The Struggle to Make Lab-Grown Meat
wsj.com
wsj.com
> 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.”
edit: to clarify, food for me is equal to traditions, know-hows, local, &c. not three dudes in hazmat suits populating a 60000 gallon tank of chicken soup. If you want cheap as fuck meat and have the choice between modern animal farming and that then by all means go for that. It just doesn't sit right with me.
It's so disconnected to everything I associate with good food, there already are alternatives, as nutritious, getting cheaper by the day, made from real thing we can grow with minimal post processing.
Very weird thing to hear from someone who claims to be a vegetarian.
I can brew my own beer in my own home.
Can I make lab-grown meat in my own home?
We've also been educated to buy and prepare our own meals from the most natural/unprocessed ingredients as possible and avoid heavily industrialized/preprocess ingredients for health reasons.
Lab grown meat is the opposite of both of that.
I am just playing Devil's advocate here. I understand the appeal and potential environmental benefits as well.
This is partly the fault of Sci-fi, bio-engineering is rarely shown as a positive in TV and Film.
This will be mostly solved with time, eventually it may become economically unviable to buy "field meat" (not sure what the term will be), and it will become a lot more accepted when they see the people around them enjoying it without severe consequences.
"Icky" is ignorance.
That’s why there are laws to keep them from seeing it. Which might be why so many HNers think animals grow up in sunshine and rainbows and it’s the sterile lab that's icky.
I'm vegetarian for environmental reasons, not ethical. Nothing wrong with eating a chicken or a pig who had a good life on an open field for me
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-est...
No kidding. They could start by using a single (and known) definition for "factory farmed".
Unless you are in the business of refining that data, this study is useless.
Except that this phrase doesn't mean anything.
And that is only if you stay within the reasonable people. Almost everybody with an impulsion to talk about this subject uses unreasonable definitions. How is a single name that applies to all that still meaningful?
Because this is HN, where someone is sure to nitpick and/or take my next statement to logical extremes, I must be very careful about how I word this. I will regret it, but here I go:
I like eating chicken. I know lots of tasty recipes. I understand this involves killing the animal. Yes, I don't do it myself, but I could if I wanted -- I'm not squeamish. But factory chicken make me uneasy, it seems well past the inhumane line, almost like an extermination camp for chicken. I think free range chicken are happier, for whatever degree of "happiness" their tiny bird brains can understand. I like thinking that the chicken I eat lived a happy if short life trampling on actual grass and all that "breeze in their feathers" stuff. Yes, in the end it still involves killing them, but I think it's way better.
1) If I avoid all meat I cannot be held ethically accountable for it's provenance when, for example, a company's marketing department lies to you or the FDA does not sufficiently protect certain terms of art like "free range" which imply a lack of cruelty that wouldn't pass muster if I saw the treatment with my own eyes
2) If I am vegetarian, I will support vegetarian options, and I create support for companies and businesses that are unambiguously dedicated to reducing cruelty/suffering
essentially all animals raised for slaughter in the US are factory farmed
So if you are vegetarian for environmental reasons and had to eat a chicken, you should go with the battery-farmed one.
You would go with the (arguably mythical) happy chicken if you were vegetarian for moral reasons.
They're free to move about at least in their "bay" and have the company of other hens that can wander about too. Sure, they don't get the marketing feelgood "sun on their backs and wind in their feathers", but they also don't get raptors, foxes, or rats.
You can get rescue hens and they're just about savvy enough to figure out - after you've lost one or two - that predators are a thing, and you'll get an egg every couple of days per hen. They'll eat all the bugs in your garden (and most of the herbs, and the tops of your carrots) and shit everywhere.
> feed (less energy expended from movement)
Less muscles, more disease, worse health, lifespan of 4 weeks, &c.
Given the same amount of money, I'm assuming they mean buy less chicken (but from non-factory sources) and spend the remainder on other foods with less environmental impact.
Why vegetarian then? It's easy enough to buy meat that was raised on a local farm. Get a chest freezer, reach out to a local 4H club, and buy the whole animal. They'll butcher and vac-seal it for you. You could buy some kid's highschool project.
I live an hour from SF and I get much of my meat this way. It's surprisingly inexpensive. There are agricultural communities close enough to every urban environment to make it worth the drive.
I think we’re going backwards by trying to replace the natural bio reactor of the body with steal and piping. It’s all too labour intensive. To make this work we’ll need to genetically engineer an animal that has only the parts we’re interested in. Including skin to replace the steel bio reactors.
Cows due to generations of selective breeding are already remarkably close to this.
We also have to pasteurize it. Or we don't, and germs from cows are hundreds of times more likely to make us sick, despite generations of selective breeding.
I understand you’re saying the challenges lab grown meat faces arent insurmountable, but short of some outside influence (statutory interference?) I don’t see how it can compete with traditional cattle on the cost perspective
At 380 ppm anything that doesn't either directly alter reflectivity of the atmosphere or drastically lower CO2 in the atmosphere is just not going to work.
But you're not growing milk in those facilities, only storing and processing it. That's an important distinction, because it means with milk it's totally fine to deal with those "single germs" with long-understood sterilization techniques.
If you try to sterilize your "lab grown meat" cultures to deal with the germs, you're going to destroy your "meat" too.
Once you have it.
> The problem is keeping it sterile while it's growing/brewing.
This is what I was talking about.
> It can be done, as has been with breweries, but it is os not an easy task.
I think growing meat in a vat is only superficially similar to brewing beer.
To fix this it is processed in food factories that you can describe as squeaky clean massive installations of ceramic tiles and shining steel.
I’m not talking about cow milk
Raw milk is generally better tolerated than homogenized/pasteurized milk. However, in the early 1900s, as supply chains lengthened and the travel time for largely un-refrigerated milk from cow to table increased to days, we found that milk was a primary source of food-borne infections. The absolute risk was still low, but the relative risk was high. Thus, pasteurization became common and in most places, mandatory.
People have drunk raw milk for millennia and have not suffered from hormone-related effects..including people on dairy-centric diets. If you're talking specifically about rbGH, it's very easy to find milk free of it, which I would recommend anyway - I'd hazard a guess that's more common. It’s disputed that it has any ill effects, but I’m totally on board with not risking it.
Everything else aside, powerlifters aren’t recommending crazy diets like gallon-of-milk-a-day (GOMAD) and bodybuilders aren’t paying out the nose for human breast milk because milk has estrogenizing effects.
They ended up building a kind of exploded steel cow, all pipes and vats and such. It seems we are heading in this direction.
I have often wondered what it would be like to start with a cow, then engineer it to be anencephalic, then start paring away "features" or moving them around. Skip the legs, but do have networks of heart-like cells providing a contractile rhythm for the muscles, and so on.
Frank-Lin takes industrial ethanol, city water, and flavoring, and makes a large number of alcohol-based products. They make over a thousand brands, but there are only a hundred or so different recipes, they admit. Each brand has its own label, and many have their own bottles. A few years back, they moved to Fairfield, CA, to be next to the bottle factory.
The Skyy Vodka article was updated accordingly. Skyy marketing was not happy.
A lot of vegetarianism is cloaked aesthetics.
What I notice though is that people get attached to their diets and act offended when you don't eat something that they consider to be some core part of their life style(barbeque, steak, meaty burritos, sushi, vegan fake meat). Some people can and do get butt-hurt when they find out I don't eat meat and then want to play "gotcha" reindeer games.
Not a vegetarian FWIW.
I don't want to live in a future in which all we have left is your 6x6cm of Google chicken and your 2x6 Amazon bacon stripe
By having a bit less of mass scale animal abusing factories ? I fail to see the correlation
Problem is, there was never that many of us. Hell, for most of human history there was less than 1/8 of us now.
The future is going to be somewhat cyberpunk because generations before us already made some choices that we have to live with now.
Never has been as many obese people nor food waste. We can and should eat less anyways
We're clearly not producing for sustenance, but for profit
Yeah, but 20% less, not a quarter of what we do now, because we obviously wouldn't survive on that.
The food waste is because food's extremely cheap. The fix is to make it expensive.
Something like this:
Whereas alternatives can be made at home from raw ingredients and minimum processing, today, cheaper than meat, just as nutritious, without the need of anything more technological than a stove
This is due to the fact that at this stage, this meat is academia-driven and not marketing-driven.
There's not much less things that I care about when talking about food. I care about taste, texture, nutritional value, availability of ingredients or ease of preparation. If some Italian-Mexican-Japanese fusion scores better on that then I'll very happily eat it too.
Efficiency is all that matters if resource utilisation is your metric.
Supermarkets effectively give the meat away for free because quite often farmers are locked into contracts that end up paying less than cost.
Don't buy any of your food from supermarkets.
You'd probably never drink coffee or beer again if you saw how it was made. Come to think of it, you'd probably never eat any kind of processed food if hygiene is unacceptable.
There are many, many reasons to be ethically-motivated but not go all the way to 100% veganism. Some of them include:
* Having beliefs that are more socially compatible and being able to attend a wide spectrum of social events and enjoy them with others allows one to exert greater influence on others (especially if you believe that e.g. 10 people reducing meat intake by 25% is better than 1 person reducing by 100%). There's a good chance that hard vegans don't get invited to a lot of things, and are effectively locked out of a lot of opportunities to exert influence.
* If you are pragmatic and believe the world is highly unlikely to stop eating meat altogether but can reduce meat intake to a point where peoples' appetites are satisfied but factory farming isn't necessary
* If your ethical reasons are largely carbon-motivated, in which case going 90% vegan (time-wise OR portion-wise) is scientifically, mathematically, close enough to 100% that environmental concerns become a non-issue
* If your body's physiology cannot cope with a vegan diet but can cope with a 90% vegan diet
There are lots of other reasons, and while veganism is respectable, I disagree that black-and-white thinking is the only way to approach ethics.
It's no more relevant than someone who designs PC cases chiming in on chip architecture whilst leaning on the fact they have something to do with computers in an abstract way, somehow giving their opinion credence.
It's a misdirection to prop up this idea that lab-grown meat is wrong because it's unnatural and they're a vegetarian. Well, cancer treatments are unnatural, sterile and hygienic hospitals too, as are most things in life. Is the world better off for medical progress even though Christian Scientists et al who hold no real medical qualifications disagree? Yup.
This puritanical angle is bizarre, and doesn't make the point he thinks it does, whilst giving others who aren't vegans or vegetarians a pithy soundbite of "this vegetarian wouldn't even eat this shit", which once it's been repeated a few times, very quickly becomes "vegan".
There's a subreddit that even makes fun of the "As an X, I dislike Thing Y that I'm supposed to like, now upvote me fellow Thing Y haters!" device.
It just looks like steak.
Food I already eat is produced in factories, including things like Quorn or Beyond Meat, and I don't find it off-putting whatsoever. For health reasons, I try to ensure the majority of my diet is home cooked plant-based whole foods, but that's only because the current evidence is diets based on "ultra processed food" are harmful. However, it doesn't seem to be at all clear yet on what specifically makes processed food diets harmful in aggregate, so I can't currently make an educated decision on whether one type of processed food is healthier than another. I just treat anything processed as junk food to be enjoyed occasionally, and the same would be true for me if we had viable lab grown meat.
By comparison, I find those occasional tiny maggots in farm-grown strawberries much more off-putting, but strawberries taste so good that I do my best to just focus on the free protein.
I don’t care at all whether the food I eat is “natural”. I don’t even care whether the ingredients are authentic, if there isn’t a health hazard; my reaction to the article’s mention of rodent DNA contamination is “who cares”. So of course I’ve tried plant-based meat alternatives, but found that they don’t taste right, while also being higher-calorie. My layman’s hope is that lab-grown meat will be able to replicate the taste more accurately. I realize that there’s no guarantee it will, even if they do succeed at producing something edible that’s made of animal cells (but has a very different structure). But it might.
Impossible's only problem for me is the price makes it impossible for them to succeed in the market. Their product tastes fine; it's not enough better than $3/lb ground beef for people to pick it.
Those are also full of stainless steel machinery: https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1HETwX5LrK1Rjy1zdq6ynnpXax/225...
1) If you're going through so much time and expense to simulate meat, why not just change your diet to something more akin to "primary sources" - i.e. vegetables, or other food that is better than meat in your desired criteria (land use, water use, etc)? That is more naturally grown and more appealing?
2) By the time you spend so much money/energy/biochemical processes to simulate the real meat, is what you get just as energy intensive/unhealthy as the original?
I’m not sure I see what’s more appealing about how animals are raised and slaughtered and processed for consumption. It’s top to bottom an inhumane industrialized process replete with torture, filth, antibiotics, radiation, disease, and people in hazmat suits and steel vats (which strangely people find disturbing). It’s not like some sort of pastoral children’s story where sally the pig has a grand life and at the end of it is gently, if undescribed way, becomes a wonderful pork chop for family dinner.
I’d rather eat scientifically produced animal matter (SPAM) because :
1) I know the meat isn’t capable of suffering
2) I know the meat is grown in highly controlled circumstances
3) by having a centralized lab regulators can easily inspect end to end food quality and handling
4) by being sterile end to end I know when I get it I won’t contract salmonella, ecoli, trichinoses, etc
5) if it made it through to my table the economics of the market and all the “ewww science” and appeal to nature fallacy hurdles means it’ll taste really really good.
Im not arguing eating more vegetables isn’t a good idea. But that argument exists regardless of SPAM, and hasn’t compelled much of a change in diet. I’d rather not see animals born to suffer than just shake carrots in peoples faces telling them eat veggies and hope they listen.
Not the kind that looks like sludge, but the kind that would be indistinguishable from a beef patty you buy at the store, not least because it would be a more efficient way of producing food at scale.
But also because some of that technology would also eventually be applied to the creation of human organs.
And I'd like to live in a world where the waiting list for an organ transplant is just a few hours for everybody.
I'm not sure that this is true.
I mean, it might be in the sense that the technology for cultivating yeast could be applied to human organs.
But to my knowledge there's not much going on in lab-grown meat that could be applied to producing functioning organ tissue, let alone building the full organ in all its parts and making it compatible with the host.
Ms. Chen said the DNA stemmed from a common medical-research technique that used treated rodent cells to help support the meat cells’ growth early in the cultivation process. The company immediately stopped using that technique, she said.
Can someone explain what this "common medical-research technique" would be? I'm having a hard time understanding how this is passed off as "contamination" when it sounds like the rodent cells were deliberately put in contact with the food being created.
In the case mentioned, rodent feeder cells were likely used to support the growth of chicken cells during the early stages of the cultivation process. The contamination with rodent DNA could have occurred due to the close proximity of the rodent feeder cells to the chicken cells being cultured.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25659081/
That said, having some rodent dna isn’t the same thing as eating rodents or allowing rodents to roll around in the meat or whatever. As long as it’s fit for human consumption, and you’re down with eating scientifically produced animal matter (SPAM), I don’t see an issue tbh.
IMHO, any kind of successful and practical "lab grown meat" would probably look like some kind of engineered "minimal viable animal" (e.g. a chicken without the brain, and maybe missing a few other things, but recognizable as an animal with functioning organ systems).
Or a tumor
So the “minimal organism” here is probably some kind of fast growing meat cell in a relatively sterile environment, alcohol production optional.
"Similar" is not the same. In all those cases you cite, you're using non-animal cells that are very close to wild to modify existing food in relatively minor ways.
If "meat" was bacterial sludge or yeast blocks, it would be a lot more practical to grow in a lab, but it's not. Meat is things like chicken muscle cells, which are not evolved to grow outside the support of a complex organism.
You are missing the key point. Not all "microbial processes" are the same: they can have massively different characteristics. Lab grown meat 1) uses exceedingly fragile microbes and 2) makes extensive modifications to the food (complete transformation). Making beer 3) uses much more robust microbes and 4) makes less extensive modifications to the food (i.e. metabolize a fraction of the carbs into a microbially-toxic substance called alcohol).
If your understanding can't make these significant distinctions, it's too fuzzy to be very good.
From the perspective of human health we can use non mammalian cells for meat such as fish, reptile, or even invertebrates. That greatly changed the risks from things like viral or bacterial infection.
There’s a massive tradeoff in terms of the need for an immune system vs antibiotics vs near perfect sterilization. Avoiding contamination is extremely difficult but if possible solves many problems.
IIRC, none of the issues are specific to beef cells. They're issues with growing animal cells in a bioreactor.
> From the perspective of human health we can use non mammalian cells for meat such as fish, reptile, or even invertebrates. That greatly changed the risks from things like viral or bacterial infection.
Maybe for viral infection, but that would definitely not solve any issues for bacterial infections.
> Avoiding contamination is extremely difficult but if possible solves many problems.
Just like perfectly secure, bug-free code is extremely difficult but if possible solves many problems. But we all know how viable that is (e.g. you can manage it at a small scale at great expensive, but good luck trying it at a large scale).
There’s major differences in growing different cells in a bioreactor. At the extreme end some cell lines are almost as hardy as bacteria.
> bug-free code
Producing some bug free code isn’t difficult, always producing bug free code is impossible. Similarly, a sterilization first approach is likely to occasionally fail but not every batch would fail.
Also, Beer is more about eating the byproduct used by these cells to minimize competition. Cheeses have more variety with some using use aromatic molds or bacterial enzymes, but others just use Rennet.
The GP is quite unimaginative to think you would need an entire animal for supporting those, but "some kind of fast growing meat cell" is wrong too.
What you described is actually pretty close to what I had in mind. I think you'd need something close to an "entire animal," since animals don't typically have lots of extra organs and systems they don't actually need.
If you start with muscle tissue and "add back in" all the stuff you'd need to grow it as a passive lump that just gets fed, I think you'd come pretty close to an entire animal: heart, lungs, and circulatory system; bones and bone marrow; kidneys; a digestive system and liver (because do you really want to feed it exotic growth factors); a rump of a nervous system; etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system#Beyond_ve...
The consumer will never have to see the unsightly 'meat' that will be very imperfect, so you don't have to invest in making it palatable to humans. It just has to produce eggs.
There's probably a lot of room to optimize egg product as it currently is.
Ultimately I am really ready to move on from the past of eating real meat and I would love to see all facets of the world switch away from it.
You have to go through so much trouble to keep things totally sterile. Control the oxygen contact of the medium. Maintain these crazy exact temperatures, all for a thin smear of cells that couldn't do anything functional at all.
And here we are, millions of these helpless cells, ruining around ruling the would.
To the world of life we are these supermassive towering beings that are ecosystems to their own that emerged from the birthplace of life eons ago and cover the planet.
The universe is such a strange and wonderous place, and yet we're some of the most wonderous things in it.
Dudes nuts. Engineered/Infected himself with a virus that changed his intestines to make them produce lactose for a few months. Is working up to build a bunch of neurons trained to perform a task.
This is what I've always expected. Synthetic meat slurry added to conventional fakemeat vegetarian products, basically taking Impossible Burger's "synthetic heme" concept to the next level.
> Upside said in 2021 that it found a way to produce some meat without using animal components. But its first chicken filets won’t be made with that process, the company said, noting that it intends to phase out the use of animal components.
Wait, what does this mean? Like, the process needs constant refreshing with new animal meat? So it's not really cruelty-free?
> “If alternative proteins are not successful, the Paris climate agreement goals are probably impossible” to meet, said Bruce Friedrich, president of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for alternative proteins. Beef and dairy cattle, along with other farm animals, are a major source of methane, a greenhouse gas.
This isn't super relevant to the conversation here since there are very many alternative proteins that don't require inventing synthetic meat.
Maybe they’re referring to FBS in media. Much of cell biology research has used cow blood as an easy way to nurture cells, and early lab grown meat continued to use that as a starting point. The switch to a more ethical alternative is underway.
I can't find for the US but I know there are strict rules on what can be called juice, for instance. It looks like Europe is more lenient than the US: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/23/927278172/veggie-burgers-can-...
If you look at our diets over the last millenium or so there was much less meat in the median person's diet. Much closer to "meat once a week or less". Meat alternatives aren't really about what we need nutritionally, it's about offering something people will voluntarily choose instead of meat when given the choice. Through that lens, synthetic meat is worth pursuing even if plant-based "meat" continues getting better and hashbrowns continue to exist.
Short answer: yes. If it weren't way more people would be vegetarians (or at least have way lower meat consumption). At this point I think it's the structure that's the hard part, it's important to people and we have a hard time reproducing it. Plus even if it's not the original structure it has to be something; nobody wants to drink meat slurry.
Personally I'm a fan of Impossible but I still have never tasted a good chicken-substitute.
Sounds gruesome, but maybe more realistic than lab grown meat?
> Massive factories to make fake meat that tastes like nothing
> Some dead cow
I think your underestimating the scale of animal agriculture.
No. Things happen sequentially and compound. It's like saying in 2005, "if Amazon is such an important company, why isn't it already worth $1tn."
Yes, we're bad at it still. Do you claim that humanity should never undertake new efforts? If you don't claim that, then you must accept that we're going to be worse at new things than things we've been doing for 10,000 years. It will get better.
Why is this difference presumably not an ethical concern for you, but it is with lab-grown meat?
Differentiating on energy intensiveness sounds like an empirical claim, so I'm going to ask about the empirics.
It's not 'lab grown meat', it's 'cruelty free meat' or 'eco steak.'
Yahoo reports about a quarter of vegans say they would eat it.[0] MSU survey found that 35% of people overall would eat cultured meat[1], including a majority of people aged 18-40)[2].
It's not the majority of the population, but it's certainly not 0%, and certainly appears to be well into double-digit percentages.
People are price-sensitive, so if it costs more than regular meat it will have a tough time gaining significant marketshare, but there's very clearly a sizable portion of the population who do want this, anecdotal surveys of your friends notwithstanding.
[0] https://news.yahoo.com/most-vegans-support-lab-grown-1208550...
[1] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/michigan-state-university-poll...
[2] https://theconversation.com/would-you-eat-meat-from-a-lab-co...
What's the problem of eating a cow or hen that was nearing its natural death?
Maybe Elon would be interested in this tech for food production on Mars where it might make more sense. If it requires a lot of equipment maintenance, it might not even be good on Mars since spare parts are hard to manufacture there.
That's an unfounded assumption - vertical vegetable farming uses more energy than traditional vegetable farming (with a trade-off of less land).
However, farming animals also uses more energy than farmi9 vegetables. So it's possible that lab grown meat won't use more energy than farm grown meat, and will come with enough other benefits - less water and land use, less cruelty, less antibiotics, less risk of cross transmission of disease - that even if there is an increase in energy use, the trade-off will be worth it.
Even if you grow silage crops specifically for feeding livestock it's not nearly so much faff and you use a relatively small amount of fertiliser and fuel.
77% of soy worldwide is grown just to feed animals, for example. (7% is fed to humans)
I don't know how you square the facts with what you want to believe on this issue, though I am curious.