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Comment by DanI-S | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome. Presumably, at some point we'll have the process optimised to the point that it could be done in your own home, or at a local (supermarket?) level. Imagine having a kitchen appliance that produces meat from liquid feedstock.

Even more speculatively, I wonder if the nutrient medium could be produced from other kitchen scraps? That's basically what animals were kept for in the past.

Aside, it sounds like efforts are focused on replicating pork/beef. It seems like some kind of fish might be easier, since texture is less of an issue, but I guess that's not what the US palate demands.

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Personally, I'm looking forward to lab-grown fur coats more than anything edible. I wore a fox-fur coat once and it was amazingly warm and light. I'd far prefer such a coat to down or synthetic if it could be made without killing the fox.

I think people who write about the ethical or taste issues are missing the boat. Peoples tastes and ethics will change as the technology does and the meat improves.

The most interesting perspective, in my opinion, are the entrepreneurial opportunities. Lab grown meat is the starting point. Lab grown fur, animal fats, leather, etc and so on are only a matter of time. The potential markets are colossal and can revolutionize many industries.

Here's a post on a vegetarian entrepreneur's (me) take on lab grown meat -- http://joshuaspodek.com/vegetarian-entrepreneurs-test -- from after the recent New Yorker article.

It's true. We generally forget that nature == nanotech. It's like we have an standard library out there, but with really shitty documentation.

More like reverse engineering with non-existent documentation.

And not just nanotech, we have already copied/borrowed a lot from nature.

Not just lack of documentation either. It is really complex spaghetti code with almost no modularization. What modularization there is (organs and even tissues) is on a gross (output) level, on the genetic (code) level almost everything affects almost everything.

Not only do markets appreciate beef, but they will pay top dollar for fancy high-quality beef. Once someone gets growing beef down, it probably won't be much of a stretch to develop top-quality sirloin, and more repeatably.

Additionally, beef is a good target ecologically speaking. Fish and birds are much more efficient at energy conversion, so there's a much larger margin of energy and material savings to be had with beef. As yet even another bonus, I suspect the ratio of edible meat to body mass in beef is much lower than in fish.

> Not only do markets appreciate beef, but they will pay top dollar for fancy high-quality beef.

Maybe. It depends on the extent to which high-end beef consumers are paying for the direct experience (taste, texture, mouth feel, etc) versus other things.

For example, consider the scam that is high-end speaker cable. People pay a lot of extra money not for real quality, but for imagined quality, exclusivity, and brand association. The same thing definitely goes on with wine and cheese, and I'd suspect some beef purchase will be like that, too.

Proper Kobe Beef falls into that category (and it's non-kobe counter part Wagyu).

People take this and make burgers out of it, not because it makes a good burger (it doesn't), but because it is expensive. (See Vegas)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobe_beef http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagy%C5%AB

You can think of it as the Scotch or Champagne of the beef world, a geographic locality owning a market in the high end, and the external imitators.

Beef is a case where there are some very obvious things(texture, fattyness, chewyness etc) that make eye fillet a much more pleasant eating experience than other cuts of meat and there's a lot less of it per animal. If you can pull that off you can make the general case of decent meat much more affordable.

Of course, there'll always be Wagyu and Kobe, but that's a much smaller market than just the high end of normal meat.

Duplicating the taste of fish would be more important, especially if it could get to sushi-grade. Fishing many larger fish is becoming unsustainable.

It's also more difficult because not only does texture matter, but the meat filters through sea water to get its taste.

I think premium-quality foods are probably a bit further off, but something of similar quality to frozen supermarket tilapia is probably not too much to ask. Some countries already consume a lot of products made of processed, retextured fish protein. I love those artificial crab-sticks.

'Fishing many larger fish is becoming unsustainable.'

IT IS unsustainable. Many fisheries have already collapsed with many more collapses looming on the horizon.

Also note, Math for Industry 201 always uses fish stocks as an example.

Catch too many fish, and you get a suboptimal population growth - the babies that do get born do well (due to a lack of competition), but there's so few born that this doesn't really matter.

It's more true for slow growing fish, like salmon, and tuna.

Fun fact, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) was not formed to stop whaling, but because it was obvious that whale stocks had collapsed, and international co-ordination was needed to allow them to grow back to an economic level. The whaling industry collapsed slowly, got a second wind as steam ships made fast-moving blue whales a feasible target, then collapsed again as the blue whales ran out. The IWC was formed in 1946, and it wasn't until the 70s that the anti-whaling movement gained any steam.

It will be fun to see how the environmental movement takes this. I bet some pragmatists will love it, some will go ballistic due to the GM nature of it, and some will maintain that we shouldn't be eating any meat, even the humanely grown substitutes.

Good call on sushi-grade fish, though I could imagine people still being picky about it (i.e. what's the point of eating sushi if it's not real, or tastes even 10% off).

Decentralized production of protein, if possible, would be pretty awesome indeed.

I would of guessed they tried to replicate chicken. Since almost all meats are usually described as "it tastes like chicken" this would be the initial benchmark.

Its been in the research stages for a while but I fear that even if they could 'grow' you a filet mignon the anti-vax* folks are going to go ballistic against it. It would certainly not be 6 months from now, and I suspect not even 6 years from now even if instant steak was demonstrable today.

* The anti-vaccine movement, also known as anti-vax, is filled with vocal, litigious, people who do not care for the science or the facts. They would have the human race become extinct because it would be 'better for the planet.' (note this is hyperbole but not far off from some of the more extreme elements of that movement.)

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