Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says | Hacker News Reader

Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

smithsonianmag.com

290 pointsgrogu88465 comments

It will be animal cells differentiated into muscle tissues on collagen scaffolds initially. The technology comes from attempts to grow functional organs (ie, liver) that are biocompatible in the body serum proper. If there aren't health effects from transplantation within the animal type you can probably eat the animal tissues just fine. It's the same thing. It's meat. It's just without the animal suffering. And hopefully it'll eventually be cheaper than growing animals too.

It's meat, but also without the immune system so...good luck.

(This isn’t a sarcastic or Socratic question, just genuine curiosity)

Is there some aspect of the immune system that remains active and providing protection to an animal, or parts of an animal after it’s slaughtered?

Not being exposed to air, for one. That's why it's safe to eat a rare steak (where the surfaces exposed to air are cooked to kill bacteria) and why it's not safe to eat rare hamburger (where all the meat has been exposed to air through grinding the meat).

> That's why it's safe to eat a rare steak

The USA department of agriculture begs to differ. https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Is-a-rare-steak-safe-to-eat

Personally I never place much trust in random comments on the internet.

So if the USDA recommends this, what's the reasoning behind allowing restaurants to sell rare steaks?

They recommend 145°F, which is medium-well. Experiential outcomes suggest pretty strongly to me that forcing all steak to be cooked medium-well or greater is wildly overly conservative.

There's also steak tartare, which isn't cooked at all.

> Experiential outcomes suggest pretty strongly to me that forcing all steak to be cooked medium-well or greater is wildly overly conservative.

Do you mean you grew coltures of bacteria from various levels of cooking and compared? Was this work peer reviewed?

I do not mean that. (That would be experimental rather than experiential.)

Order of magnitude, ~15% of beef consumed is quality steak cuts. US residents on average eats 67 pounds of beef (so 10 pounds of steak) per year. If eating steak cooked less than medium-well was dangerous in a practical/meaningful sense, it would be common knowledge (based on lived experience) that steak should be catastrophically over-cooked as a food safety measure.

Look at almost any menu in any restaurant that serves steak and you’ll find a little asterisk, and a note about the USDA’s recommendation at the bottom of the menu.

The USDA has not made it illegal or unlawful to cook steak rare. They recommend against it. A lot of people like rare steak, and will pay a restaurant to prepare a rare steak. So they do.

USDA has been trying and failing for decades to make a visual aid that accurately communicates the balance of a healthy diet. and they ban foods that people in other countries have eaten for 1000 years (while allowing them for pets). they are both inaccurate and overly conservative with nutrition and health guidance

It's more like the USDA is begged to differ.

They exist to be an ultimate authority, and that constrains them from presenting a compromised position, even if that compromise is something people find widely acceptable. The USDA simply isn't in a position to guarantee enough safety in this case to balance against their liability.

Safety is compromise. Eating rare steak is risky, but most of the risk is mitigated. Getting sick from eating rare steak is, itself, rare.

Sure, but this is chicken, which is already notably porous, which is why it’s generally considered unsafe to eat rare chicken, even if it’s been well cooked on the outside.

At least for that aspect, I’d think the protection is less relevant. I would be very curious how that’s handled with other meats, like lab grown beef. I’d be more hesitant about lab grown beef, if the cooking instructions prevented cooking it rare.

> and why it's not safe to eat rare hamburger (where all the meat has been exposed to air through grinding the meat).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett

> permits mett to be sold only on the day of production

Sounds like Germany's laws acknowledge that non-fresh mett poses the same dangers as store bought hamburger.

Can you explain the significance of your statement?

Surely the meat we all eat is dead along with the immune system and then cooked.

I'm talking about while you are growing the meat, whether it be in a natural system that is self-regulating and with an immune system, or in a vat where any contamination will spread rampantly. That's one of the biggest problems with lab-grown meat: if you make it at a scale that is economically feasible, the chance for contamination is so high that very few batches will make it through the process, and will have to be discarded instead.

Can't we solve this at least temporarily with a sodium rich environment? It seems to be effective for safe fermentation. I have no idea whether the biochemical reactions necessary to produce the meat though would be inhibited if we did this.

Try injecting yourself with saltwater and see what happens. The osmotic effects won't just affect the undesired cells. It will also affect the desired cells.

If I've learned anything from Bell Labs and Frank Capra, it's that blood is pretty similar to seawater.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=08QDu2pGtkc

We do large batch cheeses and beers and other things like that; which are similar enough that they'll offer useful pointers. "Meat" cultures might well be more subject to contamination because of the conditions required, but still. It's not a new problems and there's solutions that have worked for similar cases.

I do not think they will be able to compete economically with the backyard chicken, for example; but I'm not worried that they can't produce a safe product.

Those are much simpler yeasts and molds being cultivated. Meat cells are much more complex from an inputs/outputs point of view, and much more prone to contamination, especially at scales that are economically feasible.

Maybe they'll do it mostly robotically in a clean room type environment, with UVC blasting everything other than the actual growth medium.

I'm not an expert but it might be that the cultures we have chosen for beer and cheese and so on are those that outcompete most others while still not being harmful in by-products to us. This might take a while for lab grown meat.

If I had to opine, I would say an immune system would attack foreign antigens and anything that needs to be eliminated while the animal was alive so the meat would be… healthier?

IDK what they're talking about but I could imagine a pathogen that evolved on real animals having a field day at a meat farm without an immune system to fight back it would be reliant on the human operators cleanliness and other procedures.

Granted it might be much harder to have the initial infection happen in the first place since it's just a chunk of meat in a lab (no animal to walk around and get injured or otherwise interact with the environment, no poop, no lungs etc).

It will be interesting to see this technology develop.

That's not that much different from existing industrial environments like brewing, or making mayonnaise or other things. I don't think that's much of a hurdle to have to overcome.

Mayonnaise as an example is interesting, although the time that the mayonnaise exists for is probably shorter than meat.

With beer and other fermented stuff, the fermentation is a disinfecting process. For example people used to make really weak beer to drink instead of potentially drinking dirty water with something in it that would make you sick.

Animals are deuterstomes, meaning there is a nonsterile side, which is the skin and everything between the mouth and anus. Then there is the inside, which is sterile and protected by the immune system. If your blood or muscle tissue has bacteria, you are headed for a septic death or gangrene.

If I understood your comment correctly (I'm sorry if I didn't) - isn't it grown in essentially sterile conditions, so lack of immune system isn't an issue as I must imagine it shouldn't be able to communicate any transmissible diseases?

"Sterile conditions" isn't really a thing without temperatures high enough to cook the meat.

That’s correct. The challenge is that ensuring purity of ingredients during production is tricky at scale. A small mistake could ruin a large batch of food, lowering total yields and raising costs.

Ideally the production process would include something analogous to the immune system to make it more robust. For certain contaminants simple outcompetition by probiotics might suffice.

The alternative, natural meat, is even trickier to keep sterile at scale. This is why it is advised to cook meat fully. The presence of bacteria on natural animal meat is common.

It's more than "common" it's almost 100% guaranteed.

This is a misleading statement. We don’t even try to keep slaughtered meat sterile during production; the animal’s immune system makes that unnecessary.

We don't keep natural meat sterile during production because it would kill the chicken, which results in zero output of chicken.

Chickens' immune systems are quite fallible, and they do not keep the chicken in a sterile state. Chickens are full of dangerous bacteria despite having an immune system.

That’s not wrong. This thread began with a loose definition of “sterile” that you demonstrated understanding of above. The rest of us did OP the courtesy of not nitpicking it.

The sterile conditions become more fragile and easily contaminatible the larger the batch gets. So they need to increase the size of batches to make it economically viable, but increasing batch sizes makes it more likely to get contaminated, which kills the whole batch. Then you have to dispose of bio-waste material that has been contaminated in a safe and economic fashion, which is a whole different set of problems.

For context, the life of an average herbivore in the wild consists of living with no shelter in harsh weather while having to fear every sound. And it typically ends by being ripped to pieces by a predator and eaten alive while the brain still has some residual oxygen and awareness.

The typical farmed animal experience where you are sheltered, vaccinated against common illnesses, provided food and slaughtered after being knocked out with electricity is surely boring, but hardly encompasses more suffering.

You may want to look into the life of factory farmed pigs, for example, before you conclude which life is worse than the other. I would certainly prefer to be a wild pig over a factory farmed one.

The animals that we have been breeding for ages are pretty far removed from their wild counterparts of yore.

Also, there's a lot of homeless people that would live better as my slaves, but you'd probably still rather see them free.

I don't think this is sound reasoning as the main issue with slavery is the abuse of the slaves. What GP is saying is that animals are more abused by nature than by people. If the same could be proven that homeless would be better as slaves (ie. thag they would not be whipped and worked to death) then that would in fact be better but since we can't make that guarantee and history has generally shown otherwise we do not allow it. There is also the fact that it would normalize slavery in general.

Or better yet, we just don’t force the people one way or the other.

When we think about human suffering we don’t immediately go and compare it to the Neolithic period. I’m not arguing that animals are human, but it’s a false comparison. The correct comparison would be to compare it to if we didn’t do this. It just means there wouldn’t be factory farms and cows wouldn’t exist in the quantity (and evolutionary state) that they do now.

An animal does not choose to live a wild or farm life. I assume that fewer farmed animals does not increase the number of wild animals.

I'm not sure I buy your argument. For example, pigs have an average lifespan of 15-20 years but in a farm setting are slaughtered at 6 months old. Also I suspect a pig is more adapted to its natural environment than living in a confined shelter (often less than a square metre). In fact, in the UK, less than 1 in 20 pigs are allowed to go outside - hardly a good life! This is just pigs.

I saw an Oregon Field Guide that said between cougars, wolves, and bears, the predation/death rate for deer fawns in NE Oregon is something over 90%. I don't know about wild pigs, per se, but I don't think it's appropriate to presume they'd live so long. Many would die soon after birth. As for their conditions, many livestock we consume are raised in relatively natural conditions (e.g., cattle run on arid ground in eastern Oregon). Their lives are certainly shorter than maybe they could be, but see my first comment.

This visualisation was an eye opener. https://justone.earth/food/

Perhaps an individual animal suffering is less compared to a wild death, but the sheer volume has to count for something.

After a cursory glance it would appear the we could reduce animal suffering by focusing on eating the larger animals that produce more food. The idea being, eat the big ones, feed more people, kill less animals.

I'm not entirely serious about this. But I'm curious where the logical flaw is.

The logical flaw is in feed ratios. More feed required to produce less edible mass, therefore more land, water, resources, etc used. Feed production is also typically monoculture in the US. Chickens are actually some of the most efficient animals in this regard: https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/

It's a neat visualization, but it's really missing a domain. They present the counts over time, and nothing else.

There are ~8 billion people living. While some are starving, most of us are eating every day, if not several times per day.

If we assume the average person is eating 2 meals per day, that means 5,840 billion meals per year, or ~185,185 meals per second.

Funny, I largely agree with you, on the other hand, if I had to choose between being "free range" or factory fed, I'd still rather take the free range option. Or as one of the other commenters put it, I'd rather be homeless and all that entails than live as somebody's slave and get food and a bed.

Animals aren't people though. I think it's important to avoid unnecessary suffering or cruelty, but it's also important to be able to eat them.

I eat meat, but I think it's fair to say bringing living/feeling/thinking things into existence for the express purpose of being killed and consumed is grim. This feels particularly true if the circumstances they're raised in are horrific, which seems to be pretty common in factory farms.

In any case, nature might be crueler to living things than we are, but I still think becoming less cruel is worth the effort.

> I eat meat, but I think it's fair to say bringing living/feeling/thinking things into existence for the express purpose of being killed and consumed is grim. This feels particularly true if the circumstances they're raised in are horrific, which seems to be pretty common in factory farms.

Wouldn't the logical conclusion than be to eat less and higher quality meat? I mean I have worked on Biodynamic farms with livestock and I can assure you they live incredibly well, and are often eating as good if not better than the the regimen of the cows used for Wagyu, and sometimes even better than some of us farmers depending on the pat of the season.

> In any case, nature might be crueler to living things than we are, but I still think becoming less cruel is worth the effort.

I still think that if the key issue is the poor practice and animal welfare than the only acceptable solution is to eat less and higher quality meat from local and sustainable farms.

This synthetic meat is peak tech-bro, no one who is relying on eating fake hamburger meat on a daily basis is in a position to be taken serious when most Asian diets are mainly vegetarian and have fed populations in the billions for millennia (eg India, China, Japan). The arrogance to believe that the amount of inputs for these fake meats isn't a slight of hand because all the oils, and stabilizers at scale seems on it's face entirely absurd to a more environmentally friendly solution: pasture raised and grass fed cattle replenish the soil and serve as a natural re-vitalization for the soil between crop rotations.

I worked at a highly renown Vegetarian and Vegan place in Boulder, and even tried being both but abandoned it because of how depressed it made me feel wile working a manual labour job and working out/hiking, and I can assure that 80% of the time all were were doing was re-making vegetarian substitutes to meat based dishes rather than focus on the in-season vegetables a menu that reflected that which is what I had done for most of my career in kitchens that served meat and offered veterinarian options.

Ultimately, I think this a reflection of both hyper based capitalism, tons of Vc money cashing in on the immense amount of ignorance regarding food education with clever marketing. At the end Ag can be modeled and scaled in suh a way where it is carbon net-negative if the same amount of capital, time, and incentives were applied to it.

I agree there are a lot of problems with the intersection of food and capitalism, and there's plenty of room for solutions to those problems to just... create new or different problems. That said, I don't think the key issue is "poor practice and animal welfare", it's exchanging another animal's life for a few minutes of personal pleasure and eight-ish hours of energy.

With sufficient research, I believe we can free ourselves and other living things from that dynamic without sacrificing the experience and benefits animal products provide, and I'd be happy to live in that future. We obviously aren't there yet, so I support efforts that bring us closer to it, even knowing they'll be sub-par for years.

And in the meantime, I agree: eating less meat and favoring producers who treat their animals well is the way to go if avoiding animal products entirely isn't on the table.

> key issue is "poor practice and animal welfare", it's exchanging another animal's life for a few minutes of personal pleasure and eight-ish hours of energy.

This presumes so many things, chief among them that plants are neither alive or intelligent, and I can assure both are not true--plants are incredibly intelligent actually and have mechanisms that we should mimic now that only now we have the capacity to observe and measure them.

My time in tech notwithstanding, I have a background and careers in both the Life sciences and spent time on farms and cooking in kitchens and it became very clear to me at a young age that Life feeds on Life [0].

So long as you live in this physical Universe you have to take in the elements of another living being in order to not die and the best one can do is be considerate and take this responsibility. You can abstract this all you want but the end is that this must take place in order for your body to continue to stay alive.

I'm a total glutton by nature with an incredibly fast metabolism and I have in earlier and darker periods of my life over-indulged in both food and drink, but I soon realized that despite thinking I was 'deserving' of it I felt ill every time as body had been optimized and used to intermittent fasting and nourishment rather than over eating and drinking everyday like it was my last day on Earth.

> With sufficient research, I believe we can free ourselves and other living things from that dynamic without sacrificing the experience and benefits animal products provide, and I'd be happy to live in that future.

See above, but I will add that I have ever since I started to farm and focus on farm-to-table cuisine I formed a deep respect for every meal I eat (plant or animal based), it came at an immense cost (that I think everyone should experience) after having done the back breaking labour to grow and slaughter animals that I then ate or sold in the market(s). I can assure you that what you are advocating for is the fantasy, and most undesirable, aspects of my trans0humanist leanings. When one eats it is more than just input and output, and when we address that way it is no surprise our Western Developed nations are incredibly sick, depressed and despondent and that the 1-2 biggest killers in developed nations are food related (heart disease and diabetes).

> And in the meantime, I agree: eating less meat and favoring producers who treat their animals well is the way to go if avoiding animal products entirely isn't on the table.

I cannot see myself enjoying Life at all if we deny that food is and has been the reason why our very constitution as Homo Sapiens has pushed us this far along the evolution scale; such that we have tamed and evolved alongside with dogs, ventured and conquered this planet and sadly have gone to war with our very own (eg salt wars) in order to be able to feed ourselves and our tribes. I refuse to see how we wouldn't lose a very fundamental part of our psyche and the Human experience if we lost this and to be honest I'd be the first to resist that: given how lonely and depressed became when COVID struck and they couldn't go to their favorite restaurants and longed so much for those days that they would even risk getting sick in order to return speaks volumes: also worth noting is that despite front line workers like doctors and nurses being so exposed to COVID patients, even without PPE, it was cooks, farm workers and meat processors who had the highest number of deaths [1] in the US!

Putting on my pedantic hat on: Having done all 3 at some stage of my culinary career it has long been taken for granted the sacrifice and risk some of us have and will continue to go through in order to fulfill this vital role in Society; I just wish most would take it more serious and see how fundamental it is the Human Condition and a part I would be despondent if it ever went away.

0: https://allpoetry.com/poem/14460785-Life-feeds-on-life-by-De...

1: https://qz.com/1962493/a-new-study-shows-occupations-with-th...

>when most Asian diets are mainly vegetarian and have fed populations in the billions for millennia (eg India, China, Japan).

The modern Japanese diet is very, very far from vegetarian. In fact, you'll have a very hard time eating in restaurants if you're a vegetarian in Japan. I guess if you consider fish to somehow be "not an animal", though, it's much easier.

> The modern Japanese diet is very, very far from vegetarian. In fact, you'll have a very hard time eating in restaurants if you're a vegetarian in Japan. I guess if you consider fish to somehow be "not an animal", though, it's much easier.

Granted, but Modern anything will often reflect a more meat based diet due to convenience (Lawson's bentos and snacks are amazing!) and despite several lost generations and the rise of the freeta generation(s) an over all higher standard of living as made meat consumption a norm rater tan an exception.

As a fomer cook/chef I can assure I can easily make 5 days our of 7 wit just tasty vegetarian meals rather easily because Japanese is my repertoire, and plant based dashi can be just as good as it's fish based variants (I onsider it a meat protein, albeit a more naturally sustainable one wen done properly/seasonally) thus can build flavour tat way.

By contrast I ave a harder time to do so with Italian which is my other cuisine despite having a more immersed culture experience--I lived and worked in Emilia Romagna wit its abundance of meat based parma options.

Also the life of an average human is pretty depressing, so it's OK for management in better-off companies to harass employees.

We aren’t rescuing them from the wild, though. We are breeding them into existence. The comparison doesn’t make much sense.

>but hardly encompasses more suffering.

I think that's hard to say. But I also think "the alternative" to farmed life is somewhat ignored by vegans/peta activists.

On the one hand, as you say, death is more painful by the claws/teeth of a predator; that is certain. But life itself with little shelter (but usualy some) is the natural state of afairs for most mammals. To say that that is suffering is to say that life itself is suffering, which I think is counterintuitive as suffering is evolutionarily a means of preasuring an animal to escape from the suffering. Not to say that isn't possible. It's hard to say if the natural resiliance (assuming it exists) that mammals have to little shelter and food carries over to say being croweded into small enclosures.

If anyone has any (scientific) articles on this topic I would be interested.

The alternative, for the purposes of a farmed animal, is an animal that never lived. If the entirety of the life of an animal is suffering, as is the case in many factory farms, it's fair to suggest that not having that animal ever live reduces the total amount of suffering in the world.

That’s a slippery slope, because by that logic we should destroy all life, because life always causes suffering. Maybe a better alternative is to provide better conditions for farm animals. I’ve raised chickens in my backyard, and they seemed pretty happy to exist.

The vegan principle is about non-interference with non-human animals, it doesn't necessarily minimize suffering.

> living with no shelter

Maybe not up to human standards, but plenty of animals seek and find shelter as part of their normal life.

> having to fear every sound

Do you think animals fear their own species' mating calls? Or the rain and the breeze? How do you know what animals feel? If you are going to project the human emotion of "fear" onto them, you considered that they might feel humanlike emotions of elation, joy, and satisfaction as well?

> And it typically ends by being ripped to pieces by a predator and eaten alive while the brain still has some residual oxygen and awareness.

Human death, including death by common age-related ailments, is often painful and drawn out.

> sheltered, vaccinated against common illnesses, provided food

"Sheltered" in a coup filled with feces and "vaccinated" so that they do not succumb to the myre of illness in which they live. "Fed" via pellets of the cheapest food that the farm could buy while still sustaining them enough to develop tissue that is desirable for us to eat.

> being knocked out with electricity

I doubt that slaughter at factory farm is often as efficient, quick, and humane as you imagine.

> hardly encompasses more suffering.

Have you ever been, or been close to anyone, who was locked in jail or a psychiatric ward for a long period of time? The mental anguish of captivity is often described as worse than physical suffering.

This is an absurdly biased view. Factory farms are horrific and even pasture raised animals are treated like property and killed well before their natural lives are up.

Regardless of how one would like to spin it, industrial scale animal production means farming animals with the intent to match market prices or you go out of business. That means the production goes by the minimal animal welfare required by law.

Whether one believes conditions are torturous or not that bad, is beside the point, which is that they wouldn’t even exist if we didn’t spawn them. So what we do is we rip new life into the universe by force for that life to suffer to some degree, its’ life’s only meaning being to be processed for food. There was nothing, now there is. Somehow human kind has decided ethical discussion need not concern animals.

A great deal of product is sold daily that exceeds legal minimums. You've seen "organic" or "pasture raised" labels. All of those are driven by the market.

One irony is that every hunter and non-industrial farmer I know goes to significant lengths to limit suffering in the kill.

It's factory farms and non-human predators that ignore the subject as much as possible.

I have no qualms eating meat (I eat more than my doctor says I should).

Your comment seems pretty disingenuous though. You're comparing life in the wild to that on a small family farm. Factory farms, especially those that produce poultry, are far more horrifying. There is also a growing body of evidence suggesting that many of the drugs (antibiotics and hormones in particular) that we pump our farm animals full of are actively detrimental to their daily comfort.

It sounds to me like your statement was crafted as a defense of your dietary choices rather than an objective assessment of animal wellbeing.

Of course none of this arguing really means anything without some scientific data to back this up. I'd like to see a comparison of cortisol levels and other stress indicators in wild vs factory chickens.

Listen to this episode where Will talks about how most farmed animals wouldn't live more than a few year than they would in the wild.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0qf7CYEhxSFPAcdSw1JJMY

According to Our world in data wild terrestrial mammals make up 2% of the total number of mammals (in biomass so it is not exactly headcount, but also includes predators and rodents not strictly herbivores), while cattle, pigs, goats and sheep are >50%. So when looking at suffering you may want to take scale into account.

I’m not going to try to argue about which experience is worse because that’s difficult to quantify and I don’t actually think it achieves a lot.

If we can agree that ignoring nature, factory farmed animals don’t lead what we would call a fulfilling life, how can we justify bringing trillions of them into existence if we have alternatives? We don‘t have to go too deep into utilitarian rhetoric here, maybe it is better than nature, maybe if you follow that line of reasoning it wouldn’t be right to let animals suffer in nature or have children either. Anyway, I haven’t been able to justify eating meat to myself for as long as I was able to think along these lines.

I think we need a definition for a fulfilling life. I think we also need to consider if it is an important criteria.

Scenario: Humanity is partly enslaved by a superior alien species that holds us as cattle, breeds us, kills most of our male offspring etc. — you know, the things we do to our cettle.

Would you rather:

A) live this life that can be ended for your meat at any point

B) hide in the hostile and foreign wilderness of their planet

Sure one might argue that cows are to stupid to understand their fate, but that alien species might argue the same. Also: even the simplest animal suffers when you take their offspring away. Or you might argue that option A is totally acceptable if the aliens are just good enough at keeping us happy.

I have yet to find a rational argument why it should be acceptable to industrially breed and herd other living beings that doesn't boil down to "because we are stronger, smarter or because we can do it", which is not a universal rational argument, unless you argue the aliens are right to herd us as well.

Is the fox "right" to eat the hare?

I personally look forward to the day where our technology is advanced enough that wild animals no longer have to live in constant fear of being ripped to shreds. IMO, no one, not even wild animals, should have to live in fear of that.

Also, by extension, predators shouldn’t have to face starvation, and prey should have their population controlled in a humane way.

These are problems that can’t be solved today, or likely any time soon. But I don’t buy the argument that “just because it happens in nature, it’s right”. I think Mother Nature provides effective solutions to these problems, but I also believe they aren’t the optimal solutions. We can and should do better.

Nature's basically a real-life horror film for anything not at the tippy-top of the chain in an area, every hour of every day. Which means most things that aren't humans. But, farming doesn't really help with that, especially industrial farming.

You're either constantly at risk from hordes of relentless and effective slasher-murder-cannibals (to put it in human-focused horror movie terms—they're not really cannibals when it's one species eating another, of course) and will very probably be killed and eaten by one before you can die of other "natural causes", and every moment you're not on high alert is a moment you're more likely than normal to abruptly be murdered, or you're in one of those movies where aliens or vampires or something are farming you for whatever reason, typically in such horrible conditions that you really might prefer to take your chances with the super-murderers out in the wild.

It's all very pretty to look at when you're at the top but IMO Lovecraft's works, or films like The Thing, really capture the underlying reality of what life is, fundamentally. Incomprehensible, brutally savage, and horrifying, mostly. One of those things you kinda have to try not to think about too much (which is one of the ways it's all a bit Lovecraftian—not healthy to contemplate actual-reality, rather than our illusions about it, in this case).

As I understand your post, an explicit version of your argument would be something like "the level of suffering that nature intends for animals far exceeds the level of suffering experienced by animals farmed for meat, so farming animals for meat provides them with a better life than they deserve."

When assessing arguments like this I find it useful to substitute animals for a hypothetical population of hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals. If an island populated by such people were discovered, and they turned out to generally live nasty, brutish and short lives for some reason, would that justify farming them for meat?

The answer is clearly no. If you were to ever encounter a hominid of any cognitive ability who was being farmed for meat, you would be horrified and would report the situation to law enforcement. That individual's treatment by the operators of the farm would qualify as brutal regardless of how much people of the same background tend to suffer out in the world.

I don't think there is a valid reason to treat hypothetical hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals differently from actual nonhuman mammals.

"And hopefully it'll eventually be cheaper than growing animals too."

Just as simply planting a tree and letting the sun provide the energy for it's growth will always beat those "synthetic trees" people like to hype from time to time, I can expect to never see a synthetic process that is more cost effective to create "meat" than simply letting nature do it's thing. Down here in Brazil you basically give the animals it's vaccines and let them graze for a few years, you can't beat that. And btw, I'll rather starve than eat anything syntesized that can be made, cheaper and for sure tastier, naturally.

> Just as simply planting a tree and letting the sun provide the energy for it's growth will always beat those "synthetic trees" people like to hype from time to time, I can expect to never see a synthetic process that is more cost effective to create "meat" than simply letting nature do it's thing.

Evidence? Do you have any background in the field? It's easy as a layperson to imagine that not having to support the life of the entire organism and just growing the meat directly could absolutely be less energy intensive.

For evidence, my extended family down here raises cattle to this day. It's hard to beat doing hardly anything other than let the beasts eat grass for a couple of years. Try to beat that for a cost of goods.

If we go off thermodynamics there is a lot of energy being wasted in producing the meat, even if that energy isn't expended by those tending the cattle.

To say nothing of the animal suffering involved, we currently expend ~10x the calories we get from the beef producing it (IIRC). If we could get even to 5x that'd be a huge environmental win.

Edit: Looking it up, beef sits at 25x, and chicken 9x. So, a lot of room for efficiency improvements.

does that include bioavailability of those calories to humans?

from this anecdotal source: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/sbfn6b/c...

1lb of grass to humans = 32kcals / lb

1lb of grass to cows = 800kcals / lb

800/32 = 25x

Assuming you grow something other than grass on that pasture to eat (also assuming it isn't marginal land which makes up 2/3 of agricultural land), wouldn't that other plant extract approximately the same amount of calories from the sun? And wouldn't the bioavailability of that plant also be lesser than that of meat?

First, most cows are not grass fed. They are largely fed things that have bioavailable calories for humans, like soy. Likewise, chickens mainly consume corn.

Second, farm animals are not 100% efficient in absorbing calories and converting them to meat calories, so the 25x going from grass to beef is meaningless, assuming you were attempting o make some connection to my 25x figure on beef production efficiency.

Third, agricultural land is not all used for meat, and I'd need a source for that 2/3 being marginal figure. Looking it up I see ~2/3 (60%) of ag land is used for beef, but it is not all marginal. Beef is the main cause of Amazon deforestation for example.

Forth, if we just go by land use to globally consumed calories, cows, despite using 60% of ag land, only make up 2% of consumed calories. If we make an absurd assumption that 50% of all calories come from non-farmed sources, that still leaves 40% of ag land producing 48% of the world's calories in comparison, which would include non-beef meat as well.

Finally, just because the land wouldn't have much use to humans if we didn't use it for cows, doesn't mean it wouldn't benefit the planet, and us, if we stopped using it for such.

Ok, switch from cattle to bison then. Lab growing isn't going to be economically feasible for a long time yet.

Are bison more thermodynamically efficient than cows?

I think there is a big difference between intensive animal farming (growing animal feed like corn and soy to then grow animals with) and letting animals graze on natural grassland. For example grazing works in non-arable land (eg hills / mountains / rocky areas) and is therefore (I'm guessing) a more efficient form of food production for these areas than whatever else could be done there. On the other hand, growing plants on farms specifically to feed livestock, probably not very energy efficient compared to growing plants for direct human consumption on the same farms.

I'm sure parent meant the field on lab grown meat, not naturally grown.

The price of goods aren’t the only relevant cost here, there’s also the carbon cost. As a Brazilian rancher, you must be aware of the massive cost the world is paying for Amazonian deforestation to produce arable land.

Eating grass, producing waste, requiring space, labor, and disposal of concentrated waste (too much cow dung goes beyond fertilization) is energy intensive, which is what the parent comment was bringing up.

Cost goes beyond the labor (which is what I am taking your comment to focus on)

1. Grass costs nothing, it's already there and we can't eat it. You have to shred it so it doesn't grow too high anyway.

2. Again, pastures are already there, nothing else is on them.

3. Perfect, that's more jobs, but I know small family farms with 100 head of cattle with no extra ranch hands.

4. Not really, unless they are very large farms, but at very large scales making artificial meet will have challenges too, much more complex than shoveling shit.

> 1. Grass costs nothing, it's already there and we can't eat it. You have to shred it so it doesn't grow too high anyway.

> 2. Again, pastures are already there, nothing else is on them.

We’ve gone way beyond pasture just “being there” to rely on for animal agriculture at the rate we do it. Look at BLM grazing rates which are there to pay for renewing the grassland but to rate limit how many animal graze or the grassland would be destroyed. Amazon in Brazil is also being cut back constantly to create new pasture land

> 3. Perfect, that's more jobs, but I know small family farms with 100 head of cattle with no extra ranch hands.

If doing things inefficiently just to create jobs is a good idea, we might as well ban shovels and backhoes and make everyone dig with spoons

> We’ve gone way beyond pasture just “being there” to rely on for animal agriculture at the rate we do it. Look at BLM grazing rates which are there to pay for renewing the grassland but to rate limit how many animal graze or the grassland would be destroyed. Amazon in Brazil is also being cut back constantly to create new pasture land

A large part of America was already grassland. Many other parts the land aren't great, but cattle can still graze over it even with really sparse or dry vegetation.

> If doing things inefficiently just to create jobs is a good idea, we might as well ban shovels and backhoes and make everyone dig with spoons

I'm talking about families raising cattle on their private land and continuing to do so, not about banning shovels, backhoes, or meat.

>A large part of America was already grassland. Many other parts the land aren't great, but cattle can still graze over it even with really sparse or dry vegetation.

a large part of America was already grassland, but that doesn't mean it can handle infinite herds, hence the BLM grazing fees[1]. This is also ignoring the fact that I was referring to pasture land globally when I included references to the Amazon.

>I'm talking about families raising cattle on their private land and continuing to do so, not about banning shovels, backhoes, or meat.

Private land means nothing when you say "Perfect, that's more jobs". You should talk about how inefficiency is acceptable if it spreads work across more small businesses then, and I will argue with you on that point. I care 0% about family's keeping their small businesses together if it means the rest of us have high prices. If those families take more money to create the same amount of food as a large scale farm, then I give zero shits if they lose the family farm. I would prefer that an enterprise takes over, produces food at a lower cost, and then sells me food at that lower cost due to the competition that capitalism causes.

Could you please explain to me why I should care about the family farm asking for my tax dollars to subsidize them while they complain that my liberal lifestyle is unacceptable and should be prevented by law?

[1]https://www.blm.gov/press-release/blm-and-forest-service-ann...

This was asking about energy efficiency, though. The vast majority of the energy ever consumed by an animal is used in processes other than growth. The ability to grow meat without it needing to be part of an organism that has to be able to also grow a skeleton, reproductive system, be able to move and think, and other energetically expensive processes in addition to growing muscle, seemingly has to be possible for less energy cost than supporting an entire animal lifecycle.

Whether it can be done entirely using solar is another question, but free-grazing animals that only consume energy from local grass are not anywhere near prolific enough to feed the entire planet.

I have extended family doing the same in South Brazil. But those cows require a bit of care, a fair chunk of land, and release a large amount of methane. Lab meat will beat it in the end one day when all costs are considered.

It’s not though. Lab grown meat requires several breakthroughs before it can possibly compete with cattle. Growing large amounts of meat in vats requires a clean environment, because the vats don’t have an immune system. All of the cells need to receive oxygen further complicating scaling and they still have to be fed. It’s a very complex and intensive process.

https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...

Soon it will only be cheaper if you're completely discounting the price paid to the ecosystem. In fact with a full accounting I'd wager it's already cheaper.

How many unique species that evolved over tens of millions of years have been lost forever, in the last 50 years alone, due to clear-cutting in Brazil?

How much clean water and topsoil has been polluted and washed away?

How much carbon has been released? How much suffering from butchered animals?

I really don't know how one can be so flippant about this.

> I really don't know how one can be so flippant about this.

Easy -- think for yourself!

Easier to get rid of all the useless eaters. Are you sure that doesn't include you?

Modern industrial agriculture, is what you are describing.

It is very efficient form the POV of $/calorie. But it is terribly inefficient from a hectare/calorie.

The purpose of modern industrial agriculture was to free up labour for industry. It has been a huge success in that.

Applying technology to the food production system is IMO a good idea. I think we should be sensible. Using robotics and regenerative agriculture has huge potential to increase production, increase the quality of land husbandry, and sequester carbon in retained topsoil.

Applying technology to growing meat in vats? It is hard to see how it could improve the situation. The one thing it does is free the consumer from being part of a killing chain. I can see no reason to believe that it will improve the system in any other respect. I retain an open mind about that, but am yet to be convinced.

If you do not want to be part of a killing chain, perhaps the best way is to become a vegetarian rather than open a factory?

> It is very efficient form the POV of $/calorie.

It's probably only efficient because farms don't have to cover the cost of their methane+CO2 emissions and water usage+pollution. I'd like to see these subsidies eliminated.

There down in Brazil, rainforest are being cut down at alarming rate in service to animal agriculture. It will be easier to preserve the Brazilian rainforests if there was some other way to grow meat that didn't involve huge grazing pastures for animals.

I don't think deforestation is for pasture? I thought it was for animal feed crops like soy

Is there is a meaningful difference between removal of rainforest for pasture vs animal feed? They both seem to be "in service to animal agriculture" to me at first glance.

The issue is that 60%+ of all crops are for animal feed.

It's done to renovate or create grazing land too.

The problem with growing whole animal for meat, suffering aside, is that it's extremely inefficient. Most of the energy an animal consumes is used to sustain its organism — which, for the purpose of food, is a waste.

> Down here in Brazil you basically give the animals it's vaccines and let them graze for a few years

Let me fix this for you:

> Down here in Brazil you basically destroy a million square kilometers of old growth rainforest, give the animals it's vaccines, and let them graze for a few years

You have no idea what you are talking about. Brazil is a continental country, I'm sure you know about it. My family and I come from the southern part, it's basically pampa downn here, a green savana. That's why Argentina, Uruguai and south Brazil are the best places to raise cattle in the world, it's just grass from horizon to horizon. The average HN user is so oblivious to anything other than this idiotic 1st world mainstream view it shocks me. The propaganda about the Amazon destruction is hilarious coming from a brazilian native point of view.

> why Argentina, Uruguai and south Brazil are the best places to raise cattle in the world, it's just grass from horizon to horizon

Uruguay’s environment is massively altered by wide-scale cattle raising [1]. The savannahs are being destroyed, deforestation lowering water tables and effluence and run-off contaminating what groundwater remains. They’re great places to rear cattle. That doesn’t mean they have no environmental impact.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_Urug...

yah, I always had the impression that Brazil was predominantly rain forest. I'm curious what percentage of the country's land mass is deep/tall Amazon rain forest. If we came up with some cheap threshold like at least 10 trees in 100 square meters each at least 10m tall or something, what percentage of Brazil's land mass would satisfy that constraint?

I heard of the pampas in Argentina before I think through literature from Jorge Luis Borges. I never knew that Brazil intersected with that region down at the southern tip https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pampa.

The Amazon is only a thing at the upper third of the country, and rain forest, probably just the western side. I would guess 30% of the land area of Brazil. 100% of the south and north east, 90% costal areas, and 75% of the midwest are NOT rain forests. People don't even seem to know outside of Brazil that the north eastern part is basically a huge savana, with some areas being more like a desert than a savana even.

Aye, but it will be nice when mining Luna to have locally sourced meat instead of just yeast concentrate.

Analogy aside, just because the process has been evolutionarily optimized it doesn't mean it's the most efficient way of doing it. There's a lot of other evolutionary pressure where energy is expended in ways that don't benefit obtaining the arbitrary end product.

Say synthetic wood as your example, I would be willing to bet that a dedicated system that extracts CO2 for the carbon and combines it with water to make cellulose could be made more efficient than any type of photosynthesis. You can sell carbon credits and oxygen on top of that too.

If it was evolutionarily optimized, it most likely is not the most efficient way of doing something but it most certainly is the most resilient way.

Potato blight? soon to be available for: meat!

Is a fungal disease that ravages crop organisms grown in the open (wild varieties included) supposed to be an argument against growing food in a sterile, controlled environment?

The source of potato blight is from the genetic similarity of the potatoes grown, as potatoes clone themselves when grown from potato seed (small potatoes) rather than "true" potato seeds, from their flowers. They are naturally selected, then naturally cloned en masse.

Lab grown meat will have the same problem assuming the cells have little to no genetic diversity. Even if grown in a sterile environment, they could become susceptible to a blight-like organism (virus, bacteria, fungus, etc) once on grocery store shelves.

> Lab grown meat will have the same problem assuming the cells have little to no genetic diversity.

I know it isn't on quite the same scale as literally cloning the cells, but livestock isn't a very deep gene pool. Lots of selective breeding, by the same mindset that gave european nobility weak chins.

I agree. Lab grown meat seems like a further step towards the preexisting industrialization of meat.

Removing the sentience from cows does reduce animal suffering, though I wonder if other things couldn't be done to preserve genetic diversity. Like maybe breeding oysters without ganglia, as they are barely alive to begin with. Farmed oysters are also better for the environment than wild ones.

Ah... You should look into the sets of processes around livestock family lineage tracking. Farmers have to swap out large parts of their herds over time to prevent inbreeding. All part and parcel of what you sign up for in Agriculture.

> it most likely is not the most efficient way of doing something but it most certainly is the most resilient way

For that purpose. Photosynthesis is horribly inefficient for any use other than making more plant.

What do you mean? Does a more efficient way of biologically using sun's energy exist?

What about something like lab diamonds? You can give nature billions of years to "do it's thing" or we can produce the same result in a lab in a matter of weeks without any suffering and at a fraction of the cost. Synthetic processes can be quite efficient and it sounds like you're discarding them completely which is a little shortsighted.

I'd argue synthetic diamonds and synthetic "life" are pretty different. We also don't eat diamonds.

No, but we send people down into deep pits to dig them up with very little regard for their wellbeing.

There's an amount of suffering "required" for the production of both of these things. A diamond itself is not screaming in agony as we prepare it for use, but there's a human cost involved.

Creating Lab meat is in no way creating synthetic "life", it is more akin to synthetic diamonds than synthetic life

What about lab grown ice, then? When that was new, people complained it didn't have the same healthy green[0] color as the natural stuff.

[0] i.e. from the algae trapped in it when it formed

Synthetic diamonds are also objectively superior to natural ones.

1) your externalizing the VAST environmental costs from grazing: methane production, vast amounts of land dedicated to grazing, plus likely there is still farming/crops to feed them over winter. Googling leads to (accuracy undetermined) that 41% of land is dedicated in the US to meat production.

2) you are assuming (because you externalize / push onto the future generations the cost) that grazing is the most efficient means for meat tissue production. I doubt it is. If artificial meat can beat cows wandering around eating grass for three years by a substantial margin, which I think is theoretically possible, then grazing will be a niche production.

This technology is desperately needed for climate change mitigation, on the scale of electrification of consumer transport. It's not just the methane and farming, it's also all that land that could be used as carbon sinks and biodiversity.

https://www.arespectfullife.com/2018/08/05/41-of-u-s-land-is...

The big issue is that the world wants meat. If we can reduce the carbon footprint by 1/10th, which I think is possible, then it will be a very good think for a sustainable human race.

Is that how chickens are raised in big farms here in Brazil too? It's funny how I hear some people say they'll never eat lab meat and it will never taste as good as meat from an animal, and then they sit there drinking their Coke or their Pepsi because they don't like fruit juice.

You can beat it because you don't need a few years, acres of land, and a large amount of water.

What makes you think a human optimized process specifically designed to be simpler/faster/tastier than slaughter won't be? The whole reason it's getting research and work done on it is for the reasons you claim are important, so how are you reaching the conclusion that it's somehow worse?

> It's meat. It's just without the animal suffering

Are you sure about the no suffering part. Currently this meat is grown using a growth medium most often extracted from a pregnant mare using a technique called bloodletting which is often extremely painful for the animal.

EDIT: I think I’m actually wrong about the pregnant mare. Animal suffering through bloodletting from pregnant mares was a recent scandal where I’m from and I must have conflated it in my mind. I was actually thinking about FBS which is extracted from a slaughtered pregnant cow. So my point still stands.

> from a pregnant mare

I’m quite skeptical about this. How do they obtain and culture chicken cells from a horse?

It's the medium, not the genes. Like someone else mentioned, it's called fetal bovine serum (presuming GP meant "cow" and not "mare") and it's used in large quantities.

Ah, that makes sense! Thank you!

I’m much less skeptical now

Not the cells, but the growth medium. You need a growth medium to grow cells in a culture, because there's no support from the rest of the animal for growth. Normally the animal would provide blood, etc. to the tissue, but there is no animal in this case.

It’s call FBS, and it can be grown in a lab, too (if it’s even required…). See companies like Future Fields.

In practice, artificial FBS or FBS-free medium can be very tricky to use successfully. It's definitely not a solved problem yet.

It is a solved problem, UPSIDE (and I believe one other company) now have animal-component-free medium.

These products have existed for decades (I know because I’ve used some of them), but it is not a solved problem. For all but the easiest cell cultures, growing cells without FBS is extremely tricky. I know that marketing materials (and some publications almost certainly by the manufacturer) say otherwise, but that’s marketing for you.

Not every type of cell or tissue has the same requirements, and things get difficult very quickly as soon as you deviate from the most common cultures. Tissues and non-cancerous (or in technical jargon: non-immortalized) cell lines are usually much, much, much more difficult.

And even if you manage to grow your cells, “serum-starving” will likely happen due to some unknown missing nutrient / factor, which will stress your cells and alter their phenotype. Even if they don’t lose their adherence, undergo apoptosis, or some pathologic autophagy, they may produce all sorts of extracellular vesicles.

FBS is really expensive, and quite mysterious. Nobody really knows what’s in there exactly. [1] Researchers would love to be able to stop using it, because it could mean more reproducible results, and at scale, fewer expenses. Unfortunately, FBS is also unreasonably effective, so we continue to use it still.

[1] This is only a slight exaggeration, but it’s approximately true. Trust me, I know this sounds like a preposterous claim. But this is an absolutely-insane rabbit hole where a lot more research is very-needed. A full characterization of FBS and its effects on cells does not exist, and is much more complex than it probably sounds.

> technique called bloodletting

The technique is called a "biopsy" and while it does hurt, the animals recover pretty quickly from it. Branding is far more painful.

In a world where the animal’s well being is valued more then the economic output of the producer this might be true. However in our current economic system the economic incentive favors taking as much blood as possible without killing the animal while providing minimal relieve.

I have no faith in a regulatory framework being enacted and enforce which will minimize this suffering while keeping businesses profitable.

Given the topic of animal suffering here, what does the full picture of an animal used for this purpose look like? Are they treated any different to animals intended for direct consumption?

My assumption is that the animals will lead the same life. While this is something that'd cut down direct consumption I doubt that's ever eliminated.

So it becomes a math game. Either this cow produces the 700lbs of meat in a normal lifetime or with lab meat it produces n tons of meat (depending on how much meat can be produced per sample).

Who knows, maybe this ends up with a few cows living long lives since it's not their meat that matters but rather the quality of the stem cells they produce. But I'm guessing it's more likely these stem cells first get extracted from animals either already butchered or destine for the butcher.

> it's not their meat that matters but rather the quality of the stem cells they produce.

Note that we are talking about the growth medium here, which is used to grow the stem cells into the final product. So it should be the quality—or much rather the quantity—of the extracted serum from the animal (specifically the animal’s fetus or womb).

This is wrong. UPSIDE’s meat is grown in animal component free medium. That’s one of their key innovations.

When this technology finally gets there, and I see no reason to think it won't eventually, it will change the world so dramatically. The amount of land and water we won't need to raise animals or food for animals it's staggering. The amount of meat the world consumes will double by the end of the century (will it? I made that up). As the world gets richer, people eat more meat. Combine that with a rising population and the amount of land we need for livestock dwarfs the remaining agricultural land we'll need (again, I made that up, but it could be true.)

We could rewild huge parts of the Earth, returning the habitat to nature.

Only if it's cheaper.

They said the same thing about plant based meat - and it hasn't because it's more expensive.

Pretty sure it's not more expensive. People that are willing to buy vegan are just generally richer and more likely to be able to spend more. Thus the prices are artificially inflated by market segmentation.

At least where I'm from the companies make way more profit from their vegan substitutes then their equivalent meat products.

I agree that making the same volume of food is probably cheaper if you're processing vegan only ingredients - but if you look at the amount of nutrients / $, vegan substitutes are nowhere close to meat

That's honestly highly unlikely.

These animals consume the same products the vegan alternatives are made with... for months or years, depending on the animal.

It might be true in places without massive animal farms, but that's usually connected to more human attention which would make it even more unlikely.

> These animals consume the same products the vegan alternatives are made with...

How many people are living off of grass?

the quantity of animals is way too high for them to be fed with grass, as that would turn into a logistical nightmare.

It's usually a special feed, which is composed of corn, often bones and other substances.

That animals convert grass and plants in general to meat is undeniable. But I think the issue is, livestock is generally fed with human grown plants, which could be fed directly to humans and save a lot of energy (food and water) wasted in the process, because the amount of calories, for example, that you take off meat is nowhere near the calories contained in the food the animal consumed during its lifetime. Now, regarding if nutrients are missing from a plants only diet, that's another matter.

Plant based meats are

1) Still not real meat, hence is only considered by a limited target consumer

2) Is still relatively new to the mass-market. Hence still isn't at it's lowest price point.

My understanding is that subsidies also drive down the cost of meat quite drastically.

They could market this like crazy to the eco-conscious crowd.

To add to the other points being made... meat is subsidized and doesn't include the cost of the externalities. It's hard to imagine that in the long run, plant based meat or lab grown meat will be more expensive than growing, feeding, and looking after animals.

Agreed. Lobbies won't let the current system go for a very long time.

If Tobacco industry can hang on, Meat industry is not going away any time soon. Also a change of this kind can come only gradually, if at all.

We can't just tell all the farmers to go and take a Python bootcamp.

Growing meat in an ultra-sterile environment using complex biologics, some of which the current source is to extract them from animals. I’d bet on fusion becoming mainstream first.

From first principles, it should be eventually.

> We could rewild huge parts of the Earth

Probably not without radically changing how we grow plants for human consumption, assuming we still eat plants and don't move to an all-meat diet.

Looking over the data for the area I farm, according to government figures, 36% of the cropland is used for animal food. Most farmers here grow a rotation of soybeans, corn, edible beans, and wheat. The edible beans and wheat are intended for direct human consumption. I couldn't find an exact breakdown for soybean use, but on my farm ~60% of the soybeans are intended for direct human consumption and ~40% for animal consumption. I imagine that is not atypical. Corn is primarily intended for animal consumption.

A little back of the napkin math and you get somewhere around 35% of the output after a four year rotation on my farm being intended for animal consumption, which is effectively what the real world data also shows.

The rotation is important to maintaining soil health and keeping disease at bay. I don't see that going away, save further technical advancement, so you'd probably just see the corn shift to something like biofuels if animals weren't eating it to maintain the rotation to grow the human food.

> you get somewhere around 35%

That still has to be in the millions or billions of acres globally. No?

I think the rest of what that post is saying is that 35% is an important part of soil maintenance (ie avoiding another dust bowl). Though I do think with testing we should still be able to drastically reduce the amount of land needed, though likely not exactly 1:1 with previous animal consumption.

Billions, it would appear. But that doesn't necessarily mean that billions of acres can be taken out of service.

While local conditions don't perfectly extrapolate to the world, remember that 100% of my acres grow human food when observed over the span of more than one year. The 35% animal food production seen in a single year is the outcome of the crop rotation.

Certainly, I'd be far more profitable if I could reliably grow beans for human consumption over and over and over, but Mother Nature is a harsh mistress.

What do you use for fertilizer today, and where does it come from? Is there a scaling concern there, as well?

There's a "running out" concern for phosphate.

Technically it can be extracted from the same seawater it's running off into, but IIRC that hasn't been demonstrated in a cheap enough way yet.

Lab grown meat combined with bacteria tank flours - looking forward to it

Soybeans are crushed, meaning the oil and protein are separated. The major crushers are ADM, Bunge, and Cargill. The protein is then toasted into flakes for better animal digestion, and sold to milling operations of meat producers (e.g Smithfield foods). The oil is sold to consumers as soybean oil in most of the world, and marketed as vegetable oil in the US. Hunt-Wesson is the biggest soybean oil buyer in the US.

Your split of 60/40 human/animal split for soybeans is accurate on a calorie basis. I just though I would add some color as to why it is the case… the beans are split.

> Soybeans are crushed ... The oil is sold to consumers as soybean oil in most of the world, and marketed as vegetable oil in the US.

That's the 40% I referred to. Crushers, while generally less profitable, are a better fit for my poorer ground. I lumped this in as animal food to keep things simple, but you're right that there is also human uses. You could write books about the subject if you want to capture all the details and nuance.

The 60% are food grade (IP) soybeans, which generally end up as things like tofu, soy milk, along with other foods where the soybean seeds are eaten whole (more common in Asian countries). I was growing 100% IP soybeans for a while, but as mentioned before wasn't having much luck on my poor ground so had to introduce some less resource intensive crushers into the mix to keep things sustainable.

Ah interesting. I’ve never known anyone who grows IP beans because the farmers I know are in NC which is a meat state.

Are IP beans kept moist or sold dry?

Dry, and strictly so. At least for the market I sell in they must be between 11% and 14.5% moisture off the combine (must be naturally dried).

If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture ... and 77% of it is used for livestock: meat and dairy

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh.

https://ourworldindata.org/soy

We could also just eat grassfed beef instead of feeding animals soy.

That would require even more land since a given amount of land can grow fewer calories of grass than soy.

> Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture ...

While true, we are talking about cropland, not agriculture land (e.g. pastures). Nowhere near 50% of the world's land area is suitable for cropland.

Yes, it is ... simply deforest more land for our animals ... we could fatten ourselves so much more ;)

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

Your own link suggests that only 23% of agricultural lands are suitable for cropland.

Not suitable, but used for plant-based food.

Other arable land is used for animal feed production, and together with grazing land represents the other 77% of agriculture land (37 mil. km2), which supplies only 18% of global calories and 37% of proteins.

Those 23% (11 mil. km2) of agriculture land, crop land, is currently producing 82% of global calories and 63% of proteins.

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-g...

> Other arable land is used for animal feed production, and together with grazing land represents the other 77% of agriculture land

Right, and since we're only talking about cropland, that 77% has no relevance to the discussion. That it keeps coming up is rather bizarre. Indeed, if you keep pounding a square peg into a round hold hard enough it may eventually go in, but one sure does look silly for doing it in the first place.

That 77% CONTAINS crop land.

https://www.renewmethod.com/post/what-is-arable-land

"Arable land is classified as land that can be plowed for the purpose of growing crops."

Please, look at the graph one more time.

Arable land includes meadows, pastures, etc. Animals can (and do) eat from those lands, but cropland is more specific. Your weird tangent has no relevance.

> Probably not without radically changing how we grow plants for human consumption ...

Wrong.

> ~60% of the soybeans are intended for direct human consumption and ~40% for animal consumption. I imagine that is not atypical

Wrong.

> around 35% of the output ... for animal consumption, which is effectively what the real world data also shows ...

Wrong.

> Nowhere near 50% of the world's land area is suitable for cropland.

Wrong.

> Your own link suggests that only 23% of agricultural lands are suitable for cropland.

Wrong.

> Arable land includes meadows, pastures, etc. Animals can (and do) eat from those lands, but cropland is more specific

Wrong (in the context of) https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-g...

> Your weird tangent ...

It's called logic. I give up.

You're the only one in this discussion talking about crop land. To focuse solely on crop land and ignore pastures is misleading.

> Eloff: ... won't need to raise animals or food for animals ... we could rewild huge parts of the Earth

> randomdata: probably not ... 36% of the cropland is used for animal food ...

Even if we kept all the arable land for human consumption (to compensate for missing meat, assuming the lab-grown meat will take some time to scale) we'd have 3.3 billion hectares of pastures to rewild/reforest. Or we could reforest those 35% of arable land we use for growing animal feed and instead use a fraction of pastures for nuts/fruit production.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-pasture

Forests cover 40 mil. km2, and animal agriculture takes 37 mil. km2. Majority of plant-based foods is produced on 11 mil. km2. By switching to plant-based we could increase forest cover from 40 mil. km2 to 70+ mil. km2.

"We might even address the very real disaster scenarios presently threatening the world with questions like these: "What if you could make a simple and compassionate change in your life that would increase available farmland, increase available clean water, reduce rainforest destruction, reduce greenhouse gas production, reduce the threat from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, decrease land and waterway pollution, prevent creation of ocean dead zones, end your participation in the deaths of sentient individuals and increase overall human health by switching to a plant-based diet? Would you do it?” This is the reality we actually live in, and this is the choice each one of us faces."

https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/vegans-would-eat-meat-on-a...

OFF-TOPIC: we should reforest some deserts/barren areas as well

I think you're overestimating that, probably because of vegan propaganda. Eg. A lot of the water you use for animals turns into milk or pee (or sweat?), and goes back to the cycle of water.

I don't like posting videos but this one goes through several points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g

Literally no one worth a mention was saying the animal slaughter industry adds or removes water from the water cycle in meaningful quantities. The issue with their water usage is in the redirection of the limited fresh water sources into the virtually unlimited saltwater oceans, or pollutes it beyond the point of usability for any form of life.

The limit on fresh water is a local problem. Maybe that's an issue in California during dry years, but not in North Carolina or Iowa, which are subject to completely different rainfall patterns.

And one of the problems in California is how much water almonds use.

Yup, drupes and nuts account for about 10% of California's water usage, behind only domestic animal agriculture (~30%) and feed exported for foreign animal agriculture (~15%).

None of these belong in the desert, if anywhere.

But neither of those places has the diversity or scale of California’s agricultural system—it’s one of the most reliable suppliers of the food on America’s plate. And that’s why California’s water problem is a local problem for most Americans.

I doubt it, considering the demographic problems and the end of globalization, we’re likely to see about two billion people starve in most of our lifetimes, mostly in East Asia. It’s going to be a rough ride.

I don't see that happening. I see the opposite of that happening.

People have been predicting this mass starvation of poor people in X parts of the world since before even Paul R. Ehrlich opened his mouth. In his book "the population bomb" he claimed it would be because of overpopulation. Now that we've seen trends indicating all the opposite on that front, the new fad is apparently blaming it on climate change.

Either way, forgive me for being extremely doubtful. While its true that past catastrophes averted are no guarantee of future catastrophes averted, modern history has shown a remarkable tendency towards people heading off the worst of a given doom scenario before it becomes reality. Add to that the observable tendency of people to emotionally be attracted to particularly awful predictions even if their behavior indicates them as believing otherwise in practice, and the the skepticism about most doom scenarios like the one you mention is a good idea.

All data in our world today across the board indicates improving human standards of living and this has been going on for a long time. No concrete evidence shows a trend in the opposite direction to anywhere near a severe enough degree to assert the starvation of billions, or even millions. Problems exist, sure, and there are many dangerous environmental trends, but even these don't concretely establish anything like what you describe.

Sounds like eating real meat is going to become a wealthy person thing.

> As the world gets richer, people eat more meat.

Living in central Berlin (Mitte), one of the most expensive parts of the city, it feels the opposite is happening.

Everything here is vegan or vegetarian at least.

Even a steak place next door to where I live has vegan plates.

On that note: it made me sad that all the dramatic changes you listed omitted the suffering of animals.

What it feels like and the story the data tell are two different things. The data is unambiguous, the richer the country, the higher the per-capita meat consumption. Meat consumption in the world is rising rapidly.

That's because you're likely part of the disconnected 1%, even if you're nowhere near that relative to others in your country.

People think of robber barons twirling the mustaches when they picture the 1%, but for global topics, the 1% even includes people who are considered "poor" by western standards.

And, like the robber barons twirling mustaches people picture for their local 1%, you can't extrapolate any good data off of them.

People in the west are so wealthy that choosing to be vegan has become a status symbol, but when you hear "world gets richer", you need to be picturing people who can't afford a choice.

Both my parents grew up in villages where beef was like a few-times-a-year luxury, and of course as their villages have gotten more and more modernized, newer generations can't even imagine such a thing.

Now their country has KFCs...

I think you misread my comment. It was meant exactly as written. "It feels". It is factually not so and I didn't contest the OPs assertion.

However, many things that are now common where adapted by the broad populace because they wanted to copy/be as fancy as the 1%.

On of the most prominent examples is probably the British accent. ;)

I think you misread mine. It's explaining why you can feel that way while OPs assertion is true. It's not claiming you contested anything.

You feel that way because you're disconnected from the poor being referenced by "living in central Berlin"

There is no suffering necessarily involved in the raising of animals for meat. A cow raised for beef does not suffer, for instance.

"Meat", at best. Yes, muscle cells in a matrix. The problem will be getting the rest of the structure to be there, and to grow properly, such as connective tissues and fats, and to get the same amounts of minerals and other nutrients into the "meat" as an animal does. Meat, as a food, is much more than a clump of muscle cells.

Then there are the costs to do this properly (packaging the correct nutrients in bioavailable forms, for one), which will likely be much greater than simply letting a cow loose in a pasture to do what it does. This is to say nothing of the long-term testing that should be done on any such product — whether it promotes cancer, leads to misfolded proteins, thereby jetting new and interesting prions into the population, etc. The 20th century was marked by morally-unmoored technocrats allowed to run wild; why is the 21st century doubling down on this?

> The problem will be getting the rest of the structure to be there

I would guess if they can handle real actual meat, they can handle fat and nutrients which would seemingly be the easy part. If not would it be any different than today's vegetarians which just take supplements?

> letting a cow loose in a pasture to do what it does.

Are most cows pasture raised? I think most are raised on feed farms; I think antibiotics and hormones play a role in at least some, but perhaps most? They also emit C02 which we'll eventually have to pay for. And more generally animal farming is a (the?) primary source of new diseases already. I wouldn't expect "lab" grown meat to do any worse there, but perhaps better. Still, it is something new and new always carries some risk. But

> The 20th century was marked by morally-unmoored technocrats allowed to run wild; why is the 21st century doubling down on this?

It was also marked by dramatic increases in quality and quantity of life.

> Are most cows pasture raised? I think most are raised on feed farms.

This is very much dependant on the country. For example, New Zealand beef is about 96% pasture fed, Australia is about 66% pasture fed, and Brazil seems to be about 90% pasture fed.

Yeah I’m going to let other folks experiment with that for 10 or so years and see where it goes. I’m sure the meat is fine, it’s just a matter of not contaminating it during the process that I’m concerned about. The FDA is really poor at enforcing the health and safety aspects of manufacturing and processing. They simply don’t have enough inspectors and the inspectors don’t fine big offenders enough

Or consuming terrifying amounts of energy and resources, when you can put a cow in a field until it's big enough to eat.

One cow is fine, it's when you try to put millions of cows out there and grow them as fast as possible that you get problems.

This is a nonsensical comment.

Culturing meat is entirely about minimizing resource and land usage, and curbing the serious environmental impacts of the beef industry, which is of course truly infamous for methane emissions and deforestation.

Personally, I doubt that. I strongly suspect that lab-grown meat is mostly about making lots of money selling it for high margins to vegetarians who still want to eat "meat".

Bingo.

I'm an agricultural researcher with a background that includes in vitro biology, now getting another degree focused on entire food systems. I have spent a lot of time looking into the economic realities of food innovation, land-use, energy, water, price-sensitivity, and consumer preferences.

There's nothing wrong with getting excited about lab-grown meat, but we have a loooong way to go before considering it as a realistic food source in the future.

One must consider the current price of food is grounded in the use of fossil fuels, ignoring negative externalities, and millennia of optimization.

To consider lab-grown meat as a future replacement of conventional animal production, you have to go way back to primary energy sources and work your way back from there. Chances are, you'll find that a hypothetical future of lab-grown meat is cost-prohibitive for basically the entire world.

I'm not here to argue the ethics, environmental damage, etc. Just pointing out the COST, and why consumer adoption should not be viewed through the lens of a six-figure salary programmer.

It's some revelation that capitalism is driving this? Shocker.

Imagine thinking modern factory farming is anything as simple as “putting a cow in a field”.

I don't think the expectation is the replicate the horrid factory farming system.

Traditional farming and cattle ranching still exists!

Imagine thinking modern factory farming is the only way to go about things. It really can be as simple as putting a cow in a field with grass and water. My family has been doing it for 150 years.

imagine thinking this is possible at the scale required to satiate humanities appetite for meat.

It can be, but the reality is that it largely isn’t. You can refine your own iron if you’d like, but most people do not.

And that scales for the 32 million cows consumed in America per year? https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/...

And yet that's where all the meat I eat comes from, and indeed most of the meat eaten in this country.

You are wildly mistaken if you believe traditional "cow does whatever it wants until slaughter" farming is where the majority[0] of meat comes from in this country (assuming USA).

[0] https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...

I'm not in the USA. You haven't got any form of safe or ecologically sustainable farming in the US, and you need to fix that.

Huge portions of the midwest are used nigh exclusively for cattle grazing. Yes they spend the end of their lives in close quarters eating a lot, but they're not generally being birthed in those environments.

97%[0] of cows are finished on feedlots, i.e. get a substantial amount of calories from corn and other feed. Other animals like pigs are exclusively fed feed. Animal factory farming already consumes a terrifying amount of resources, using up a lot of the plant agriculture that we do.

[0] https://littlecreekmontana.shop/blogs/ranch-blog/food-for-th...

The finishing process changes the tase quite a bit. Some folks like the grain taste some like it grassy.

Blind taste-testing overwhelmingly favors feedlot-finished beef.

People used to eating grain-fed beef prefer grain-fed beef, yes.

Go out and find an isolated tribe who only eats occasional wild game. Serve them grain-finished beef and grass-fed beef. Do you actually believe they will choose grass-fed over grain-fed?

I prefer meat that has been fed only grass and never buy grain-fed meat. (I eat mostly lamb, not beef.) I prefer the taste and believe it is better for my health; in particular, the omega 6 fatty acids in grains and in grain-fed meat promotes chronic inflammation. (I don't buy grains either.)

That's your n=1 opinion and it doesn't change the reality of human preferences which are clearly documented in the literature. Even the overall health outcomes associated with grass-fed are not significantly different than grain-fed. The tissue composition may be different, but not health-outcomes.

86%[0] of livestock feed is inedible by humans. They consume forage, food-waste and crop residues that could otherwise become an environmental burden. 13% of animal feed consists of potentially edible low-quality grains, which make up a third of global cereal (not total crop) production. All US beef cattle spend the majority of their life on pasture and upcycle protein even when grain-finished (0.6 to 1).

[0]http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/home/en/news_archive/2017_More...

A lot of inedible feed is going to be stuff like alfalfa, which is specifically grown as feed and whose farming has massive negative effects like starving the Colorado river of water [0].

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/12/colorado...

Then we need to reassess water-use and water rights and let the market sort itself out. Make alfalfa farmers pay for water and send the cost down the value chain. Consumers will signal how much they are willing to pay, and producers will respond by reducing their supply.

I agree - currently a lot of farmers have essentially unlimited water rights, and they should pay the true price of water.

Along the lines of letting the market sort it out, we could vote for the government to end meat subsidies, or generalize them into protein subsidies available to alternative proteins.

It's very easy to say "we should stop growing this and feeding it to animals, and grow that instead and feed it to humans", but it's a lot harder to make that work in reality.

Not everything grows particularly well in a given location.

>crop residues that could otherwise become an environmental burden

Could is doing a lot of work here, especially because someone might quickly read this as would. This statistic makes it seem like 36% of non-forage inedibles can only be processed by livestock, but there isn't evidence for that.

If you work out how to eat straw and bean stalks, and tough heathery grasses, then you've got a real moneyspinner on your hands.

>eat

This is exactly what I mean - the statistic has convinced you of some unwritten law that says that only livestock or humans can eat this stuff. Since humans can't, it has to go to livestock.

But you're completely ignoring that processing these inedibles doesn't have to come in the form of eating them - we can make compost, building materials, packaging. Just because something is doesn't mean it ought to.

You can't really make packaging materials from tough cellulose-y things like bean stalks because mice eat it, you can't really make building materials from it because it goes on fire, and because it's tough and made of cellulose it doesn't really break down well in a compost heap.

Do you know what composts that stuff like crazy, though?

Feeding it to cows.

And even better, it reduces methane and carbon dioxide emissions, because you're turning all that carbon into cows instead of just letting bacteria emit it as gas.

>And even better, it reduces methane and carbon dioxide emissions, because you're turning all that carbon into cows instead of just letting bacteria emit it as gas.

Cows don't work as carbon sinks if you're killing them every 2 years to eat them. You're just reintroducing that carbon in the form of sewage, transportation, and food waste. They need to be allowed to live all 20 years of their lives for the carbon efficiency argument to work. This necessitates (1) massively reducing the population of livestock by ceasing breeding (otherwise it's hurting any gains with carbon storage in the soil) and (2) finding alternative uses for the inedible byproducts of plant agriculture.

Nothing really works as a carbon sink in the long term.

Bear in mind that cows do not actually generate carbon - as with humans, they just move it around.

You know cows are ruminants and people aren't right?

That's why we don't eat grass. Because it doesn't feed us. But it feeds cows.

Finished, yeah, but most of their time they're on land that can't be farmed.

Pigs used to be fed swill but mad cows disease and foot and mouth put paid to that.

They’d be bad enough at it without presidential malfeasance https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1055451

If you put cattle on farmland, and utilize regenerative agriculture techniques, it costs a bit more, because yields aren't artificially boosted while destroying the topsoil. In return you actually capture carbon into the grasses from the atmosphere. That would normally just rot, but the herbivores digest it and make it bioavailable for the fungi and bacteria in the soil, where the carbon accumulates.

The herbivores are key component of sustainable agriculture, you can't do it without them. Lab grown meat is an interesting, energy intensive step in the wrong direction.

I think we can all agree that there are problems with factory farming, and grain finishing livestock.

Yes we agree, only not on the "a bit more" cost. The cost is significantly more - even if imported from a much cheaper country. Also the request is huge compared to what sustainable agriculture can sustain - let's not forget that the farmers of yore weren't eating beef with each meal, while nowadays it's a matter of status for many.

I've seen this argument get eaten, partialy digested, spit back up, then go through 3 compartments of a stomach and it still doesn't make sense when you actually think about it.

If the intent is actual sustainability, then they have to be given their full 20 years to live. The cattle themselves act as carbon sinks too and have to be part of the whole ecosystem, not only exposed to one part of it. If you're constantly slaughtering them and replacing them, it's not doing much. It just sounds nice.

>it costs a bit more

"A bit" is an understatement.

>The herbivores are key component of sustainable agriculture, you can't do it without them.

You can't. But you have to do it without eating the vast majority of them.

The Myth of Regenerative Ranching:

>[...]

>If regenerative agriculture were to challenge the mainstream food system, it would run into some hard physical limits. Converting the beef industry, at current levels of demand, entirely to a grass- and crop-forage feeding system would require increasing the total size of American beef herds by 23 million cows, or 30 percent, according to a recent article in the respected science journal Environmental Research Letters. And that increase, were it even possible, would have monumental consequences for both greenhouse gas outputs and land use. But there simply isn’t enough land in the U.S. for that many grazers. At best, beef production would have to decrease by 39 percent and potentially as much as 73 percent. Framed that way, grass-fed grazing, especially if scaled, doesn’t seem likely to regenerate many ecosystems—indeed, it would likely require deforestation, as is the case in Brazil, where the clear-cutting of the Amazon is driven both by soy plantations for feedlot and factory farm animal feed and by the need for grazing space for grass-fed cattle. And as the Environmental Research Letters article argued, even temporary overgrazing can lead to long-term and perhaps irreversible ecological degradation.

>[...]

>Actually making animal agriculture less ecologically disruptive would mean taking animals’ ecological value as a bedrock principle against and over their value as commodities. That means treating commodity production, not land, as “marginal”: Commodities could be extracted only if doing so didn’t disturb the ecological, social, and cultural value of the landscape. In other words, in most such systems, animals would more than likely play a minor support role for primarily plant agriculture. And that, in turn, would almost certainly mean far fewer grazers entering the commercial food system, and at a much higher price point. Point Reyes, for example, might feature free-ranging elk managed by an Indigenous best practice–driven conservation agency, not dairy cattle grazed by private ranches. This kind of truly eco-friendly meat production would produce even less meat than the current grab bag of practices loosely labeled “regenerative.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/163735/myth-regenerative-ran...

The ecological role idea is interesting. The great plains for instance used to support some 30 million bison that native populations would harvest from. There is an ecological role for ruminants in this case in these regions. Today the great planes have 16 million cattle (1), and one could argue this remains a good area for ruminants to graze.

1. https://agrilifetoday.tamu.edu/2021/04/29/great-plains-grass...

>In return you actually capture carbon into the grasses from the atmosphere. That would normally just rot, but the herbivores digest it and make it bioavailable for the fungi and bacteria in the soil, where the carbon accumulates

I'm not entirely convinced by this argument. A lot of the ecological arguments against meat-eating is because cattle grazing requires huge swaths of land. Current practices generate this land via deforestation (I don't have statistics on how much land is generated via deforestation, but we can at least conclude that it's A Thing That Happens^{tm})[^1]. While certainly, grass captures some carbon, I'm going to guess that it's far less than a rainforest ecosystem of the same area, especially since the rainforest isn't being actively consumed. There's also the biodiversity of a forest environment.

[^1]: https://archive.ph/4pRMd <- WP article

> Current practices generate this land via deforestation

Current practices in undeveloped countries. Advanced economies have been reforesting recently.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS?location...

Livestock is generally bad for the environment, I think mostly the argument is mostly about "how bad."

> I'm not entirely convinced by this argument.

It’s been proven by Allen Savory and others, you can check his Ted talk here https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI

Even if lab grown meat is the next best thing since sliced bread it would be a complete climate disaster to not continue, and expand, holistic cattle farming.

What you're describing is a fantasy. There simply is not enough natural grassland out there for the entire human race to grow enough meat to eat this way. That's why the Amazon is being chopped down to make more land for grazing.

Lab grown meat is a step in a direction that allows us to not use so much land for livestock.

I 'm pretty sure we already eat far more shady stuff than industrially grown cells.

That's antisocial behavior as we've all learned recently. If you don't eat the fake meat, you'll just spread your clear love for animal cruelty to those around you, even if that's just conjecture.

Anyway, snark aside, I'm curious how this goes because while I'm not apologetic for my place on the food chain, carbon emissions from animal farming are problematic and the price that real meat should cost if we raise them humanely is pretty exorbitant. It will be hilarious to see cattle rustling become a capital offense again.

Without being apologetic, it is still worthwhile to consider your responsibility as a moral agent for causing suffering; especially so when it is unnecessary.

How would you know next time you order a steak at your favorite restaurant? I can see restaurants substituting - just like they do with fish.

It's the USDA that will regulate the actual manufacturing and processing, not the FDA. As the article mentions that process hasn't started yet. It's hopefully quicker/easier than the FDA safety approvals however.

You won’t, because the FDA will make it illegal for supermarkets to label their meat as being not lab grown, the same as they do for GMO foods.

Do you have ANY idea what goes on in a meatpacking plant?

Let's just say, the large intestine doesn't exactly stay pristine in the process, and I doubt they clean everything like you think they do.

It’s gross but we use heat to make it safe to eat. The contamination does not migrate into the meat for the most part just the outsides. With lab grown you could potentially contaminate an inner surface or induce some other contamination that’s not exposed to heat from a grill. Anyway after a decade or so we will probably know what the risks are and of contamination of that nature is likely or possible in the process. Seems like lab grown hot dogs might be a good place to start for example.

David Humbird's 2021 paper "Scale-up economics for cultured meat"[1] is a pretty damning study of the problems with lab-grown meat. His core conclusion: "Capital- and operating-cost analyses of conceptual cell-mass production facilities indicate economics that would likely preclude the affordability of their products as food."

Does anyone know if the problems that Humbird describes have somehow been solved?

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bit.27848

I think the approach of this paper is akin to estimating the cost of Microsoft's BHAG ("a PC on every desk") based on the costs of building mainframe computers in 1970.

Here's the key leap of questionable logic (IMO):

> The capital cost of a conceptual bulk animal cell-culture process is developed from the bare-equipment costs of its most important items. From this purchased equipment cost, a total capital investment (TCI) is obtained through the application of cost escalation factors, which are understood to be rather high for biopharmaceutical cell-culture processes

The idea that at scale, it's going to cost $0.75M for a 1m^3 culturing chamber seems crazy to me. I'd guess these are expensive right now because they are specialist equipment (they are manufactured to the ASME bioprocessing standard, which was created for bioprocessing in a pharma/research context), and when they begin being mass-produced I'd estimate they will come down in cost by two orders of magnitude.

(For context, a ~400gal brewery fermentation vessel made of stainless steel can be purchased for about $5k, made in China. It's about 2x for a "made in USA" vessel. These bioreactor vessels are a bit more complex than the standard jacketed fermenters used by brewers, but eyeballing the schematics they do not seem more complex than a steam-jacketed mash tun, for example.)

At high scale, most of the cost is the bioreactors, the rest of the plant, and buildings. I can't find any real working for the capital costs beyond the bioreactors, but given the extremely pessimistic estimate there, I am skeptical about the broader plant estimates too.

TLDR; if you treat this as a pharma process, you will get pharma prices. If you treat this as a food process like beer (which also has sterility requirements, contamination risks, and clean-room cell line propagation requirements to overcome when manufacturing at scale) then the prices will be much lower. I treat this paper as a pessimistic worst-case scenario, and assume that process innovation will allow substantially lower prices.

The fundamental question is whether food-grade fermentation/culturing processes like those used in beer or yoghurt can suffice; for example it seems to me entirely plausible that we could lower the equipment quality requirements substantially, and still obtain a satisfactory safety profile by discarding contaminated batches. Not a cost-effective option for extremely expensive pharmacological products like vaccines, but potentially viable for simple food products like cultured meat.

> The fundamental question is whether food-grade fermentation/culturing processes like those used in beer or yoghurt can suffice

Analyzing probable cost of fake meat production by comparison with existing cultured food manufacturing is sensible, but fake meat has some differentiating aspects to be accounted for.

A prime difference between these fermentation processes and a hypothetical cultured meat system is that the single cells involved in making beer and yogurt are simpler, much faster breading species than the multicellular lines which develop into complex animal tissue. Another difference is that whereas fermentation involves partial digestion of a portion of the growth medium by the fermenting microbes, creating a volume of artificial meat would require synthesizing cell dense tissue to fill the entire volume. So with artificial meat you need more growth and the growth will be slower, factors which both expand the opportunities for contamination. So preventing contamination will be more important and more challenging with lab meat than with these fermentation products.

I agree with your assessment that the source paper is exceedingly pessimistic about the costs. There is no physical reason why cultured meat production couldn't eventually be cheaper than natural meat production, the hurdles are only technological.

edit: spelling

Hard pass. Let's see some long-term (10 years) test data first (e.g., how does it effect things like muscle growth/retention, fat growth/loss, cell function, cancer promotion/prevention etc).

I'd put this stuff on the same level as any mass-produced junk (HFCS, seed oils, etc) that has already been proven to be harmful to humans long-term as a cautious default.

Seed oils being unhealthy is quackery.

https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-...

They improve health outcomes when put to the test, especially when replacing saturated fat.

Yep, and funny enough, if you plot seed oil consumption along with total calorie consumption and obesity, the answer is obvious. We just eat too much, and cooking oils' 9cal/gram really sneak up on people who don't pay attention.

I'll give it a read but a quick look at this fella and his "thing" and he's clearly on a crusade: https://www.the-nutrivore.com/blog.

Not outright dismissing this (I will read it because I'd like to be better informed and wrap my head around his stance) but that his main offering is debate training and not targeted health guidance/planning, it seems highly suspect.

For context, why I added "seed oils" in there. Once I saw the difference between Canola Oil (what I used the most up until I learned) production [1] and Olive Oil production [2], I never went back. For those interested, I also use tallow and coconut oil.

I found/find it deeply disturbing that they say stuff like Canola is "healthy" when the production process sounds/looks like something you'd expect to describe the pit under a Valvoline.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfk2IXlZdbI

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aieNV3V4b_s

I hear avocado oil is supposed to be good as well. What are your thoughts on butter/ghee?

Depends on the flavor I'm going for but I use butter often, too. Ghee I've only tried a few times as a play/test so no real opinion on it.

Wew lad

The problem with all processed oils is that all the fiber and the rest have been striped away, leaving only the extremely calorie dense oil. Processed oil like that takes up so little space in the stomach that's not filling, making it easy to eat too much food overall. At least in the US, this is compounded by so many processed foods having added oil as a primary ingredient or a cheap filler.

The healthiest way to ingest seed oils is undoubtedly to eat some seeds.

no one is going to read that blog post and its the same level of quackery as the blog posts that say seed oil is killing our health.

"nick is a fomer student of Human Nutritional Science and Linguistics at the University of Manitoba, and he currently works as a nutrition science communicator, creating in-depth blog articles"

Not sure why you shared this. maybe you should share actual research or anectdotal evidence by someone who is actually responsible for someone else's health and has yoe.

But keep cooking your steak in a pan filled of PTFE

I only cook in untreated stainless steel or cast iron for this very reason.

Citing a likely dangerous thing that the FDA doesn't have any objections to is not a good counter.

Maybe some folks will enjoy this as a food product.

It's not clear to me that there's a real upside to this though, for folks who don't mind killing and eating birds.

Research I have seen (you can see it too: [1]) indicates that chicken, dairy, and legumes are all about as low-impact as it gets when it comes to protein sources for humans.

As other folks have mentioned, scaling up the meat lab causes a lot of headaches because the lab meat doesn't come with its own immune system the way a chicken or a cow does. Headaches in the form of increased operating costs and energy inputs.

[1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-015-0931-6

eventually shifting public opinion, and growing the subsection of people who "mind killing" seems like a major upside.

Everything you eat requires killing. We are only weird about killing for meat because as conscious life we are biased towards conscious life. Meanwhile, we don't blink an eye if we take down an entire field of corn, or even take town an entire forest to grow that field of midwestern corn, because its unconcious life and not valued by our moral principles.

The secret is to just treat things with respect. You can be respectful of the animals you raise up, you can respect the land you sow. Unfortunately this world lacks a lot of that common respect towards life these days, but maybe this thinking will change in the future and we can live in a more balanced way.

?? We are not carnivores. We are literally some line between herbivores and omnivores. Carnivores have to kill or they will most likely starve to death. Vegtables and fruits are the natural foods of earth for herbivores and omnivores and some carnivores. You are not killing when you eat plants and fruits. Fruits and vegtables want to be eaten for their seeds to spread. It is not a question of concious vs unconcious. Killing animals when you don't need to is already morally unaccepted in society. Animal life and plant life are completely different. To combine them and act like it is the matter of concious vs unconcious bias is completely wrong. An animal will run till exhaustion to avoid being eaten. A fruit tree is there to be eaten. Plants and fruits don't have a central nervous system where they 'feel' pain. Humans are literally animals. Eat a fruit and plant the seeds and see what happens. Eat an animal and plant the bones and does a new animal come up?

You are killing when you eat plants and fruits. Are you foraging in the woods for these things? Or are you buying them from the supermarket, from an orchard where the farmer killed a thousand acres of native flora and all the fauna dependent on that flora to grow these fruits and nuts fit for shipping across a continent?

Everything has a cost, and we should be conscious of them so we can work on mitigating them, no matter if the cost is to intelligent or unintelligent life. Most of the biomass on earth comes from unintelligent life.

You are still conflating killing animals for food & growing plants/vegtables/grains as if they can be equivocated. These are 2 drastically different things especially when it comes to morality and ethics.

I'm no vegetarian by any means, but equating the life of corn to the life of a relatively intelligent animal like a pig is really, really disingenuous

But why is it disingenuous? Both are masses of living cells. Both die after damage or neglect. I'm just highlighting our species' biases. My cat for example is intelligent but has no such biases, eating rodents, insects, and catgrass with the same violent gusto. I'm just pointing out its a bit of a human fallacy to label some organisms as off limits and others for our harvesting, when no other forms of life do this.

It's best to be aware of this bias so you can treat these other ecologically important organisms with similar respect we reserve for intelligent life. Conservation efforts for example are often more successful if the animal is perceived as cute, which is kind of sad. I'm not saying don't cut down that corn field for harvest, chop it all, but be aware of what these and other behaviors of the farmer are doing to the rest of the organisms in the area, such as native flora, or microbial life that in turn contributes to your corn yields.

https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/plants-are-alive

https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/vegans-kill-animals-too

Whether it's oxen in a slaughterhouse, deer pierced by a hunters' arrows, or herds that die off because their grazing lands get taken for crops, animal lives are sacrificed so that more humans can live.

There's a chart here with the carbon footprint of protein sources.

Nuts, Peas, Beans and Tofu come out ahead of fish, eggs, chicken, pork, cheese, shrimp and beef (the worst):

https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat#:~:....

Chicken costs could be lowered a lot for example, since you can use them as pest control for your garden, compost from their waste, etc

Those things don't convert cereal grains into the protein that humans need. Poultry, eggs, cheeses are good ways to do that. Crops can't just be substituted for each other.

Polling my own bubble, I'm dubious about lab meat.

Across the board, it seems that people want lab grown meat for others. Vegans want omnivores to eat it. Omnivores think it'd be good for vegans.

Meanwhile, any mass market product is likely to be some sort of processed meat product. Sausage, mince chicken nugget or somesuch. These aren't generally premium products, so you need to go really low for price competitiveness.

It's cool. Don't get me wrong. I like technology. It just seems like a solution looking for a problem to me.

If we priced externalities at their true societal cost, the problem of animal farming becomes clear very quickly. Reducing carbon emissions from animal agriculture is one of the bigger targets for helping reduce climate change. I don't think telling people to just not eat meat will work, so lab-grown meat seems like a promising solution to explore.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Doesn’t lab grown meat need a lot of growth serum, which is currently extracted from pregnant animals? So as it stands it is not a solution to help reduce climate change (nor animal suffering). For that we’d need a more sustainable way of producing these serums. I’m not aware of any methods which are proven to work at scale.

Beats me! I don't expect it to be more efficient today, it's brand new tech. My hope is that it will be much more efficient as research continues & economies of scale start to kick in. It may well turn out to be a dead end, but until that's clear, I think it is exciting to think about.

There are non-FBS options now https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/upside-foods-develo...

> Doesn’t lab grown meat need a lot of growth serum, which is currently extracted from pregnant animals?

5 years ago it took ~50L of fetal bovine serum (FBS) to grow a burger, at around USD 400/L. FBS is made from the blood of unborn calves, which are taken from slaughtered cows.

All lab meat companies are obviously looking to reduce that input cost by finding a replacement.

My bubble mostly doesn't care. I would say my bubble isn't particularly naturalist or organic leaning so that might be it. I will definitely eat lab grown meat, especially for something like ground beef or chicken nuggets or sausage.

It seems a lot of people don't know or don't care where their food comes from, and to the extent they do know or care, they'd like the source to minimize harm.

If this alternative way of meat production can taste about the same and cost about the same, then I think people who like the taste of meat will be buy it.

Some vegans and vegetarians don't want it because they don't like the taste of animal meat, whether it came from a live animal or lab.

A lot of [well intentioned] arguments focus on lab grown meats as a "cheap" protein but I think if you want mass market adoption it should go in the other direction, like electric cars.

What if lab-grown meat can create flavor profiles that rival wagyu? What if protein and micronutrient ratios can be tweaked to give athletes an advantage over athletes that eat animal meat?

If we frame it as a "cheap sustainable alternative" some people will always scoff at it, but if instead it starts off as an exclusive delicacy the public will want it that much more.

I think one must keep in mind that the conceptual idea of eating cultured meat is one thing, and the practical economic reality is another.

If a cultured meat "chik'n nugget" is cheaper than a mechanically-reconstituted-real-chicken-meat nugget, and the quality is the same, lots of people will buy the cheaper cultured option.

The same logic applies for basically every fast food product, and also every Costco-bulk meat product.

There are some people that care deeply about the quality and sourcing of the meat they consume, and cultured meat is probably not for them. For most other meat eaters, price (assuming parity on quality with the equivalent low-cost option) is going to be the prime determinant.

Agreed.

I don't see the economic realities stacking up. The price of cheap, processed meat products is pretty low... and not all of the price is ingredients. It's a long way to the bottom.

Meanwhile, the higher end ethical consumers... it's hard to predict their consumer preferences/choices. I suppose some vegans want meat and some omnivores want to be vegan... but as I said, I'm dubious about these groups' real size.

This won't get to $1 per kg overnight. There probably needs to be adequate demand all along the continuum to fuel volume price reductions.

I also think it's naive to assume that environmental (eg energy/carbon savings) benefits will materialize. Its equally naive to assume eco consumers will buy the story otherwise, over the long term.

The main bull case seems to rely on overwhelming cost advantage. Where's the reason to think this will happen.?

> It just seems like a solution looking for a problem to me.

Vegans primary objection to eating meat is that it is murder.

Meat eaters primary issue with vegan cuisine is that it does not include meat.

Hope this helps!

> Meat eaters primary issue with vegan cuisine is that it does not include meat.

In my extended group of acquaintances, the distaste for typical vegan food isn't that it doesn't have meat, it's that it tries to pretend that it does and ends up being kinda gross as a result.

Those meats (btw, not a typical vegan food) are trying to be as close as possible to the real thing to help convert meat-eaters into vegans.

And they're doing good job - I know of some long term vegetarians/vegans who don't like some plant based meats not because it's gross, but because it's too similar to the real thing.

When you switch to plant-based, in time your tastes will change, and you'll no longer miss meat/cheese ... however unlikely it may seem to you now. Maybe because cheese & meat are addictive.

[0] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/autism-and-casein-from-cows...

[1] https://www.peta.org/blog/bacon-apologists-prove-that-meat-i...

[2] https://nutrientrich.com/diet-trapped/is-meat-addictive.html

I am an avid carnivore that hopes to consume only lab grown meat in the future. I've met many people like me. You may be underestimating the size of this group.

That said, like many others in these comments, I'll be waiting at least 10 years to understand the long term effects, if any.

The article says:

> Some hope that lab-grown meat could reduce the carbon footprint of the food industry.

Some hope. What are the facts?

I am sceptical that a lab process can be more efficient than a biological process. And being less efficient would it not use more energy, resources, and release more carbon?

The energy for biological processes is often largely solar, for lab processes often largely from fossil fuels.

I have no data, does anyone?

I also don't have any data, but my gut feeling is the opposite. There's a lot of waste[1] in growing a whole animal (skin, bones, organs, unused muscles, etc), not to mention the time and space required. It seems to me that growing only the "good parts" would be far more efficient, but you feel the opposite. It's impossible to know who's right. I wonder what the efficiency will be like in the future, I think that's the make-or-break factor here.

[1] Waste purely from the perspective of growing human food. I understand many parts of the animal are actually used for other purposes.

> [1] Waste purely from the perspective of growing human food. I understand many parts of the animal are actually used for other purposes.

That's pretty important. If we replace the high margin steak part of the animal with lab grown equivalents, what is the plan for all the things we've learned to make with the rest of the cow?

We'll figure it out. Even in the most optimistic case, it's not like it's going to be a lightswitch where all food animals suddenly disappear overnight.

Animals do a lot of stuff (and have a lot of parts) which are not necessary when producing a steak or ground meat.

Will use more GRID energy, but require significantly less arable land per unit. (And thus probably less fossil fuels, because agriculture uses a lot).

> Animals do a lot of stuff (and have a lot of parts) which are not necessary when producing a steak or ground meat.

Useful parts, which will have to be replaced right along with replacing the profitable steak parts.

Aren't most of those parts only 'useful' because they are a cheap byproduct of steak production?

An obvious difference is that animals require extraordinary amounts of land to live on and lots of food that needs land to be planted on which necessitates a very significant amount of deforestation, something that will not be needed for a lab

> Producing meat in the lab “will never be done with anything remotely like the economics you need for food,” Pat Brown, founder of the plant-based meat company Impossible Foods, told the Post last year.

Whether correct or not, this kind of reporting always seems silly to me. You're not interviewing an impartial expert on the subject, you're getting a quote from a direct competitor. Of course, they're going to say something along these lines. This important nuance will be lost on most readers.

> The cost of lab-grown meat will likely be several times that of regular meat, according to Wired. Producing meat in the lab “will never be done with anything remotely like the economics you need for food,” Pat Brown, founder of the plant-based meat company Impossible Foods, told the Post last year.

Obviously he isn't an objective observer but I wonder what the argument is to back up the claim that it "will never be done with anything remotely like the economics you need for food".

'Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons' moment

If someone cloned some mammoth or giant sloth cells and grew them, I'd be interested in tasting what my prehistoric ancestors got to eat.

I'm not sure muscles that haven't been "used" will taste the same as flesh that is grown and hasn't been out walking around. The texture is sure to be different.

Isn't that a point against the whole concept, and not in particular against specific options like mammoth or giant sloth, which you replied to?

I think their point is that if a slaughtered animal is necessary for correct taste, the dream of tasting a mammoth won’t be fully realized by this technology.

But that would also apply to the current topic of chicken.

There is no shortage of slaughtered chickens for the curious person to taste.

Right, but we don't even know if their hypothetical concern is relevant yet. The comment could well have been "will this product taste the same as normal chicken?" as a top-level comment on this post. Instead it's "in the hypothetical case that this doesn't taste the same as normal chicken, which we don't know yet, then neither will mammoth or giant sloth taste the same as their ancient walking versions".

The charitable interpretation would be the on-topic one.

  > > > FDA: First-generation cultured meat is not illegal.
  > > I’m excited to taste mammoth!
  > This technology is still too young for that.

Having read a bit about the topic, the chemical profile of slaughtered animals includes some changes due to the stress and fear that the animal's experience just prior to being killed, like increased cortisol levels.

Meat from stressed animals will be "tough, tasteless, and high in pH, and will go bad quicker than unstressed meat." (From: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-scared-animals-tas...)

If you've read about factory farms that most meat comes from, it's a stressful environment.

On the other hand, lab-grown meat sounds would be zero-stress.

Unfortunately I don't think that's possible because of the relatively short half-life of DNA.

Is there some resource detailing just how thorough the FDA reviews consumption safety? While I doubt this won't pass a long-term test, it'd be interesting to see whether or not food products are tested for long-term effects at different consumption levels, or if they simply test for any immediately concerning issues and constantly watch for illness/health problems that might be attributed to evolving consumption trends.

Here's the company's assessment of why their product is safe: https://www.fda.gov/media/163262/download

And here's the FDA's summary of their findings: https://www.fda.gov/media/163261/download

Look forward to lab-grown burgers and steaks!

Me too. Aside from the environmental improvements, there's some pretty cool stuff they could in theory do with this tech. Making consistent, perfect cuts of meat with little waste. It's early days, but this is pretty promising tech and I'm excited to see where it goes.

Cool: perfect wagyu-level steak cubes

Not so cool: advertisers will subsidize your steak if the marbling looks like their logo

Does it make economic sense to grow wheat, oil and sesame seeds in a lab? Let alone ketchup

If those processes can be refined to be more efficient than they are in nature, then yeah, why wouldn't it?

Wheat has far less value per square meter. Haven't run the math, but generally the higher the value of the good, the more viable growing it indoors is.

Shouldn't need a very large warehouse to grow a meaningful amount of beef. Presumably the lifecycle/turnover on that square footage is much faster too

Safe to eat is not the same thing as healthy.

Further long term nutrition studies required

We have such a poor understanding of nutrition as it applies to health I'm not too eager to call this the silver bullet that others claim it to be. Even Impossible Brands is smart enough not to claim it's products are a healthier alternative.

The safe thing to do for this kind of things is to wait for others to consume it in mass first.

It is not like there is a pressure for you to eat lab grown meats.

There's always some politician willing to do anything for a Creutzfel Jacob equivalent...

https://youtu.be/QobuvWX_Grc

John Selwyn Gummer (twat) "is noted for delaying a ban on beef in 1989, and for the way he attempted to feed a hamburger to his four-year-old daughter Cordelia at the height of the BSE panic in 1990, though his daughter did not eat it as it was too "hot" and she was full."

> It is not like there is a pressure for you to eat lab grown meats.

Oh, just you wait.

So far us guinea pigs seem to be pretty safe from vague concerns around, say, GMOs. I'm pretty open to specific concerns about lab-grown meat, but until then I'm happy to take calculated risks on many things in life.

I'm happy that someone else is willing to go first. It's a win win.

I think the focus should be on how to improve animal lives as much as possible, exposing bad players in the industry, and reducing carbon emissions from animal husbandry. That's the practical solution now which would have the largest effect. If lab grown meat becomes viable in 10 years that is fantastic, but we need to focus on more realistic action now.

Are the companies getting costs under control? I remember reading an article last year [1] about how the cost curve isn't looking favorable.

1: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...

Getting costs down often requires preparing for mass production, prior to this, mass production was not viable, this is the necessary next step.

Oh sure, but the article indicates that even at scale there will be incredible challenges due to the cleanliness standards required, for example. I don't take that one article as gospel, but it seemed pretty damning and well-researched. I'd love to see a rebuttal to it.

Am I ignorant or would it be hugely inefficient to grow meat in a lab energy wise?

I understand the whole methane issue but using up non renewable energy sources to make something that could be done with renewable resources seems a little silly unless the plan is to do this with renewables.

Or is this about the ethics of consuming meat?

> I understand the whole methane issue but using up non renewable energy sources to make something that could be done with renewable resources seems a little silly unless the plan is to do this with renewables.

The source of power to the lab feels like a separate issue. It would be a very intense stance to take that having your city grid on non-renewable resources means any product made in that city is bad for the environment!

Besides which, beef production uses the same power sources as everywhere else (heat, light, transportation, etc.) so it wouldn't be any different just because they feed the cows plant matter.

Or maybe I've misunderstood?

> The source of power to the lab feels like a separate issue. It would be a very intense stance to take that having your city grid on non-renewable resources means any product made in that city is bad for the environment!

That's not what I'm proposing. Nature is very efficient so I imagine the energy that it takes to create a pound of flesh naturally (with grass) is alot less than that to required to do it in the lab.

From a little googling and back of the envelope calculations I just did it turns out methane is really that bad for global warming. At least in the short term.

To produce a cow worth of fake meat you would have to displace more than 16 tons of C02 before it becomes a less efficient way to produce meat from a global warming perspective. This assumes the cow has been raised using ancient methods. However this is in the short term. C02 lasts longer in the atmosphere.

I am wondering how big of an impact on meat quality have viruses/parasites the animal has to overcome? Would they lead to more high-quality proteins/substances than otherwise? Or is it the other way round? Will we need to simulate those pathogens in the lab to improve quality?

Fine by me, but for the love of god, label it. Label everything. Stop bending to the will of every shady food manufacturer and give some transparency to the human beings actually consuming these substances.

COVID and books like “bottle of lies” and other recent incidents have unfortunately undermined the public’s trust in the FDA. I doubt the public is going to believe them for a long time to come

As far as I can tell, FDA did not say "Lab-Grown Meat is Safe to Eat." Actual statement:

The FDA’s approach to regulating products derived from cultured animal cells involves a thorough pre-market consultation process. While this is not considered an approval process, it concludes when all questions relevant to the consultation are resolved. A transition from the FDA to USDA-FSIS oversight will take place during the cell harvest stage. USDA-FSIS will oversee the post-harvest processing and labeling of human food products derived from the cells of livestock and poultry. This closely coordinated regulatory approach will ensure that cell-cultured products derived from the cell lines of livestock and poultry meet federal regulations and are accurately labeled.

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-spur...

https://www.fda.gov/food/domestic-interagency-agreements-foo...

I find it funny the photo is of chicken nuggets. A breaded, fried food that makes me think of the worst kinds of meat to eat and the easiest way to hide taste and texture.

I'm hoping this is a good thing but what are the industrial costs? What kind of raw materials are being used to make the lab equipment? How much electricity? Has the math been done or is it just comparing current numbers of livestock versus no livestock.

It's concerning to me how long the time horizon of public science is becoming. There is little scientific consensus on the topic of laboratory grown mass nutrient bioavailability. There is little consensus on the mid-long term effects that this has on intestinal flora.

I'm inclined to believe that the FDA is making statements on authority at this point.

The many "Lab meat still has a long way to go" comments here haven't been following the space. Please check out wildtypefoods.com for an example of "lab" grown salmon that you can eat right now. There are other startups doing the same, google them up.

Eagerly anticipating cultured sashimi v0.1 myself but it’s not wrong that this is still an expensive, rudimentary approximation of slaughtered meat products. We’ll get there—for a sustainable planet we have to—but the road is long and we are indeed at the rough beginning.

A good summary of the actual contents of the FDA’s report:

https://read.whatever.social/elliotswartz/status/15972312726... (Nitter view)

There's also this:

"Flavour enhancers [developed using] aborted fetal tissue are being eaten without the knowledge of consumers. Amounts of these flavour enhancers used in food products are below a certain threshold, so they don't need to be reported or safety-tested by the FDA."

This technology is being used to develop plant-based meats. Plus, look at the ingredients used, way too much soy, and lots of other suspicious things.

https://twitter.com/Babygravy9/status/1597242169299210241

But have they worked out the economics yet? I thought it was borderline impossible with current technology to create lab grown meat that didn't rely on precursors that made it more expensive than the real thing?

Not to mention the risk of contamination wrecking entire batches. This technology doesn't scale well, because in order to scale it up to be economically feasible, they also increase the likelihood of contamination, which destroys the entire batch.

Lab Grown meat / food is an area I am incredibly bullish on. I need to find a good way to invest and put my money where my mouth is. I imagine a future where we are able to grow large amounts of meat (fish, beef, chicken, etc) near cities where we are drastically reducing the environmental effects. This will also be a huge boon for seafood as fishing is really destroying the ocean. With economies of scale, I think we will get to the point in say 50 years where the luxury option is "real" beef or "real" fish but we have meat at the price point of rice.

I am curious what credibility FDA has so that people listen to what they say? Did anybody actually reviewed their methodology on making these assessments? How do they determine that it’s safe to eat?

Heavily processed food is suspected of being responsible for a variety of health ailments. Is there a reason to presume lab-meat would be healthy, vs just as bad as other processed foods?

As someone who is perfectly content with the massive variety of non-meat food out there - discovering more all the time - it is amusing to see all the hoops people are jumping to make lab grown meat a reality.

Maybe in the not too distant future, meat from slaughter will be banned, lab-grown meat will be the only legal source, and then marketed as an essential source of nutrition by every outlet that stands to gain from the consumption of meat.

Sometimes the best way to not lose is to not play at all.

Recently there were news articles of how leprosy bacteria can repair diseased organs to perfect health, and then infect it.

I wonder if leprosy could be used in the lab grown meat industry to make it grow better.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2346967-leprosy-bacteri...

I hope this propagates to the EU if it's truly safe. It's been more than a decade and I still miss meat when the weather gets cold.

Lab grown? That's beyond impossible.

Good pun, I appreciated it.

Excellent article explaining why lab-grown meat will never scale: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...

> David Humbird, the UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who spent over two years researching the report, found that the cell-culture process will be plagued by extreme, intractable technical challenges at food scale. In an extensive series of interviews with The Counter, he said it was “hard to find an angle that wasn’t a ludicrous dead end.”

> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.

> “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”

I have a theory that the hype surrounding cellular ag is driven by the private investment world's obsession with scale. Investors hear a founder say "we can disrupt the food industry but we just need to SCALE", "we need a massive deal size, and then we'll sort out the economies", "look how sexy and different our technology is"

It seems more accurate to say that the business model is contingent on a number of breakthroughs that may never occur. It's not hard to see how the development of a more (and, let's say, sufficiently) economical process would retroactively justify all the capital invested and press generated up to that point, especially if it can put an end to the ecological disaster and permanent superholocaust that is the modern meat industry.

As far as I am aware, a cow grown for beef in the USA does not suffer. It is shot in the head one day, completely unaware of anything. There is no suffering necessarily involved in raising animals for meat.

We should rather spend resources on improving animal husbandry and reintroducing wild ruminants where possible.

I don't want meat from a lab, I want it from healthy animals either wild or raised on a farm in good conditions.

Two forms of meat, the worst first:

(1) Industrial factory farmed meat, fed with crops like alfalfa/soy/corn, where the animals are injected with prophylactic antibiotics (because cramped conditions cause disease outbreaks, also a growth enhancer) and growth hormones, and/or genetically modified to promote gigantism (both applications tending to increase disease susceptibility, so more antibiotics). The meat is then processed in meatpacking production lines (highly susceptible to cross contamination, with a consumer portion of ground meat containing parts from hundreds of animals) - hey, why not gamma-irradiate it to kill off bacteria and viruses? Lots of animal torture and needless suffering to top it all off. Fairly cheap end product, however. Note this production system is not a strictly American phenomenon - Mexico's pork-export factories are the same, and there's China's 'Pig Skyscraper'

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/25/chinas-2...

(2) Essentially nomadic-style animal herding on grassland. This is the traditional method of raising animals - they mostly eat grass, or other kinds of forage, although growing crops for fodder (without use of modern pesticides and herbicides) is often part of the picture. Typical species are cows, sheep and goats. Historically, pigs were raised this way as well (more like wild boars). Chickens can be raised this way, as well. See also kobe beef cattle in Japan. The main issue is this method is low yield and high cost, i.e. the meat is expensive (but healthy, and animal suffering is very minimal, i.e. they lead decent lives up to the point of a quick slaughter). For example:

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2021/10/5ca39ec007e4-feat...

I have little patience with vegans who refuse to differentiate between these two types of meat production on ethical grounds. However if everything moves to the latter ethical and healthy production system, meat will be more expensive and less of a 'daily staple' - and there's nothing wrong with that dietary switch, it's better for everyone.

As far as lab-grown meat, that'll probably be even more expensive than ethically-farmed meat, and likely use even more resources (electricity for maintaining the vats at precise temperatures, specialized nutrient feedstocks, etc.), so I'm not sure what the point is.

I suspect the pitch would be that in a possible future with sufficient scale, and improvements to process and efficiency, that you would be able to replace the category 1 meat entirely with lab grown meat, allowing folks to maintain their meat consumption at low cost without the horrors of massive scale meat production.

I've got no idea if that's plausible or not.

Either way I'd vastly prefer that we regulate (and stop subsidizing) animal farming to the point that all meat basically falls into category 2.

> I have little patience with vegans who refuse to differentiate between these two types of meat production on ethical grounds. However if everything moves to the latter ethical and healthy production system, meat will be more expensive and less of a 'daily staple' - and there's nothing wrong with that dietary switch, it's better for everyone.

As a vegan, myself and most/all of my friends would agree that some hunting is good. For example, where I am deer need to be hunted, b/c humans replaced their natural predators and they are overpopulated, causing issues such as disease etc..

Personally I do not want to be the one hunting deer, but I have no issue with it.

Factory farming is a completely other level from hunting.

If we were only allowed to eat meat we personally caught from wild animals... well, yeah, that'd probably be pretty solid...

The problem is even "ethical" farming is pretty rough on animals and rough on the environment. It isn't "natural" at all, even if you are putting them in a field outside rather than crammed into a barn.

Curious how this will affect the gut microbiome. That's my biggest concern with this.

And no, this concern doesn't mean I'm fine with cows being pumped with growth hormones and antibiotics.

Hard pass. Science magically lost its replication crisis after covid and robot cars kill people so Asimovs laws dont apply.

Eating this will probably turn be into a VAT mutant.

My questions are will vegans or vegetarians eat this? Why or why not? Also what about people that hold cows sacred? Will they be able to eat this? Why or why not?

I'm mostly vegetarian; I'll eat meat once or twice a week. If the price, taste, texture and nutritional convenience are similar, and it's safe to eat, I'd be very happy to replace "natural" meat with this. Don't see why not!

In terms of veganism. Some will, some won't. It depends. Some vegans will be against any suffering and might consider the harvesting of cells from the progenitor animal. Others may be against this due to a lack of consent (from the animal). Others might consider the initial harvesting as harmless, e.g. the cells/DNA might have naturally shed. There's quite a spectrum of vegans out there.

I'm vegetarian because of the carbon cost of most meats, especially beef. If lab-grown beef's carbon cost is drastically lower than animal-grown beef, I'd be thrilled to start eating burgers again.

The initial product is chicken meat, not cow, so sacredness of cows isn't super relevant yet. But once we get there, I assume that the feelings on the subject of abortion for those people would be relevant. If you view an embryo as a person, then you might view petri dish muscle as a cow.

As a vegetarian, I wouldn't incorporate this into my grocery shopping, but absolutely would give it a shot at restaurants. Being vegetarian while eating out tends to be more inconvenient, especially if I'm with other people and don't get to provide much input into where we're going.

Do they bleach the nuggets for hygiene, as they do to real chickens? And what about the taste? There is nothing better than a good roasted Bresse chicken :)

Safe yes, but also bland and with no texture. It needs more umami flavour and fibrous texture. They should mix it with Marmite and celery.

My understand is the meatless substitutes are chock full of these additives to try to nail the flavor. I’m sure lab grown protein product will need the same treatment.

IMO it’s a nutritional sacrifice in order to avoid eating animal product, not a particularly “healthy” alternative.

All I know is the beyond meat burger I tried was mushy and bland. Quorn's a lot better.

10-50 Years later: FDA Says Lab-Grown Meat is responsible for X,Y and Z... Asks consumers to switch to a more natural alternative.

You jest, but when there is big companies poised to make big bucks from fake meat, it is completely naive to assume they have our interests and those of the planets in mind. History has shown the opposite time and time again.

The family-owned organic farm I buy my groceries from isn't Unilever, Nestlé nor has venture capitals expecting it to turn a massive profit.

Call me a selfish asshole, but I will keep choosing organically grown food from living beings (meat or vegetables) for my health. Y'all can eat your lab burgers.

Going to be great to see people make up reasons not to eat this, when they are fine with all the crap that goes into a cow to keep it healthy and alive long enough to slaughter. Nevermind the crazy chemicals used for milk processing!

You may think, oh - we've been eating that for a while, right? No, not really. It's just about as new as obesity and other modern epidemics we've been dealing with ...

> when they are fine with all the crap that goes into a cow to keep it healthy and alive long enough to slaughter

What, like grass and sugar beet pulp?

I think the concern is feeding them other cows, growth hormones, and antibiotics to make them put weight on faster.

Yeah, that's illegal though and if you do that you cannot send your cattle for slaughter.

I keep getting "unrulymedia.com" certificate errors when visiting the page.

I'm a little worried about nutrition. I'm sure lab grown meat has plenty of protein but what about all the other micro-nutrients?

I'm talking about the spectrum of compounds that inevitably find their way into the muscle tissue from real animals digesting real food.

Not to mention healthy fats. Protein is way over valued.

How do you figure that protein is over valued? In my experience most foods people eat are fairly low in protein.

Great stuff, hope they found time for a longitudinal study as well!

I would hope so.

I just want to eat actual cow meat that doesn't require a financing plan. I don't care about all this not-meat. They are not equal, in my eyes.

I just want to eat actual cow meat that doesn't involve any suffering.

Producers go through not insignificant effort to reduce and eliminate the stress of slaughter on meat animals. Suffering results in stress which results in poor quality meat (tasteless and tough), and millions of dollars worth of meat is tossed out annually due to pre-slaughter stress.

vegetarians that don't meat because of animal cruelty : will you eat lab grown meat?

Nope, it's been so long that I'm indifferent to the taste of flesh and have no desire to eat it. I prefer my own vegan cooking over almost anything else.

People differ, but I would (occasionally). I'm mostly vegan for about 10 years now. I've been looking forward to this technology because it will result in many meat eaters changing their eating habits - reducing the number of animals suffering.

Probably not. I'm not the strictest vegetarian (I'll sometimes treat myself to oysters, and will eat meat if it's the only reasonable thing available at a restaurant or dinner party), and at this point in my life, I just plain prefer foods based around vegetables, beans, and grains: I find it's easier, safer, and cheaper to prepare at home, and generally tastes better (to my palate, at least).

Probably not, but I'm not morally against it or anything. I just don't see why I would eat it.

In theory, I don't see any reason not to. In practice, it depends on a million things.

Why "meat"? Why not a new name?

Giving a product name that is defined for opposite is wired marketing.

If you read the FDA’s memo you’ll see they didn’t call it meat.

https://www.fda.gov/media/163261/download

Labeling is a separate issue from whether it’s edible.

... but is it effective?

This is great news!

The FDA use to say cigarettes were not hazerdous to your health.

Just say'n.

Yeah, no. Highly processed foods is a no go for me.

What do you mean by highly processed in this context?

"Processed" is such a meaningless word in this context. A raw carrot put into a food blender is "processed" too.

It conveys nothing about the health or quality of the food

but are they conscious?

The FDA says all kinds of things

doubt.

Is it still heavily soy based?

I for one welcome our lab grown meat overlords.

I'd feel safer if some lab grown meat told me the FDA says I can eat their staff.

Hopefully by the time it's mainstream I'll own my own micro farm, raise my own chickens and grow my own veggies

This world is becoming more dystopian by the minute

The lobby must be paying good money

It's like with pesticide, "residue is safe to eat people, trust!"

> ...the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will need to inspect the company’s production facilities and product

While I'm not undercutting the work that the USDA places into regulating consumer safety in the food supply chain, isn't it crazy to think that lab-grown meats are probably going to be under higher scrutiny from a food safety perspective than farm grown and butchered meats?

> isn't it crazy

no, it's not

Is it really higher scrutiny, or the same scrutiny USDA applies to farm-grown/butchered meats?

I think so, yeah. It isn't crazy b.c that is how lobbying works in the US, but it is crazy b.c you'd expect a lab to be better defacto than a slaughterhouse.

>you'd expect a lab to be better defacto than a slaughterhouse

That worked well in Wuhan

Lately going on HN is like walking into my local gun shop ...

I've yet to see a satisfying solution to the hyperpolarization of previously neutral spaces. HN is the gold standard in moderation IMO but still isn't immune.

I don't know what the solution is, but some communities I'm a member of react aggressively towards it. That seems to work.

What reason do you theorize the USDA wasn't present in Wuhan?

Nah, considering one has well understood risks and has been practiced for thousands of years, while the other approach is brand new, I think it's reasonable. It can also be a selling point for lab-grown meat, the fact that it is safer and free of bacteria.

Our modern way of raising animals for slaughter is just that - modern. Not thousands of years. We have not been pumping steroids into the meat we eat for thousands of years.

We give our food substances that fatten them up as quickly as possible, and we're surprised we're getting fat.

We give our food water, but it doesn't quench our thirst. We give our food grass, but it doesn't tear up our teeth. Our food has poop in it, but doesn't taste of poop. Is there any evidence that steroids which are digested by a cow linger in its body as an active substance for years, in a large enough quantity to have a steroid effect after going through another creature's digestive system?

Isn't obesity rather well explained by cheap easily available food, carb heavy diet and increasingly sedentary lifestyle?

Otherwise, cows grow to much bigger than people, much quicker than people do. Why don't their natural growth hormones affect us in the same way?

From a certain point of view lab grown meat is a high risk yolo solution.

Animals have a highly effective immune system pumping out hunter killer nano bots to actively fight off invasive microorganisms, lab grown meat doesn’t. Similarly it’s far easier to tell of an animal is extremely infected.

> lab grown meat doesn’t

I'm so not a biologist, so: why would that be harder than also lab growing the bit of their bodies which makes the various immune cells?

Extremely unimaginably harder to produce to working immune system in a lab alongside your cell culture soup you want to market as “meat”.

Like, an immune system needs to be trained, needs to be maintained, needs plumbing, needs waste removal…

Kinda like the difference between playing catch in the backyard and launching rockets to outer space?

Plus all that extra stuff is almost certainly not tasty.

If anything, it seems it would be easier to monitor lab-grown meats for chemical byproducts of harmful microorganisms.

That assumes quite a bit, noticing a cow died is dead simple. Building, validating, using, and monitoring a system to detect harmful byproducts has a rather high threshold by comparison.

isn't it crazy to think that lab-grown meats are probably going to be under higher scrutiny from a food safety perspective than farm grown and butchered meats?

Will they be? There's quite a long list of information about slaughter inspection just meant for regular people to understand. I'm sure the technical documentation goes into quite a bit of scrutiny. https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and...

Even if lab grown meats do end up being more highly scrutinized, it's not crazy to look more closely at a brand new process than one has been exercised for over a hundred years (the Federal Meat Inspection Act is from 1906).

Cows have an immune system, labs don't.

That's a pretty big problem with lab-grown meat. Bacteria are much better at reproducing quickly than cells of complex organisms like animals. So if your reactor is not perfectly clean, you are going to grow bacteria instead of meat. The reason live animals (including us) don't get overwhelmed by bacteria is because they have all sorts of defenses, most importantly, an immune system.

Unless labs have something equivalent in, they will have to be under extreme scrutiny.

At this point I can't say I trust a single thing the US government tells me.

Sorry, you lost me these last almost 3 years. Good luck getting me to buy back in. Maybe next lifetime. At least I won't do the suddenly dance, which is getting more and more common.

You might argue that people will just eat whatever because they don't care what's in it, but there are definitely boundaries for that in some societies.

Case in point, bugs are safe to eat, but people in some cultures just can't even imagine doing so because... bugs! McDonald's Chitin McBuggits will never be a thing.

Bugs carry parasites. Lots and lots of parasites. And parasite eggs. Cultures that eat insects also have high rates of parasitic infections.

Do you have a source for statements about getting parasites from eating cooked insects?

Cows and pigs are more closely related to humans than insects are and their parasites are more likely to be able to cross the species barrier than an insect parasite. That is why we generally cook meat to kill parasites.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6613697/

To summarize, we don't know the exact impact cooking would have on reducing the risk (the studies haven't been performed), but the risk is to the tune of ~30% of the insects tested from insect farms were contaminated with parasites that are dangerous to humans.

FYI I wasn't posting about how good bugs are, I was posting about the negative impression that vat-raised meat can have, which is a bit like the negative impression about bugs.

Your own post is a bit of an example of reactionary posts about foods that somehow "disgust" others with opinion sometimes disguised as research showing all kinds of "problems".

I was implying that there's a reason why people have a revulsion to eating bugs. It's rational. It's not just "cultural squeamishness". I should have explicitly stated my intent.

The FDA also states that regular meat is safe to eat, despite it being long proven to cause all types of diseases from cancer to diabetes. I’ll pass.

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