Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't
harpers.org
harpers.org
I feel like squeamish people are probably not the best ones to write about novel meat products...
Farmer Neighbor (not the one with the cows): “oh, no that’s just when they take the calves away for veal”
As a parent I feel worse about dairy than beef…
Constant rape. Constant separation from off spring. Tons of hormones and medication to keep infections down.
They are so stressed physically and emotionally that their lifespans are 50% or lower of what they should be. Dairy cattle routinely just die from stress.
Its also insanely bad for the environment.
I grew up ranching and have seen dairy operations plenty of times. They're disgusting cruelty factories.
Every time we eat a snack or food that involves dairy, remember that it is completely unnecessary to include dairy.
You're preaching to the lactose-intolerant choir here, man.
I am not sure I buy that. Rape is intensely upsetting to humans, but that does not imply it is so upsetting to other animals. And dairy cows aren't usually impregnated through sex to my knowledge; they are artificially inseminated. I don't see evidence that cows find this upsetting.
It's unnecessary to bring in weak arguments when we have such strong arguments. Cows are distraught beyond measure when their calves are taken away.
Rape is not a terrible word to describe forcible penetration.
The fact that your cat needs the medicine just means that the discomfort you are inflicting on your cat is ultimately with its best interest in mind. When we hurt an animal, or even kill one with its best interest in mind, we do it out of compassion.
When we forcibly impregnate an animal repeatedly and then take away it's calf (cows being viviparous animals, this causes them suffering), that is not in their best interest. Their suffering is not benefiting them, it benefits us.
I cut out dairy about a decade ago. This is another level.
Disclaimer: I'm not a vegetarian, but I dislike wasting meat. Something like "eat what you kill" but with in the supermarket in the middle.
The last part shows the slaughterhouse process (at least live cow to half beef carcass anyway), fair warning you can't unsee that but imo more people could benefit from knowing how their burgers are made.
I don’t eat meat for ethical/health/climate reasons. You bet your ass I’m singing the praises of lab grown meat if I had that kind of platform. Instead, they used their voice to say how icky pretend meat is. It honestly pisses me off lol.
Lmao god damn veggies are delusional.
Yeah I said that.
Per the article, all the other folk seemed to enjoy the lab grown meat just fine
If we made it so before one could eat meat of the animal, it had to personally kill and watch the animal die, we’d eat less meat.
It should be a requirement
I do like what they did for example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/world/europe/norway-schoo...
People tend to seek the feeling of blamelessness when they should seek the condition of blamelessness. Often doing the right thing will make a person feel guiltier than doing the wrong one.
My wife grew up in a country where people would still personally slaughter pigs to roast at major holidays. Didn’t keep her or any of her family from eating meat.
People who kill animals themselves regularly are probably subsistence farmers who consider meat a luxury, and what's more, the way they killed them was probably nothing like the incredibly high volume processing that goes on in a modern slaughterhouse.
I definitely think that if most people had to visit a modern factory farm and see the life cycle of one of these animals, kill it and process it, they would probably be shocked at what is legal.
This statement is thrown around a lot, but it doesn't really check out. Per-capita meat consumption in most of the west is only around 66kg/year (increasing to 100-120kg/year for meat-heavy countries like Spain, Argentina, and the USA).
That's about one pig and a handful of birds - even many peasant populations could afford to raise that much meat each year. The well-off were consuming massively more meat that this throughout history. Not to mention the incredible quantities of fish consumed by coastal populations.
Records from Durham and Westminster cathedrals suggest monks were eating in excess of 400kg/year of meat and fish. Records from Italy in a similar period show labourers and even widows receiving in excess of 80kg/year of meat. And so on...
So the number of dead animals per year needed to sustain a typical human is much greater.
For example someone who is a much more moderate meat eater than most, might eat at least half of their protein intake from vegetables, with the remainder from healthy chicken breast meat, eating around 1 kg of raw chicken breast per week, i.e. from 2 dead chicken.
That means 100 dead chicken per human per year, though it is likely that other less choosy humans would eat the thighs and a few other parts, so the 100 chicken would actually sustain between 2 and 3 humans for a year.
That is not a "handful" of birds.
It sadly doesn't go back further than the 1960s. If you select Western Europe, the number seems to be falling (back from almost 100kg, though). USA, not so much.
Note though that for what your parent describes, you'd want numbers to go even further back, then you could likely see the whole effect of post-WW2 boom; though WW2 itself would obviously also extremely skew the data in the 40s.
I feel like I eat quite a lot of meat. And even I find that number rather suspect. Over a kilo a day? They did also do labour, but still that sounds extremely high even for pure carnivore diet of today... Or then there is some sort of significant waste.
...There's an argument to be made that the average modern human is too cowardly to be capable of butchering their own meat.
Is that true? ...Unfortunately, there's a non-zero proportion of people that will fit that mold. But I hope that it isn't the case for at least 90% of the population.
If anybody has even the smallest negative thought to eating meat these days, the very first internet search they do will bombard them with pictures of slaughter houses in the most negative light and animal abuse pictures. If that doesn't stop them eating meat itself, very few are going to be turned by a legit farming and slaughter practises.
My sister is vegan and it wasn't our slaughtering of animals that pushed her away from eating meat, it was the internet showing the worst of large corporate practises. For a long while she merely didn't eat corporate meat and only local or home grown or hunted meat.
> It was found that [slaughterhouse workers] have a higher prevalence rate of mental health issues, in particular depression and anxiety, in addition to violence-supportive attitudes. Furthermore, the workers employ a variety of both adaptive and maladaptive strategies to cope with the workplace environment and associated stressors. Finally, there is some evidence that slaughterhouse work is associated with increased crime levels. The research reviewed has shown a link between slaughterhouse work and antisocial behavior generally and sexual offending specifically.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380211030...
I've seen plenty of videos from slaughter houses, mostly ones activists use to point at the cruelty going on inside, but it never made me feel uncomfortable.
Going with a religious doctrine, the existence of an all-loving, all-seeing, all-powerful God in a world full of suffering should tell you that suffering is a good thing, for if it wasn't such a God would prevent it.
~Whatever your take is can you articulate it so we dont have to wait for parent to respond and then your response too?~
Nevermind, saw your other comments. Dont feed the trolls.
There's a plant that can change the shape it grows its leaf to match what other plant is around them - that includes copying artificial plants. So it has to be possible for a plant to "see".
This is such a stupid line, it makes me wonder if this article just wasn't paid for by a meat industry lobby. Meat industry who we know for a fact is already putting a lot of energy into fighting alternatives, like impossible meat.
I was so convinced that these meatless meats were going to be the next big thing.
One thing I think they missed out on was getting to 'close enough' and 'much cheaper' and then just pivoting.
Like, why stay with simulating the 5 or so animals we harvest? Just go off and make up new ones!
Like, here's a jackalope burger, or a unicorn burger or something. Tie into marketing!
"Exclusive to BurgerKing, the Iron Man 5 burger! Now through August 29th only!"
Put in some strange spices, vary the texture, give it a red and gold swirl, let the imagination run wild.
Can you imagine what business a Spiderman burger patty or sausage link would do? K-Pop demon hunters branded chicken-ish nugget like things?
I remember as a kid, we once ate some kind of filled chicken nugget thing, which would have been pulped chicken glued back together into a pouch. I thought it was pretty tasty, but in hindsight its probably good that I only got to eat it a couple times, because typing it out now it sounds disgusting and super unhealthy.
That is very different from stuff like Beyond and Impossible Burgers which aim to mimic the taste of meat with plant ingredients. If anything, lab grown meat cells were at a huge disadvantage to the Beyond/Impossible crew, who could make a better meat for cheaper and was more appealing to customers (if I'm going to forego an animal product, I'd rather have a plant version than a frankenmeat version).
But to your point, I really liked Impossible Burgers specifically because they were the only plant-based alternative that really satisfied a craving for meat. There were veggie burgers for years prior, and they were "its own thing", but I'd always feel hungry after eating one. I like Impossible Burgers because it satisfies all my hunger for meat but I'm not killing an animal in the process.
These days they are growing animal fats in bioreactors too, albeit separately from the proteins, and then sort of 3D printing them into one another to achieve a meat-like taste and texture. It's conceptually pretty cool, even if the results appear to be underwhelming.
I sampled some of Li’s unusual dish while he continued. “I had the ship take a few cells from a variety of people on Earth. Without their knowledge, of course.” He waved the sword vaguely at the table behind us. “Most of you over there will be eating either Stewed Idi Amin or General Pinochet Chilli Con Carne; here in the centre we have a combination of General Stroessner Meat Balls and Richard Nixon Burgers. The rest of you have Ferdinand Marcos Sauté and Shah of Iran Kebabs. ...”
We ate up, most of us quite amused. One or two thought the idea a little too outré, and some affected boredom because they thought Li needed discouragement not accomplices, while a few were just too full already. But the majority laughed and ate, comparing tastes and textures.
“If they could see us now,” Roghres giggled. “Cannibals from outer space!”
You have to wait until you have actual lab grown meat and I think that will actually be really successful if they can create a real meat with all of its complexities and nerves and fat striations, etc. they’re also going to have to prove to people that it’s not gonna cause cancers and things like that but if they can pull that off, it’s going to be a massive massive industry.
If you weren’t paying attention, it quite literally tastes and feels like chicken.
The killer was usually the downstream processing required to clean out off-flavors and colors, which was required to get even a passable product (these are just protein powder fillers at this point, not whole cuts), but ballooned CapEx and cut yield such that cost went back up to like, A5 Wagyu levels.
I’ve sat in the awkward tasting sessions the author describes, and they’re all the same. The attendees muster up a “that’s pretty good” - but we all know nobody would ever choose to buy this unless they were forced to.
Now that I’ve been out of it for a while, it’s pretty obvious to me what the problems are. Cost, obviously. Taste and texture simply aren’t there. And “the knowing” is real. I never got over imagining the whole factory process involved in the production. I’m sure vegans would say the same about animal farming, though. So my conclusion was, the only way this technology becomes relevant is if people are forced to use it. And that’s either because you’re cruelty-free by choice (small fraction of the population), or because the cost of meat suddenly skyrockets, which today, is not looking that likely. Keep in mind as well that meat costs would likely be driven by feed costs in such a scenario, which also impacts cultivated meat. So it’s ultimately a process efficiency play, and you’re competing against eons of evolution.
but why write more than 7000 words to communicate a simple point (lab-grown meat was promised 1-2 decades ago but failed to arrive and won't arrive in the foreseeable future)?
This reads like propaganda. Take tofurkey for example, it's just seitan and tofu and the same "chemical binders" you'll see in every other product in the freezer aisle.
And tofu is only as "ultra-processed" as cheese or bread is.
The only odd one is soy leghemoglobin, which comes from soybeans but mimics meat hemoglobin. It's just part of the legume, though.
The only troubling thing on the ingredients list is how much oil they put into it, but you can make the same complaint with 70/30 meat burgers. The macros are bad, but most burgers are.
I hope you use fresh turmeric for your Indian meal, because the powdered stuff is sometimes adulterated with lead oxide.
So at this point it's not even clear that anyone is actually losing their grip on the status quo...
Plenty of folks can take criticism.
Just as a matter of what's more effective, even aside from the fact that judging people is inherently wrong.
You mean the e-waste generating companies that actively target children with their highly addictive products?
Thanks for the anecdote though, that is interesting.
Don't threaten me with a good time!
Eternal dependence, and applauding the way they destroy your humanity down to the very last cell. Go on, applaud it.
Also the small farmers you are romanticizing hardly exist anymore precisely because of the returns to scale that lead large resource efficient factory farms to dominate.
This is a great example of how the propaganda is working.
What replaced almost all ground beef (except in burgers) for me, was Jackfruit. More specifically, the combination 90% pea protein, 10% jackfruit. Granules that can be rehydrated with boiling water in 2 minutes, price competitive with discounter mince, no extra ingredients, no high carb count. It has a good texture and tastes mostly like whatever you season it with.
Planted: 10 ingredients, 5.6g/100g carbs in the finished product
Pea/Jackfruit granules: 2 ingredients, 1.9g/100g carbs in the dry product (so roughly 0.8g/100g in the finished product)
Bugs for chickens, grasses/grains for cattle and omnivorous pigs are their own kind of bio-reactor…
Its literally the least efficient way of producing calories when we factor in all the costs, especially to the environment and health.
The entire point of meat in 2026(since industrialization of meat) is excess and waste. Its a rich people food that was introduced to the masses to make a profit.
It’s the negative affect and suffering (stress, pain, boredom etc) that is the bad part of eating animals.
(I think— I know others have thought more than I on this topic)
It just seems like an easier tech solution might be promising
(A smaller problem is that humans will start using the drugs if the distribution is not tightly controlled.)
Just a hundred, two hundred years ago we made the Elephant rifle, because a normal gun couldn't bring it down, but it was a fun sport to go out and kill just for the heck of it. No one cared about the animals.
It seems like we are living in an age of suicidal empathy and I'm not sure how we got here.
Throughout history there have always been people who were vegan or plant based who cared about animals.
We live in a society which has traditionally silenced those voices. The USA, especially, screams about how killing and stealing is a righteous/earned right. Not exercising that right is leaving much on the table. Americans gotta keep up with the Joneses, and that historically included excess cruelty to animals(this includes "savage" people like blacks and browns).
Lots of religious groups advocate for less animal cruelty and consumption.
It's a fascinating point of view, especially since it seems to me that this suicidal empathy originates from the USA. South Korea only recently stopped torturing and eating dogs due to international pressure. Japan still hunts whales. So does Norway. The Chinese couldn't care less, neither does anyone on the African continent. Muslims outright refuse to eat any meat that isn't "halal", which is a short way of saying torturing animals to death. There's this rumor going around the USA that India is full of vegetarians, which gets vehemently denied by Indians each time it gets brought up.
Of course, you can find a bunch of nutjobs talking about all kinds of nonsense in any society, see for example Scientology. But institutionally we didn't care for animals hundred of years ago. Cowboys used spores, which is kinda like using a blunt knife. Horses and elephants were used in wars. Dogs had to stay outside in their little dog house and weren't allowed inside. The list goes on and on.
Also South Korea didn't end their dog meat industry because of international pressure, it's because incomes have been steadily rising and more households are purchasing dogs as companion animals and developing moral concern for them.
Compassion for animals isn't some U.S. conspiracy. There are animal rights activists all over the world.
And Halal slaughter is not humane by any means, but neither is slaughtering an animal with western stunning methods. 90%+ of pigs in the UK for example are stunned using C02 gas. I encourage you to watch undercover footage of this happening.
Suicidal empathy is when your feelings hurt more than your body, so you sacrifice yourself to feel good.
> Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation[…]
Anyone would kill a fish if that’s the only way to survive on a desert island. Meanwhile avoiding animal exploitation of our moderne age isn’t particularly dangerous.
In fact, our addiction to beef seems straight suicidal. Hesitation to eat beef would improve our fitness as a species.
It seems almost like you view domination of animals as an end rather than a means.
Not eating meat, eggs and honey because you feel sad about animals is now considered a valid moral position called veganism instead of mental illness.
I'm not talking about science (which still seems undecided on whether eating eggs is good or bad), I've observed shifting attitudes that originated from the USA and wonder why people feeling sad for animals is now considered a good reason to not eat various types of food.
In many ways, veganism seems like a budding religion that is trying to get off the ground, but instead of asking whether you are ready to accept Jesus as your savior they ask if you are ready to feel sad for animals.
Books like the bible narrates multiples points of views, read them as an history book and you'll catch a glimpse an era lifestyle. Read every line as a single thesis and you get messy pack of contradictory ideas.
I'm not sure where you find "encourages", most sacrifices are depicted to show Jesus's fury about it. Perhaps the old testament? In any case that doesn't contradict the point of "we always had ideals".
Like, they're close enough for a vegetarian/vegan to get something that reminds them of the taste, but for a frequent meat eater it's not even close sadly. I keep trying from time to time.
As for why, it's much easier to replace the product than it is to replace the need.
https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/how-healthy-are-the-impossib...
This comparison seems to suggest they are very similar. The fact that impossible burgers are vastly less resource intensive to produce and don't involve killing an animal for no good reason is an incredible deal.
If I were a vegan/vegetarian for ethical or religious reasons I don’t think I would want food that reminds me of meat.
As an occasional meat eater that also enjoys the many natural options for plant-based protein, why would I want something that replicates taste/texture of something I can already eat?
To me, the progress vegan meat has made is an absolute godsend.
I used to eagerly anticipate the lab-grown meat revolution, but with the quality of current vegan alternatives, it just seems no longer necessary.
I have tried, but I disagree with that assessment. It just tastes like peas for me.
This can still change though, if the products of animal farming were to become more expensive and with higher mandatory quality standards, as they in my opinion should be.
Cows can be treated nicely, given a field to romp in, fun toys, and then euthanized quickly without causing them fear.
But that means leaving wide open space that’s not making the shareholders enough extra money and therefore we don’t do it. Instead, we torture them.
The land we use for ranching isn't empty or useless. That's just what resource extractors always say.
Doesn't mean that I wouldn't prefer if it all came from grown meat, rather than the entire industry that we have now. If the taste, texture and looks are the same, why shouldn't we switch (if those 3 factors are the only important ones)?
Problem was that broadly there's two categories to compete in. "Superior product" , and "cheaper". the last round of artificial meat was neither.
I genuinely believe that eventually we'll have a proper "biological revolution". much like many inorganic technical revolutions have shaped the world (AI being one of the most recent) I think we'll have a breakthrough that opens the doors to the kinds of biological technologies from science fiction.
At that stage I would anticipate an assault on both categories. Ground beef/chicken/pork of sufficient quality that undercuts factory farmed meat. But also superior products. the best wagyu in the world is just tissue, a collection of cells. I can certainly imagine a future where chunks of meat at that quality or even better roll out of vats. softer and more marbled than any real meat because it's not limited by the conditions of being grown within a functional animal.
And when it's better or cheaper people will buy it, and squeamishness will abate as it becomes normalized. that the meat may be more humane will be a nice value add but never enough to prop up the product itself.
[1] see https://www.daniel-suarez.com/changeagentsynopsis.html
In the long term, the only way to produce artificial meat that looks like natural meat, but is cheaper, would be to create a a genetically-engineered multicellular organism, derived from some fungus, which would feed like a fungus, but which would grow some parts containing muscle tissue, instead of growing mushrooms.
In the short term, there already exists the technology to produce protein powder with the same composition as natural whey protein concentrate or as egg-white powder, but obtained from a culture of some genetically-modified strains of the fungus Trichoderma, which have been modified to secrete the desired animal protein, instead of an enzyme that is secreted by the unmodified strains.
There exist some startups that hope to eventually sell such fungus-produced animal protein powders, initially as ingredients for industrial food processing. Unlike "lab-grown meat", this technology has the potential to achieve a lower cost than the protein powders made from cow milk or chicken eggs.
For some people, like myself, the availability of such a protein powder as a cooking ingredient would be enough to eliminate their dependency of any natural animal protein sources.
I have eaten only proteins from vegetable sources for about 4 years, but eventually I gave up, because that forced too rigid constraints in what I could eat without exceeding the calories threshold that would make me gain weight rapidly and without exceeding the cost of a diet including meat, while also taking too much of my time with plant protein extraction at home, because the commercial plant protein concentrates are much more expensive than meat, so I do not consider their use acceptable.
So now I still eat vegan food that I cook myself, but when cooking certain dishes I enhance their protein content with whey protein.
Thus for me whey protein from a fungal culture would already be enough, but for those who want the taste of meat without killing an animal, that is much farther in the future, after we will understand much better the relationship between genome and multicellular growth and morphogenesis.
My take away on the answer to the headline question is:
Currently the lab grown meat is too expensive and not good tasting enough to compete with real meat and plant based alternatives exist so - not it’s time yet.
I was initially positive about lab grown meat, but then you realise that Kraft Foods or someone will get hold of it and turn it into the most unhealthy slop you could imagine.