Fantastic. I can’t wait to have cruelty free meat products
Where do the stem cells come from in a cruelty-free scenario?
animals
I see the sustainability argument, but it doesn’t address my main concern, which is that it sounds yucky. Still, I’ll eat lab sausage before I eat cockroach patties so 🤷
“yucky”? Have you ever been in a slaughterhouse?
I have not, I understand it’s pretty yucky in there though. Lab slime just doesn’t sound appealing to me.
Why does this sound more yucky than the current way of obtaining meat?
In a lot of ways, it is just as gross as alcohol. It’s made in large batches in a vat using tiny little organisms that assemble the final product. With alcohol the organisms typically being yeast, and mean being the actual cells.
Meat lab:
Brewery:
Granted it is a hell of a lot more complicated with meat production, but aesthetically it is pretty much the same thing.
Sorry but this looks way more pleasant than a typical factory farm to me
Agreed
tiny little organisms that assemble the final product
That’s what breathing and walking animals/meat are.
What are your thoughts on yoghurt, bread and sauerkraut? Since you don’t like alcohol because it gets made by fermentation, I wonder what you think about those.
Since you don’t like alcohol because it gets made by fermentation
You misunderstand. I like alcohol, but I was merely making a comparison between something commonly accepted as being hygienic enough (alcohol) with something less accepted (lab meat).
They’re both equally “gross”, which is to say not really gross at all. But to answer your question, not a big fan of yogurt, but I like bread and sauerkraut.
Good news for pigs. I’ll be delighted to see factory farming disappear and be replaced by tech like this.
Yeah but what are we gonna do with all these pigs then? Uplift them and invite them into our society?
Animal reservoir? Instead of millions of pigs sent to the slaughter, thousands in free range zones where they can have their stem cells harvested without suffering. And “train” the rest to live on their original place.
Yeah, not a good idea. There are wild hogs, but our farm pigs are not good for the wild. They go feral and become giant and dangerous and do a lot of damage, and they also breed like crazy. It’s actually a really big issue. These animals are meant for the farm and nothing more.
Their original place is farms.
Eat the last generation and put a couple in zoos, like we did with all species once they are no longer useful…
We could let the pigs run the farm, then document what happens.
They did already heress the document
I had heard of this story many times before, but had never actually read it. Thanks.
You could even write a book about that!
We can keep them as cute animals :3
Someone has been reading Revelation Space.
I thought they were talking about Animal Farm
They still need the pigs to cultivate the cells to make the sausage.
No.
They need one cell, once.
They can than grow that one cell into an infinite number of cells.
Slaughter them for one last time and spare their future generations by removing their lineage from existence. Nbd
That’s straight ignorance.
Sorry chief, I’m unable to fathom the logic underlying this comment.
Do you think that the day the first stem cell sausage hits the supermarket shelves pigs will be deleted from this reality?
You’ll still be able to buy sausages made with real flesh in 50 years, just that between now and then alternatives will emerge that are tastier, healthier, and cheaper.
Steam trains still exist but you don’t drive one to work every day because they’re shit.
I was responding to a post advocating for letting the breed die out. Just. Look. Up. I geuss?
That’s not what that comment says.
Oh, poor little humans, imagine having to live by *checks notes* eating vegetables.
Oh, the humanity!
And meat is by far not the only thing we cultivate pigs for.
This was definitely one of my concerns when I first went vegan, but thankfully, it’s really not a problem at all, due to basic supply and demand.
Everyone in the world isn’t going to go vegan overnight. The demand for animal products will gradually decline over decades, and farmers won’t waste their time and money by raising more animals than they can sell, so the supply will decline in turn.
Release them into the wild
Nah. We got people in helicopters shooting them by the hundreds and they are still out of control.
That’s the fastest way to kill of even more animals and species as a whole. Pigs are really good at adapting and eating.
Yeah, it’s not a good idea
Imagine how that moment would look on The Simpsons. Imagine Lisa hitting the button to free them all
Except for the pigs raised for stem cells? Which I think somehow is an even more distopian concept… Maybe just a different flavour.
Note: I am actually in the comments looking for the answer to my question “how many stem cells?”. Like per lb or whatever… What’s the ratio?
The article answers your question
It involves nothing more than pulling a single cell once from a pig without causing harm.
Thank you. I read the article, I swear, before posting. (Literally stopped what I was typing after I read my own statement “looking in the comments”) Not sure how I missed that.
The whole “stem cells from a fetus” thing certain groups try to spread is false. Technically stems cells can come from a fetus, but they generally don’t. We even have methods to turn regular cells into stem cells I’m pretty sure. This doesn’t do anything more than taking cell(s) from a pig one time and they can be grown on their own potentially forever. No other pig needs to be involved.
OK, but how does it taste?
Sausage is smart since you can get away with a lot of textural sins, and it’s already expected to be packed with sodium.
Follow-up questions will also include price.
I mean it also heavily depends on the exact version of sausage. We already have fake Mortadella made from peas (I think) which I can not (or barely) tell apart from the real thing. And at the other end of the sausage spectrum, Chorizo or Sujuk have enough spices, paprika and/or garlic and cumin in it so you can probably hide a lot of stuff instead of pork in it. Though I haven’t yet found a fake version of those which I liked. And sometimes my German nature gets in the way. I’ve had sausage abroad. And some people put actual ground-up pigs in there and the product still doesn’t taste of anything I’d call sausage. I also had those british-style breakfast sausages with a really weird consistency. It’s really quite some variety with sausage, already. And I still need a good plant based alternative to Salami and pepperoni on pizza.
It says they sampled it. It doesn’t say how it tasted. Hmmmm…
Sausage seems like the perfect entry point for this technology. People don’t really care what goes in them as long as it tastes good. It’s also a lot more forgiving from a texture perspective. It would even be feasible to expand to more exotic sausages like pheasant or alligator.
I’m thinking of going the other way with it. I want sausages made of my own stem lines. Delicious.
Every man dreams about gobbling their own sausage at some point in their life.
Imagine people selling the rights to make sausage out of their DNA. Which famous person would you like to eat?
I know i’m in a significant minority, but I care a great deal what goes in processed pork products (or rather, my gut cares). I’ve yet to pin down which “preservative” commonly used in pork/pork-like products I’m allergic to, but I have a serious problem with even Kosher Hot dogs.
Basically, if its not fresh homemade bratwurst or sausage, I just can’t eat it.
I’m sure that, if these methods continue to become more viable than their livestock counterparts, then the need to use at least some preservatives will decrease… hopefully.
One problem I’ve noticed with currently available meat alternatives is that they are even more processed than real meat.
Yes. I’m not sure how much of the non-meat chemicals are for the preservation / shelf life as opposed to the ones necessary to the creation(?) process.
I suspect that at first the meat will still require the more aggressive preservation methods because the distance in both time and geography from the lab will be similar to that of the slaughter locations.
But without needing to work around breeding seasons and just general herd growth variations throughout the year, the creation of the meat could be much closer to the demand. Storage costs for temperature sensitive products that are also time sensitive has got to be a huge industry cost, so there is more economic reasons than just “use less chemicals” for it to start to trend that way. (Also, I’m sure the chemicals used are absurdly cheap and hardly a factor)
Some ideas you’ve probably already considered:
-
Nitrates and nitrites: in pretty much every commercial sausage. May be listed in the ingredients as curing salt or Prague powder.
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Onion or garlic powder
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Breadcrumbs
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Emulsifiers: in any kind of hotdog or Weiner where it’s all blended and looks smooth, as opposed to a sausage where you can actually see little pieces of fat and meat. Listed in the ingredients as some kind of gum or some kind of glyceride.
Those first three I don’t think are exclusive to pork products, and I’m sure its not Onion/Garlic powders or breadcrumbs. I use them frequently when cooking without getting sick.
But emulsifiers… would sausage/bratwurst of a lesser quality also have them? And are they exlclusive to tubular pork? Because they sound they may be the same thing that’s in most sugar-free gums, and glyceride by itself is everywhere, unless it’s a specific kind.
I appreciate the help, but like I said I have narrowed it down to something that’s pretty exclusively used to preserve pork for really any duration of shelf life of a grocery store. I don’t get sick when I eat fresh pork of any kind, well I guess so long as it’s cooked, and I don’t get sick when I eat other animal products with preservatives in it, or at least not consistently at all.
I’m good with just leading this pseudo-jewish life for the time being. Honestly unless it’s like quality fresh brought worse at Oktoberfest, then I don’t really feel like I’m missing out anyways.
I have narrowed it down to something that’s pretty exclusively used to preserve pork
I don’t know of any preservatives that are exclusively used for pork. I’m a butcher so I have pretty good knowledge of that stuff. I didn’t really expect it would help you but I thought I’d take a shot in the dark.
I don’t really feel like I’m missing out anyways.
Grocery store sausages, definitely not.
Emulsifiers
Good to know.
-
Man, that’s gotta suck. Not knowing exactly what’s causing the problem can mean it being a problem unexpectedly with other things.
Its not awesome, but for theost part, that specific reaction is limited to just that. I’m pretty adventurous when it comes to food, so i’m sure that whatever chemical causes it is limited in use outside of that market.
You have to compete with plant based sausages though which, unless some big breakthrough happens, will be much cheaper. They’ll also probably taste pretty similar cause this is only generating cells, they’ll have to add in a bunch of other artificial stuff like heme to make it taste like a sausage at which point I’m not sure if people could taste the difference between animal cells and plant cells as the base.
The big difference will be if they can generate fat cells too.
As someone who really enjoys meat but tries to eat vegetarian (and does so 99% of the time), I can’t say that I’ve ever been impressed by the taste of a non-meat sausage. Every single one I’ve had has left me wishing I’d just had falafel instead. Fortunately falafel is delicious and cheap
Notably, though, vegetarian haggis - which is essentially just a large sausage - is usually pretty damn good. I have no idea why it seems to end up differently. Maybe because haggis depends less on the meat flavour in the first place?
People don’t really care what goes in them as long as it tastes good.
American, I presume?
It’s also a lot more forgiving from a texture perspective.
This is also why I see milk and eggs being easier to develop. Non-animal dairy actually already exists (see: Perfect Day Foods), though I’ve only seen it in a few products.
Sustainable sources of real meat without killing animals are very welcome! Good luck to them because killing things to eat meat is the worst.
My hope is that these alternative meat industries also factor in job creation opportunities for people who are working in conventional meat production right now—if there’s populist pressure towards moving for more lucrative and safer jobs in lab-manufactured meats, that would be help reduce pressure from farm industry lobbyists, I think.
But the above is a secondary goal (and maybe the responsibility of another party), and shouldn’t distract from the primary goal of researching methods to create sustainable, cruelty-free lab-manufactured meats!
Real basic question first: where are they getting all those stem cells?
Here’s what they say on their site: https://meatable.com/
I couldn’t find the exact procedure details.
people who are working in conventional meat production right now
The industry is ripe with conditions that at least approximate human trafficking and anything lab-grown sounds like basically completely automated, and where it isn’t you need highly skilled professionals. Not of the “is dexterous and can learn to make a clean cut fast” kind, but of the “degree in cell biology” kind.
Jobs for people without advanced education are getting rarer and rarer, that isn’t going to change, and don’t look to industry to change that they have the exact opposite incentive. If, OTOH, you introduce something like an UBI soon you’ll have a gazillion people getting into pottery or knife or furniture making or whatnot, again doing actual crafts because it’s economically feasible because you don’t have to sell your stuff for prices only rich people can afford just to make a living.
If, OTOH, you introduce something like an UBI soon you’ll have a gazillion people getting into pottery or knife or furniture making or whatnot, again doing actual crafts because it’s economically feasible because you don’t have to sell your stuff for prices only rich people can afford just to make a living.
Fair point. If I’d had the time for it, I’d be encouraging or supporting my local representatives for working on this.
Honestly you will not need a college degree to run a bioreactor. It won’t be automated because it’ll consist of cleaning, taking out the outputs and refilling the inputs. You do for inventing the reactor, but not for running it.
Whoever’s overseeing many of them will need a degree, but labor will mostly still be labor.
This is correct. Once it’s developed, it’s just following instructions.
Technically koser because there’s no cloven hooves?
Yes, very Kosher.
source: porky the pig
They’re not technically kosher. Nor halal.
NOT YET
It hasn’t officially been ruled upon by either kosher or halal certification boards yet (although many Jewish and Islamic leaders have expressed differing opinions on the matter), but most lab meat growers very much hope it will be ruled as what is known as “parvere” — or neither. That is to say, since it didn’t actually come from an animal, it’s not technically meat, it has no blood, wasn’t slaughtered, etc., and, as such is considered more in line with a vegetable or other foodstuff that isn’t milk or meat.
If lab meat is considered in this way, it could clear the way for Halal certification as well as for Hindus who do not eat beef, and many others with objections to eating meat for various reasons.
kosher or halal certification boards
That’s fucking wild.
We live in a brave New World, adjudicated by a very old and blind one
Imagine if the next big Abrahamic schism comes over wether or not lab grown meat is halal/kosher or not.
While the Christians cry over whether it’s “woke”.
The mere mention of stem cells will rustle all the Christian Jimmies.
I culture cells for a living. Not that these are the only ways, but the most common and effective ways to grow cells in the lab is to add either FBS (fetal bovine serum) or BSA (bovine serum albumin) to the culture media. Currently we don’t mass produce BSA in an animal free manner and FBS is by nature an animal product. Granted, that the products of one animal may in fact allow manufacturers produce more than enough ‘animal-free meat’ to overcome this but I haven’t seen any numbers. I’m interested in hearing more about these techniques going forward and in determining if animal-free products can really be produced animal free.
What if it requires 1/1000th the number of animals … but each one suffers a hundred times more?
Would it be worth it?
How do you quantify suffering?
If you don’t have a way of quantifying suffering, perhaps all utilitarian calculus is bunk?
From a utilitarian perspective, you’re still reducing overall suffering by an order of magnitude, so your scenario is still a greater good.
This assumes a linear value function of course
stem cells can suffer? this isn’t cloning an animal, it’s cloning certain tissues.
Hence the word “if” here. A hypothetical scenario.
A man of culture I see
Do you use Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS) to make your meat?
No, for a simple reason: we’re committed to making meat without causing any harm at all to animals. So we’ve developed a production process that doesn’t require FBS.
That’s what they say.
Where did you read this? Could you link a source please?
Bottom of the page
I culture cells for a living.
Relatable.
Asking the real questions!
As a technical Jew I can say that yes, this is technically kosher ^disclaimer: I have no knowledge at all of Jewish custom or scripture^
What
Their mother was Jewish but they haven’t been taught the religion, making them technically Jewish but without any knowledge of Judaism.
Bingo 👍👌
Ahhhhh this makes more sense, thanks for clarifying!
He’s a Jew but not Jewish.
Like me.
One is an ethnicity. The other is a religion. It’s easy to get confused.
He’s Jew-ish
So is everybody here a technical Jew? Like, that’s three of us, and this isn’t a huge community.
I’m Brian, and so is my wife.
Brian is an interesting name for a woman. Then again, my brother Steven married a man named Stephen.
I’m reasonably certain I wouldn’t count. As far as I know there were no Jews (by ethnicity) in my family for the last couple hundred years.
I do, however, count as a Native American, specifically I’m ¹/16th Lakota.
They’re a theoretical Jew like Einstein was a theoretical physicist.
New judaism lore dropped
But is it considered cannon?
Rednecks on Facebook are already getting butthurt about this like this and asking lab grown meat to be banned
They’re going on about stuff like cancer or whatever
Ok but how long does it take to get the stemcells
or does the pig, that takes 60 times longer to grow give you 10000x the meat?
Very relevant question that the article doesn’t answer unfortunately.
Just copying my answer from above. Not to say that this is what they’re doing for sure, but generally stem cell cultures these days are sourced once then replicated forever.
I’m not exactly what you would call concerned about meat as a food source. I’m fine with it. But anything that can break the need for industrial farming is a damn good thing imo.
I’m eager for a good product to come to market so I can at least try it. So far, there hasn’t been one that’s available that’s priced well enough to be a viable choice, nor that matches expectations of taste. Textures have gotten good though.
But I think a sausage format is a great place for cultured meats to break into because there’s a wide range of ingredients with different flavors already. We’re used to sausages being fairly varied in taste and texture, so adding a new type is less of a “new food” barrier. Tbh though, it’s gotta be better than veggie sausages, those are pretty meh at best.
okay, but what’s the resource consumption like? that’s the major issue with meat farming - it takes all the resources necessary to grow food for the animals, and also all the resources necessary to keep and grow the animals themselves. If you need more meat in the same timeframe you can always just raise more pigs.
The major issue is the slaughtering and torture of animals…
I mean, theoretically this makes only the parts we want to eat and makes it directly instead of an offshoot of all the other biological processes like growing to the right age and ratio and growing the parts needed to keep it alive all that time. So my ass pull non educated thought process would assume the end result should require faaaaarrr less energy assumption for the same amount of meat?
I mean what don’t we eat/ use? I hate to imagine a world with only boneless wings. or not having a ham bone to make soup with after easter. my dogs would miss their dehydrated chicken feet. my stock would miss the chicken backs and necks and etc. shame we can’t just raise headless animals.
Quick search shows that it is better from a resource standpoint for pretty much all resources:
https://scienceline.org/2019/01/the-truth-about-lab-grown-meat/
Is it better for the environment?
That’s a definite yes. A 2011 study found that clean meat produces 78 to 96 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions, uses 99 percent less land and between 82 and 92 percent less water. Research at the Good Food Institute has concluded that a cell culture the size of one chicken egg can produce a million times more meat than a chicken barn stacked with 20,000 chickens, according to Emery. Energy costs, too, are much lower — and no animal parts are wasted, he adds.
“We won’t be growing the bones and the skin and the intestines that take up resources,” Emery says. “We’ll be vastly more efficient in the land we use.”
How much will it cost?
Experts say cost is the main obstacle standing between consumers and clean meat products.
In 2013, the first clean burger cost $325,000. While the price has decreased dramatically since then, current estimates range from $363 to $2,400 per pound, making it much more expensive than regular meat. (A pound of conventionally produced lean ground beef costs less than $6. Organically raised beef typically costs about a dollar more.)
JUST’s Birdie says the company is pushing hard to drive down production costs. “How do we make these products in order to compete with the price of a Big Mac?” she asks.
The biggest expense, she says, is protein used to feed the cells as they grow. In an effort to improve cost efficiency, JUST has developed a robotic platform capable of screening thousands of proteins to find the best at spurring growth, she says.
And this was from a decade ago. I imagine they’ve improved the resource need quite a bit since then.
Whatever that is right now, I’d say it’s at least more animal friendly, and you can control waste and pollution better, making it cleaner.
Over time, efficiency can be improved as well
I’d say it’s a very good step
Pigs eat pigs
True but we’re not here to discuss your badge bunny mom.
Uhh. That’s meaningless? What’s the energy/resource usage comparison.
Eh it’s not great but if they can create true pork competitive product quickly, that can be profitable in a chaotic market, allowing them to scale production to meet more unforseen/fast moving demand.
Only meaningless on one scale. It seems like a huge improvement on the animal cruelty scale.
I’d try to use money to calculate that. For farming, there’s probably tons of data. But for growing meat, there won’t be as good a model of what this thing’s inputs are. Like say it takes a dropperful of iodine at one point in the process. What’s the energy content of that iodine?
Money would be a good approximation of this: what’s the cost of producing that pork versus rearing a pig?
For us, it’s essential that our meat is available to and affordable for everyone. So it will, at the very least, be the same price range as traditional meat.
That’s the claim
Every one of these claims so far has been 100% Elon Musk style “FSD is ready to ship right now in 2017” kinds of claims.
There was a great article in the New Yorker (or one of those style mags) a month or so ago that just ripped the industry apart about the billions of dollars spent on products that were overhyped and never shipped. I know that we’re feeling the pain of contraction right now, but we were dumping buckets of money into ideas that were not vetted - it was like the late 90s.
So, like with autopilot for cars, I will believe it when I see it.
Let me guess, the stem cells are harvested from pigs?
Generally stem cell cultures these days are sourced once then replicated forever.
That’s pretty incredible, with no noticeable degradation between replications? I know very little about stem cell cultures.
There’d have to be some degradation over time. Unless they’re repairing the DNA using computerized backups or something.
The stem cells themselves are self-repairing and self replicating. Quoting Wikipedia:
Due to the self-renewal capacity of stem cells, a stem cell line can be cultured in vitro indefinitely.
Currently all embryonic stem cell research and therapies in the US are conducted using only 486 cultures.
Likely, but stem cell harvesting is not as horrible for pigs and doesn’t require thousands of them either. It’s certainly a massive improvement.
That’s kinda the point‽
Presumably they culture more, but obviously the first cells would have had to. Some of these companies have been very particular about sourcing their starting cells non-lethally from sanctuary animals or whatever, because why not.
If you only have to do it once (or a few times) and can use it repeatedly ad infinitum, you can be just about as discerning as you want.
Exactly.
I’m skeptical. It’s been really picking hard to get those things to grow in a vat. This would be a huge breakthrough, and popsci has a way of leaving out critical, fatal details.
Such as “a claim proven by the hundred pounds of pseudo pork they shipped us overnight”?
I didn’t read the article. I assume this journalist made zero primary observations?
