US approves chicken made from cultivated cells
apnews.com
apnews.com
The big question of course is scale. Seems like the kind of thing that can develop an economy of scale better than the meat grown on the animal (farmers spend a lot of effort growing things that aren't salable, or are barely so, like bones and feathers). And the ultimate (scaled out) cost target is probably much better than the "traditional product" if the environmental impact gets priced into food costs.
The bones actually have most of the micronutrients, and people used to eat marrow like butter to avoid wasting it.
While I eat almost only vegan food, I make an exception and I add to some of my food small quantities of such bone meal. However, unlike most people, I read very carefully the small print, so I am aware that this supplement is in fact made from cattle bones, even if its label does not suggest this.
These are the main ingredients in Plant-tone. This product might not be as relevant to folks who live in cities or in rural areas, but folks who live in the suburbs go through it like crazy.
I personally doubt this is anywhere near being able to compete with real chicken. Chickens are one of the most cost-effective sources of protein.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-efficiency-of-meat...
To put it into perspective beef requires 50x more energy input, than caloric output. Chickens only require 7.7x more input than caloric output, eggs are 5x.
Chickens take in corn and produce fat and protein. I'm unsure of the number of steps for lab grown meat, but I doubt it'll be fewer steps and likely will have more chemicals (and likely be less healthy).
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they add regulations and additional burden on the non-lab grown meats and subsidizing lab-grown meats (they effectively do already subsidize it through grants).
Moreover, in legumes and cereals the proteins are mixed with large amounts of starch and if the proteins are separated from starch in industrial processes the cost of the protein extracts is many times higher than the cost of chicken meat.
Only wheat flour is an exception, because the gluten from it can be extracted without special equipment or chemical substances, so wheat gluten is the only source of pure proteins that I am aware of and that is cheaper than chicken meat.
Fun fact, for octopuses that number is 3x, which (not that I've researched it) is the most efficient number I've found.
https://animals.howstuffworks.com/marine-life/octopus5.htm#:....
The question of scale and costs is a really good one. I suspect the real savings will not be in growing a chicken but in the whole logistics of getting a chicken into a supermarket packaging for you to buy. The process of taking a chicken from farm to supermarket is highly labor intensive and while it scales unit costs don’t decrease meaningfully with scale. The cultured meat decants ready to pack and could be packed and shipped in a fully automated fashion that decreases in cost as scale increases.
Pea protein has 78/100g protein which sounds like a reasonable replacement for whey protein isolate (89/100g) or other animal sources. Not saying you should eat pea morning 'till evening but supplementing just protein powder is an option, too.
What vegans may have trouble obtaining from non-animal sources are vitamin D3 and Omega3 fatty acids.
The research for improving the production of other kinds of vitamins is more active, by trying to either discover or create bacterial strains suitable for this purpose.
A serious problem is that unlike the production of traditional food, the production of vitamins and nutritional supplements is concentrated in a few countries, and mostly in China.
So if overnight everybody would become vegan, then suddenly most of the world would become nutritionally dependent on China.
Ideally every bigger city should be able to produce the vitamins needed by its inhabitants, like it is able to produce other staple foods, but we are very far from this when entire countries may not have any vitamin production facility.
Humans also produce creatine, choline and taurine, but for these three there is convincing evidence that the internal production is not sufficient, so for vegans it is beneficial to take supplements with them.
It is likely that the internal production of K2 is also insufficient, but I have not seen yet any conclusive research results about this, because it is very difficult to control all confounding factors.
Even if it is not certain that this is needed, it is prudent for vegans to also take vitamin K2 supplements, along with the other substances known to be missing or insufficient in vegetables (vitamins B12, D3 and K2; DHA and EPA; creatine, choline and taurine; iodine, selenium, calcium and sodium).
However for any nutritional supplements the daily intakes must be chosen carefully, because on the labels of many such supplements the recommended daily dosage may be appropriate for someone who prepares for a sports competition or for someone who is treated to recover from a deficiency, while the normal daily intakes may be significantly lower than that.
I do not believe that paying such prices is rational, so for many years I thought about eating only vegan food, but I could not see any way to get enough proteins without gaining weight.
I could switch to vegan food only after I have discovered that I can make a home-made bread that is highly enriched in protein by removing about 75% of the starch during a 6 to 7 minute washing of the dough. With a longer washing time it is possible to separate completely the gluten from the starch, but I am not willing to spend more time every morning with breakfast preparation, and this is enough to provide on adequate protein to calories ratio.
For Omega3, the only good alternative to fish oil is Schizochytrium oil. A few years ago, it was 8 times more expensive than fish oil, but the price has been declining slowly and now Schizochytrium oil is only 3 times more expensive than fish oil (e.g. with taxes and shipping included, EUR 300/L for double concentration Schizochytrium oil vs. EUR 50/L for cod liver oil). This is still very expensive, so hopefully the price will continue to decrease.
Vitamin D3 is normally made from sheep wool, which seems a perfectly sustainable source. There exist products which claim to contain "vegan" D3, but until proven otherwise I believe that this is a scam for extracting money from naive vegans.
The "vegan" D3 is claimed to be extracted from some kind of lichen, but it is irrational to pay money for such a product unless the vendor discloses which is the exact species of lichen, whether it is a wild lichen or a cultivated lichen, how it is cultivated and how the vitamin D3 is extracted from it.
If the lichen is not cultivated, but wild, that is not acceptable. Wild lichens grow extremely slowly and exploiting a species for vitamin extraction is guaranteed to cause the extinction of that species in a short time.
This is called seitan and has been a meat replacement for at least a thousand years. You can buy it in the store. Hell, you can even buy wheat gluten itself right from the store and make your own without all the washing.
The one benefit of pea protein is that it doesn't foam up like whey based alternatives in a blender and upsets my stomach less than the whey.
Pea protein is chalky/gritty as hell though, even after extensive blending and ingredient mixing. 3/5 stars.
As it currently stands I imagine that far fewer animals are required to make x pounds of synthetic meat than it does to make x pounds the usual way. Is this correct?
Specifically regarding the two companies approved today, Good Meat is already approved to use serum-free media in Singapore and we can expect the same to happen in the US. [1] Upside Foods has both serum and serum-free processes [2] and is moving toward being 100% serum-free. [3]
[1]: https://read.whatever.social/elliotswartz/status/16515663766...
[2]: https://read.whatever.social/elliotswartz/status/15972312903...
Despite its long history of use, FBS has several well-described issues that have made its replacement a priority in recent years. First, inherent variability and undefined nature of FBS use leads to compounding external costs in quality control. Second, FBS is a potential source of contamination. Third, there is a limited global supply of FBS. Lastly, the use of FBS carries ethical concerns, making its use inherently misaligned with one of the fundamental benefits of cultivated meat.
A wide range of efforts to replace serum have been tried and accomplished and many of these replacements are used today, permitting serum-free cell culture for a variety of applications. However, serum-free formulations will need to be further optimized specifically for cultivated meat.
https://gfi.org/science/the-science-of-cultivated-meat/deep-...
What's nice is that the tissue sample taken from one chicken can be cultivated for years and make a huge amount of meat. Think of it like a sourdough starter that continues to produce more bread as long as you feed it appropriately.
As someone who has a sourdough starter in the fridge, thanks for that imagery.
the lab-grown stuff will actually be _cleaner_ than anything made 'organically'
cells don't poop (the same way), and aren't exposed to pathogens in a lab
Animals also have immune systems to survive mild infections. Cells grown in a lab are much more prone to any form of contamination at all.
It's possible to deal with both things in a lab, but not inexpensively.
But even now, there’s the benefit of producing less suffering. No need to breed animals that can’t even support their own weight and spend their entire short lives suffering in darkness, crowded in cages with other suffering beings, awaiting death.
I'm no expert on the matter, but it will likely never be competitive with real meat in either taste or price:
- You need a lot of expensive equipment and chemicals to grow fake meat. A chicken just needs food and water.
- You need extreme cleanliness to grow fake meat or else you're just growing bacteria. Animals have an immune system and can deal with minor threats.
- Cells don't exist in a vacuum. You need to deliver nutrients and remove waste. Animals have lungs, blood vessels, kidneys, and all the other organs needed to maintain the entire biological system which has been optimized over millions of years.
- Meat isn't just muscle cells, it's a very complicated structure. Growing separate cells and mushing them together will never give you the same taste.
The only real equivalent would be if you could grow a chicken without a brain.
> No need to breed animals that can’t even support their own weight and spend their entire short lives suffering in darkness, crowded in cages with other suffering beings, awaiting death.
If that bothers you, there are always more expensive ways to eat real meat.
I’ve been buying free-range chicken and eggs for a while, but recent reports have said that there is basically no actual free-range chicken or eggs on the market. There’s no oversight, so almost everything labeled as free-range isn’t really free-range, so it’s just more expensive, with no benefit.
They actually have inspections of facilities and generally enforce better baseline standards for animals, like minimum spacing. Not perfect, but probably the best you'll get in a grocery store.
Everything else is just marketing terms, and effectively unregulated:
'cage free': a bunch of chickens packed into a large room, effectively a cage. Just not individual/tiny cages.
'free range': they have access to an outdoor area in theory, but it might be a tiny cage, no guarantee the chicken was ever able to use it.
'pasture raised': animals generally spend more time outdoors than indoors, but no guarantee.
Or, you know, just stop eating meat.
It's expensive to house, feed and butcher regular chickens too. They get an infection, it runs thru the whole plant, millions slaughtered and burned and they have to regrow them. Not free either.
Time will tell.
The chicken at your typical grocery store needed a lot more than food and water. They needed vast amounts of land, housing, and staff. Covered in shit and full of open sores, burns, and wounds they're constantly pumped full of antibiotics because their immune systems could never keep up, beaks have to be removed, the corpses of birds that don't survive to slaughter age have to be collected and removed regularly. Factories filled with machines are used to kill and process them (https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c53840a3d44fcb1766161a2f37257...). Even after all that the chickens are soaked in or sprayed with chlorine and other chemicals before packaging.
What we have right now is so far removed from healthy chickens living and growing in the sun that we might as well be growing the meat in labs and sparing a living thing all the suffering we subject them to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upside_Foods
the goal was to sell at 60 Euro/kg (by 2020).
Not exactly competitive, pricewise.
To sibling comment on price, we’ve come a long way in a decade;
> Ever since the first lab-grown burger - which cost a mere $330,000 (£263,400) to create - was unveiled in London in 2013, dozens of companies around the world have joined the race to bring affordable cultivated meat to the market.
seems like the ideal word. the meat is synthesized from cells rather than being grown
expanding restaurant menu choices by an order of magnitude when we go out
I know of a half dozen other reasons different vegans have, not about them right now
Thank God this stuff isn't econonically viable, nor is it in any way "sustainable". This is processed foods par excellence.
Also very pleased to live the rest of my days to pay for ever increasing price of real animal meat.
This causes real meat to become more expensive because it becomes a luxury item - only wealthy people can pay for the intense farming practices that today every consumer is helping pay for.