Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods
wired.com
wired.com
The way we grew them normally was in those roller bottles [2]: you have some tissue culture medium in the bottle (containing fetal calf serum, which is still required to grow mammalian cells AFAIK, another reason most of these companies can't do what they say) and other components. Then the bottles are put on their sides on a roller mechanism, in an incubator with a controlled CO2 concentration.
The cells want to grow in a one-cell-thick monolayer all over the inside of the bottle. What they won't do is to grow a double layer. This is because they have "contact inhibition" which is a major mechanism for preventing tumor-like growth: when cells are touching each other, they stop dividing.
So these guys are trying to grow tissue and what they seem to be doing instead is growing monolayers just like this on the inside of roller bottles, scraping them off, then putting them together again.
One thing that disturbed me was that they need to coat the bottles with porcine gelatin. In that case, a lot of those "chicken" cutlets are actually pork!
[1] WI-38 cells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WI-38
[2] Tissue culture in roller bottles (yes, the medium is red at least for mammalian cells): https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-hgsfepq18i/images/stencil/12...
If you give the cells something spherical [1] to adhere to then you can achieve a higher yield, but still only a monolayer.
How does that work inside the human body, where presumably they do form 3D structures?
The ECM starts developing in the fetus and figuring out how it grows from a few cells into a bunch of differentiated organs, muscles, bone, etc. is a core problem in embryology (biology in general, really). If we knew enough to make proper meat, we'd probably be steps away from a Jurassic park scenario.
I might be very stupid, but if this is a thing, how do we grow? Aren't, for example, bone cells always touching other cells?
https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/febs.14...
"But roller bottles aren’t just problematic due to their miniscule output. They’re also expensive and wasteful, according to numerous biopharma and cultivated-meat industry sources. Each flask is made from sterile, single-use plastic, which must be discarded or recycled once it has generated its 2 to 3 grams of tissue. Given that an ordinary 2-liter plastic drink bottle can easily weigh 30 grams, Upside’s current production method likely produces plastic waste more than 10 times faster than it makes meat. “Can you imagine how much landfill waste you’re actually generating?” says one former employee, who was disturbed by the volume of single-use plastic being used at Upside.
Roller bottles also require a lot of tending by human beings, says David Humbird, an independent analyst and bioprocess scale-up expert and author of a comprehensive economic assessment of cultivated meat. Before it can produce its 2 to 3 grams of tissue, each bottle will need to be individually prepared, filled with cells, then periodically opened and filled with new media over the course of several days—a painstaking process that staffers must repeat under sterile conditions with hundreds of bottles before finished cell sheets can be carefully squeegeed out. It’s an approach that requires many hours of work by trained scientists to yield a tiny serving of food.
But the chicken served at Bar Crenn uses multiple animal-derived ingredients. The roller bottles in which the tissues are grown are coated with porcine gelatin to help the cells stick to the plastic surface. An FDA safety dossier submitted by Upside also confirms that it might use bovine serum to grow its cells. The current employee also said that bovine serum—derived from the blood of adult cattle—is being used in the roller bottle process for Bar Crenn."
I can't comment on if they are claiming the current product is made in a scalable fashion or in a lab.
Seems pretty clear from TFA that unless WIRED are grossly misrepresenting facts, current product is made in a lab using roller bottles:
> WIRED sent a detailed list of questions to Upside based on our reporting. In an emailed statement, Chen, the company’s chief operating officer, claimed that our reporting contained a number of factual inaccuracies but did not directly address any of the points raised. Chen went on to say that Upside’s current process for producing chicken fillets was not one the company intends “to scale in its current form.”
> "All breakthrough innovations and transformative technologies, including scaling our cultivated meat products, will take time," Chen wrote in the emailed statement. "Cultivated meat is no exception. Not every research avenue, cultivator, or idea we explore will materialize exactly as we expected."
Even the food snobs would be happy, since responsible wildlife management practices would yield a certain amount of expensive, hard-to-get wild meat that they could build a culinary mystique around.
Not all wildlife can be picked up and pet by a human. That doesn’t mean it’s not a living being participating with a vital role in the ecosystem. There was a time before life could eat wood, and that time period is why the energy source is named “fossil fuel” and “dino juice”, that time period was long ago.
(And presumably also does not describe what happens in factory farming, which is the actual topic at hand, and which wildlife behavior has nothing to do with)
Factory farming is pretty messed up. We like to paint a pretty picture of a pasture, and I actually do get to see that in the midwest US, but a lot of the meat people buy does come from horrible conditions.
Would you rather not exist at all if it saved you from dying?
Feed lots do sometimes come into play for finishing beef cattle, but this takes only ~4 months. And it is very possible to buy pasture&grass finished beef that doesn’t use feed lots at all.
Of course you can buy the other stuff, I said as much.
My point is that this statement is one part deceptive, and one part obviously wrong for the US, the market in question.
> Beef cattle are almost always raised on open pastureland. They live a very normal, happy, life for all their years.
Let's not ignore how terrible of a life that is. Forcefully impregnated repeatedly and then having your calf taken from you while your body slowly falls apart form abuse. Cows aren't dumb beasts, they have social relationships and care for their calves.
But how many human mothers do you know that spend their whole life with 1/3 of their children? To the extent “keeping families together” is something to optimize for, they’re doing better than us.
that's taking it a little far... their goal is providing an ethical food source, not revolutionizing human diagnoses
can't wait for meat-less meat tech to get through its paces and take the time to mature. humans took hundreds of years to figure out how to herd cattle; what's another few years to make it in a lab?
Honestly, as long as the product isn't contaminated, the consumer doesn't care if it made in roller bottles or futuristic machines. At worse they are misleading investors, but are not endangering the health of consumers.
Theranos on the other hand, actually hurt not just investors but the end consumer by promising them blood tests that did not actually work.
> Theranos on the other hand, actually hurt not just investors but the end consumer by promising them blood tests that did not actually work.
Elizabeth Holmes was _acquitted_ of defrauding patients; her convictions were only for defrauding investors.
This looks a lot like Theranos.
Lab grown meat is full of those kinds of caveats and while no company has committed as egregious a fraud as Theranos, they’re all going to eventually find themselves in the position where they either have to lie to keep getting investments or admit that it’s not feasible and fold.
Personally, my bet is that without advanced bioengineering that can design entire artificial immune systems that protect the growing tissue, bioreactors will just be too expensive to scale up and compete with animals. IMO the only way it’ll work is if we have giant (semi-)open vats like salt evaporation pools that convert solar energy directly into protein and fat, with an engineered biome that responds to contamination like an immune system. And that's probably decades if not centuries ahead of us.
if we could replace the typical cattle pastures of today with this other system (basically the same idea without needing an organism that has a nervous system attached to it), I think we'll be closer to "making it"
> with an engineered biome that responds to contamination like an immune system
I saw a farmer once demonstrate how their barn has an automatic ventilation system that kicks in when the temperature gets too high :)
If they can get the end user price under control, they could displace a whole lot of beef consumption. At the current price point, it’s not nearly worth it on a taste or economic value comparison with 80% ground beef.
Amusingly, Impossible's ground beef like product was getting rave reviews from prominent foodies at first. It first appeared only at expensive restaurants. Then they got Burger King to sell it. Only then was there criticism.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/18/gigantic...
That’s when a key line of code triggered on an errant latest-generation DJI Mavic Pro. This drone, manufactured by a “private” Chinese company, then descended 90 feet in only 4.2 seconds, and subsequently crashed. Directly into Johnny’s ass.
maybe better than worcestershire
A comparable serving of beef has about 12x the amount of protein as mushrooms.
How many oz of mushrooms would one have to eat to get the same amount of protein?
Edit: legumes are more practical, green peas give you 2g/oz and peanuts can be 7g/oz shelled according to google, (though they are different proteins than the beef). Mushrooms are good for texture and some like shitaki can give the umami taste, but they aren’t a nutritional meat substitute on their own.
We should measure the protein density at a meaningful state for consumption.
While you can eat some mushrooms fresh and dry, their water density when fried is somewhere in the middle. Closer to dry when processed.
You can want a perfect world, but it will never exist.
Like it or don't, solving meat consumption and its effects on the planet is something we'll have to do. That probably involves a meaty substitute for meat.
Salt and spices taste good.
Do salt and spices actually taste good though? When has anyone ordered only salt and spices?
Need both (or salt, spices and vegetables/lentils/beans etc), and a skilled cook for delicious meal.
I like meat. In fact, I really like it.
No shame in that.
The answer is in the fact that I (we) like a lot of other stuff!
Maximize that and meat consumption will be reduced.
Of course, there are also people who don't like the taste of meat at all. But to claim people who like meat actually like the spices is patently ridiculous, not interesting.
When cooked, most meats have the necessary fats needed to bring out great flavor. Anyone who has done primitive camping can tell you just how good meat cooked in various ways is!
The resolution, which has always been obvious to everyone (except hackernews, apparently) is that flavour is the result of the combination of ingredients. That you typically eat X and Y together doesn’t mean X is tasteless and Y is tasty (or the reverse). It just means X and Y combine to make a good dish.
But Indians still eat meat, the majority in fact.
You can want one thing, but you have to live with the real thing.
Some people think meat tastes good, regardless of seasoning. Drawing attention to seasoning is just a red herring.
We need to figure out low-co2 meat. And seasonings.
Adding more ingredients only enhances the flavor, but it’s not necessary if your taste buds aren’t hyperstimulated. Meat tastes good.
It does to me -- but I think there's a good point here (even if unintentional):
Meats have _textures_ that vegetables don't have. Someone else mentioned how the Impossible Burger replicates "the bloody meat texture". For many folks, that's going to be as important as the taste.
I love vegetables but sometimes I just want a hamburger -- or kung pao chicken, or lamb kadhi, or many other dishes where I _like_ the taste and texture of the meat, and I don't have a better replacement.
The effects on the planet can be completely eliminated with massive expansion of nuclear and/or space-based electricity generation to power vertical farms that a) don't displace natural habitats and b) capture and recycle livestock's methane emissions along with other waste products.
I wouldn't be too dismissive of the potential here.
An ideal situation only exists in a textbook, and dealing with reality is what we should do, was sort of my point.
Listen to yourself.
I'm not being dismissive of the use of mushrooms as a meat argument. But I was being dismissive of the moral superiority based, "you should do this because it's right" argument being made framed by mushrooms.
I hope that's more clear.
I love mushrooms, and am mostly vegan, but the skeptic in me suspects it's not as economically viable (with their current processes) to make meat-like products out of just their "mycoprotein" or they'd be doing more of it.
I realize they have released a few vegan products, but I've never seen them in stores and can't see why they wouldn't be as widely available as their other products if there weren't some texture/flavor issues without the eggs.
So you're not vegan.
Vegan is the church.
My local animal rights group changed their marketing 15 years ago from mainly using the term “vegan” to “plant-based” which is free from the cult-like elements of veganism, such as disapproval of anything but “100%”. The term “vegan” is back now that it has become more mainstream.
Veganism as a taxonomical distinction between animals and plants/fungi doesn’t make sense because it would entail eating sentient plants which doesn’t track the underlying ethics.
What do you feed to mushrooms?
Employee: "the startup could be the next Theranos".
Lots of teams poke fun at their shortcomings.
They obviously don't look great, but you're excerpting that as if it's employee testimony. It wasn't.