Lab-grown salmon hits the menu
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
About 10 years ago I became more aware that reducing my consumption of meat was good for the world. This was good for Beyond Meat’s prospects.
About 5 years ago I became more aware that reducing my consumption of ultra processed food was good for me. This was very bad for Beyond Meat’s prospects.Beyond Meat and Impossible burgers definitely are ultra processed though.
> An ultra-processed food is a grouping of processed food characterized by relatively involved methods of production. There is no simple definition of UPF, but they are generally understood to be an industrial creation derived from natural food or synthesized from other organic compounds.
This disgusting salmon-flavoured soy bean paste certainly qualifies.
It is important to not that nuts and dark chocolate usually fit the ultra processed (or sometimes just processed) food definition. This poses real problems in studies because they are roughly a net benefit health wise so authors have the choice between excluding them from the study (which misleadingly worsens claims about processed food being bad) or keeping them in (misleadingly softening how bad they are).
Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). Group 1 [un- or minimally processed] foods are absent or represent a small proportion of the ingredients in the formulation. Processes enabling the manufacture of ultra-processed foods include industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; application of additives including those whose function is to make the final product palatable or hyperpalatable such as flavours, colourants, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers; and sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials. Processes and ingredients here are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-(h)eat or to drink), tasteful alternatives to all other Nova food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals.
So I guess it depends on how well it ends up fitting into the diet. If we end up eating it the way we eat salmon -- a few times a week, in reasonable quantities, with a similar nutritional profile -- then it's not a concern. If it ends up going into a product that you eat by the bagful, then it could be a concern for the same reason other ultra-processed foods are.
Ultra-processed food does not have an agreed-upon definition, and is the new "junk food" with the pretense of being more scientific. Is bread and pizza ultra-processed food? Studies do not agree on their definitions, sometimes including ingredient lists, sometimes not, sometimes it is required that the product is made in small shops with love and not in large factories. The mechanism of how ultra-processed food are supposed to cause harm remains undefined.
At least the way it tends to get made in the US, a sugary pastry that's stuffed full of sugar, carbs, fats and cheese? Ok yeah, my favorite foods are _all_ terrible for me and I can't eat them anymore. This makes me very sad.
Now compare to a steak - add salt, 5 minutes on pan, rest. Better than $50 steak at most restaurants.
1) My pizza oven runs on gas not electricity. Not that this is better environmentally. Some run on wood.
2) I'm getting better results than I can get in a local pizza place. Cheap pizza is not great pizza. Home pizza making has a learning curve, it's more of a niche thing than e.g. cooking a steak or burger.
For grandparent post, Pizza is of course not a "dessert", it's a savoury main course. Full of white flour, cheese fats, and salt. So also not health food.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture authority have designed the NOVA classification of food[1, 2], which includes ultra-processed food as a category.
[1] https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/527...
But most "regular" cheeses like Swiss cheese also need rennet, ie. you need to slaughter a calf and scrape its stomach lining. You may want to make sure your downstairs neighbor is OK with the procedure before you start (offer them a veal dinner to make up for the noise?). Other than that, it's basically (unpasteurized) milk, salt and water. And time.
Yeast: take a sourdough baking class. You just need air, water and (organic) flour.
There is no consistent definition and people regularly bend over backward to put all "junk food" in this category.
So, donuts are fine because they are only a few ingredients that you can make on your stove, and they're bad once a factory makes them? Maybe only because the factory uses "chemicals"?
No, it's the fried calorie-dense food that is easy to overeat while displacing nutrition from better food sources that is the problem.
Pizza made at home will not use such things. Your local pub that makes their own pizza will not either. Fast food or frozen pizza gets their ingredients from central suppliers in bulk, and they have no choice but to use such things in order for their products to survive the extended storage, processing, transportation, and similar delays that will occur on the way to the consumer.
Probably because we can use it to let ourselves off the hook for a bad diet. We can do things like roleplay that it's the seed oil in our Doritos making us fat, and that if it were butter then, idk, it would be a superfood or something?
It's the pepperoni, 15g sodium, 100g saturated fat, and 3000 calories of Costco pizza you just ate that's doing a number on your body, not the guar gum in the dough.
Or, how are you going to pick apart an ingredient list when you just ate a half-dozen home-cooked lard donuts? You're cool with laying down arterial plaque but you draw the line at ascorbic acid in the store-bought cream filling?
The "ulta processed" meme is a huge distraction. It's like listening to a fat guy talk about how he's very particular about the gum he chews because he stays away from "sugar alcohols". Yeah? What about the other 4999 calories of food you ate today?
Precisely what is wrong with flavor enhancers? A common flavor enhancer is MSG, and using that in homemade dishes would not be that unusual. I frequently use it in many home preparations that could use more savory flavor.
Likewise with thickeners or emulsifiers such as cornstarch, xanthum gum, guar gum, etc: these are often used in many preparations at home. Just because something has 'no nutritional value' doesn't mean it doesn't have culinary value. By this same logic, spices have no nutritional value and are just flavors, which clearly doesn't pass the sniff test.
These aren't some toxic compounds that machines put in our food. You can just go to a food supply store and grab them. MSG is just available pretty much everywhere.
Yeah, no shit? We're not ants in a colony. I think you're pretty stupid if you're alright with harming yourself while achieving nothing. If you wanna risk your life for a cause then take direct action, eating processed slop and pretending to feel good about it is only gonna make both your world and mine shittier.
I’m not convinced that the “UPF” category adds anything useful over “HFSS” at this point. Happy to be pushed off my view, but seen nothing that would do so thus far.
They're both ultra processed in the same way that a jellyfish and a California Redwood are both carbon based life forms.
I’m all for all tastes and textures.
Cheese production may be the definition of “chemically mangled milk” but I’m all for it.
Frankly I think the bigger reason these don't seem to be working out is that they aren't having the actual impact desired. The price isn't coming down. And if the price remains at higher-than-meat levels the ecological impact (which is what I personally care more about) is probably not where it needs to be either.
I mean, let's be blunt: all this dithering about health effects and environmental externalities isn't actually going to change anything. Make a burger for the price of a bean dip, however, and the market will beat your door down even if they claim not to care about the hippy nonsense.
As I said, they measurably improve health outcomes relative to the meats they're replacing in important areas.
My understanding of the studies on UPF health outcomes is that their data is drawn overwhelmingly from traditional categories like junk food and processed starch and sugar. Which is all the more reason to avoid the equivocation between the two categories, lest someone get the mistaken impression that the Twinkie data is about the burgers.
They imitate meats, but is there any evidence that, in practice, they replace them? In menus, and I suspect in actual human eating behavior, they seem to replace earlier vegetarian options like old-school TVP, not meat.
Although I'd also add that UPF avoidance is more of a useful heuristic than an inherently reliable indicator of something's healthfulness. It's not like it's physically impossible to use complex industrial processes to create a product with high-quality nutrition that aligns with a given consumer's desired macros.
I don't personally believe that plant-based meats as we know them are as healthy as meat, but that doesn't mean they couldn't theoretically be, and it doesn't mean lab-grown meat can't be (although I'll let other people be the guinea pigs on immortalized cells and check back in next century).
Edit: 1: Except the powders. Turns out that they're on the low end of "ultra-processed" based on the Nova classification system, whereas Beyond/Impossible Meat is more firmly in that category. See comment below.
However there are other protein powders that are obtained using minimal processing, much less than the traditional food processing, so they cannot be considered "ultra-processed" by any definition.
For instance the protein concentrates that are extracted from milk or whey are much less processed than the traditional dairy products. (This is also reflected in their price, which is similar to that of the cheapest kinds of chicken meat, per their protein content.)
To extract the protein powder from milk or whey, only simple (in principle) processing steps are done: centrifugation to remove the fat, ultrafiltration to remove the lactose and the water and drying to remove the residual water.
This kind of processing alters the proteins of milk far less than the traditional making of cheese, which requires strong processing with enzymes and/or acid and/or heat and/or fermentation, and which causes significant changes in the structure and composition of the milk proteins.
If you call milk/whey protein concentrate as "ultra-processed", you must call any cheese as "hyper-super-ultra-processed".
It is true that making milk/whey protein powders requires machines that can be made only using modern technologies, while cheese and other dairy products were already made many millennia ago. However the simplicity of the old technologies is only apparent, because they exploited the work of dead animal bodies (rennet) or bacteria or fungi, which are much more complex than human-made machines.
In this case, i.e. for making milk/whey protein powders, modern technology has allowed the use of much less processing for extracting the useful part of milk, keeping it in its unaltered state, than the traditional technologies, so this is clearly not an example of "ultra-processing".
Similarly, extracting vegetable oils using supercritical carbon dioxide is certainly not "ultra-processing" as it allows a better preservation of the oil fraction of oily seeds or oily fruits than the traditional oil extraction methods.
So the use of modern processing methods is not the same as "ultra-processing". To the latter, one should count only processing methods that cause irreversible changes in the food, removing the control of the end users on the composition of the food that they eat, i.e. processing that mixes ingredients into the food or that alters the food through heating or other treatments.
The definitions are indeed fucked.
That being said, the same system would categorize Meati, tofu, and cheese as merely processed (Nova group 3), not ultra-processed (group 4), at least according to Grok (which provided detailed reasoning that sounded credible). For comparison, Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat were deemed to be firmly in group 4.
There are 3 kinds of processing, with very different effects. One kind is separating a product into its components. Another is mixing various ingredients. The third is applying some treatment to the product that modifies its structure, heating being the most frequent method.
I consider only mixing ingredients and applying various treatments as belonging to "ultraprocessing", because these processing methods remove the control of the end consumer about what is being eaten, as they are normally irreversible.
On the other hand, any separation method cannot have a harmful effect by itself and separation of the edible components is absolutely necessarily for human food, because we have reduced digestive systems, which are unable to extract as efficiently the nutrients from food as those of most other non-carnivorous mammals.
The only harmful effects of well-separated food ingredients, like seed flour, oils or protein powders, happen when the end consumers choose to mix them in unhealthy proportions, like when adding too much sugar or too much fat to some dish, but then they can blame only themselves for this.
With food that has passed through the other kinds of processing, nothing that the end consumers do with it can make it healthy, when it has not originally been so, which happens frequently because for its producers it is more beneficial to try to make it addictive instead of healthy.
It's not a question of whether or not they fit that definition, it's that the definition itself is so expansive that it allows equivocation between food products that are meaningfully different in their ingredients, health outcomes and environmental outcomes.
"Ultra-processed" may be a little fuzzy at the boundaries, but at least it's a specific enough term that we all know and mostly agree on what we're talking about when we use the term. UPF-ness is a heuristic that can help determine whether or not a certain food is junk, but once you've categorized something as "junk food" you've already decided it's unhealthy. No one has to study or debate whether or not junk food is unhealthy.
And the value judgement is the only part that has an especially meaningful connection to health. It is admittedly really difficult to do rigorous research on the health impacts of diet, but the connection between "ultra-processed-ness" and health outcomes is super messy. And even when we can get data that suggests negative health outcomes, what's the actual cause? Preservatives? Lack of fiber? Hyperpalatability? Nobody has been able to clearly articulate a cause and if we could then we could just focus on that thing rather than the "ultra-processed-ness."
The most pressing question here: is tofu ultra-processed? It's a protein isolate prepared by a solution-precipitation process. If you replace the tofu salts (calcium sulfate and similar) with ethanol (an anti-solvent for proteins) you get protein powder. This is not the most efficient way make protein powder, but the point is that on the one hand you have a traditional centuries-old process, and on the other you have what seems to be a sine qua non of ultraprocessed food, and the difference is... ethanol.
Beyond Meat, which contains... dietary fiber... is part of a particular subset of highly processed foods that are trying to be healthy. If you see "chicory root extract" on a food's ingredients label, it's probably in this club. This is a telltale sign of spiking the dietary fiber content. (Beyond Meat does not contain chicory; its fiber is from peas.)
Most ultra-processed foods are not trying to be healthy. They are designed to be addictive. It's a little bit like the old kerfuffle over "weapons-grade" encryption being restricted for export. The technology can be useful for military purposes, but encryption is not a weapon per se.
The critical diversion is not from meat to processed foods, but from the practice of deliberately engineering addictive foods to the techniques that facilitate it. The food product companies would like you to look anywhere other than their intentions, because they can always change the how and what in pursuit of them. They will always be happy to ostentatiously move away from the old way of making a bag of chips you can't put down, to the new way of making a bag of chips you can't put down. The root of the problem is the incentive structure.
Of course I agree with the rest of your point, which is similar to what I was saying. (I also chuckled at your choice of analogy, as a founder of an encryption startup.) I have a lot of thoughts on the incentive structure[1], which I would dramatically overhaul given the option.
The way to make a good profit in the food industry is to sell a lot of a product that you can sell for a good price, but have it be very cheap to manufacture. If you take really cheap input material that historically was used mostly for animal feed, like corn or oats, and can do a bunch of food science magic to it to make it very tasty and addictive, you can charge a good price and people will buy lots of it.
The problem with ultraprocessed foods is simply that the manufacturer has been given too many free parameters, and if they get enough they can find something addictive and unhealthy. Since shelf space on grocery store shelves is allocated based on sales, the shelves will be filled with addictive food. This is even true of the produce section. Fruits and vegetables are bred to increase their sugar content, reduce bitterness, etc. Luckily breeding fruit trees is more time consuming and less controllable than all of the chemistry that can happen in a potato chip factory. We will see how this holds up as genetic engineering becomes more predictable.
Anyhow the only solution we've really come up with to this social problem is to change our brains with Glucagon Like Peptides to be less susceptible to these tricks. We will see how long that is able to keep ahead of the food companies.
Beyond meat type meat alternative products have simply not been around enough, and not consumed by enough people to enable any sort of studies that show they are better. It takes many years, sometimes decades of tracking tens of thousands of people through their lifetimes to establish any reasonable certainty that something is better than the other.
Moreover the ingredients in meat alternatives are known quantities and they lack the specific compounds like heme iron, nitrosamines, and saturated animal fats that are mechanistically linked to cancer and heart disease in red and processed meat.
Beyond doesn't contain heme iron, but Impossible does.
But it could be a legit issue in terms of sharing rather than improving on a health outcomes associated with meat.
"Ultra processed foods are killing us"
Meaning: stop eating sugar cereals, doritos, frappuccinos, sweet granola bars, cheesy crackers, candy, and salted, processed deli meats
Popular interpretation: stop eating vegetarian meat alternatives
Big tobacco, drunk driving, union busting, questioning global warming, the list goes on and this man is likely responsible for some of the most detrimental misinformation campaigns in modern history.
https://sentientmedia.org/big-meat-rebrand-disinformation/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Organizational_Rese...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berman_(musician)#Hiatus...
> "We harvest the cells from our tanks and integrate them with a few plant-based ingredients..."
Gross. This should not legally be allowed to be marketed as salmon, at all.
This is starting to sound like a process which will require untold quantities of anti biotics and preservatives.
Building lab grown tissues and not just cell lines is what's being worked on now, for any purpose not only food.
It's certainly not fish.
That is a world I don't want to live in.
To be fair I live in Australia which does seem to have much stricter labelling requirements than the US.
The proof-of-concept marketing name "I Can't Believe It's Not Salmon" illustrates the fundamental problem here. Can lab-grown salmon be labeled as just plain "salmon"? Can it reside in the meat department right next to farm-raised and wild-caught salmon fillets? Does it always have to be prepended with "cultivated"?
It’s kinda like how they’ve started calling chocolate type products that have never seen a cocoa bean ‘chocolatey’.
Do we accept we are in a dystopia yet?
(Almost nobody who goes in to a restaurant is fooled by "Fish" in quotation marks on the menu; it's an alarming enough call-out to make anyone aware of it)
"cultivated" is not meant to mislead, it's meant to find an agreeable label that communicates the product provenance.
If a consumer has an expectation that what they're eating and drinking are specific things, they would be well served by learning to read the label(s). Nobody is serving these things outside of niche restaurant experiences and calling them the exact same thing as their OG counterparts.
e.g, Almond _milk_ has been a thing for centuries now. Everyone knows it's not from a cow, yet we call it milk because the end product is similar enough that people get what the point is. Humanity will likely do this until the heat death of the universe. You should probably just get over it.
If you're going to be this disingenuous then I'm not going to bother responding past this. shrug
Tissue culture in general is more like cancer than not like cancer, even when using "non-cancerous" cell lines. But cancerous and "immortalized" cell lines are particularly useful in cell culture because they don't snuff themselves out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line
https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...
I wish they'd just sell the fish cells, alone. Would love to try that.
It makes it easy to wonder if there's a connection between that fact and the types of diseases, particularly auto immune and inflammatory diseases, that occur in the population.
It’s people ignoring the mountain of evidence that such a switch would be a backwards step for health outcomes and claiming the opposite because they read a book by the usual rogues’ gallery of science misinterpreters (Taubes, Teicholz, Shanahan).
It would be funny if the one seed oil you're OK with is mustard seed oil, the oil closest in composition to canola, the one oil anyone has a legit gripe about (it doesn't taste very good).
I don't care either way; let the mustard oil flow. I don't buy the mustard oil thing either. Just don't pretend that mustard oil is somehow healthier than canola. Use whichever fat tastes best to you.
I've got a bottle of Uncle Roy's cold pressed extra virgin "spicy" mustard seed oil at my local Spar.
The label reads "erucic acid free", so I'm guessing they somehow remove it?
It even has the awful pun of "The healthy Oilternative".
I understand they also remove (most of?) it from Canola Oil.
It’s particularly popular in the northern state of West Bengal in India, where it’s used in dishes such as achaars, a pickled condiment used to add an acidic spice to a wide variety of dishes.
Through careful breeding processes, the group of scientists were able to produce rapeseed plants with low levels of erucic acid. The oil, later to be named canola oil (can- for Canada, -ola which stands for “oil, low acid”) soon became a commercialized, easily marketable hit with both the public and science community alike (Fisher, 2020).
The FDA has approved one brand of edible mustard seed oil that’s produced from a cultivar bred explicitly for its low levels of erucic acid.
Still digging for the brand
This is pretty vague. Similarly ~50 years ago, people were not eating as much meat as they do today.
So is it also easy to wonder if there’s a connection between high canola consumption and the fact we’re living longer than ever?
Smoked and canned salmon are often packaged with similar oils and flavor additives.
Also canola oil is now considered on par or healthier than olive oil. Soybeans are one of the worlds few complete plant protein sources with a high quality protein and widely consumed all over the world to both animals and humans to much beneficial effect. Sunflower oil is the least healthy thing here, but still considered quite healthy without excessive heating.
I always find this is looked over and a double standard. You can raise an animal on a diet of anything along with medication, drugs, and supplements, and advocates will label the beef/chicken/pork product as "meat" and "natural" as if it was a single pure ingredient. But then if a non-meat alternative like a burger is mentioned, every individual ingredient used gets scrutinized, even if that ingredient is often fed to farm animals like soy or grain.
That mapping seems correct to me, as a lot of the objections here are free-floating one-offs that presume these background assumptions more so than they are apples to apples comparisons intent on clearly comparing them in totality.
They already sell those at the seafood aisle.
So, basically a salmon-flavored jelly? I'm actually ok with this as long as there is no harmful substances involved. I wonder how's the texture once it's cooked or grilled.
This came as a shock to me. The macronutrients don't lie, though. Fish is protein and a little fat, carb content is fractions of a gram, and these labels are telling me that there's more carbohydrate than protein.
The ingredient labels that the FDA allows, do find a way to lie. If you read a ten-ingredient label that says "Ingredients: Beef, wheat flour, corn flour, oats, textured vegetable protein, canola oil, vegetable oil, xanthan gum, carageenan, salt", and tell people that this is the highest-percentage ingredient to the lowest-percentage ingredient ordering, most people will assume it's >75% beef, but all the label is saying numerically is that it's >10% beef; If every other ingredient was in the 9.0 to 9.9% range then the beef input would be around 1/6th of the material. Add more ingredients and this can be manipulated even more.
I also don't think this is comparable. Blended Alaskan pollock had an immune system before it hit the cold chain.
Why doesn’t the FDA require explicit percentages be listed..?
In the US, the invisible hand of the market will surely push a food producer to regulate itself effectively.
"4-5 grams of protein per 100 gram serving" "fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae"
Real Coho Salmon is about 20% protein and 7% fat so we're looking at less than 20% of the important parts being salmon. I retract my previous comment. It's not Salmon.
I believe the FDA defines a minimum of 40% of a meat product to be made of that meat to be labeled as that meat (eg. beef hotdogs needs to be made of 40% beef) and I'm not sure if this qualifies as that.
As a benchmark, the tuna used in a Subway tuna sandwich is 100% tuna, the beef in Taco Bell beef tacos is 88% beef, and the chicken in McDonald's Chicken McNuggets is 100% chicken but make up 45% of the nugget.
I hear.
> In addition to water and cell-cultivated salmon, our saku contains fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae, soy (an allergen), potato starch, konjac (a root vegetable), beta-carotene and lycopene (natural colors), carrageenan (an extract from red seaweed), and natural flavors.
Think about why each of these things are in there:
• Fats — because the parts [tissues] of the salmon that we eat, have not just muscle cells contained in them [the part that tastes + mouthfeels + cooks like salmon], but also fat cells (adipocytes), to contribute the taste + mouthfeel + cooking properties of "fatty tissue" [which is how we expect salmon to be] vs "lean tissue". And sure, the people creating this thing could have another tank growing "salmon-derived adipocytes", with some hormone bath to trick those adipocytes into absorbing and metabolizing nutrients from the environment to grow heavy with fat... but why bother? (That actually sounds dangerous, in fact — you might end up eating big doses of fish hormones trapped in the fat.) At the micro level, a little sphere of fat is a little sphere of fat; you can use a salmon adipocyte, some other kind of adipocyte, or even just a skin of sodium alginate, and the taste and texture of the result will be identical, as long as the fat inside the bag has identical properties (glyceride chain length, mostly).
• Natural colors and flavors — weirdly enough, because salmon grown on its own wouldn't look or taste fully like salmon. The look and flavor of salmon comes not just from what the salmon itself produces via the action of its cells/proteins/DNA, but also from "impurities" — things the salmon eats, that end up depositing into the salmon's tissues over time. Like how eating shrimp makes flamingos pink. Salmon without those things is white, and missing some of the sweetness we associate with salmon. (You can even notice this in salmon meat from different conditions; wild-caught salmon usually gets more of these nutrient sources than farmed salmon, so wild-caught salmon is often a much deeper reddish-pink color than the orange of farmed salmon.)
• Starch, maybe carrageenan (and the implicit ingredient, water) — together, a simulacrum of (slightly-viscous) salmon blood. Using water alone wouldn't work; it's too thin, it'd just run out of the muscle tissue like a water from a sponge, desiccating the tissue over a span of minutes. You need some thickener to prevent that. (I suppose you could make salmon blood plasma + platelets. Might be more nutritious if you did. Not sure how you'd get it into the tissue reliably, without any kind of circulatory system in there. And it probably doesn't make much of a difference to taste or texture even if you did. But this might still be a v2.0 goal of theirs.)
• Soy and konjac (and also maybe carrageenan here) — a simulacrum of connective tissue, i.e. collagen. This is likely the matrix holding the cells in place. There's no such thing as "cells stacked directly on other cells" that actually stays together; there needs to be some non-cellular tissue matrix that the cells slot into. (Compare/contrast: "meat glue." Is a chicken nugget chicken?)
Why not actual collagen as a matrix, or maybe, say, gelatin? Why not ground-up shrimp as a colorant instead of beta carotene + lycopene? Why vegetable oils instead of animal fats? In all these cases, probably because their goal with these ingredients seems to be to only build this salmon out of plants + cells, rather than any animal byproducts. An unstated premise here seems to be that they want to design the process such that no matter how far it gets scaled up, there's no point at which it would be more economical to switch one of the ingredient sources from "make it in a bioreactor" to "get it from an animal byproduct sources", and at even further scale, "drive animal slaughter to get said byproduct as the product."
AFAICT, this is almost the closest thing you will ever be able to get to something you can call "salmon" — or maybe more specifically, "animal-harm-free salmon" — that can be created solely in a lab.
(To get any closer, you'd need to get pretty mad-science-y. You could, in theory, genetically engineer a... tree, or what-have-you, that would metabolically synthesize the salmon blood plasma, the salmon connective tissue, the salmon-prey-species tissue trace impurities, etc.; and also act as a host to a commensal salmon cell population; eventually putting all that together inside a fruit or something. Pluck and peel the fruit, and inside — salmon muscle matrix tissue, fully cellularized, with solutes. [Though probably with the tree's vascularization, rather than salmon vascularization.] We're probably 50 years from understanding genetic engineering well enough to do that; and even then, it'd probably be operationally impractical, due to salmon muscle tissue rotting at any temperature a tree would grow at. But that product would technically be "closer to salmon", I guess.)
Simple answer: they're cutting corners -- increasing shelf life, decreasing production costs, and overall increasing profits, like many of the big food corporations operating today.
Buying some filtered animal-derived blood plasma on the open market and letting the tissue grow/soak in it, would likely be a lot cheaper than precision mixing+dispersing of thickeners + reverse-pressure-gradient tissue impregnation of those thickeners. Food-grade blood plasma is the lowest-demand animal byproduct there is — it's what gets rejected out of even blood-sausage manufacture.
Same with collagen vs., specifically, carrageenan — collagen's cheap in bulk and works great for getting animal cells to stick to it; carrageenan's expensive, finicky to work with, and there are concerns about the carcinogenic effects of its long-term consumption. Many food-product manufacturers have moved away from previous formulations containing carrageenan; companies are only sticking with carrageenan at this point if there's nothing else that works within their constraints. Judging by other carrageenan-containing products, those constraints are probably something like "plant-derived; solid at room temperature; melts in your mouth; decent compressive strength, yet tears easily under tension."
And vegetable oils would be cheaper than animal fats... but vegetable oils with the same set of health guarantees as salmon (i.e. "omega-3 rich" vegetable oils) are not. And their product does claim to have the same health benefits as real salmon; so presumably they are aiming for that omega-3:omega-6 ratio target, since it's usually the headline "health benefit" of eating salmon. Which means they're probably buying, continuously-measuring, and mixing different oils to hit that ratio — similar to what orange-juice processors do to create a homogeneous juice.
While that type of infrastructure is certainly possible, there's no clear way to scale it like there is for cellular culturing.
And the result might be pretty disappointing even if you did it. Picture a human who spent their whole life in a coma in a hospital bed — they'd have zero muscle mass, fragile bones, etc.
However, you might be able to get around this by hooking the animal's body up to a synthetic brainstem that sends computer-controlled impulses down the spine – such that you've got e.g. a bunch of brainless salmon strapped in place in a flow tank, whose bodies are constantly being told to breathe, swim forward, open their mouths to capture food when food is released into the tank, etc.
I think that, besides the scalability challenges, the reason this approach isn't more looked into as an avenue of research, is that the ethics of cellular-cultured meat are really clear (there is nothing experiencing pain there; there aren't even nerve cells to sense or relay pain), while the ethics of brainless whole-animal cultivation are... non-obvious, to say the least.
Also it's the mostly same ingredients that farmed salmon is already packaged with.
Meat, bread, eggs, dairy, onion, herbs, spices.
Industrial food has a lot of things which are much less recognizable as food.
Degrees of separation from something alive which I'd like to eat to the ingredient matters to plenty of people.
And milk from a cows udder, how is that not gross?
You know there's puss and blood in cows milk because they all have raw infected udders from being milked non stop by a machine?
Enjoy your meatloaf!
Vegitables are grown IN THE DIRT THEY ARE BY DEFINITION DIRTY, FIGS CONTAIN DIGESTED WASPS, nearly every agricultural product contains at least a little bit of BUGS, FRUIT IS THE REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS OF A FLOWER.
Sigh.
I will never understand how so many defend the expeller-propelled and solvent laden oils as somehow pleasant and natural…
An expeller is just a screw press. Get your terminology right if you're going to chase the latest food demonizing fad.
And yes, lots of oils are extracted by mashing up biologicals mixing it with a solvent like hexane and then evaporating off the solvent leaving a trace <1ppm behind.
I filled my gas tank today and did some spray painting without entirely appropriate ventilation. I'm sure most people regularly expose themselves to a little bit of organic solvent on a regular basis without a second thought or moralizing about it.
Isn't that the ingredient in lab grown salmon? Also things you're calling "much less recognizable" are basically varieties of vegetable oil.
I'm perfectly fine eating something that was alive, so long as it was treated with respect and was killed humanely. Doing so connects you, a living being, to other living beings that are part of the circle of life, which live and die the same way you and I will.
People don’t care as long as it tastes good. The current methods we have for farming meat do not scale and we need to work on alternatives. Meat is tasty and people want to eat it.
Innovation will continue in the lab grown meat sector and when it eventually scales it will over take traditional methods. Current factory farming is anything but natural and there is plenty of harm being done.
What does this mean?
Not sure about fish but mammals produced for meat are usually killed before adult age. Is that "killed humanely"?
Would you say the same thing about killing other humans for food? If not, why not?
I'd ask the poster a similar question though. If a monkey or chimp was treated with respect and killed humanely, would they eat that?
Where is the line drawn?
Explain to me the difference between disrespect and being cattle-bolted through the skull.
When the fish is yanked out of the factory farm and suffocated in air or chilled and frozen alive do you think they experience this respect we're talking about? If so, where?
Does the operator say thanks to each fish before their brutal, agonizing, often prolonged for market death?
'respect' is about the most stupid thing I can think to bring up when referencing loss of life in animals.
It's a meta human concept that means nothing other than the mans approval of method -- it means nothing with regard to the animal or the suffering.
I think if you could choose between that and being slowly consumed by five or six coyotes from the ass forward, you'd go for the cattle bolt. I have a ton of problems with the US meat industry (to the point where I only eat meat once a month or so unless somebody is throwing it away), but there are ranchers out there who do try to do their best for the food they raise.
I actually do think, if we solved all the other problems in the world and had time left over, it would be right to intervene in nature to stop the harms you described too, and that conversation is a pandora's box of its own. But I don't think the upshot of these harms in nature is that we're also allowed to engage in similar harms at any scale we choose, as long as the badness isn't as bad as what happens in nature. Mainly because that comparison sidesteps the role of unique human moral responsibility and implies an unmade argument that analogies to nature can serve the function of authorizing human-initiated moral harms.
The "connection" you're advocating appears to be a more a romanticized free association (along the lines of "we are all stardust") than a specific conceptual argument accountable to the interests of the animals being harmed.
In light of the fact that similar compounds are added to the majority of farmed salmon for similar reasons, the comparison shows that the objection is likely a fallacious appeal to nature, purporting that something is good because it is "natural" or "normal" rather than presenting any objective evidence to argue their point.
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their correct name
- Confucius
They need to call this tankcellfillet or something on those lines. Companies must not be allowed to get away to slap the tag healthy on clearly harmful foods and get away.
>clearly harmful foods
Want something even grosser? Go catch a salmon and then look at how many parasites are in _every_ fish.
If you have ever eaten salmon, you've swallowed tons of parasites in all stages of their lifecycle.
The parasites are part of the circle of life and are in no way gross to me.
Sorry you feel that way.
For most of human history eating meat riddled with maggots was part of the circle of life, is it weird to be grossed out by eating meat riddled with maggots?
Surely if it was good enough for us to live on back then, it’s part of the circle of life and should be totally fine. Right?
If one’s no longer acceptable because we don’t do it any more, then surely if lab meat gets established then we’ll look back at that parasite-riddled salmon with the same revulsion as we do the maggots.
Even ancient man avoided parasites when possible. Parasites can kill you, regardless of how natural they are.
Dog shit and nightshade are part of the circle of life too, but they seem to be avoided by most.
Something being good because it's 'part of the circle of life', whatever that means, is as blind and irrational as 'all upf is bad by virtue of being defined as upf.'
Life isn't as simple as black and white.
However, I’m not convinced that vegan activism via pointing out that many people’s behaviours are at odds with their stated ethical preferences is particularly effective.
I suspect this is because many vegan activists make the assumption that people have ethical preferences which then drive their behaviour. For many (most?) people, though, I think they act the way that feels good to them and then come up with justifications for it post-hoc, even if those justifications are illogical.
As such, I live in hope that lab-grown meat will be tasty and cheap enough that people switch across and stop consuming animal products, which will give humanity the space to look back and see the abhorrent nature of animal agriculture for what it is and ban it outright.
With any luck, we’ll view our current generation’s treatment of animals with the same confusion we feel when we consider our forebears’ tolerance of slavery.
Bring on the cultured salmon!
Strongly disagree. I absolutely hate that animals have to be killed for us to eat meat. And the industrial scale cruelty of factory farming gives me existential dread. But I have yet to see a healthy looking vegan person.
I've lived in a couple of very liberal cities with vegans, and every single one I met looked... just sick and unhealthy.
But I think we're on the same page w.r.t the best end-goal. I can't wait for cultured meats so we can stop inflicting so much cruelty on farm animals.
When we look at the data on the subject, both in terms of shorter term RCTs looking at biomarkers and longer term observational data, vegan diets seem non-inferior to the other top-tier dietary patterns we see for lifespan and healthspan (med, lacto-ovo vegetarian etc).
That said, I’m sympathetic to the view that with currently available foods one does have to be more mindful of diet than when on an omni diet - I think that’s true. But when an omni dieter looks unhealthy we just say “that guy looks rough” and when we see a vegan who looks unhealthy we say “vegan diets make you look rough”.
many such cases. People have no idea about how much their bias influences their perception of the world and then share the output of that worldview as if it is relevant to reality
As I say, my thesis is that these double standards/logical contradictions are intellectual tools to protect us from our cognitive dissonance. We’re not really operating from a set of logically coherent principles for the most part.
I say this without judgement or any belief that I’m not doing the same thing in a million areas in my life. Just to point out that this is why I lean more towards cultivated meat than outreach activism when it comes to veganising the world!
I would also say that i have seen the complete opposite to you, alas this is all anecdotal.
This anecdata is so wrong and only serves to degrade the conversation. I can only imagine you have some sort of bias that convinced you this was worth sharing.
There are a wide range of people who are vegan with various aesthetics, just as with any diet. There is also a selection bias as veganism can attract people who have health issues that they are treating with diet. Your judgement of the efficacy and impact of a lifestyle being based on some people you've met tells me your way of thinking about the world is deeply flawed and shallow.
Agreed. Replicated meat is the ideal.
"I shall try some of your burned replicated bird meat!"
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/2d56c6ef-8b4d-4d7b-926f-e6c4c47...
In addition to water and cell-cultivated salmon, our saku contains fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae, soy (an allergen), potato starch, konjac (a root vegetable), beta-carotene and lycopene (natural colors), carrageenan (an extract from red seaweed), and natural flavors.
Hmm. They also compare their place to a microbrewery but I can't find any photos of the actual production process, generally a point of pride for a microbrewery. It sounds less like "lab grown meat" than literally "lab grown cells" + other stuff to mimic aspects of meat texture/flavor/color.
https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...
https://goodfish.org.au/species/atlantic-salmon-tassal/
They've taken what was a pristine harbour untouched by humans and turned it into a sewer for salmon effluent. There is a prehistoric fish, the maugean skate, that is likely to go extinct if the salmon farming continues.
Also, the dish itself was really cool. Kann served it as sashimi, along with a bunch of small pickled things and a hunk of smoked watermelon.
I suspect lab grown salmon is a bad idea on those economic grounds.
Salmon is just one example.
* High demand but limited supply
* Unable to externalize costs that wild/farmed fish doesn't pay
* R/D investments that needs to be recouped
* Small production with a lack of economy of scale
Oh it could obviously be this is a terrible product where its more important to appear environmentally friendly than to actually be so. But lets see where it is in a decade, with my current limited data it looks like a step in the right direction.
I'm not 100% sure either of those has been proven out.
I could see CO2, but it sort of depends on how much power the bioreactor and sterilization consumes and how much methane is release. Granted, it'd be easier to capture those and easier to place these reactors in or near a grocery store, for example, for immediate delivery.
Food safety is almost certainly going to be a bigger problem. The big problem with bioreactors is they are cultivating the ideal substance for very nasty bacteria/fungus/etc to flourish in. Bioreactors do not have immune systems. That means keeping things absolutely sterile is of the utmost importance. I'm sure when the initial products are produced safety will be pristine. However, what happens when the CEOs of these companies decide to cut back? Heck, what happens when the new guy forgets to do a sterilization cycle or runs it short?
A major issue is these will be regulated by the FDA which has a history of doing a poor job of keeping food safe. I'd feel better if it were under the jurisdiction of the USDA.
I can cherish the research path and value the intended endpoint, but knowing what I know of agribusiness, early approval to market seems a mite reckless. Particularly in 2025. Particularly with "sushi-grade fish".
We produce millions of tons of affordable meat from industrial production of animals THAT HAVE immune systems, swimming in antibiotics, that the FDA tells you to cook thoroughly because it's definitely full of salmonella. We chop it up using child labor on production lines that would make you a vegetarian if you saw them.
Canola is often sprayed with neonicotinoids and the oil processed with solvents like hexane.
I'd personally prefer to get my omega acids from real salmon.
Not saying one's better, just that all our food sources have higher and lower quality steps before market.
I’m not sure about the cost savings either, at least right now it doesn’t seem feasible.
Innovation is fun but I think the best way to tackle all your points is to keep the pressure on legislation.
It's true that you could solve this by only eating legumes, but you then go on to say you don't even eat only legumes yourself, you also consume meat. So for those times where you do consume meat, lab grown meat would solve the issues that come with that.
Totally get that you may have dietary/taste preferences that preclude consumption of these meats, but that sounds different to the OP's point that they potential solve a lot of issues with our current food supply.
Meat consumption is also not a binary decision, you can consume 10% of the meat you currently do and reduce the environmental side effects caused by your meat consumption by 90%. Furthermore, you can consume meat that comes from small scale local sustainable sources to further reduce your footprint.
It is the same deal with eggs, I don’t buy factory eggs, I buy them from my local farmer who has free range chickens. Sure, eggs are $8/dozen, but that is the real cost of eggs which do not preclude animal suffering and unsustainable farming practices.
My point is maybe the solution to the meat supply issues is to consume less meat, and consume meat from more sustainable sources. It is almost impossible for western society to grasp that maybe the solution to sustainability problems is to align their consumption with the rest of the world instead of turning to technology to solve all their problems. It is the same with so many other things like water management where the solution seems to be to dam more rivers and suck more acquifers dry instead of maybe not trying to grow grass and cedar trees in a desert.
> It is almost impossible for western society to grasp that maybe the solution to sustainability problems is to align their consumption with the rest of the world instead of turning to technology to solve all their problems.
Not sure what persuasive power this is supposed to have. In the case of lab meat, the technological solution seems outright better than the “rest of the world” solution.
If the “rest of the world” solution is “eat less meat” then on an ethical basis, that is a worse option compared to lab meat. Sure, fewer sentient beings having their throats slit for taste pleasure is better than the status quo, but zero is even better than that.
I mean, 'Whale' meat or 'Caviar' or 'Foie Gras' instead of ordinary 'Salmon' would find far more market.
With that said, vegan caviar has existed for years make of algae, and it's honestly not far from the real thing.
K, no thanks,
Hard no from me, not even once.
I’d rather eat non-lab grown salmon once a month or once a quarter than eating that f—— aberration.
Mix in the benefits you mentioned and it seems like a no-brainer to me.
Ouch. Red states are pro-deregulation, until laissez-faire innovation offends their beliefs.
As we've seen with incandescent light bulbs and plastic straws, "free market" is only temporary, until the "bad" thing simply gets banned.
They're just pre-emptively banning artificial meat, to prevent real meat from being banned!
The idea of preemptively banning something so it can't become better than the status quo seems ludicrous.
The proof is in the pudding / free market. If the alternatives (paper straws, LED bulbs) were better, people would voluntarily buy them! (cf: mobile phones vs. stationary phones, almost noone has the latter these days, because the former are just - better!) Instead, they're banned because they're better.
edit: I looked into it and incandescent bulbs aren’t normally preferred but there’s a small following. Even the following admits LED bulbs have a lot of benefits. It seems they just don’t like all the colors.
Apparently the market tolerates this garbage even though LEDs are supposed to be a superior technology and last longer (and some I've bought years ago have, I just don't remember the brand and it was in another house). Perhaps Ace is practicing planned obsolescence and taking advantage of their customers' expectations that "light bulbs get replaced"?
I used to find incandescent bulbs 4 for a dollar on sale. An LED bulb is typically at least a couple of bucks, that's why I say 10x the price.
I will grant they use less electricity, but my electric bill hasn't noticably changed. The amount of electricity I use for lights in my home isn't even noise in my monthly budget. But what is annoying is having to get out a stepladder once a month to change a bulb, when the huge selling point on these bulbs is that they were worth the price because they would last 10x as long.
Also it's not hard to work out how much electricity you are saving. If you are worried about a couple of bucks, it won't take much usage of a 80W bulb to blow through that.
Every bit of research I've ever seen shows LEDs DO last substantially longer. 5-50x longer, depending on which kinda light you'd like to compare to [1]. They're also much cheaper over the long run when you factor in the cost of electricity.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...
When they first came up they were pricy but unless you're talking about fancy smart-bulbs with Wifi and color changing, they are not 10x the price. And they empirically last 5-20+ times longer.
So even before you consider that a huge portion of the energy put into incandescence is lost to heat (thereby making it cost MUCH more in electricity), they are still roughly the same price after accounting for lifespan.
Dumping toxic waste into a river would also lower costs for consumers vs disposing of it correctly, but there are regulations to prevent that. Complete unobstructed free market capitalism is not sustainable, there needs to be a balance.
> "free market" is only temporary, until the "bad" thing simply gets banned
How can the alternatives get better, if regressive municipalities preemptively ban them to prevent "slippery slopes"?
I'm not the one who started banning though. I'd be open to first unbanning plastic straws and incandescent light bulbs, then unbanning artificial meat. Let the market decide!
But I definitely want to ban them before they ban me.
Sometimes the most efficient solution is to collaborate in the way only a government can organize. Sometimes regulations do more good than harm. If someone cannot articulate exactly why their proposal is a good idea and instead relies on repeating myths then be wary.
So... Like a wild fish, but with NO IMMUNE SYSTEM WHATSOEVER, which requires your sterilization protocols to be effectively perfect.
NASA has tried and failed to get their sterilization protocols to perfection levels for Mars landers, and consistently failed despite using basically zero organic materials.
We're going to cook this stuff, yes, sure (aren't we?)... but the squick is rational. And the problem gets inherently worse at larger scale production.
It's not going to be possible to grow a thing that looks like a piece of salmon but is secretly riddled with viruses and bacteria.
Either the lab gets their sterile technique right and they wind up with something that looks like salmon, or they get it wrong and you wind up with bacteria slop. Things that look like salmon can only become so if no bacteria and viruses are present.
There's just such a gulf between the prices at which this is feasible for food use, and the prices at which existing large bioreactors can culture animal tissue.
If we can't even get plant slop ("algal biodiesel") culture consistent and cheap enough to burn in an engine, or get plant slop ("tilapia feedstock algae") cheap enough to industrialize to outcompete chickens... I don't know that I'm comfortable eating bioreactor meat that can only survive in the FDA danger zone.
In an a bioreactor where no immune system exists, there can't be a latent infection: there's no immune system! If it can infect and destroy what's growing, then it'll infect and destroy all of it. It isn't going to look like tuna meat after that.
Don't forget that salmon and most other deep sea fish are immediately frozen when caught, which not only helps preserve flavor, but eliminates parasites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_and_parasites_in_salm...)
> Our saku is sushi-grade and is perfect for dishes like sushi, crudo, and ceviche
One of modern humanity's oldest activities is fermenting carbohydrates in large bioreactors into alcohol, yogurt, and pickles, but there are a lot of things that turned out not to work in that history.
When we try to fabricate, say, monoclonal antibodies using large cultures of multicellular tissues for pharmaceutical work, the price ends up coming out to millions of dollars a kilogram.
I am implicitly skeptical of the protocols of a protein tissue culture that has to be produced at the ~$30/kg price level.
Could you eat it and not die? I'm sure!
But could you feed people with a billion meals worth of batches and have nobody die? I'm less sure! My understanding is that tissue culture failures are frequently the bane of a biologist's research program.
Freezing doesn't kill the parasites, it slows the clock that started ticking when the fish was killed. It's not pasteurization, like what's done to canned tuna. It just slows the clock when you refrigerate or freeze the fish, but does not reset it to zero. And of course, if you're eating fresh fish that was healthy when it was killed, there's no need for an intermediate freezing or pasteurizing step.
This situation is different because the "clock" starts when the cell cultures are removed from the donor salmon. The whole blob/tank/plate/catalyzing surface (I'm not sure what the design is, I wish they had more documentation) on which the product grows for the whole time that the product is growing is vulnerable to a single bacterium that would grow out of control, like an immunocompromised human might be killed by an ordinary illness that most people would shrug off in 24 hours.
When the FDA talks about freezing killing parasites in fish, they're talking specifically about anisakis worms - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisakis
Ah, good news for you then! Fish immune system most definitely does NOT stop parasites. Every (and I mean it, every) salmon you've ever eaten had some parts of parasites in them.
That's also why you absolutely should NOT eat fresh-caught salmon without thoroughly cooking it. Industrially-caught salmon is always frozen, and it kills parasites.
My personal guess is that the first actually economically viable lab-grown meats will be of endangered/extinct animals that the extremely wealthy will be willing to pay the exorbitant costs that it takes to create them for the novelty factor.
If they're actively pushing into the market, that means they're selling _something_ at maybe $30-$100/kg. Would you trust that something, knowing what you know of animal tissue bioreactors? Would you trust a restaurant serving thousands of meals of that something?
Relevant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZGPjvFkLzUW
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/recalls-public-health-...
"Produced without inspection" and "processing deviations" account for a lot of recalls.