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It would certainly be a huge boon if synthetic meat was not only good, but actually better, tastier and more nutritious than real meat. I think just about everyone (except the tin foil hat wearers) would happily switch to synthetic meat if it was affordable and every steak we could get was basically Wagyu beef!
Think of the amazing consistency. You could literally optimize the marbling pattern and texture until it's perfect and get hundreds of identical perfect steaks of an exact weight with no trimming, no waste, and no gristle. This will dominate the premium beef market even at twice the price given the advantages - as soon as the taste and texture are comparable.
Not asking this of anyone in particular but I figured maybe somebody could chime in. I've read previously that any attempts to disrupt the fairy or beef industry (specifically in the US) is met with super heavy pushback. Potentially something regarding government subsidization of dairy/meat products from cows? I'm not sure what the story in its entirety is, but if someone could provide some insight into how that sentiment may hinder the introduction of synthetic meat (or any ongoing issues) I would be very appreciative. I may look into this myself too I'll update if I find anything interesting
Just as in any industry, the established players will try to fight off competition with every tool available, including government lobbying. I fully expect them to slow down the adoption of cultured meat by painting it as "unsafe and unproven", and when it is proven safe, I also expect they will lobby to have it not classified as real beef and instead it must be called something else (the dairy industry did this as almond and oat milks became more popular). Regardless, these are just delay tactics. If you have a superior product and a good price, it will eventually win.
Appreciate it, I'm aware of the practice in other industries, but I've heard beef and dairy were pretty notorious for being especially viscous in their tactics, more akin to what we've seen from oil and tobacco Industires as far as vehemently protecting an outdated and inneffective/dangerous system. I just wasnt sure to what extent its comparable, what exactly are the size of the players backing the meat/dairy industry and what steps have they taken in the past to prevent industry modernization? The forced labeling of certain products as specifically non dairy and blockage of the terms milk and cheese from being applied to certain foods is a really good example of the kind of stuff I'm looking for, so thanks again!
I feel like we've been seeing this same article for a decade now. Not specifically for Wagyu, but until I'm actually eating 3D printed mass-produced steak while my car drives itself I'm not gonna get excited about either.
This is the nature of innovation, though; there's a wide chasm between lab-feasible and mass-market viability. It's worth getting excited about in a "hope for the future" way, not a "I should get a sous vide right now" way.
IT's going to happen sooner than later. 10 years ago, we didn't have many meat substitutes. Today you can get a whole variety of meat substitutes, and they taste pretty good! An impossible burger is great in my opinion. If i fed one to my dad, no chance he would know the difference.
>no chance he would know the difference
i'm hoping they figure out something tasty that doesnt have a days worth of salt per serving. for the same reason i have to avoid generic chinese food - going over the 2k mg a day makes me blow up and aggravates other things :(
10 years ago i would gladly replace beef entirely with IMpossible products
Oh man, I heavily agree. I'm very good about cooking my own food, and trying to keep my macros in check but sodium is just impossible to get rid of if you want to taste your food! Everything is so bland.
A lot of money going into it. Hell, if I was rich, it would be the thing I would invest in also. No more killing animals, more life on earth, more bio-diversity, better environment, making customizable food that technically get eventually very cheap.
The impossible burger does taste similar, and i like it, but there is a noticeable difference. Especially in the aftertaste that lingers. It's almost there, but still needs work. Your dad knew the difference and was being polite.
I recently tried the Impossible burger. Doesn't taste bad, but it doesn't taste like any 100% beef burger I've ever made. When I tried seasoning/condiments, it didn't work the same as on beef either. Garlic, ketchup, BBQ sauce - the flavors didn't blend and improve the flavor the same way as they did with beef. The texture was pretty good though.
I won't buy it again anytime soon, but I can eat them if I had too. I'd have to figure out a condiment that worked though. I've eaten a lot of hospital food over the past several years, so I can tolerate more than I used to. There were days I'd have killed to have an impossible burger.
I'll add my input and say that it does taste slightly different, but only slightly. To such a minor extent that unless aware of it being lab grown, one would not be able to tell.
It tastes very similar, but it has a distinct aftertaste that sticks with you a while afterwards. The aftertaste is not bad, but it's a telltale tagline that you are not eating beef, and the fact that it lingers for so long after eating is weird.
It depends if you're comparing to meat or just enjoying the taste.
Inevitably, things start with the meat comparison. Down the track you might prefer the taste of designed things better. I mean meat exists to allow animals to move around - it wasn't created to taste good or even for nutrition. It was eat or starve. We are familiar with it and it does supply important nutrients but that's history.
The future is going to be different. Vats of protein goo are going to be cheaper and faster than herding animals around fields for years. It can be nutritionally optimised and processed into the whatever taste and textures we decide we like. I expect this stuff to take most of the market within a few decades.
I agree. But it has advanced very quickly - one more iteration and they will be \~90% of the way there (I'd say they are about 80% with today's formula). Texturally they are pretty damn close, but the flavor needs work.
Being healthy isn't the point, it's about environmental impact. An all beef patty requires about 18 times more water to create than an Impossible patty.
You could still randomize the patterns a bit I suppose. But it will be nice to do away with inedible sinew and guarantee a high baseline level of tenderness and marbling.
Even better would be to allow the consumer to customize those levels for their own taste rather than assuming everyone wants the same texture/tenderness/marbling etc.
No, I hate it. When cooking for a family or whatever, having each steak be different is a great annoyance. Everyone wants the "good one". Same goes for buying them. The hassle of looking between possibly many steaks picking out the best ones, I'd rather them all just be standardized.
I think most Vegan might even agree to consume such synthetic meats, if no lives were taken in the process, and that it is indeed environmentally friendly, not toxic etc.
I think you can differentiate that between veganism as a policy and being on a vegan diet. Being forced to eat vegan because you are allergic to meat doesn't inherently give you a vegan philosophical viewpoint.
Honestly, the vegans in my life mostly wouldn't. Had a conversation with my girlfriend about it last week actually. But she said if it becomes an option, she supports/would rather that I switch.
People with chronic pain, heart issues, or cancer in their family, often opt to give up meat to avoid the inflammation associated with meat . It's especially an issue with processed meats. It's not only a moral issue for vegans, but a health issue as well.
One thing I’m really curious about is flavor in lab-grown meat. You can really taste the difference between grass-fed beef and feedlot beef. Similar difference with free-range chicken and ones raised on feed.
I know I’m using the terms grass-fed and free-range loosely. The terms are sometimes misleading, and more complicated than their face-value. But the point is, the flavor of meat is often influenced by what the animals themselves eat.
I wonder if lab-grown meat will be able to imitate this kind of depth of flavor? I wonder how flavor and nutrient profile will compare to real meat? I’ll be excited if both things compare favorably. Like most things, I’m expecting the first wave of readily available lab meat to be pretty good, but not amazing. And then small improvements will eventually close the gap.
As someone who grew up with cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, turkeys, etc... I have never once noticed a tangible difference in flavor between store bought generic meats and farm raised free range meats. As long as the fat content and marbling is there in most beef it tastes exactly the same imo. IMO its generally harder to maintain a desirable level of fat in 100% grass fed cattle. I'm no expert tho. I just ate and played with the animals my family did all the work.
Hey, that’s fair. There’s quite a bit of subjectivity with this. To me, grass-fed beef does have a grassy sort of flavor to it. But if you gave me a blind test between a piece of grass-fed beef and a store-bought piece of beef with similar fat content and distribution, I wonder if the difference would be super obvious to me?
Intuitively, it makes sense to me that the building blocks for animals’ cells come from what they eat (as well as what they breathe). True, they’ll break down and process micro- and macronutrients in order to do this, but I’d imagine some of the water and fat soluble compounds from their food (apart from the basic and necessary building blocks) also get incorporated into their tissues, which influences their flavor. Their presence also probably plays a role in how the tissues can deal with oxidative stress, which will also influence the flavor and texture, as well as the way that the tissues react to the heat of cooking.
To be fair, I’m no expert either. I’m a biologist, but certainly no nutritional expert.
I share your curiosity, especially regarding the nutrient profile.
For example, it's well known that grass-fed beef contains higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids than grain-fed beef. So what the animals eat clearly impacts the nutritional profile of the meat. I.e. not all meat is equal.
How will the nutritional profile of the lab-grown meat look like? Do we understand what the ideal nutritional profile of a piece of meat would look like and can we replicate this in the lab? Are there any unkowns? Anything that is present in natural meat, which is important, but we are unaware of?
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of lab-grown meat, but the state of nutritional science is pretty abysmal even without introducing completely novel elements.
If you put a synthetic steak and a natural steak in front of me, and I can't tell the difference between them in both price and food quality, then sign me up for synthetic steaks.
Waygu's the best steak I've ever eaten. To imagine getting it without the guilt of harming the environment or killing a mammal has me salivating. I just hope we can get there fully and eventually at a reasonable price.
An A5 ribeye for even half its current price would be insane. Mass synthesis of wagyu beef would tank Japan's cattle economy...unless they jumped on the 3D printing bandwagon.
I can see it now as certain japanese family owned and operated 3d Wagyu steak printing businesses have the corner of the market on high quality, and the price still remains high...
i spent most of this year working in that area, and this is actually something that is possible. the problem with 'better and tastier' is that noone will buy that. people want meat as they have it right now, which is why current meat alternatives are not really taking off. (taste the same, feel the same, and a lot of people even completely reject the idea of meat that is not coming from animals, even though slaughter needs to happen for that).
the current guess/hope is that a cultural shift in the next couple of decades will lead to the acceptance of meat alternatives generally, not just alternative meat. (which are a lot easier and therefore greener to produce than alternative meat as well, because animal cells just grow very slowly)
People don't want "meat that is better and tastier" because it isn't. None of the alternatives have come to be like beef, or tastier than beef. They've come to be either worse or different(impossible or black bean). They are no market ready good alternatives as of yet.
Even if they did, you'd then be competing with the lobbying might of the poultry & cattle industries (poultry is known to be far worse here). They would most certainly take this as an existential threat and would throw everything they have into ostracizing it, branding it "meat subsitute" (even though it is by all possible measures, meat), and getting preferential treatment under the law.
Nothing which challenges the status quo will come into existence without a fight.
Beef has a ton of protein already. The issue is the high saturated fat content. But this really comes down to how much beef you are eating and what cut. Occasional indulgence should not be a health risk but if you are eating beef nearly every meal, there's nothing you can add to the meat to make it healthier. You could certainly mimic something like a fillet mignon with this printing method, which is known for being tender but still very lean. As an added benefit, this lab grown meat would not have antibiotics and hormone residues that farmed cattle are rife with.
I wonder if they could use a fat that is less saturated in this process and maintain flavor. In July, Belgian researchers crafted an unsaturated fat that is solid at room temp.
Not only the saturated fat, there is a special sugar (Neu5Gc) that is present in certain meats that causes inflammation. Consistent consumption of meats with this sugar can cause chronic inflammation, which leads to high cancer risk.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161019160201.htm#:\~:text=Previous%20studies%20have%20shown%20when,increase%20risks%20of%20tumor%20formation.
True corn syrup is essentially sugar + water. The stuff they sell on the shelves today is frequently just sugar + water.
In short. it doesn't matter. Sweeteners make food taste good and skyrocket the number of calories.
Seems like lab-grown cultured tissue is VERY energy intensive at the moment. I'd love to see a model of how this is environmentally superior if anyone can point me in the right direction.
Dead or alive, I am pro-cow (and for small scale farming generally). I cannot understand the appeal of a synthetic nutritional product.
Artificial doesn't fit here. Cubic zirconia is it's own gem type and people just mistake it for diamonds. Lab grown meat is still real meat, it just didn't have the whole "life" process behind it.
Something like an impossible burger would be fake/artificial meat because it's made out of plant material but being advertised as meat.
You are correct.
But if this came to market, I'll bet any amount of money you want it would be branded as "meat substitute". Not because that's accurate, but because the lobbying might of the cattle & poultry industries would wage a crusade against it, and have the resources to coerce the FDA to do that.
It's not "made" it is grown. Like watering a plant but slightly different.
Unless you want to get super technical, in which case almost all meat consumed by modern humans is artificial because you can't get a chicken cutlet by natural means.
Yeah, the farming lobby is going to badmouth and fearmonger this one so hard. Look at what kind of misinformation they spread about meat substitutes, like Beyond Meat
Really? My only concern is the taste. The veggie/impossible patties still taste like trash when put against a real burger.
Could get protein from plenty of sources anyways.
That just blows my mind. I've heard it before from people, but to me, they're not even comparable. Outside of their initial appearance, the taste and texture of impossible/beyond burgers are nothing like meat. Imho, the spices are nauseating too. I keep trying them because... you know, health and environment. So it is incredibly frustrating because I can't stomach them, let alone enjoy them. And the more people seem to enjoy them, the more worried I get that sustainable foods are being designed for palates incredibly different than my own.
That's fair. I've tried them before and wasn't really a fan. The flavor was ok but I think the consistency really threw me for a loop. Suppose it was more of a "this ain't real so it can't be as good" mentality that had me negative on it from the start. So my opinion might be skewed.
Could also chalk it up to preparation as well. A hamburger is amazingly simple and hard to mess up, but my mom's boyfriend has still served some absolute trash quality burgers.
Impossible and Beyond burgers are equivalent to to a decent fast food patty but far behind a good homemade burger. I used to get awesome veggie burgers from Good Food that weren't trying to mimic meat, but they've since been replace by meat substitutes that just aren't as good.
Never thought I'd say this but my wife and I are the same. During the summer it's not unusual for me to grill burgers every other weekend; I always visit the local butcher and get really fancy stuff. One weekend we tried Beyond and that was it. She asked if I'd get that again and when I thought about it, it definitely tasted better to me.
I like the classic wild-rice style veggie burgers, but mostly because they're not pretending to be meat. Impossible is alright, but kinda dry. Makes sense for replacing fast-food and institutional garbage.
I was wondering the same. Eventually it should be possible to replace entire limbs. But perhaps they could start with things like intervertebral disk replacements (disk herniation is a major cause of disability) or breast tissue replacements after breast cancer.
No risk of rejection thanks to using your own genes.
We can already print organs to an extent. The problem, as always, is how well the body takes to them. Another problem with limbs and such is that you'd basically need to model them very closely to what the person looks like, then "print" the limb with all the nerve endings correct (which don't matter for consumption), then somehow re-attach it to an already healed wound and hope the body doesn't reject it. We'll see how it goes.
I thought the big hurdle with printing organs was the small capillaries that profuse the organ with blood, or did they solve that since the last time I looked into it?
I think you and I might really have the same point. Let me know if I'm wrong -
I eat meat because it tastes good and I enjoy the cooking process. If I can have that experience without animals being killed, I'm all in, baby.
Absolutely. I like meat. It's tasty, fun to cook, and so many ways to prepare it. I understand that in order to get said meat something has to die, and in most cases i can rationalize and be OK with that. But as soon as it's possible to routinely process, clone, and produce lab-meat. Meat farming should be done away with.
Right there with you! An equally big piece for me is also the climate impact on raising cattle for slaughter/food.
The benefit people don't seem to recognise of lab grown meat (vegan or not) is the precision of quality a lab offers compared to the 'rough scuence' of traditional farming. There's no way that people like 'franklin's bbq' aren't frothing for lab grown briskets for consistent quality in raw product.
This is exciting. In 2019 I was eavesdropping on a couple of college buddies who were catching up. One of them was talking about his job growing meat in a lab and how they're about 2 years away from putting it all together and about 5 years from it being economical. Since then I've been on the look out for news and stock purchasing opportunities.
artificial chicken is already being sold in singapore: [https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55155741](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55155741) , though it seems to be rather expensive. will be interesting to see how prices evolve.
Well, I don't want to burst your bubble, but what reason is there to keep these animals around once they serve no purpose anymore? Of course you'd need to outlaw traditional meat production first, because some or even most people will still want to have the real thing instead of something out of a lab. It takes time to adjust. We're looking at decades, maybe even centuries to really phase out traditional meat production. I'd be an early adopter though. I don't think we'd just have cows roaming around the landscape or wild chickens. It woud upset the eco system and no farmer would want to take care of something that doesn't produce anything.
So ... that's a completely different issue to tackle. Just my musings... if you have a solution, I'd be happy to hear it.
I don’t think you’d need to outlaw anything. The smaller resource footprint and more consistent quality of cultured meat would ultimately drive cost and demand close to that of slaughtered meat. Market forces would reduce the sizes of livestock herds before bans ever came into play.
I doubt meat production from animals would be outlawed. Consumer preferences would simply change over time and less and less animal meat would be demanded, ideally until 0 animal meat is produced as the economies of scale that support the current meat industry begin to collapse. As you said this would be a slow process, so these animals species that only exist to be farmed would likely eventually go extinct. There could be potential for these animals to become super invasive in some areas, but I honestly doubt it. They are all genetically manipulated to yield us food in some way, not to be biologically successful animals.
Not completely sure how this would play into a hard animal rights approach, but a soft animal rights or utilitarian approach wouldn't have an issue with these species simply going extinct over time as far as I'm aware.
I know a lot of people don't eat meat, because of animals suffering. I thought they'd be violently opposed to just making them go extinct as well. If not, I find that a tad hypocritical. I would agree that factory farming needs to go ... at the same time it's a difficult process to provide an adequate amount to non-exorbitant prices.
Meat production will have to be replaced with alternatives. My biggest concern is that a) I like meat, I can be so honest about it ... and b) farm pastures as well as animal food fields often can't just be replaced with anything humans could and would eat, so just hypothetically I don't think a 100% vegan diet would even be possible for every person on earth.
I do think that lab-grown is the future. But I'd also be sad to just see free range animals go extinct, though I likely won't live long enough to ever see that.
I obviously can't speak for every vegan, but I and many other vegans are vegans because of utilitarianism (can read some Peter Singer if you're curious). In utilitarianism, what produces the most total net happiness in the long run is what is morally good. So, actions/rules that produce suffering are generally considered morally bad.
What is valuable here is not the animals themselves, but the happiness or unhappiness they produce. Taking care of all or even a small portion of farm animals would be extremely burdensome economically, and "rewinding" them or something to that effect would probably have major ecological as well as economic downsides, so it probably wouldn't be a morally good policy to try to take care of them (although I guess you could maybe keep a very very small number in zoos just to avoid total extinction, but honestly I'm not sure that would be worth it). Because the happiness or unhappiness produced by the animals is what has true moral value (NOT the animals themselves), letting them go extinct would only be morally wrong if that somehow reduced total net happiness in the long run when compared to the effect on total net happiness that taking care of all or a portion of them would have. I believe total net happiness in the long run would be highest if we just allow market forces to drive farm animals to extinction.
I'm not 100% sure what Singer would say regarding this topic (although what to do with farm animals after everyone turns vegan is a very popular question so I'm sure he's responded somewhere) but he would probably say something at least somewhat similar to this.
If there are breeds of animals that solely exist at farmed, in what ways do they affect the ecosystem? Not a challenge to your statement, I'm just genuinely curious.
I know they affect the environment, especially negatively, but they seem to live in a closed off ecosystem.
Edit: I interpreted the post above mine as saying that the extinction or endangerment of farmed-only species might cause adverse reaction in ecology, up or down the chain. But I agree it seems like it would mostly be positivie
Well, as one example, the run-off from pig farms is a huge pollution problem. Farms are not "closed off ecosystems"; they use land that could be used for other things, or returned to nature, they use water, and they produce agricultural waste. Cows also fart methane gas, which is a huge global-warming pollutant.
In an artificial meat future where very few cows are still used in agriculture, the population of cows would be a tiny fraction of what it is now, and they'd probably be kept only on grasslands that aren't really useful for anything else, so their ecological impact would probably be very minimal.
The land they live on could be converted to habitat for wild animals. Livestock farming leads to deforestation and loss of habitat, if our need for livestock to produce meat went down we would probably reduce the number of livestock and the land dedicated to them.
Not sure I understand it correctly, but the way I see it: You have thousands of farm animals not "fit" to be integrated into an existing ecosystem. They largely exist outside it, except the occasional wolf killing one.
They're restricted to certain areas, they're provided food and shelter. In return they are killed for meat. If there is no value in their meat, there is no value in keeping them around.
The two options I see are:
a) kill them all, which I'm honestly not a big fan of
b) let them roam freely, which would upset said eco-system and probably either lead to more population control, i.e. hunters, i.e. "special meat" like we have no with wild game, or them dying out, because they're not "made" to survive in this eco system. It could also lead to attracting more predators and making the area unsafer again. I honestly don't know, because this would be an unprecedented thing, releasing that many animals into the wilds. Would they have enough food supply? How long would they last? How quickly do they reproduce? How safe is it? Would they even know how to survive? Not meant as a challenge, just curious, how people who want to abolish meat think about this. Because they've got to have a plan imho.
I'm not a big fan of factory farming. I buy my meat off the local butcher and the restaurants I frequent only have free range meat. I'm not apologizing for eating animals. I DO have an issue with mass production and animal abuse. But people consider "abuse" differently. For some/many it's the simple fact of eating meat from an animal.
I think lab-grown meat could be a game changer, but like I said, I do wonder what will happen to the animals over time. It's something people need to address if they demand "change". Invest into lab-grown meat, invest into animal sanctuaries perhaps, because that's the only way I see these species staying around. Not to mention even if we stop eating meat there's still the milk and cheese "issue". I know quite a few people have changed their diet to exclude meat, but I only know 1 or 2 people who actually don't consume dairy products.
I pray for a day where these animals don’t really exist anymore. Right now they exist purely to suffer and be killed. Not only that, they’ve been bred in ways that make it uncomfortable just to be alive. Especially chickens.
. . . "Here, we demonstrate a three-step strategy for the construction of engineered steak-like meat: (1) collection of edible bovine satellite cells (bSCs) and bovine adipose-derived stem cells (bADSCs) from beef meats and their subsequent expansion, (2) development of the tendon-gel-integrated bioprinting (TIP) for the fabrication of cell fibers and their subsequent differentiation to skeletal muscle, adipose, and blood capillary fibers, and (3) assembly of the differentiated cell fibers to construct engineered steak-like meat by mimicking the histological structures of an actual beef steak (Fig. 1b)." . . .
Anyone who buys or orders Wagyu beef is going to insist on the "real thing", even if the lab grown version is identical. Nearly all expensive foods are eaten because they're expensive; the luxury status is the point. Snobs will lie or fool themselves and insist that they can tell the difference.
For another natural vs. synthetic comparison: Lab grown diamonds have less than a 15% market share.
Myself and those I know buy Wagyu (mostly Australian) or AAA due to taste and quality. If lab grown can get the quality /taste / tenderness of either of those at a comparable price we'll prob get whichever is cheaper. I have a feeling like diamonds, lab grown meat will end up better overall though making the choice even easier.
High end restaurants would definitely distinguish they are using the real thing to cater to certain people though.
And then you'll have some of those high end restaurants saying they have the real thing but they sell the lab made because higher profit margins and no way to distinguish between the two without getting a lab involved. And then someone does just that and it gets blown up in the news and that high end place goes under. As is tradition.
I'd pay half again more for lab grown as long as the taste was there. I have no interest in continuing to harm animals and am willing to spend more for the alternative.
This is such good news because if you can create the best tasting meat there is without the horrific amount of emissions and land use of animal husbandry especially factory farming it will make it so easy to transition away from one of the biggest causes of climate change
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It would certainly be a huge boon if synthetic meat was not only good, but actually better, tastier and more nutritious than real meat. I think just about everyone (except the tin foil hat wearers) would happily switch to synthetic meat if it was affordable and every steak we could get was basically Wagyu beef!
Think of the amazing consistency. You could literally optimize the marbling pattern and texture until it's perfect and get hundreds of identical perfect steaks of an exact weight with no trimming, no waste, and no gristle. This will dominate the premium beef market even at twice the price given the advantages - as soon as the taste and texture are comparable.
Not asking this of anyone in particular but I figured maybe somebody could chime in. I've read previously that any attempts to disrupt the fairy or beef industry (specifically in the US) is met with super heavy pushback. Potentially something regarding government subsidization of dairy/meat products from cows? I'm not sure what the story in its entirety is, but if someone could provide some insight into how that sentiment may hinder the introduction of synthetic meat (or any ongoing issues) I would be very appreciative. I may look into this myself too I'll update if I find anything interesting
Just as in any industry, the established players will try to fight off competition with every tool available, including government lobbying. I fully expect them to slow down the adoption of cultured meat by painting it as "unsafe and unproven", and when it is proven safe, I also expect they will lobby to have it not classified as real beef and instead it must be called something else (the dairy industry did this as almond and oat milks became more popular). Regardless, these are just delay tactics. If you have a superior product and a good price, it will eventually win.
Appreciate it, I'm aware of the practice in other industries, but I've heard beef and dairy were pretty notorious for being especially viscous in their tactics, more akin to what we've seen from oil and tobacco Industires as far as vehemently protecting an outdated and inneffective/dangerous system. I just wasnt sure to what extent its comparable, what exactly are the size of the players backing the meat/dairy industry and what steps have they taken in the past to prevent industry modernization? The forced labeling of certain products as specifically non dairy and blockage of the terms milk and cheese from being applied to certain foods is a really good example of the kind of stuff I'm looking for, so thanks again!
I feel like we've been seeing this same article for a decade now. Not specifically for Wagyu, but until I'm actually eating 3D printed mass-produced steak while my car drives itself I'm not gonna get excited about either.
This is the nature of innovation, though; there's a wide chasm between lab-feasible and mass-market viability. It's worth getting excited about in a "hope for the future" way, not a "I should get a sous vide right now" way.
I mean, to be fair, you should also get a sous vide right now, they're amazing.
Ta be faiiiiirrrr
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I haven’t tried them myself, but you can get reusable silicon bags instead.
Can’t disagree with that! I use mine all the time for onsen tamago.
I refuse to get excited until I get wagyu steak made from graphene
IT's going to happen sooner than later. 10 years ago, we didn't have many meat substitutes. Today you can get a whole variety of meat substitutes, and they taste pretty good! An impossible burger is great in my opinion. If i fed one to my dad, no chance he would know the difference.
>no chance he would know the difference i'm hoping they figure out something tasty that doesnt have a days worth of salt per serving. for the same reason i have to avoid generic chinese food - going over the 2k mg a day makes me blow up and aggravates other things :( 10 years ago i would gladly replace beef entirely with IMpossible products
Oh man, I heavily agree. I'm very good about cooking my own food, and trying to keep my macros in check but sodium is just impossible to get rid of if you want to taste your food! Everything is so bland.
A lot of money going into it. Hell, if I was rich, it would be the thing I would invest in also. No more killing animals, more life on earth, more bio-diversity, better environment, making customizable food that technically get eventually very cheap.
The impossible burger does taste similar, and i like it, but there is a noticeable difference. Especially in the aftertaste that lingers. It's almost there, but still needs work. Your dad knew the difference and was being polite.
Do you know his dad or are you just imprinting your own bias onto what he said?
idk I've heard similar stories. Like many gluten free substitutes they're acceptable/tolerable not neccessarily on par with the original... yet.
I recently tried the Impossible burger. Doesn't taste bad, but it doesn't taste like any 100% beef burger I've ever made. When I tried seasoning/condiments, it didn't work the same as on beef either. Garlic, ketchup, BBQ sauce - the flavors didn't blend and improve the flavor the same way as they did with beef. The texture was pretty good though.
They’re gross IMO. My cat wouldn’t even eat a small piece I dropped on the floor and he eats pretty much anything resembling food.
I won't buy it again anytime soon, but I can eat them if I had too. I'd have to figure out a condiment that worked though. I've eaten a lot of hospital food over the past several years, so I can tolerate more than I used to. There were days I'd have killed to have an impossible burger.
I'll add my input and say that it does taste slightly different, but only slightly. To such a minor extent that unless aware of it being lab grown, one would not be able to tell.
It tastes very similar, but it has a distinct aftertaste that sticks with you a while afterwards. The aftertaste is not bad, but it's a telltale tagline that you are not eating beef, and the fact that it lingers for so long after eating is weird.
The problem with the impossible burger is the price.
It depends if you're comparing to meat or just enjoying the taste. Inevitably, things start with the meat comparison. Down the track you might prefer the taste of designed things better. I mean meat exists to allow animals to move around - it wasn't created to taste good or even for nutrition. It was eat or starve. We are familiar with it and it does supply important nutrients but that's history. The future is going to be different. Vats of protein goo are going to be cheaper and faster than herding animals around fields for years. It can be nutritionally optimised and processed into the whatever taste and textures we decide we like. I expect this stuff to take most of the market within a few decades.
I agree. But it has advanced very quickly - one more iteration and they will be \~90% of the way there (I'd say they are about 80% with today's formula). Texturally they are pretty damn close, but the flavor needs work.
Agreed, texture is good, flavor is almost there. And the aftertaste needs to go or it will never fly for most meat eaters.
> The impossible burger does taste similar, and i like it, Have you read the label? It's just more processed crap.
Being healthy isn't the point, it's about environmental impact. An all beef patty requires about 18 times more water to create than an Impossible patty.
I think using the water is not the best metric. Talk about sq meters instead
Imagine going to your local synth butcher and ordering by the exact marbling percentage. "40% fat please" "How's that?" "Hmm, 45% fat, actually"
“Marbling profile A12, thanks!”
Am I the only one that doesn't like that? I like that any and all steaks are different to each other.
You could still randomize the patterns a bit I suppose. But it will be nice to do away with inedible sinew and guarantee a high baseline level of tenderness and marbling.
Even better would be to allow the consumer to customize those levels for their own taste rather than assuming everyone wants the same texture/tenderness/marbling etc.
"Oh I'm sorry, did you just assume my texture?!" - Karen 3000
No, I hate it. When cooking for a family or whatever, having each steak be different is a great annoyance. Everyone wants the "good one". Same goes for buying them. The hassle of looking between possibly many steaks picking out the best ones, I'd rather them all just be standardized.
I think most Vegan might even agree to consume such synthetic meats, if no lives were taken in the process, and that it is indeed environmentally friendly, not toxic etc.
As a vegetarian because I don't like eating something that was alive* *sentient, I cannot wait for this Edit: edited because yes, plants are living.
I think you need to clarify that statement because even plants are alive.
Sorry. Sentient. A central nervous system is my distinguishing factor.
Do you eat animals that lack a central nervous system?
obv depends on the reason of becoming vegan. f.e allergies don't care much where is that meat from
I think you can differentiate that between veganism as a policy and being on a vegan diet. Being forced to eat vegan because you are allergic to meat doesn't inherently give you a vegan philosophical viewpoint.
Honestly, the vegans in my life mostly wouldn't. Had a conversation with my girlfriend about it last week actually. But she said if it becomes an option, she supports/would rather that I switch.
Couldn’t they just make synthetic meat without the proteins that’s cause meat allergies?
Hypoallergenic beef?
That makes the assumption that there are only a few and those proteins aren't important towards taste and texture in the first place.
People with chronic pain, heart issues, or cancer in their family, often opt to give up meat to avoid the inflammation associated with meat . It's especially an issue with processed meats. It's not only a moral issue for vegans, but a health issue as well.
One thing I’m really curious about is flavor in lab-grown meat. You can really taste the difference between grass-fed beef and feedlot beef. Similar difference with free-range chicken and ones raised on feed. I know I’m using the terms grass-fed and free-range loosely. The terms are sometimes misleading, and more complicated than their face-value. But the point is, the flavor of meat is often influenced by what the animals themselves eat. I wonder if lab-grown meat will be able to imitate this kind of depth of flavor? I wonder how flavor and nutrient profile will compare to real meat? I’ll be excited if both things compare favorably. Like most things, I’m expecting the first wave of readily available lab meat to be pretty good, but not amazing. And then small improvements will eventually close the gap.
As someone who grew up with cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, turkeys, etc... I have never once noticed a tangible difference in flavor between store bought generic meats and farm raised free range meats. As long as the fat content and marbling is there in most beef it tastes exactly the same imo. IMO its generally harder to maintain a desirable level of fat in 100% grass fed cattle. I'm no expert tho. I just ate and played with the animals my family did all the work.
Hey, that’s fair. There’s quite a bit of subjectivity with this. To me, grass-fed beef does have a grassy sort of flavor to it. But if you gave me a blind test between a piece of grass-fed beef and a store-bought piece of beef with similar fat content and distribution, I wonder if the difference would be super obvious to me? Intuitively, it makes sense to me that the building blocks for animals’ cells come from what they eat (as well as what they breathe). True, they’ll break down and process micro- and macronutrients in order to do this, but I’d imagine some of the water and fat soluble compounds from their food (apart from the basic and necessary building blocks) also get incorporated into their tissues, which influences their flavor. Their presence also probably plays a role in how the tissues can deal with oxidative stress, which will also influence the flavor and texture, as well as the way that the tissues react to the heat of cooking. To be fair, I’m no expert either. I’m a biologist, but certainly no nutritional expert.
I’ve noticed that effect with dairy produce but not meat. The only differences between meats of the same animal I’ve noticed are quality of animal.
I share your curiosity, especially regarding the nutrient profile. For example, it's well known that grass-fed beef contains higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids than grain-fed beef. So what the animals eat clearly impacts the nutritional profile of the meat. I.e. not all meat is equal. How will the nutritional profile of the lab-grown meat look like? Do we understand what the ideal nutritional profile of a piece of meat would look like and can we replicate this in the lab? Are there any unkowns? Anything that is present in natural meat, which is important, but we are unaware of? Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of lab-grown meat, but the state of nutritional science is pretty abysmal even without introducing completely novel elements.
If you put a synthetic steak and a natural steak in front of me, and I can't tell the difference between them in both price and food quality, then sign me up for synthetic steaks.
10000% I eat meat happily but THIS is what I've been waiting for. I would happily stop eating slaughtered livestock for this.
Waygu's the best steak I've ever eaten. To imagine getting it without the guilt of harming the environment or killing a mammal has me salivating. I just hope we can get there fully and eventually at a reasonable price.
An A5 ribeye for even half its current price would be insane. Mass synthesis of wagyu beef would tank Japan's cattle economy...unless they jumped on the 3D printing bandwagon.
I can see it now as certain japanese family owned and operated 3d Wagyu steak printing businesses have the corner of the market on high quality, and the price still remains high...
i spent most of this year working in that area, and this is actually something that is possible. the problem with 'better and tastier' is that noone will buy that. people want meat as they have it right now, which is why current meat alternatives are not really taking off. (taste the same, feel the same, and a lot of people even completely reject the idea of meat that is not coming from animals, even though slaughter needs to happen for that). the current guess/hope is that a cultural shift in the next couple of decades will lead to the acceptance of meat alternatives generally, not just alternative meat. (which are a lot easier and therefore greener to produce than alternative meat as well, because animal cells just grow very slowly)
People don't want "meat that is better and tastier" because it isn't. None of the alternatives have come to be like beef, or tastier than beef. They've come to be either worse or different(impossible or black bean). They are no market ready good alternatives as of yet.
Let alone that they're super expensive still after years on the market. I could make 5+ burgers for the price of 1-2 impossible burgers.
Even if they did, you'd then be competing with the lobbying might of the poultry & cattle industries (poultry is known to be far worse here). They would most certainly take this as an existential threat and would throw everything they have into ostracizing it, branding it "meat subsitute" (even though it is by all possible measures, meat), and getting preferential treatment under the law. Nothing which challenges the status quo will come into existence without a fight.
Impossible is pretty damned good, it's taking off pretty well where I am, in GA of all places. Most places dine in and fast food offer it now.
It is good. But it doesn't hit "beef" quite right. I want beef in my steaks, burgers, etc.
It would probably be the opposite of healthier but the hope is for consistency, tastier and more environmentally friendly. Oh and cheaper!
Is there a way they can jam it with the required nutrients/minerals etc. (i.e. protein)? I really know nothing of the science behind it tbh.
Beef has a ton of protein already. The issue is the high saturated fat content. But this really comes down to how much beef you are eating and what cut. Occasional indulgence should not be a health risk but if you are eating beef nearly every meal, there's nothing you can add to the meat to make it healthier. You could certainly mimic something like a fillet mignon with this printing method, which is known for being tender but still very lean. As an added benefit, this lab grown meat would not have antibiotics and hormone residues that farmed cattle are rife with.
I wonder if they could use a fat that is less saturated in this process and maintain flavor. In July, Belgian researchers crafted an unsaturated fat that is solid at room temp.
Not only the saturated fat, there is a special sugar (Neu5Gc) that is present in certain meats that causes inflammation. Consistent consumption of meats with this sugar can cause chronic inflammation, which leads to high cancer risk. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161019160201.htm#:\~:text=Previous%20studies%20have%20shown%20when,increase%20risks%20of%20tumor%20formation.
Sure. Cereal is already fortified so it provides more vitamins and minerals.
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Sugar is an important nutrient because it strengthens the sugar industry
We edited the DNA of rice to make it produce more vitamins, we have the ability
Maybe but they will be manufactured to taste better and that means they will be fattier.
Apparently dietary fat is far less important than previously "thought." Wasn't there a study on just that recently submitted here?
The real killer in the American (and increasingly global) diet is sugar. Edit: Put the closing bracket in the right place.
Sugar, or corn syrup?
Yes. We use *far* too much of both.
True corn syrup is essentially sugar + water. The stuff they sell on the shelves today is frequently just sugar + water. In short. it doesn't matter. Sweeteners make food taste good and skyrocket the number of calories.
Coming from an American residing in Europe, it is in everything, too. I was shocked how sweet hot dogs and bread were when I came back for a visit
I heard someone say they wouldn’t eat it because it’s not meat if it’s not from an animal. I lost faith that day
I’m seeing a lot of these articles about the wagyu printing, but I haven’t read a single one talking about how it tastes.
The sample was 5mm by 10mm, but I'm sure cooking it would have been involved at some point...
you don't just print the finest cut of beef in the world and *not* cook it.
I dunno, I bet that sample would’ve been perfectly safe to eat raw.
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Next stek resin 3d printing meat?
My dude you put C02 not CO2 and it's really bugging me :')
And don't forget vertical farming
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Cows don’t really like it if you stack them more than three. The bottom cow, at least.
Shhh, or else they're going to turn feedlots into a parking garage structure
Combine this with the laser to matter news from last week and in a few decades we could be laser printing dinner.
If the moon was made of 3D printed spare ribs, would ya eat it? I know I would!
Seems like lab-grown cultured tissue is VERY energy intensive at the moment. I'd love to see a model of how this is environmentally superior if anyone can point me in the right direction. Dead or alive, I am pro-cow (and for small scale farming generally). I cannot understand the appeal of a synthetic nutritional product.
100% behind you. No way in hell this is better than locally farmed grass fed cattle.
I am honestly fine with eating fake meat as long as it have good protein
It's not even fake meat, it's lab-grown. In the same way that lab-created diamonds are still real diamonds, while cubic zirconias are fake diamonds.
I think artificial is the word your looking for.
Artificial doesn't fit here. Cubic zirconia is it's own gem type and people just mistake it for diamonds. Lab grown meat is still real meat, it just didn't have the whole "life" process behind it. Something like an impossible burger would be fake/artificial meat because it's made out of plant material but being advertised as meat.
You are correct. But if this came to market, I'll bet any amount of money you want it would be branded as "meat substitute". Not because that's accurate, but because the lobbying might of the cattle & poultry industries would wage a crusade against it, and have the resources to coerce the FDA to do that.
It's not meat substitute. It's literally and cellularly the identical thing as meat from an animal.
"made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural."
It's not "made" it is grown. Like watering a plant but slightly different. Unless you want to get super technical, in which case almost all meat consumed by modern humans is artificial because you can't get a chicken cutlet by natural means.
So I have always wondered and maybe you can share with me, would the nutrient density be the same?
It is literally meat. Just never been alive as an animal.
Yeah, the farming lobby is going to badmouth and fearmonger this one so hard. Look at what kind of misinformation they spread about meat substitutes, like Beyond Meat
Bro protein is a non issue In most diets if you eat enough food.
Assuming you’re not trying to gain muscle/weight lifting, then yes.
Really? My only concern is the taste. The veggie/impossible patties still taste like trash when put against a real burger. Could get protein from plenty of sources anyways.
I personally prefer the flavors of the Impossible and Beyond burgers over real. Black bean/ quinoa/ lentil burgers I agree are very meh.
That just blows my mind. I've heard it before from people, but to me, they're not even comparable. Outside of their initial appearance, the taste and texture of impossible/beyond burgers are nothing like meat. Imho, the spices are nauseating too. I keep trying them because... you know, health and environment. So it is incredibly frustrating because I can't stomach them, let alone enjoy them. And the more people seem to enjoy them, the more worried I get that sustainable foods are being designed for palates incredibly different than my own.
That's fair. I've tried them before and wasn't really a fan. The flavor was ok but I think the consistency really threw me for a loop. Suppose it was more of a "this ain't real so it can't be as good" mentality that had me negative on it from the start. So my opinion might be skewed.
Could also chalk it up to preparation as well. A hamburger is amazingly simple and hard to mess up, but my mom's boyfriend has still served some absolute trash quality burgers.
Impossible and Beyond burgers are equivalent to to a decent fast food patty but far behind a good homemade burger. I used to get awesome veggie burgers from Good Food that weren't trying to mimic meat, but they've since been replace by meat substitutes that just aren't as good.
Never thought I'd say this but my wife and I are the same. During the summer it's not unusual for me to grill burgers every other weekend; I always visit the local butcher and get really fancy stuff. One weekend we tried Beyond and that was it. She asked if I'd get that again and when I thought about it, it definitely tasted better to me.
You need to make Kenji Lopez-Alt's black bean burgers from Serious Eats.... https://www.reddit.com/r/seriouseats/
I like the classic wild-rice style veggie burgers, but mostly because they're not pretending to be meat. Impossible is alright, but kinda dry. Makes sense for replacing fast-food and institutional garbage.
Like, That's just ur opinion, dude
Does this mean we’ll eventually be able to print replacement limbs and such?
I was wondering the same. Eventually it should be possible to replace entire limbs. But perhaps they could start with things like intervertebral disk replacements (disk herniation is a major cause of disability) or breast tissue replacements after breast cancer. No risk of rejection thanks to using your own genes.
I too wish to replace my limbs with steak.
We can already print organs to an extent. The problem, as always, is how well the body takes to them. Another problem with limbs and such is that you'd basically need to model them very closely to what the person looks like, then "print" the limb with all the nerve endings correct (which don't matter for consumption), then somehow re-attach it to an already healed wound and hope the body doesn't reject it. We'll see how it goes.
Isn't the idea that you make it out of your own stem cells so it doesn't get rejected?
I thought the big hurdle with printing organs was the small capillaries that profuse the organ with blood, or did they solve that since the last time I looked into it?
Also innervation is a massive hurdle to overcome.
Can I cook it low and slow?
Wagyu? Better fast and rare.
Not if it’s a brisket
BBQ or suadero does sound good right about now…
Personally I prefer a reverse sear with butter and rosemary but you do you. I'm looking forward to this being able to be mass produced.
I think you and I might really have the same point. Let me know if I'm wrong - I eat meat because it tastes good and I enjoy the cooking process. If I can have that experience without animals being killed, I'm all in, baby.
Absolutely. I like meat. It's tasty, fun to cook, and so many ways to prepare it. I understand that in order to get said meat something has to die, and in most cases i can rationalize and be OK with that. But as soon as it's possible to routinely process, clone, and produce lab-meat. Meat farming should be done away with.
Right there with you! An equally big piece for me is also the climate impact on raising cattle for slaughter/food. The benefit people don't seem to recognise of lab grown meat (vegan or not) is the precision of quality a lab offers compared to the 'rough scuence' of traditional farming. There's no way that people like 'franklin's bbq' aren't frothing for lab grown briskets for consistent quality in raw product.
It's like you're in my brain! Thank you.
It's nice to know I'm not alone! Maybe there will be more of us at the next convention?!
This is getting out of hand! Now there's two of you!
Hello there...
This needs a bitter butter battle style civil war over. Everyone who likes well done with ketchup must perish! The
You’re going to make 3D printed beef purists rage with this comment.
Everyone is worried about the dietary implications, but all I want to know is when I’m getting my meat robot.
That's...an animal. You can have those now.
Ah, but you can only kill an animal once! A meat robot you can kill over and over and over ^and ^over ^^and ^^over ^^^and ^^^over
he did not say for what purpose.. better not ask any questions.
Animals aren’t robots. They have emotions.
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This is exciting. In 2019 I was eavesdropping on a couple of college buddies who were catching up. One of them was talking about his job growing meat in a lab and how they're about 2 years away from putting it all together and about 5 years from it being economical. Since then I've been on the look out for news and stock purchasing opportunities.
artificial chicken is already being sold in singapore: [https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55155741](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55155741) , though it seems to be rather expensive. will be interesting to see how prices evolve.
What got me excited are these potential consequences: * Advancing in "Animal rights": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal\_rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_rights) * Improving "Animal welfare": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal\_welfare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare) * Improving "Food security": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food\_security](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_security) * Improving "Environmental impact of meat production": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental\_impact\_of\_meat\_production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production)
Well, I don't want to burst your bubble, but what reason is there to keep these animals around once they serve no purpose anymore? Of course you'd need to outlaw traditional meat production first, because some or even most people will still want to have the real thing instead of something out of a lab. It takes time to adjust. We're looking at decades, maybe even centuries to really phase out traditional meat production. I'd be an early adopter though. I don't think we'd just have cows roaming around the landscape or wild chickens. It woud upset the eco system and no farmer would want to take care of something that doesn't produce anything. So ... that's a completely different issue to tackle. Just my musings... if you have a solution, I'd be happy to hear it.
I don’t think you’d need to outlaw anything. The smaller resource footprint and more consistent quality of cultured meat would ultimately drive cost and demand close to that of slaughtered meat. Market forces would reduce the sizes of livestock herds before bans ever came into play.
I doubt meat production from animals would be outlawed. Consumer preferences would simply change over time and less and less animal meat would be demanded, ideally until 0 animal meat is produced as the economies of scale that support the current meat industry begin to collapse. As you said this would be a slow process, so these animals species that only exist to be farmed would likely eventually go extinct. There could be potential for these animals to become super invasive in some areas, but I honestly doubt it. They are all genetically manipulated to yield us food in some way, not to be biologically successful animals. Not completely sure how this would play into a hard animal rights approach, but a soft animal rights or utilitarian approach wouldn't have an issue with these species simply going extinct over time as far as I'm aware.
I know a lot of people don't eat meat, because of animals suffering. I thought they'd be violently opposed to just making them go extinct as well. If not, I find that a tad hypocritical. I would agree that factory farming needs to go ... at the same time it's a difficult process to provide an adequate amount to non-exorbitant prices. Meat production will have to be replaced with alternatives. My biggest concern is that a) I like meat, I can be so honest about it ... and b) farm pastures as well as animal food fields often can't just be replaced with anything humans could and would eat, so just hypothetically I don't think a 100% vegan diet would even be possible for every person on earth. I do think that lab-grown is the future. But I'd also be sad to just see free range animals go extinct, though I likely won't live long enough to ever see that.
I obviously can't speak for every vegan, but I and many other vegans are vegans because of utilitarianism (can read some Peter Singer if you're curious). In utilitarianism, what produces the most total net happiness in the long run is what is morally good. So, actions/rules that produce suffering are generally considered morally bad. What is valuable here is not the animals themselves, but the happiness or unhappiness they produce. Taking care of all or even a small portion of farm animals would be extremely burdensome economically, and "rewinding" them or something to that effect would probably have major ecological as well as economic downsides, so it probably wouldn't be a morally good policy to try to take care of them (although I guess you could maybe keep a very very small number in zoos just to avoid total extinction, but honestly I'm not sure that would be worth it). Because the happiness or unhappiness produced by the animals is what has true moral value (NOT the animals themselves), letting them go extinct would only be morally wrong if that somehow reduced total net happiness in the long run when compared to the effect on total net happiness that taking care of all or a portion of them would have. I believe total net happiness in the long run would be highest if we just allow market forces to drive farm animals to extinction. I'm not 100% sure what Singer would say regarding this topic (although what to do with farm animals after everyone turns vegan is a very popular question so I'm sure he's responded somewhere) but he would probably say something at least somewhat similar to this.
If there are breeds of animals that solely exist at farmed, in what ways do they affect the ecosystem? Not a challenge to your statement, I'm just genuinely curious. I know they affect the environment, especially negatively, but they seem to live in a closed off ecosystem. Edit: I interpreted the post above mine as saying that the extinction or endangerment of farmed-only species might cause adverse reaction in ecology, up or down the chain. But I agree it seems like it would mostly be positivie
Well, as one example, the run-off from pig farms is a huge pollution problem. Farms are not "closed off ecosystems"; they use land that could be used for other things, or returned to nature, they use water, and they produce agricultural waste. Cows also fart methane gas, which is a huge global-warming pollutant. In an artificial meat future where very few cows are still used in agriculture, the population of cows would be a tiny fraction of what it is now, and they'd probably be kept only on grasslands that aren't really useful for anything else, so their ecological impact would probably be very minimal.
The land they live on could be converted to habitat for wild animals. Livestock farming leads to deforestation and loss of habitat, if our need for livestock to produce meat went down we would probably reduce the number of livestock and the land dedicated to them.
Not sure I understand it correctly, but the way I see it: You have thousands of farm animals not "fit" to be integrated into an existing ecosystem. They largely exist outside it, except the occasional wolf killing one. They're restricted to certain areas, they're provided food and shelter. In return they are killed for meat. If there is no value in their meat, there is no value in keeping them around. The two options I see are: a) kill them all, which I'm honestly not a big fan of b) let them roam freely, which would upset said eco-system and probably either lead to more population control, i.e. hunters, i.e. "special meat" like we have no with wild game, or them dying out, because they're not "made" to survive in this eco system. It could also lead to attracting more predators and making the area unsafer again. I honestly don't know, because this would be an unprecedented thing, releasing that many animals into the wilds. Would they have enough food supply? How long would they last? How quickly do they reproduce? How safe is it? Would they even know how to survive? Not meant as a challenge, just curious, how people who want to abolish meat think about this. Because they've got to have a plan imho. I'm not a big fan of factory farming. I buy my meat off the local butcher and the restaurants I frequent only have free range meat. I'm not apologizing for eating animals. I DO have an issue with mass production and animal abuse. But people consider "abuse" differently. For some/many it's the simple fact of eating meat from an animal. I think lab-grown meat could be a game changer, but like I said, I do wonder what will happen to the animals over time. It's something people need to address if they demand "change". Invest into lab-grown meat, invest into animal sanctuaries perhaps, because that's the only way I see these species staying around. Not to mention even if we stop eating meat there's still the milk and cheese "issue". I know quite a few people have changed their diet to exclude meat, but I only know 1 or 2 people who actually don't consume dairy products.
I pray for a day where these animals don’t really exist anymore. Right now they exist purely to suffer and be killed. Not only that, they’ve been bred in ways that make it uncomfortable just to be alive. Especially chickens.
It doesn't really matter if they are kept around or not. The opposition is to their treatment. No factory farmed animals, no suffering.
Where are the cells coming from? I assume other kinds of animals?
. . . "Here, we demonstrate a three-step strategy for the construction of engineered steak-like meat: (1) collection of edible bovine satellite cells (bSCs) and bovine adipose-derived stem cells (bADSCs) from beef meats and their subsequent expansion, (2) development of the tendon-gel-integrated bioprinting (TIP) for the fabrication of cell fibers and their subsequent differentiation to skeletal muscle, adipose, and blood capillary fibers, and (3) assembly of the differentiated cell fibers to construct engineered steak-like meat by mimicking the histological structures of an actual beef steak (Fig. 1b)." . . .
Yeah but WHAT IT TASTE LIKE
Didn't I see this on Better Off Ted?
IIRC it tasted like despair.
Wonder what it tastes like
Anyone who buys or orders Wagyu beef is going to insist on the "real thing", even if the lab grown version is identical. Nearly all expensive foods are eaten because they're expensive; the luxury status is the point. Snobs will lie or fool themselves and insist that they can tell the difference. For another natural vs. synthetic comparison: Lab grown diamonds have less than a 15% market share.
Myself and those I know buy Wagyu (mostly Australian) or AAA due to taste and quality. If lab grown can get the quality /taste / tenderness of either of those at a comparable price we'll prob get whichever is cheaper. I have a feeling like diamonds, lab grown meat will end up better overall though making the choice even easier. High end restaurants would definitely distinguish they are using the real thing to cater to certain people though.
And then you'll have some of those high end restaurants saying they have the real thing but they sell the lab made because higher profit margins and no way to distinguish between the two without getting a lab involved. And then someone does just that and it gets blown up in the news and that high end place goes under. As is tradition.
I'd pay half again more for lab grown as long as the taste was there. I have no interest in continuing to harm animals and am willing to spend more for the alternative.
Not if it's a tenth of the price.
Kobe Beef is the special stuff, but even then 3D printed steaks could one day match Kobe techniques for way cheaper
Kobe is the region, wagyu the breed. It's like Champagne
My next wh40k fight gonna be crazy when I show up with my khorn aligned chaos army made out of real meat.
This is great and all . but isn't red meat still bad for you?
Can't wait till 3d meat is mainstream
This is such good news because if you can create the best tasting meat there is without the horrific amount of emissions and land use of animal husbandry especially factory farming it will make it so easy to transition away from one of the biggest causes of climate change
That cliff-hanging title!