Challenges of producing cultivated meat at scale

I do expect plant-hybrid will be necessary and can significantly bring down the cost. Customers are concerned with taste, texture, cost, convenience, and health. Some plant-based alternatives are already challenging taste and cost (we’re an investor in Black Sheep, and I think it tastes better than the animal analog) and cell based hybrids may be able to make additional improvements.

On the need for hormones, we invested in Japanese company, integriculture, because it solves this problem by coculturing organ cells (like liver and pancreas) that product these hormones natively.

As far as go to market, I expect there will be better opportunities with cosmetics where you could sell something for $1,600/lbs while volumes are still low.

I am not "nauseated" by meat per se; I grew up on it.

Au contraire, I have patiently waited out the availability of higher-quality meat proxies. Beyond and Impossible were a significant step in some narrow niches toward satisfying my ongoing interest in, say, a good grilled burger. I try each new pretender to fake-bacon and am duly disappointed.

"Vat beef" has been a running joke in my family and circles; it has always seemed like scalable fusion or FSD in being "just a few years away."

Perusing this, I find myself asking the same squicky philosophical question I return to... what is the best "line" to target between conventional animal (with its baleful gaze and obvious capacity for suffering), and scifi vat-beef (cultured cells growing in a fortified gel or something)?

I say squicky because I wonder if the sweet spot so to speak is closer to brainless animal, than fermentation tank. A lot of the optimization and engineering has been solved to spec for us, why not just breed headless animal horrors with digestive systems and other details tweaked to not belch methane, to accept Huel as input, and maybe ditch the keratin and the like as unnecessary in a controlled environment?

It's pretty easy to imagine something that looks like a Human Centipede/Expanse nightmare of a banana or grape cluster comprised of budded legless meat-beanbags which have conventional vascular systems and kinda-sorta digestive tracks, and maybe lungs/maybe outboard oxygenation, optimized for producing electrode-stimulated meat meat meat.

The optics are a branding problem, yes, but when it's this or insect-protein, I dunno. The decision may take longer.

Just a thought.

> The culture media is an essential component of in vitro cultivation. It is responsible for providing the macromolecules, nutrients and growth factors necessary for cell proliferation. Sourcing growth factors is one of the most challenging tasks of cellular agriculture. Traditionally, it involves the use of fetal bovine serum (FBS) which is a blood product extracted from fetal cows. Besides the argument that its production is unethical, it is also vitiates the independence of the use of animals. [...]

> The current alternative is to generate each growth factor individually using recombinant protein production. In this process, the genes coding for the specific factor are integrated into bacteria which are then fermented. However, due to the added complexity of this process, it is particularly expensive.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat#Growth_factors

So unless a viable alternative is found the ethical (and probably environmental also) issues are pretty much the same as eating normal meat.

"Factory farms are not what animals evolved for, so the unnatural conditions in which they're raised very likely induces suffering and pain in the raised livestock."

What makes you think that "natural" means free of suffering? Nature is spectacularly cruel. Many domestic animals (think well-loved family pets such as cats and dogs) live lives incredibly free of the suffering of their non-domestic ancestors.

It is certainly possible to raise animals for food where they have an easy life, and feel no pain at the end. I can't speak to whether it is economical (obviously, ensuring this would be expensive), but still. It is NOT impossible, or really all that difficult.

If you want to make the argument that killing animals with brains is bad, fine. I can go with that, and would prefer meat that doesn't involving killing. But basing it on false assumptions about how much pain the animal must experience is just going to make me say "let's just make laws that say animals must be treated very well and have a perfectly painless and stress free death."

Because I'm just not convinced, at all, that a well treated animal automatically suffers more than one in the wild.

So in essence I think that plant meat will replace meat, no need to "cultivate" it

I would think that producing high end meats using cultivation shouldn't be much more expensive (if at all) than producing low end meats, given the primary difference is the marbling, which is a fairly arbitrary parameter biologically.

There must be some good reason why this is hard, but i'd just like to understand why that is.

> To be price competitive, cultivated meat needs to match the cost of animal derived meat.

I don't think that's strictly true. Plenty of people are willing to pay more for products that are more ethical. Also, meat prices are likely to increase as we grapple with climate change and other issues related to subsidized, unsustainable sources of meat that we currently use.

That being said, if we are still mostly around $10,000/lb, we are a long way off and the overall conclusion doesn't change much. Seems like there are some big things to figure out before it's going to be a thing in the markets.

To make a philosophical point: Huge assumption right there. At best we can say that if they are conscious and experience pain, they do so in a paradigm that is fundamentally different to that of animals, one which we as humans are unable to relate, and therefore we care less, prefer not to think about it, and treat them as unconscious agents.

We relate to the perceived experience of animals a lot more because superficially they seem to react similarly to relevant scenarios that we interpret and relate to as reflecting consciousness and personality, and their anatomies that generate such consciousness is similar to ours, so we know which parts should be removed in the process of cultivating meat. We know no such thing about plants. In fact, we know jack shit about plant consciousness, and the more we learn the more we realise that plants have their own form of consciousness too (fungal neural networks, eusocial norms and social hierarchies, pain-like/defensive responses, collective intelligence, etc).

We prefer to think of plants as a glorified bundle of chemical reactions packaged as a quasi-neural network. But then, you could reduce animals to the same; humans too. The only reason we consider humans to be more than the sum of their chemical parts is because we are able to communicate our suprising subjective experience clearly. The reason we consider it likely that animals share a similar experience, is because we identify some of their behaviours as relatable, and perhaps even as a form of communication for that experience. With plants, we simply don't relate, but this in no way means their behaviour isn't underlied by conscious experience. You have no idea when a plant recoils from your touch or releases chemicals, whether this is "just a chemical response" or if its experiencing a stressful experience in its own manner of consciousness.

I have caught myself wondering, imagine if you had to justify garbage collection in your code in terms of ethics. Like, you wake up one day and find out that every single variable you've ever instantiated in code, had a conscious experience. What would you do? Would you leave programs running? Would you let memory leaks happen to avoid 'killing' variables off? Would you only delete some variables but not others?

* takes FAR more energy and material inputs that normal meat

* tastes like ass