Singapore doubles down on lab-grown meat as Silicon Valley backs off
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One way this business might make sense would be to sell boutique cell-cultured "specialty" meats, like scallops, veal, and wooly mammoth (yes, it's been seriously considered). They're not nearly as price-sensitive, and the scale is smaller. Here's hoping we can ease the burden on endangered populations and mitigate the inherent cruelty of some of those industries with cell-cultured alternatives.
More broadly, it's not really about cell-cultured meat. It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever which can be ingratiated in to the food supply chain anywhere. The huge success in culturally normalizing the consumption of 'beef balls' and similar '<highly processed, derivative, nominal protein identity> balls' in markets like Thailand to my critical eye largely stem from the beef ball factories of Shantou in Guangdong. Make no mistake: those people are making bank selling total bunk for real bucks.
Poverty will be the driver.
Economically, it's hard to pass up plants. They've literally evolved over millions of years to produce the goods using almost nothing in resource terms. Somehow the world just needs to learn to love Indian food and stop expecting protein and lipid dense meals.
Side note: "in to" should be one word - "into".
The corn syrup based foods are cheap, tasty, and really easy to eat. It's too bad they have no nutrients besides calories.
The rest of the world seems to use sugar from beets/sugar cane/coconuts?
Correct me if I'm wrong, I base the above statements on a rant by an American coworker about how the corn lobby managed to somehow force American food producers to exclusively use relatively high calory corn syrup as a sweetener as opposed to much lower calory sweeteners.
...Diabetes prevalence was 20% higher in countries with higher availability of HFCS compared to countries with low availability, and these differences were retained or strengthened after adjusting for country-level estimates of body mass index (BMI), population and gross domestic product (adjusted diabetes prevalence=8.0 vs. 6.7%, p=0.03; fasting plasma glucose=5.34 vs. 5.22 mmol/L, p=0.03) despite similarities in obesity and total sugar and calorie availability. These results suggest that countries with higher availability of HFCS have a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes independent of obesity.No, corn syrup is used in food and drinks all over the world.
Personally, I have nothing against corn syrup so long as the sweetness actually tastes nice and appropriate for what I'm consuming.
Corn syrup is also a lot better than artificial sweeteners which all taste like hot garbage and make me literally ill.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/495946/consumption-share...
The problem is that US government subsidies for corn and soy have created an entire class of products that are cheaper than any alternatives.
If we removed those subsidies, there would be far less incentive for companies to use them.
We have at least some options for this already. Mycoprotein is one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn#Production (apart from the plant isolates)
> [...]
> It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever
Personally I follow fermentation based (bacteria based) proteins with interest, potentially they can have an even smaller footprint than plant based protein.
Like Solein ( https://solarfoods.com/solein/ ), which has now been accepted as safe for human consumption in one country: Singapore.
So they're not always behind the curve.
Maybe one day - the potential of fungi is amazing. It's a whole world that is fundamental to ecology and comparatively poorly understood or mapped. However, I remain skeptical at present once you factor in one or both of the lab costs (steel vats, process control, power consumption, thermal systems, and lab employees) and the raw inputs (fermentation doesn't happen on thin air).
By the time you've grown the raw input, why not just grow a food crop?
I feel virtue-signalling regulatory moves are meaningless. Case in point: many markets are totally unregulated, by your logic they're ahead of the curve. I don't disagree.
For life generating protein is a byproduct of other goals. It seems possible that we can do better.
Hell yeah. I'm not really a fan of the lab grown meat aspect but I'd try a wooly mammoth burger.
(Or perhaps Neolithic people would pity us and our culinary traditions—the bland, meaningless ennui of takeout fast-food. The true enjoyment of mammoth steak, we shall never know, is what it tastes when you've chased it down yourself for three days on foot).
Swiftie Burgers. Kardashian hot dogs. Nixon ribs.
I bet the taste would depend more on the tastes of the team making it than the actual flavour profile of a mamoth.
The way I was thinking about it is that how meat tastes depends very much on the excretion system of the animal removing waste products from the tissues. And those functions (the lymphatic system, the circulation, the kidneys, the bowels, the lungs) are not present in the lab grown meat tissue. We are obviously providing those functions artificially but I wouldn't be surprised if these artificial attempts are "worse" than the real deal at their job. After all the real chickens spent millions of years co-evolving these support functions with their tissues.
Plus what the tissue is fed! Some say they can taste if the cow was fed corn vs grass. Whatever the lab grown meat is fed must be even bigger difference from the original.
> There are several additional steps needed in order to make it palatable.
Makes sense. I wasn't even thinking about those, just the growing conditions. But of corse! And I bet while these were developed there was a ton of "prepare, taste, spit it out in disgust, adjust" cycles. With extant animals in theory at least you can do it scientifically by having blind taste tests comparing the real meat with the lab grown one. With mammoth, or anything else extinct, we would be guessing and making things up even more.
Would love to see an article about this if you have one. Just curious is all.
Huh... I figured that china would account for most of their food imports, but that's not actually the case.
https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/SGP/Yea...
Surprisingly France and the UK are high up there, despite being geographically distant industrialized countries (e.g., not primarily based on agriculture). I wonder if this is because this is showing dollar value imports and these places export high cost food products? ... is it just champagne from France?
Edit: oh my god it is champagne (or more generally spirits: https://tradingeconomics.com/singapore/imports/france)
When you would be able to import the labmeat ingredients for at least 8x times the result weight of the imported meat.
Where S. would get these ingredients domestically?
1) It's a small island, but it's also a major trading port. Which means its whole economy is already geared towards importing food from neighboring countries.
2) On the other hand: no domestic industry to disrupt! No domestic farming groups lobbying against meat substitutes, which may push research/distribution furhter along.
They're also big on future-proofing and environmental awareness in general as they have a very long term stable government that looks 10-100 years ahead.
Malaysia makes a lot of sense; there is a lot of cuisine overlap, it is right next door, and Singapore actually started its modern life by getting kicked out of Malaysia. (That whole saga is interesting; as far as I know Singapore may be the rare example of a country unwillingly becoming independent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_in_Malaysia)
Given the money going into lobbying states to make it illegal in the US, I can only assume that it must have some chance of success.
The one thing it raised was that cultured meats do not have any sort of immune system. Thus if they are not produced in, what amounts to, TSMC level sterile environments there is the potential of entire batches being rendered useless as bacteria have a feast. There was also a lot of issue with scale, things I am sure you are aware of.
For specialty meats, yeah it makes sense.
But for pure scale I am a bit more hopeful on things like Precision Fermentation of yeasts as being a much more viable meat alternative. Turns out things like Quorn were way ahead of there time in that sense.
Two examples of non-meat protein advances: fungal-derived cheeses, and protein extracted from duckweed.
I'd love to know the major ones, or whatever you can share.
I'm much more optimistic about lab grown meat than most people. In fact I would love to invest in some lab grown meat companies. The more I know the better.
This is were Vow, and a few others are going the high-end, foods that haven't really existed before, with their Japanese Quail Parfait. Similar to how Tesla started with the roadster, and then went to the S, 3, Y, etc etc.
Imagine creating a cultured cavier or foie gras. Sold in small quantities to those who want the experience, social signaling, and opportunity to make a small difference. The companies won't make money on these items, but they can cover a higher percentage of their cost, and learn how to scale. Then move into less rare, but still coveted foods, etc etc
We already have these and they’re delicious. I’m unconvinced kaviar has a market. But your core point, that these firms should go high and trade replicating for expanding, is correct.
A high priced cultured caviar isn't just trying to be a replacement for the expense of real caviar. In fact, as I'm suggesting it (which you are agreeing with) is that because it does not harm fish in the process, it can be priced higher. This can't be done with imitation caviar, whose entire purpose for being is cheaper.
Though, it is in some ways a marketing move. It's not quite the difference between fake leather and vegan leather, but it isn't that far off.
"Is it artificial?"
"Of course."
I feel like the superrich don't really care about their CO2 costs, in fact, the more wasteful, maybe the better the social signal. But I guess there are different categories of superrich.
So it’s 97% normal chicken, but 3% cultured? That doesn’t seem too interesting.
The cultured meat industry needs better lobbyists or the beef industry is going to squish them.
0. https://www.texastribune.org/2018/01/10/time-oprah-winfrey-b...
> 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've posted this comment before, but the linked article is relevant to every story about lab-grown meat as the entire concept is a fantasy, or less charitably, a scam.
They (like us) have been evolving under thermodynamic pressures for millions of years, I would like us to be able to not have to produce them to have high quality protein/fat/etc, but I haven't seen anything to say it's remotely possible.
This elides over the cost differential and where that "cheaply enough" wall is. Animal grown meat is currently rising in costs and will continue to rise in costs as both demand is rising and the habitat for those animals is constricting due to climate change. How much cheaper does lab grown meat and how much more more expensive does animal grown meat need to be before it becomes viable. From what I've read they are closer than this argument assumes.
It's clearly possible to make muscle cells (and other components of meat) reproduce rapidly: cattle exist.
It's clearly hard, or we'd have already have all this plus vat-grown organs and (affordable) vat-grown leather.
And some (non-meat) cells are already convenient to grow in vats (you just don't want to get all your protein from nutritional yeast and/or spirulina).
"1000 ways to not make a lightbulb", or whatever the real original Edison quote was — what's the number, 90% of start-ups fail?
For instance, even the most efficient cell lines used in pharmaceuticals aren't efficient enough for low-cost production of bulk cell mass. This implies cultured meat companies are attempting to solve problems that have long eluded a much larger, better-funded industry. The absence of these breakthroughs in pharma, where the financial rewards would be enormous, suggests they may be fundamentally unattainable with foreseeable technology.
This I agree with; it's just… well, I'm 40 now[0], and a lot of biology that can be done today involved technology that was not foreseeable when I was born.
So, yes, pharmaceuticals getting the hard problems solved first, sure — I'd say that I'd know not to invest in vat-meat startups until pharmaceuticals companies have solved problems I'm oblivious to except for the logical impossibility with such a test.
[0] aaaaaaa
For generics and biosimilars, more efficient production could be a major competitive advantage. The fact that we haven't seen breakthroughs in this area, despite clear financial motivation, suggests these are not easily solvable problems.
[0] https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/car-t-manufacturi...
The persistence of process-related challenges in both industries, despite significant financial motivation to solve them, underscores their complexity. This relates back to the "fractal no" concept from the original article, where each obstacle in cultured meat production is composed of many smaller obstacles. Importantly, monoclonal antibodies can sell for thousands of dollars per gram, orders of magnitude more than meat, yet even with this immense profit incentive, the pharmaceutical industry hasn't solved these bioprocessing issues. This suggests that cultured meat production, with its much lower profit margins, faces an overwhelming set of challenges,
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15700...
it "absolutely" is, anything that exists, is fundamentally a question of thermodynamics, it's unavoidable.
In this case, cows exist, therefore thermodynamics is resolved to "yes you can make a cow for at most the cost of a cow, in the general case", and I don't need to show detailed working to know that. Existence proofs make it obviously "not a question of" any law of nature, including thermodynamics, that we can't reproduce that existence proof synthetically.
This doesn't tell me how to do it, how to make it cheap enough for anyone to care, what the actual ultimate limits are, etc.
Either every single company is wholesale lying about key parts of their processes and outputs…or this is just another hitpiece by Big Ag with exaggerated claims.
I'm sure that's all harder than it sounds. But I doubt it's the same "wall of no" as muscles in a vat.
The NYT carried another opinion piece by the same author this year[1] along with a number of reader rebuttals[2], including this one from Mindy Kursban:
> It is surprising that in his obituary for cultivated meat, Joe Fassler spends so few words on the viability of the science and cites more chief executives than scientists.
> Just recently, the chair of Tufts University’s biomedical engineering department, David Kaplan, who has published more than 1,000 peer-reviewed papers, told[3] a room full of cultivated meat scientists that progress over the past five years gives him “complete confidence that we’re going to get to where we need to go.”
> There are many eminent scientists all over the world who share Dr. Kaplan’s view, but readers would not know that from reading Mr. Fassler’s essay, which argues that cultivated meat is a project of Silicon Valley “dreamers with a fancy prototype, a pitch deck and a good amount of natural charm.”
> This groundbreaking science may be taking longer than initially thought, but it’s making strides, so it’s a shame that Mr. Fassler spends so little time exploring it.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/09/opinion/eat-just-upside-f...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/opinion/lab-grown-meat.ht...
This feels incredibly dismissive? Sure I will concede that most likely the 9 year timeline mentioned in that article is incredibly optimistic and very likely will not come to fruition.
But I think it is also naive to think, regardless of how much you know on a particular subject, that there are not solutions to problems that have not been developed yet or that there are already examples to those problems that are not public knowledge (it even mentions that the paper was written with NDA knowledge).
Then it is even more naive to try to paint a "wall of no" seemingly in a way to shut down research on this subject.
Just look at the silicone chips allowing us to have what once would have been considered a super computer in our pockets compared to when computers were tubes. Of course at that time anyone suggesting that a personal computing device would even be possible would likely be laughed out the room, the core technology didn't even exist to think that maybe some day it would be possible.
Are these companies and that paper making lofty promises that may be borderline lying to investors, maybe. But I don't think we should be saying it is impossible at this point in time.
Somethings are just rather complicated at scale and both cultured meat and fusion belong to this category.
But there is a difference between it being very complicated and likely relying on technology (or a fundamental understanding of something we don't know about) we don't have yet, and a "big no" and "never". Which is what this paper seems to be saying (reinforced by the comment I was replying to also saying "never").
That is the part of this that bothers me. Yeah we should admit that it is going to be very hard (if not impossible) and we should examine the reality of the timeline claims. But we should not be discouraging the research on both of these topics at this time by making claims that it will never happen.
We can criticize the timeline and the promises made to investors, that is incredibly valid.
But "never" is naive.
The only time I am really comfortable with saying "never" is something like, we will never travel faster than the speed of light. That seems to be fairly well proven at this point in time and if we ever fight a loophole around it, likely the core law will remain true.
Even GFI, the tech hype bros in that article that's being responded to, is showing a pretty big lack of vision. "This gradual progression is necessary; you can’t just throw a small amount of cells into a large bioreactor and hope they’ll start dividing. Cells are “fastidious,” Hughes told me, and have strict metabolic requirements for growth, including oxygen tension." <- pretty comfortable saying that under those constraings, 100% agree on the fractal of nos. But like, yeast and other things we grow in bioreactors aren't that picky. The hype bros want to try and convince people it's happening now so they're pitching some nonsense vision of mass manufacturing based on tech that obviously can't scale, and taking their vision of how things are going to work as ground truth is kinda silly. Almost by tautology, a successful bioreactor based approach is going to be one that uses bioengineering to create cells that don't need that sort of pickiness. It doesn't exist yet, sucks for the hype bros, but how sure are you that nobody will ever figure out how to engineer yeast to work as meat so you can use bioreactors from defunct breweries or something?
The first cow genome was only published 15 years ago - at least wait for biology and medicine to plateau and for the incentive of fixing climate change to go away before convincing yourself it's never gonna happen!
Why don't we work, via CRISPR or aggressive evolution, to get to the point where something like a cow is much closer to a meat worm? Imagine if we could get the brain down to something where it's basically like a mollusk, to remove most of the ethical issues with slaughtering something as sentient as a cow or a pig. Then imagine if we could breed away the legs and such, and get this thing to the point that it's just a long tube of the most tender cuts of meat. Whole worm of ribeye and fillet. And it can just be suspended in a factory, hundreds of meat worms high, with food being pumped in their mouth, and excrement being swept up.
Again, sounds insane, but I want my meatworm future.
1.) they have no immune system and are therefore incredibly finicky when it comes to infection. meat worms can still have an immune system
2.) they don't produce the necessary hormones for growth. meat worms can still produce hormones
3.) hard to get the proteins and fats to grow together. meat worms would absolutely love to be fat
You're also proposing a fairly massive genetic engineering project to get to that point too - I suspect there are many other problems on the chopping block that would be possible if/when we're capable of making those kinds of changes to organisms.
The idea does solve the moral qualms (if we ignore the squickiness of creating an artifical being in a much degraded state from its origin)
If you agree with this viewpoint, then the idea of “beef worms” or “chicken fruit” makes sense. But if you question positivism and think that beings have another form of value that isn’t merely the sum of their sensory impressions, it gets much more complex.
However, theoretically lab grown meat could be a big win on the thermodynamics front, and whoever solves that will have a far easier time getting the economics working too.
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.21.537778v1....
As for the energy inputs themselves, the notion of grass-fed beef often gets trotted out as a way to make beef more eco-friendly, but in practice this mostly amounts to greenwashing. Most beef is not grass-fed, and most places in the world that raise cows are not suited to pure grass feeding.
And then there's the land use aspect. When we're clearcutting the Amazon in order to satisfy the world's demand for beef, we've fucked up.
I thought there's already research showing that seaweed in the cow's diet drastically reduces methane emissions.
Can somebody explain run through these quickly, I'm not sure which parts are wrong and how much they're wrong:
1. the constituents in the methane came from the food the cows eat?
2. the food got it from the atmosphere?
3. cows don't increase methane constantly, rather it's the marginal volume of feed required to sustain every new cow on the planet less the ones slaughtered? I.e. the growth in new supply?
4. Eliminating cows raised for meat would stop the increase in methane due to increase in supply and it would result in a one-off net reduction in atmospheric methane in time proportional to what cows were releasing, assuming the food continues to grow?
5. What happens when the food the cows are no longer eating dies, does anything get released then?
(Via intermediary step of some of their stomachs being bioreactors filled with bacteria, oh the irony).
3: Sure, but demand is still going up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beef_production_1961_2021...
4: I'm not sure I follow the question, but methane has an atmospheric lifetime of about 12 years, so it would probably fall, but I'm not sure how much by
5: Some mixture of CO2, methane, and carbon sequestration; at this scale it's worth considering which crops are grown and how they are used precisely to minimise that kind of impact
However, from a green house gas perspective, plants consume Co2 (moderate green house potential), and either due to rotting or as part of digestion, methane does get produced. Which has a high green house potential. Not in identical proportions to the co2 consumed of course, cows and rotting plants also produce co2.
So think of part of the problem being some co2 being converted into a more problematic green house gas (methane) with a lot of steps in the middle.
Also people being jealous of that tasty steak that is a byproduct of the process.
1. Introduce artificial meat that only large corporations can make
2. Ban natural meat as artificial alternative exists
3. Jack up the prices and profit
Turns out you can just skip both the incredible engineering problem of lab grown meat and the incredible political problem of “banning meat” and even people who are apparently paranoid about corporate/government control will just go right along with it.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farm...
And I dont mean this in an angry environmentalist way. There are a lot of people who dont pay attention to their current food chain and don't know just how tightly most of the brands are controlled by a select group of companies.
So before jumping to future conspiracies, look at what you're in now:
https://capitaloneshopping.com/blog/11-companies-that-own-ev...
https://xtalks.com/food-industry-by-the-numbers-leading-food...
I eat some of the above foods, so I'm not some anticorporate person.
What I'm interested in is where do the raw materials come from? I suppose this needs a number of "ingredients", including proteins, that must be sourced from somewhere.
https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...