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Comment by plaidfuji | Hacker News Reader

This is an expected result if you extrapolate from an early R&D stage process to a global scale, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth pursuing more sustainable routes to the mass production of animal muscle.

And that’s really what the underlying goal is here - don’t fall for the false dichotomy of “farmed” vs “lab-grown” - factory farms are essentially process development labs. How efficiently can you convert land and feedstock into salable whole-cut animal muscle? The animals are just bioreactors at this point, with experiments being done on how to optimize feedstock conversion to fatty muscle mass, which antibiotics limit contamination and yield loss the best, etc.

The only question is how animal-like will the eventual bioreactors in the cultivated meat process have to look to reproduce the real thing at scale and at lower cost? The lines will only continue to blur.

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They even talk about this in the article:

> “The environmental impact of near-term ACBM production is likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production if a highly refined growth medium is utilized for ACBM production,” concluded the study.

> The authors propose a solution, suggesting the creation of cell lines that can withstand higher amounts of endotoxins. This would decrease the necessity for energy-intensive purification procedures and ultimately reduce the environmental impact of lab-grown meat.

It’s new, “alpha” stage tech, proving that it’s possible to grow meat in a lab, without yet being optimized for efficiency/scale. Not a reason to be bearish on the tech - it’s a problem that needs to be solved, but also one that seems solvable.

A minor addition, the agriculture industry had an enormous amount of subsidies and decades of research and work at the global scale to reach the current state. Comparing an early prototype with an industry of this kind is disingenuous at best.

No, its called a benchmark and tells you how much you have to do to reach the goal you are ostensibly trying to reach. Its useful not disingenuous. Now if someone says this is the final word on lab meat, that would be disingenuous.

That is pretty much what the previous comment was implying.

Any comparison outside of goal-setting (if that is the case) is most likely purposefully biased or misleading.

Thank you, that was exactly the point.

Sorry, I may have read it a little literally/uncharitably. It sounded to me like you were saying any comparison is disingenuous.

it’s cool. Goals, standards, and raising the bar drive us forward.

I think the fundamental problem is keeping the huge bio tanks hermetically clean. The cleaning process is very energy intensive as is the medium growing process.

One way to cut cost would be to introduce small cells that seek out and destroy pathogens. We could design a bio tank organ that creates these cells by eating some of the growth medium. Also instead of using a medicine grade medium we could use organic sacks that grow bacteria from plant matter. Then we could move said bacteria to sacks filled with acid that would extract energy to create more biomatter.

Some of the excess energy could be used for the bio-tank to locomote around in the environment and harvest plant matter for digestion. Also by using genetic code we could make these new and improved bio tanks self-replicate. We could call these new devices Clean Organic Walkers, or Cows for short.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted but your satirical take is kind of exactly what I’m talking about. We might end up reverse engineering an immune system to make it work at scale, because contamination resistance actually is one of, if not the primary problem at large scale.

"nanomachines, son"

Not disagreeing with you, but ultimately you have to ask the question: does this make sense? And look at the "why". What are you trying to optimize?

Of course it makes sense. People like to eat meat. Meat is expensive to produce, particularly including externalities like CO2, animal suffering, etc. Making meat less expensive to produce across some or all of those dimensions seems like a no brainer.

Exactly. And yes, starting with new technologies, but if we try to optimize our existing process for obtaining meat we will likely not get far before hitting a local maximum. So it makes sense to try to make dramatic leaps to other areas of the solution space to see if we can fine a new maximum. It will take a lot of resources until the new technologies are better (by various metrics) than the old ones, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying. With the scale of meat consumption the potential payoff for better methods is huge.

In terms of optimising, I can see it going two ways:

1. Optimising for the consumer means that we will be able to engineer meat to our preferred and individual tastes. Gamey or fatty, dry or falling off the bone etc.

2. Optimising for the producer means that we will get the slurry what was served as a meal in the movie Brazil.

The free-market optimist in me would like to see 1, but the realist in me knows that once corporations monopolise the fake-meat industry and eventually water it down to slurry, we'll get Brazil... and we'll be convinced this is how meat should taste.

Yeeah. Given enough time it's always 2.

You may not care about the widespread cruelty to animals in meat production, but many people do.

I think animal cruelty is more nuanced than "killing animals to eat them is bad" but yes. The question is: if you care about animal cruelty should you stop eating meat altogether?

But you may not care about possible future when I can not grow some chicken legally for my own consuming, but I appreciate eating animals as one of the most natural and beautiful things in my life.

How is the legality of residential chicken breeding relevant to this discussion on the environmental impact of lab-grown meat?

It's not, but the bots are out in force

When you lose an argument, call the winner of the argument a bot. Works every time.

I responded to bs about so-called animal suffering. The logics is simple: if we have lab-grown meat than there is a probability that the owner of the lab starts lobbying refusal of eating animals somehow. We live in a world of feelings (SJW, metoo, *gate) so every time I meet such discussion in a lab-grown meat topics I feel an urge to remind about possible suffering of butchers.

I'm sure you're the most and maybe only rational person in the room. Other views that are well reasoned can not possibly exist, they must be the outgrowth of emotional manchildren and wömen. Maybe you should adopt an ancient Greek name.

Is there anyone suggesting this?

Opinion: They are trying to optimize profit and control.

Don't mess with food. We know what works, we've almost always made it worse: less nutritious (rolled oats instead of steel cut), less tasty (tomatoes, chicken), more vulnerable to die-out (bananas), or worse. Now you get Bill Gates and Monsanto advocating GMO / lab-grown foods for the masses. The market plan for the long-term on this is terrifying though.

Just... grow real food, eat real food.

The earth currently can produce enough food for everyone. The reason people go hungry in 2023 is because food rots on docks from government mismanagement, or goes into Dear Leader's kitchen and not those of his people, or a million other reasons that all boil down to selfishness, arrogance, or advanced forms of these same vices.

Apologies for the rant.

We've already optimized meat production in ways which are worse. It is very bad for the environment and extremely cruel to the animals. Part of the optimization is removing the processes far from consumers so that they're unaware of the downsides.

The solution is to eat more real food, which includes a higher proportion of vegetables and a much lower proportion of meat. But a lot of people are resistant to that, for a variety of reasons. If lab-grown meat can at least reduce the animal cruelty, it's an optimization I'd prefer.

For better or worse, if you look at what is needed to feed all people GMOs are going to happen. It's not an if, it's a when. Everyone consuming real, organic food has not been on the table for years now.

Cost

Cost makes sense. Is the synthetic meat cheaper?

I’m being glib intentionally, spirit of like, hacker koans.

obviously not, as in a everyday definition of cost, sticker price today. but the externalities, as in a formal definition of cost, are so much, and important enough to enough commercial stakeholders that yes, 100% makes sense to try to do this and hit under the actual cost, which has diverged from the short-term cost

Not every meat producing shop aims for the lowest operating costs, ie in Western Europe meat from free range animals are extremely popular, we don't buy any meat (+ eggs) that isn't at least that (for kids it would be great to buy all time bio meat but that's not always available).

Its not BS and lies either, where we live farm animals roam the grass fields or mountain pastures constantly, to the point where it may be tricky to hike some parts of mountains.

That’s great and all, but not really practical for all meat eaters. The reason we have factory farms is because it’s significantly cheaper to generate meat with animal cruelty than low cruelty meat.

This also assumes you are sourcing all your meat. But have you ever gotten something prepackaged with meat? Or eaten out? Do you know where that meat came from?

The market incentivizes animal cruelty. The only way to really combat that is either regulations to make cruelty more expensive than cruelty free meat or a cheaper alternative to cruelty meat. Anything less, including personal choices, is peeing in the ocean to warm it up.

How much land would that require if you extrapolated it out to our current meat consumption?

How about 2x, since it's projected our consumption will double by 2050?

Does the land physically exist?

Well said. The people advocating against this research have to be completely in denial about what modern meat factories actually are like (can't really call them anything else considering how the animals exist there).

Sligs when?

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