using and where they come from.

I would assume that it’s something like what the animals they’re replacing eat, but presumably in smaller quantities since they’re only growing muscle tissue and not an entire animal.

There’s something to be said for a device that transports itself around marginally-arable land eating grass and pumping out fertilizer while creating edible protein. Especially if the alternative is intensively-farmed row crops like corn and soy that tend to require tons of fertilizer and herbicides.

IMO an equally exciting area of research is taking something like algae that only need water, sunlight, and some minerals to produce food. Which could then be further processed into lab-grown meat or be eaten as is.

I’m all in favour of this for climate change and animal welfare reasons, but I don’t see how it’s a national security concern in e.g. Europe and America, given they already encourage farming overproduction specifically because food is so important, and that almost everywhere could already be more effective in how many people a given unit of land area or fresh water can support, both by encouraging vegetable-based diets and separately with more poly-tunnels, greenhouses, and aeroponics.

Overproduction is based on assumptions around how variable farm output is. Climate change increases variability.

Climate change isn't the weather.

Climate is the average.

We are in a global warming emergency and no one is doing enough about it.

Climate change is literally the weather.

Long term average weather. But yes, IIRC, climate change is causing more extreme variability, and that variability itself is a problem.

Though I do disagree with @airhead969, as the literally exponential growth of PV by itself looks to me to be enough to make us net zero in a decade or two (probably two, given exponentials are often sigmoids in disguise).

Climate isn’t the average weather it’s the expected weather. X hurricanes every Y years for example doesn’t change the average significantly, but their a major climate concern in areas at risk from them.

Well one mechanism by which this becomes a natsec concern is food scarcity in other parts of the world might simultaneously cause domestic instability as well as mass migration to more food-secure locales.

We should also do all of the things you mention here.

The greenest protein factory is the one that we don't have to build - even if it's 99% less land or 80% fewer greenhouse emissions than the traditional farming of cows, sheep and poultry. It's actually this: https://interestingengineering.com/the-explosion-of-insect-p...

We should do that too

Just eat the bugs...

dont forget to be happy...

It's always fun with these kinds of posts, because people never think what their total progressive future will be like. No cars, no pets, eating bugs for protein, taxed to shit to provide a social safety net, forced to clump up in cities for efficiency. Probably a lot more than that. Being an eco-serf.

This is the kind of sentiment that watching too many Alex Jones documentaries will give you. It's funny that you think places like America, which can't even manage to legislate sensible climate-saving policies, would ever get to an extremist state of banning cars and pets, or forcing you to eat bugs for protein. You are laughably out of touch with reality.

> We can choose to curse our younger generations with a warped sense of ickiness or masculinity, or we can choose protein security indefinitely into the future.

A false dichotomy if I ever saw one.

It is a false dichotomy currently because the in-between area is largely occupied by “do the economics make sense.” That is very clearly trending in one direction (towards “yes”), so at some point in the future it will largely boil down to something akin to this dichotomy. My framing is definitely dismissive of one side, but it does strike me as a set of arguments that are largely aesthetic on one side and the reality of food security on the other.

Maybe eventually eating plant matter won't be considered efficient either, what with the massive expenditure of fertilizer and ecological damage of pesticide and herbicide runoff.

We will need to figure out to bio-engineer edible plant matter as well. Then once we've mastered that, we can start bio-engineering ourselves to photosynthesize from the sun directly, to cut out all middlemen from the food chain. Then we can bio-engineer a vacuum-resistant carapace and launch ourselves toward the sun to exist as truly self-sufficient organisms. Then we blot out the sun with our flesh, and find some way to go to a different star.

I think what the comment above is missing is that these are the metrics that the PR team chose to publish.

The lab meat might also use 100x the CO2 in other production materials. It might be more labor and energy intensive. The cost might be 10x higher - even at scale.

You cannot trust the PR numbers from a company looking to normalize their product.

This is why 3rd party analysis is required.

> it is so apparent at this point that any country who chooses not to board this train will be at the mercy of those who do

This is hardly the only solution though. We can also shift to just plant based diets from crops which are not water intensive. Vegetarianism has been present in many parts of the world from a long time and those parts have also done fine with surviving.

We have a plethora of recipes as well which we can import from those parts of the world and add it with other highly nutritious vegan recipes. At least I have been far more impressed with eating those cuisines than eating fake meat as such.

I agree but also "protein security" reminds me of "mineshaft gap" from Dr. Strangelove

>ickiness or masculinity,

How is this related to lab-grown meat?

There's a certain squeamishness some have about eating something labeled as "lab-grown", as if it's somehow tainted with "unnatural" origin.

At the same time, there's a certain machismo, bravado, "manliness" associated with eating meat from an actual animal, mainly a vicarious association with hunting, but also by demonstration of some certain kinds of "alpha male" traits (access to resources to afford it, dominance, etc.). Lab-grown meat wasn't hunted or butchered, so may be viewed as "easier" in some sense--less manly, in other words.

Depending on the capital requirements and cost of these facilities, and imagining them as semiconductor fab type facilities, a nation would really be putting all their eggs in one basket if their protein security relies on just a few dozen such facilities across the country. This major centralization could be done in by one ransomware attack or activist employee , whereas the decentralized protein production by tens of thousands of producers today is far less susceptible. Once food security becomes tech-driven, its something to worry about.

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