[HN Gopher] Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough ...
___________________________________________________________________
Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to displace
traditional meat
Author : coldturkey
Score : 132 points
Date : 2021-09-22 20:24 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thecounter.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (thecounter.org)
| oehtXRwMkIs wrote:
| The fact that the CE Delft report used some random cheap
| fertilizer off of Alibaba as their price estimate for
| macronutrient feed is a really bad look. Makes me think there's a
| lot of borderline fraudulent overhyping going on to attract money
| and investment.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| There is, very obviously. They're exploiting the fact that most
| people are lazy and dumb. " _You don 't need to look into the
| details. You don't need to give up eating meat when lab-grown
| is just around the corner. Invest in the future!_" While in
| reality cutting down on meat consumption or even going
| vegetarian/vegan would be the better option. Plant based meat-
| replacement products are another promising option.
|
| There are so many examples of such hype. Take the recent
| peddling of psychedelic drugs as a treatment for everything.
| Companies collect a lot of cash with the investment hype
| forming around this. But of course all your mental health
| problems don't magically disappear with DMT. It's this
| exploitative society and our lifestyles that make more and more
| people sick. It's ultimate the same Peter Thiels who also sell
| you the cure that are part of the problem in the first place.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| > "And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, GFI's facility
| ..."
|
| > " cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the
| world's meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like
| the one GFI envisions ..."
|
| > "Each of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping
| price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion ..."
|
| The last sentence is clearly a mistake -- the 4,000 factories in
| total would cost $1.8 trillion. Thus replacing all meat with
| those would cost $18 trillion -- less than 20% of the world's
| GDP. So clearly feasible, but still not realistic.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I'm patiently waiting for the west to realize that insects are
| the future of protein. I will gladly munch down a handful of
| crickets, even before they're prepared to look appetizing.
| "Beyond" and "Impossible" meats, lab grown meats, and black bean
| patties are neat projects, but not the future. And movies like
| Snowpiercer that shows the _horror_ of flavorful, nutritious, and
| sustainable bars of crickets (edit: cockroaches) really aren 't
| helping.
| deworms wrote:
| Ok, you eat bugs, I will stay with grass-fed beef like normal
| people. Meat is not a "problem" and it doesn't need "solving",
| and I will not eat insects, that's absolutely disgusting.
| boston_clone wrote:
| A dead carcass / decaying flesh is "normal" but bugs are
| where you draw a line? That's kind of interesting, and almost
| certainly cultural rather than logical.
| deworms wrote:
| We're not automatons that you can throw any random mix of
| protein and carbohydrates into as fuel, and food choices
| are not "logical". Being forced to eat insects like an
| animal is humiliating and disgusting. Regular meat is
| delicious. Most people will never consider eating bugs,
| they're synonymous with disease, filth, and poverty.
| boston_clone wrote:
| Please don't straw-man here; I never said you can throw a
| random mix of protein and carbs together as fuel. A
| plant-based diet is recognized by dieticians around the
| world as suitable for virtually all stages of life
|
| Meat _is_ a problem, too - for your health and for the
| environment - not to mention the animals themselves.
|
| edited to remove fluffff
| deworms wrote:
| Meat is more nutritious and more tasty, and it's great to
| eat either seasoned and not. What is definitely not
| beneficial for health is a heavily processed and salted
| mush of plant based meat facsimile, or whatever
| frankenmeat they're trying to conjure in those labs. It's
| also another step towards you being more heavily
| dependent on enormous multinational industries.
| boston_clone wrote:
| Meat is still a problem, for all the areas I've listed
| above. If you're willing to neglect that reality for
| something tasting good, you're absolutely right that food
| choices aren't logical (at least in your personal case).
|
| You're also welcome to provide evidence that something
| like Beyond beef is less healthy than it's flesh
| counterpart. With zero cholesterol in any plant-based
| product, though, I have a feeling you're going to
| encounter some difficulty.
| yongjik wrote:
| Americans used to consider lobsters disgusting: they look
| like sea cockroaches after all. Yet look at where they
| are now.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| A steak or chicken breast or pork chop is a fundamentally
| different thing than anything you can get from bugs.
| Culturally they might be interchangeable sources of
| protein, but you can't get a steak from crickets or grubs.
|
| Like it or not, steak is normal, and good eats to a
| majority of the west.
| drooby wrote:
| How much more efficient is it though than the current system
| with livestock? This process is still growing plants to feed
| animals to feed humans.
| NickM wrote:
| Look at how hard vegetarians and vegans have worked for decades
| and decades to try to convince people to replace foods they
| like with other types of food that they _already eat_ but just
| _don 't like as much_. The amount of success they've had is
| small, and the amount of backlash high.
|
| With insects you're trying to convince people to replace foods
| they like with foods they literally find _disgusting_ and have
| never eaten in their lives. Yes I 'm sure it makes sense on
| paper, but I think you're drastically underestimating the
| cultural barriers on this one.
| irrational wrote:
| I'm not sure anything would help. Though, I find hot dogs to be
| disgusting, so I'm probably not a great candidate for cricket
| dogs.
| amenghra wrote:
| Cricket can be turned into powder which then becomes flour
| for baking protein-rich goods. Doesn't have to look like a
| hot dog.
| deworms wrote:
| You can turn lots of things into a powder that contains
| protein, that doesn't mean they should be eaten. Would you
| try baking "protein-rich goods" with dried semen?
| drooby wrote:
| hmm, this sounds like this could create a lot of jobs
| though.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I'm waiting for the same thing, but with fungi. Mycelia alone
| are protein rich and love to literally grow in giant vats.
| Culturing fungi is well understood and massively scalable
| compared to culturing animal cells.
| boston_clone wrote:
| A company already exists that uses this technology; see here
| for more: https://www.quorn.us/mycoprotein
| heavyset_go wrote:
| As far as I know, they're one of the only companies doing
| this and their strain of fungi is their IP. I'd like to see
| this catch on at a larger scale.
| soldehierro wrote:
| I don't understand why people are looking to insects over
| legumes for protein. Legumes are widely cultivated and socially
| and culturally acceptable. Protein is pretty much a solved
| problem.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Agree, and I don't understand any of this lab-grown meat hype
| when there are so many plant based alternatives. It doesn't
| seem that lab grown meat will be cheaper or have a better
| carbon footprint than plant based foods.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| iirc legume protein is significantly lower quality then meat
| protein?
| sithadmin wrote:
| I'm having difficulty discerning what your position on the
| social/culture barrier is.
|
| Is it that the West has failed to realize a future in insect-
| consumption that other regions/cultures already have? Or that
| this future won't be realized unless the West in particular
| embraces consumption of insects?
| deworms wrote:
| Insects are only eaten by people who are so extremely
| impoverished that's their only alternative, sort of like
| Haitian mud cakes. Nobody sane will willingly touch them.
| tkzed49 wrote:
| Is there an advantage of insects as a protein source over
| plants or fungi? What makes you dismiss the plant-based
| Beyond/Impossible meats?
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I'm struggling to find a real source, however glancing at
| nutritional facts of cricket powder, it appears that protein
| makes up 3/5ths of its mass, versus 1/4th for black beans.
| tkzed49 wrote:
| I think you'd have to factor in the resource input required
| to create that mass of crickets vs beans/pulses/etc. I
| realize crickets are pretty efficient but they could end up
| being very similar. I also don't have good sources for
| this.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Have you seen the kilo prices of editable insects? I can by a
| pack of crickets for 20 dollars for 26 grams at a domestic
| online store. There are 453 grams in a pound!
|
| A cheaper option is buffalo worm flour at just over 100 dollars
| per kilo.
|
| "Beyond" and "Impossible" meats have already undercut insect
| prices tremendously on super market shelves.
| skybrian wrote:
| Note that the article is about bioreactor-grown meat, not plant-
| based meat like Beyond, Impossible, and so on.
| deworms wrote:
| Note how they never tell you what plant it's based on, exactly.
| It's a mush of enzyme-treated mixed plant refuse.
| skybrian wrote:
| Source?
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| Ag is subsidized to the hilt. That's why food is so cheap. That
| and borderline wages for labour.
|
| We only subsidize commodity ag that is publicly listed in
| financial markets.
|
| This is also the reason why food growing(non commodity market)
| farms don't get sufficient investment or experience the benefits
| of cutting edge tech. Investors can see returns on already
| optimized markets because there is room to introduce new services
| and products..that is enhanced by AI and subsequently data
| collection on steroids.
|
| None of this is going to end well. Hubris. We need to consume
| less meat, automate Ag and focus on plant based nutrition(not
| fake meat altho cell based vat created meat has its place).
| oxfordmale wrote:
| I remember similar stories about solar panels and wind energy
| decades ago, and they are definitely viable now. The lab grown
| meat industry will either have to wait for a break through or for
| meat prices to sky rocket. Both are probable in the next few
| decades.
| woeirua wrote:
| There's a difference between the natural progression of
| technology, manufacturing capability, and economic and
| efficiency improvements brought about by large scale
| manufacturing. The path to cheap solar panels was relatively
| straightforward 10 years ago. The argument this paper makes
| (convincingly IMO) that the path to these efficiency
| improvements for cultured meat are still TBD.
| rini17 wrote:
| The point here is that investors are promised not "probable
| breakthrough in next few decades" but "in 2030s we'll feed the
| world".
| exdsq wrote:
| So what? Meat is too cheap anyway - it's subsidized beyond reason
| and healthcare costs are crazy. Give it time and there's a non-
| zero chance we won't have an economy to care about due to climate
| change. This is a good step even if it's 'costly'.
| deworms wrote:
| We've been hearing that line for the last 50 years. Bacon and
| eggs cause/cure cancer depending on the week of the year. Meat
| remains one of the healthiest and most nutritious things you
| can eat, the problem is a wild west of cancerous additives and
| unrestrained processed foods in countries like USA.
| kdamica wrote:
| This is the exact argument people made against solar power 20
| years ago. They were wrong. Technology costs are very hard to
| predict.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I imagine insect "meat" would be far cheaper than this.
|
| Now, I don't know how people feel about eating Charlotte & Hopper
| over Elsie & Foghorn Leghorn - probably wouldn't be too bad with
| the right _sauce_
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I mean, beyond/impossible already are a pretty good simulacrum
| of _some_ kinds of meat. If what you 're trying to do is
| simulate meat, I don't think you're going to do better wth
| insects. If what you're trying to do is just have good protein,
| we already have tons of options, starting at beans. But sure,
| insects is another. (I ate a bunch of Brood X cicadas this
| summer, they were tasty. They did not make me think they were
| beef or chicken).
|
| I think the idea of lab-grown meat in the OP is supposed to be
| a much _better_ simulation (I mean, arguably not a simulation
| at all) than impossible /beyond, and be able to simulate whole
| pieces like a steak or piece of chicken not just ground meat.
|
| But yeah, that's a question I have, with plant-based meat like
| beyond/impossible already being way better than I would have
| predicted a few years ago... what's the point of spending so
| much money on the "moon shot" of vat-grown meat, instead of
| just doing more with the plant-based approach that's already
| working well?
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Needing to fake meat mouthfeels will hopefully be a short
| trend. Beyond/impossible requires so much processing to
| produce a patty (and in the process, potentially losing
| nutrition), versus mashing beans or grinding insects.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Right, and vat-grown meat will require even more resources,
| as per OP, if it were even possible.
|
| If people were or could become happy with beans or even
| ground insects, there would be no purpose to it at all. But
| when we have plant-baset meat simulation already, there
| already is no purpose to it.
| deworms wrote:
| Beyond/impossible "meat" are a mess of extremely heavily
| processed ingredients infused with a mix of low quality
| enzyme-treated plant protein broth. Doesn't sound like
| anything anyone sane would want to touch, but then again
| most people don't read labels on food, and in some
| countries (USA) most of the disturbing details (such as
| inclusion of GMO) are legally allowed to be hidden from the
| consumers. There's no shortage of reports of these things
| stinking, bubbling, falling apart, dissolving, and behaving
| in many other unappetizing ways. Most people will stick to
| regular meat, which is healthy and delicious.
| howderek wrote:
| Future Meat Technology can already produce cultured meat at
| roughly the prices quoted in the article ($4/100g, which would be
| $18.14/lb). It seems unrealistic that the industry would have
| already reached its lowest price point considering large scale
| facilities are just now being made.
| sinemetu11 wrote:
| Plenty of brown rice, soy, nuts, beans etc for people to stop
| eating meat altogether if they actually needed more protein (they
| probably don't). -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| Maybe we should direct funds towards advertising meat-free and
| the benefits of not consuming carcinogenic meat instead of all of
| this meat replacement. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2015/11/03/repo...
| bserge wrote:
| Take a lesson from "AI" companies and "communism" - Have the pigs
| be in a coma for their whole lives or something and call it lab
| grown.
| SimeVidas wrote:
| We could tax cow farts.
| deworms wrote:
| Funny how every solution to "global warming" is more taxes,
| isn't it?
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Not true, only the most efficient and market driven solutions
| are based around pigeovian taxes. Plenty of inferior
| solutions involve onerous regulations or huge subsidies, but
| because republicans pop a new blood vessel whenever they hear
| about climate taxes the inferior solutions are the only ones
| that are politically palatable right now.
| deworms wrote:
| Most of the world doesn't have "republicans", we just don't
| want to pay an ever increasing amount of taxes on
| everything that will be wasted by corrupt politicians. The
| government can absorb any amount of taxes and very little
| of it is spent in a way that I approve of. We already have
| to give over 65% of what we make to the government, I want
| nothing more than to be left alone.
| Forbo wrote:
| Sounds like you need better representation in your
| government.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| carbon taxes under most systems are revenue neutral. Here
| in Canada, most people recieve more back then they payed
| in, because the highest income brackets emit
| disproportionately.
| deworms wrote:
| All taxes come with an overhead required to process them.
| I oppose all such arbitrary wealth redistribution as
| unjust in principle.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Ive seen gaming companies missing deadlines over and over and
| they didn't even have to invent the computers they had to run on
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Technical minded people might want to skip the popular article
| and go straight to the Open Philanthropy analysis:
| https://engrxiv.org/795su
|
| The punchline: muscle cells are much more fragile than yeast,
| don't grow as fast, and need more expensive feedstocks. The
| bioreactors have to be smaller and run much longer, making them
| vulnerable to bacterial contamination. You'll never get to the
| price of commercially produced bulk yeast, because muscle isn't
| yeast.
|
| You could imagine tweaking the temp range and growth rate with
| genetic engineering or adding in an immune system. But now you're
| talking about decades of investment, not years.
| Aloha wrote:
| We should eat less meat, not none, just.. less.
|
| Like, anyone who tells you "everyone must be a vegetarian" is in
| my opinion, a fool.
|
| Meat should cost a bit more, and we should feed our meet sources
| as naturally as possible, cows from grass, pigs from offal (and
| other sources, pigs will eat anything), and end factory farming
| of poultry - quite arguably poultry should cost 2-3x more.
|
| Similarly, if folks want to lose weight, the best answer is just
| to eat _less_ , and I say this as a fat person.
| cs702 wrote:
| As a big fan of the idea of manufacturing meat in an
| environmentally sustainable way (and without having to resort to
| raising and killing animals), reading this article felt as if
| someone was throwning a bucket's worth of ice-cold water on my
| face.
|
| According to the article, the barriers to cost-efficient
| manufacturing of lab-grown meat at large scale are _fundamental_
| , e.g., impossible to overcome according to the Laws of
| Thermodynamics and our current understanding of cell biology and
| chemistry.
|
| Quoting from the OP:
|
| > David Humbird, the UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who
| spent over two years researching the report, found that the cell-
| culture process will be plagued by extreme, intractable technical
| challenges at food scale. In an extensive series of interviews
| with The Counter, he said it was "hard to find an angle that
| wasn't a ludicrous dead end."
|
| > Humbird likened the process of researching the report to
| encountering an impenetrable "Wall of No"--his term for the
| barriers in _thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design,
| ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that
| will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be
| produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat_.
|
| Is there anyone on HN with deep expertise in this area who can
| comment on this article's scientific accuracy?
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I have no experience in the area, but just to point out that
| you could equally apply some of those arguments to meat
| production.
|
| The current meat industry is only cost effective because we've
| spent the last few millennia optimising the everloving hell out
| of it - and its scale is just as unfathomable. A significant
| proportion of the Earth's land surface is currently dedicated
| to either growing animals or growing animal feed.
|
| So of course, for an alternative to displace it, it would also
| have to work at unfathomable scales too.
|
| And bearing in mind, the technology to grow meat is essentially
| an exercise in recreating eons of evolution in a factory. It's
| an enormous challenge, but that alone doesn't mean it's
| impossible. Current meat production is also incredibly
| inefficient from a thermodynamic perspective.
|
| I have no idea whether lab meat will ever come to pass. I
| suspect it will eventually, but probably take longer than
| expected.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Optimizing _and_ subsidizing. And that's to say nothing of
| the cost of the negative externalities.
| philwelch wrote:
| I like to joke sometimes that we already have a technology to
| transform indigestible biomass into meat: livestock.
|
| > A significant proportion of the Earth's land surface is
| currently dedicated to either growing animals or growing
| animal feed.
|
| Almost the entire land surface of the earth, as well as
| almost all of the water, ultimately provides nutrients to
| carnivores. Sometimes the carnivores are fish, dolphins,
| tigers, or bears. Sometimes we are the carnivores.
|
| You could argue that agriculture and livestock domestication
| are a huge difference, but that only becomes a concern at a
| certain scale and a certain level of industrialization. Well
| into the 19th century, large parts of North America were
| primarily populated by nomadic hunter-gatherers who mostly
| subsisted off of wild bison.
|
| There is a part of me that finds the notion of lab-grown meat
| somewhat revolting in this context. Not only did the white
| man massacre the bison and transform their habitat into
| cattle ranches, but now even the cattle ranch is not
| industrial enough for him.
| FredPret wrote:
| The _white man_!? There is a global question of high meat
| consumption.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _A significant proportion of the Earth 's land surface is
| currently dedicated to either growing animals or growing
| animal feed._
|
| If those stats include wild areas double-used as grazing
| land, then "dedicated" is too strong of a word.
| missedthecue wrote:
| _" A significant proportion of the Earth's land surface is
| currently dedicated to either growing animals or growing
| animal feed."_
|
| It's important to note that almost all of the land that
| cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose.
| They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like
| rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no
| arable land, and no human population that is competing with
| the cattle population for resources.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I was pointing it out purely as a reference to the utterly
| enormous scale of the industry.
| boston_clone wrote:
| That's only a portion of it, though. That area could be
| used for something other than agriculture, and a
| significant portion of arable land is used for growing
| crops that go exclusively toward animals that are later
| slaughtered, e.g. soybeans.
|
| Moving away from meat is the right way forward - ethically,
| ecologically, and economically.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Realistically, though, it isn't used for other things.
| Lack of infrastructure is a decent barrier for many
| things.
|
| Not that I disagree with the last bit - I'm mostly
| vegetarian save for an occasional fish dish.
| munk-a wrote:
| If not used by cattle ranching it would be used as a
| natural preserve - there are huge chunks of the country
| that aren't fit even for ranching and in those chunks of
| the country you'll see... nothing. Except a biome that's
| doing its thing without human intervention. If this land
| is good for nothing but cattle rearing and we stop cattle
| rearing then we can return big chunks of it to nature.
| novok wrote:
| You can do cattle ranching in a regenerative way that
| would be better than doing nothing and making a place a
| national park. [0] Are there problems with current
| chicken, pig and some ruminant ranching? Yes. Does it
| have to be done this way? No. Are there major
| environmental issues also with monoculture plant farming
| that nobody seems to bring up? Yes.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&t=1s
|
| Getting rid of ruminant cattle farming will just make the
| world worse off as food demand gets redirected to a
| smaller amount of arable land and missing cattle would
| accelerate climate change and desertification. Humanity
| does not have a lack of land to live on, there is plenty
| to go around. City land is expensive because everyone
| wants to be on small space.
| philwelch wrote:
| A lot of the land used in the US for raising cattle was
| previously the habitat of wild bison, who were themselves
| the primary food source of the indigenous people who
| lived on that land. Cattle ranching in the American Great
| Plains is just a domesticated and industrialized version
| of what the Great Plains have been doing all along.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > That's only a portion of it, though. That area could be
| used for something other than agriculture,
|
| Like what? What do you propose as a better use of the
| high plains? (Let's define this as land west of 100
| degree W to Rocky Mountains) There are no natural
| resources, no large cities, lack of infrastructure, etc.
| Other than wind farms, what can you do with grasslands
| that receive less than 10" of rain a year that sits on
| top of a rapidly depleting aquifer?
| jonas21 wrote:
| Yeah, maybe land wasn't the best thing to call out as it's
| not particularly scarce in the US. Water, on the other
| hand...
|
| California uses more water to grow animal feed (Alfalfa +
| irrigated pasture) than it does for all residential and
| commercial uses combined.
| nightcracker wrote:
| Here in the Netherlands it's the exact opposite. We have
| infinite water, just not a lot of space.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Manatee farms when?
| nicoburns wrote:
| > It's important to note that almost all of the land that
| cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose
|
| I'm not so sure about that. Brazil is the second largest
| producer of beef, and there have been huge outcries because
| large swathes of the Amazon are being cut down to
| facilitate beef production (as well as crops such as soya -
| which I should note is mostly used as animal feed - and
| palm oil).
|
| Apparently the soil does soon become unsuitable for even
| raising cattle, so it does become land unsuitable for other
| purposes. But it certainly didn't start out that way.
| ghayes wrote:
| I'm a little confused; why is rural Texas less able to
| support human life than Manhattan? Other than the
| infrastructure that was built by humans, I assume the
| primary advantage of Manhattan is protection from human
| invasion and easily accessible water?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| missedthecue wrote:
| If a cattle farm isn't built in Manhattan, a thousand
| other people will be lining up to turn it into office,
| residential, or retail space.
|
| If a cattle farm isn't built in Erath County Texas, that
| land is going to sit there doing nothing. It has no other
| productive use case.
|
| The point of this is that pointing out how much land beef
| production uses isn't as insightful as it may at first
| seem, because that land isn't being taken from another
| economic activity.
| mc32 wrote:
| Some of that land historically was inhabited by relatives
| of current herbivores (bisons) so some of the land is
| feeding herbivores as it did historically.
|
| Now, there are places where forest was cut down for
| grazing. Thats true. We also have experience where leaving
| the land alone a few decades reverts it back to forest
| (this is seen in forests in the eastern US which were once
| grazing lands for domesticated herbivores and now are back
| to being mature forests.
| je_bailey wrote:
| I think the thing to keep in mind is that this is very specific
| to the concept of growing meat using a cellular culture. This
| in no way invalidates other methods of replicating meat.
| fabian2k wrote:
| If you use current technology for growing cells I can easily
| believe that it will never be competitive. Even with economies
| of scale that is rather sensitive work that is very easily
| spoiled. Unless you figure out how to ensure clean-room
| conditions for low cost this part alone might make this too
| expensive.
|
| But I don't see how there could be any kind of insurmountable
| problem here. Animals "solve" this problem for us right now, so
| there is a way. I just think that the solution has to be quite
| different than how we grow cell cultures in the lab right now.
|
| Short term I'd be really skeptical on the prospects of
| replacing meat in this way. But long term is an entirely
| different question.
| lazerpants wrote:
| It's like looking at the Wright Flyer and saying that it is
| neat proof of concept, but that affordable transatlantic
| flight will simply never be possible. Prescient at that point
| in history, but myopic over a long enough time frame.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm surprised it was downvoted. It was a good point. Those
| of us in the computer industry can well remember when "640K
| should be enough for anyone."
|
| We _literally_ cannot imagine what the future will bring. I
| 'm still waiting on my flying atomicar.
|
| I think it will end up being necessary to make food this
| way, and that we'll figure out how to do it (Soylent Green,
| anyone?).
| White_Wolf wrote:
| I do have times when I look at my phone and think about
| the first "computer" I touched. I'm still amazed
| sometimes of how tech changed since I was 6-7 years
| old(talking almost 40 years)
|
| I'm no fan of lab growing anything because or banning
| people from raising animals or having food plots because
| those that make the food make the rules. That being
| said... I wouldn't be suprised to see, in 2-3 decades,
| something taking off in that regard. All it takes is one
| stroke of genius and a ton of elbow grease to change it
| all.
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| I've been on the other side of this - going more toward
| regenerative ranching as the other way away from the industrial
| food supply. I can't really beat Diana Rogers on explaining
| this, so I'll just point you here.
|
| https://sustainabledish.com/fake-burgers-make-no-sense/
|
| Also - before folks say that we couldn't feed everyone that
| way, I always like to point out that before the Europeans
| decimated the American bison, there were more head of bison
| roaming the west than there are head of cattle today. Just
| turning our monocrop soy and corn farms in the midwest back to
| prairie (by actually doing nothing to the land - just leave it
| alone), we could have regenerative ranching and cows and more
| food for less energy input than we do today.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| You are right on the money here and I wish more people
| understood that there is a sustainable path forward using
| animals as part of the carbon capture solution. When you say
| you are on the other side do you mean actively working on
| ranching? It's something I'm very interested in myself.
| Falling3 wrote:
| >I always like to point out that before the Europeans
| decimated the American bison, there were more head of bison
| roaming the west than there are head of cattle today.
|
| I don't think that's true. Most estimates of the peak Bison
| population I've seen put them at about 30 million. Some
| estimates are as high as 60 million. Today, we have about 94
| million head of cattle down from a peak of 104.
|
| Additionally, your linked article is incredibly unconvincing.
| It's riddled with Appeals to Nature and attempts to use a
| single instance of questionable behavior by a single company
| to poison the well for all alternatives to raising animals
| for slaughter.
| resonantjacket5 wrote:
| > Nothing on this scale has ever existed--though if we wanted
| to switch to cultivated meat by 2030, we'd better start now. If
| cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world's
| meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one
| GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade
| publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at
| a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
|
| Optimistically it seems even according to this article that
| most of barriers for affordable cultivated protein are with
| high capital costs and once the factories are built, you can
| eventually amortize a lot of the costs aka how solar/electric
| cars did so. Also they are aiming for a self-imposed 2030
| deadline, sure it might take until 2040/2050 but nothing the
| article says it won't eventually be built. (Unlike say the
| water/housing/ education/healthcare crises with bottlenecks of
| land/regulations/labor)
| sinemetu11 wrote:
| > If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the
| world's meat supply by 2030
|
| Why do we need protein from meat? The money to engineer
| cultivated protein could be directed to educating simple
| americans on the fact that they're consuming way too much
| protein already. Most americans consume twice the daily
| protein they need.[1][2]
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/well/eat/how-much-
| protein...
|
| [2]https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/how-much-protein-do-
| you-...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Discussing computing pre-transistor must have been pretty
| similar.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| It is hard for me to fully buy into this too. I feel like the
| same was said for electric cars...
| woeirua wrote:
| And it was true, until cheap LI ion batteries became
| commercially available because they have the required power
| density to make it viable. From there it was just a matter of
| the economies of scale.
| void_mint wrote:
| It's the treadmill of solving previously thought to be
| unsolvable problems. Each step is going to be more "See it's
| impossible", until it's not.
| tobiasSoftware wrote:
| "According to the article, the barriers to cost-efficient
| manufacturing of lab-grown meat at large scale are fundamental,
| e.g., impossible to overcome according to the Laws of
| Thermodynamics and our current understanding of cell biology
| and chemistry."
|
| I came away with the opposite understanding. I don't understand
| why lower cost lab grown meat would be _fundamentally_
| impossible. At its theoretical best, lab grown meat takes the
| existing non-lab grown situation and improves on it in two very
| important ways - no energy wasted growing non-meat, and
| vertical farming would allow for less land to be required.
| Rather, the issues I saw that the article talks about, such as
| issues maintaining sterile environments, aren 't things that
| are theoretical limits, but are practical problems that might
| or might not have an eventual answer.
| mchusma wrote:
| I think this article is more clickbaity than it should be. From
| a physics perspective, of course you should be able to grow
| meat, because we do it now with a bunch of other unnecessary
| things like thoughts, nerves, behaviors, etc. There is no
| reason in principle that it cannot be done.
|
| But it's a lot of work, which everyone agrees.
|
| I personally think a blend of lab grown and veggie
| (Impossible/Beyond) will be the first "killer app": tastes
| better and costs less than traditional meat for most
| applications.
|
| IMO impossible is close now for some cases, cost is probably
| the main issue with some extra flavor that I think may need to
| be synthesized.
| [deleted]
| jjoonathan wrote:
| All advanced technology looks like a "wall of no" until someone
| finds a path through. Or doesn't. The only way to know is to
| throw dollars and smart people at it until one's appetite for
| risk is spent, or one hits it big.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Exactly. Putting folks on Mars is very difficult too, yet
| we're still working on it.
| issa wrote:
| I went vegan decades ago and these sorts of discussions always
| crack me up. I understand that for a lot of people (myself
| included at one time) giving up meat sounds absolutely impossible
| to imagine. But in reality, it is very simple. These days there
| are so many readily available plant-based products. There isn't
| really a NEED for lab-grown meat except in the sense that people
| think they need to eat meat. It might be a better plan to spend
| hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising to deprogram
| people from that way of thinking.
| caturopath wrote:
| I really doubt that is an effective way to spend the money, it
| might not be hard to go veg(an), but so far it's really hard to
| get people to go veg(an).
|
| Occasionally I hear animal welfare researchers and activists on
| the 80,000 Hours podcast report their actual modeling and
| computation where they seem consistently to come to the
| conclusion that changing minds is not an effective use of money
| and effort at the margin.
| a5aAqU wrote:
| There is a better solution to the problem: edible insects.
|
| The first reaction most people have is that the public in
| developed countries wouldn't eat insects, but people once thought
| lobsters were gross. Changing people's tastes is not as large of
| a barrier as most people think.
|
| If society is going to spend lot of money to spend on the
| problem, we should start investing it in the cultural shift to
| eating insects and see how far it can be taken via "influencer"
| and celebrity culture. It's a much easier problem than the
| alternatives.
|
| https://theconversation.com/eating-insects-good-for-you-good...
|
| https://theconversation.com/eating-insects-has-long-made-sen...
|
| Before you downvote, look at the projected market size, even
| without an intentional cultural shift:
|
| https://fortune.com/2019/06/28/edible-insects/
| airstrike wrote:
| I don't know about you, but I find lobsters much meatier than
| grasshoppers...
| a5aAqU wrote:
| Many great ideas sound ridiculous at first. That's why most
| people don't build new things. Convincing people that insects
| are a good food source is far less of a challenge than what
| many successful companies have done (or hope to do).
| oxfordmale wrote:
| I have tried eating insects.The taste is fine, but I don't like
| the crunchiness of it. On the other hand I did try meat
| substitute and they are much more palatable
| a5aAqU wrote:
| It will take time for people to get used to it. You don't
| necessarily eat something like a "bowl of crickets", but you
| can grind them up and add to dishes, like protein smoothies.
| deworms wrote:
| Ok, billionaires and politicians first.
| a5aAqU wrote:
| "Influencers" and billionaries will probably happen before
| the rest of the public does.
|
| Billionaires should get on board before someone else does.
|
| > By 2030, the global industry for edible insects, sold whole
| or in a smoothie-ready powder, will grow from sales of $1
| billion to $8 billion, according to a report from Barclays
| and Meticulous Research.
|
| https://fortune.com/2019/06/28/edible-insects/
| deworms wrote:
| According to those who have invested in the nightmareish
| companies who produce these abominations, their investments
| will skyrocket soon.
| a5aAqU wrote:
| The global food market is worth trillions of dollars.
| People in many countries eat insects. It doesn't have to
| start with people in the US who have never really given
| serious consideration to it.
|
| I've traveled a lot and seen how people's perceptions of
| foods change when they are exposed to new things. I don't
| think edible insects is a huge stretch if it were done in
| the right way.
| goldenshale wrote:
| Wait, so you mean if you take linear projections of today's
| outputs and costs and extrapolate into the future it seems
| impossible? No shit. This is basically the case with every
| interesting technology project. There will no doubt have to be
| innovations in the approach, the equipment, etc. But in reality
| all we are talking about is mixing fluids and maintaining some
| temperatures. All of which is done at massive scale for
| chemicals, oil and gas, etc. I don't have strong claims to make
| regarding cultivated meat, but the kind of thinking behind this
| article is rampant. If the money is there, then this can no doubt
| be scaled up for far, far cheaper than the author envisions.
| woeirua wrote:
| Maybe you should RTFA before commenting. The people who did the
| detailed analysis in the article have extensive experience
| doing exactly this thing and even using the most optimistic
| projections still found that it's just not feasible.
| twofornone wrote:
| >New studies show cultivated meat can have massive environmental
| benefits and be cost-competitive by 2030
|
| I don't understand the fixation that environmentalists have on
| meat. Methane farts is a trivially solvable problem with cheap
| dietary supplementation and otherwise the carbon footprint of a
| cow is negligible compared to a host of other, far more pressing
| pollutants. And what little deforestation happens to make
| pastureland only happens once. What am I missing?
| debo_ wrote:
| One thing: The massive monoculturing of soy and other grains
| required to feed the cattle? That eclipses the deforestation
| used for animal pastures (the article goes into this in some
| detail.)
| Zababa wrote:
| That's a problem with some cattle but not all. Some cattle
| mostly eats grass on non-arable land.
| nicoburns wrote:
| If you want to get rid of some cattle production, that
| still implies reducing meat consumption.
| Zababa wrote:
| Sure but reducing meat consumption is oversimplifying. If
| you reduce meat consumption of grass-fed cattle, there's
| no point.
| deworms wrote:
| Meat is not a problem, and it doesn't need to be "solved". You
| are the carbon they want to reduce, don't let them.
| Zababa wrote:
| > What am I missing?
|
| Not eating meat is easy to do and easy to signal. It has also
| been repeated so much that people don't question it.
|
| Just like many ecologists are against nuclear power for
| political (and not environmental) reasons, there are also lots
| of vegetarians/vegans leveraging the ecologist movement to push
| their ideals.
| deworms wrote:
| The future is more meat, especially as more people are lifted
| from poverty and are able to afford better food. Most people
| eat it every day.
| Zababa wrote:
| I think that's true. The biggest consumers of meat are not
| the USA but Brazil.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I agree, they'll have to come up with a continuous process to
| replace the batch process they have now.
| bilekas wrote:
| > In all this, it would be so good to know we have a silver
| bullet. But until solid, publicly accessible science proves
| otherwise, cultured meat is still a gamble
|
| The article is written as if this lab-grown meat was expected to
| solve the worlds problems. There are more factors in play. I
| appreciate other sides of the coin argument, but this is a
| strange one..
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| With Impossible and Beyond Meat's proven success do we really
| need cultured meat? Though personally I have no idea why
| Impossible and Beyond have been successful over existing
| delicious veggie burgers.
| [deleted]
| analog31 wrote:
| Did the article take subsidies and externalities into account?
| JoeCianflone wrote:
| Basically this seems to be saying that this is a no-go at the
| moment and possibly forever. We're going to need innovation on
| top of innovation on top of innovation to make this work...if it
| can be done at scale. To me though I think we're looking at the
| wrong problem. Why scale the technology up? Could we just build
| smaller facilities...like a lot of them that serve as local hubs
| that cultivate and grow for an area? You know...like a farm? Go
| to your local "farm" to get the meat. If the hump is scale...stop
| scaling get smaller.
|
| I'm cynically assuming the answer to why this won't work is that
| there's no money in it so no one would fund it.
| criddell wrote:
| Is an analyst of today trying to figure out if lab grown meat can
| succeed different from an analyst in 1970 trying to figure out if
| something like an iPhone will ever be viable?
| blululu wrote:
| Maybe, but the sake of venture funding a 40 year horizon is
| irrelevant. An analyst in 1970 would have easily concluded that
| a iPhone would be impossible for the next 10 years. Maybe
| possible in 50 years is as good as impossible for a venture
| backed artificial meat companies that needs to turn a profit in
| the next 20 years.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I mean... the mother of all demos was 1968. Moore's law was
| also fully active with truly exponential growth in the number
| of transistors per dollar and per watt for years at that point.
|
| Those computer guys in the late 1960s / early 1970s were
| looking far into the future for how computing would evolve, and
| their predictions were largely accurate. If anything, the
| trajectory of computer progress has been one of the more
| predictable things in the last 50 years.
| reissbaker wrote:
| "Those computer guys in the late 1960s / early 1960s were
| looking far into the future for how computing would evolve,
| and their predictions were largely accurate."
|
| This is survivor bias -- you're familiar with the "computer
| guys" who made accurate predictions, because they were lauded
| for being on the right side of history. There are plenty of
| people who predicted the opposite in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s,
| 80s, 90s, etc; e.g. there is only a world market for "maybe"
| five computers (IBM president, 1943); there is no reason
| anyone would want a computer in their home (DEC founder,
| 1977); the Internet is a fad and will collapse by 1996 (3COM
| founder, 1995); etc etc.
| bonzini wrote:
| Compare the ENIAC to the Apollo Guidance Computer, and you'll
| see that by 1970 we were already on a pretty good track.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| Agreed, miniaturization took a giant leap forward moving from
| valve's to transistors. Even in the 1980s Bell Labs said that
| in the future we will receive our telephone signals through
| the air and our TV signals through a wire. An accurate 30
| year prediction.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Honestly, I think conventional vegetarian food manufacturers will
| produce quality substitutes far before lab meat is even a rate
| luxury, much less commonplace. Beyond Meat is already excellent.
|
| Scaling back labmeat targets to simple liquid slurry gravies that
| could be used as flavor additives to fakemeat products seems more
| achievable.
| ekzy wrote:
| I agree. As a vegetarian, I think those alternative products
| are very good and close enough to meat for burgers, sausages,
| nuggets etc. How is lab grown meat going to compete?
| igetspam wrote:
| I'm not even vegetarian and I've replaced most of my meat
| consumption with plant based alternatives because they taste
| great. There are some things that aren't there yet but I
| can't imagine it'll be long.
| aviraldg wrote:
| This is equivalent to saying: "paid labour may never be cost-
| competitive enough to replace slavery".
|
| Sure, "traditional meat" is cheaper. But that's because it
| involves the torture and murder of animals.
| deworms wrote:
| Animal husbandry is not "torture and murder". Man is the ruler
| of this planet and has the right to feed himself as he sees
| fit.
| skybrian wrote:
| I think the point is that if it's that expensive, some other
| alternative is likely to win. There are other meat substitutes,
| which are already having some success.
|
| Expensive technologies win a lot of market share only if no
| other alternative can work, and even then their use will be
| minimized.
| drooby wrote:
| It's also subsidized
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| There is a decent chance this article is correct but I also
| dislike part of article's focus.
|
| The part I dislike was focusing a lot on the size of the reactors
| needed in order to replace the US meat production. It is a bit
| unfair to compare the size of a bioreactor to a meat packing
| plant without considering the size of all the (organic?)
| bioreactors... livestock. There are ~30M cattle in the US at any
| given time so the volume is considerable. To ignore the
| infrastructure and space that livestock use is making the
| implicit claim that livestock are 'free' instead of 'cheaper
| currently'.
|
| Considering how efficient meat production is (at the expense of
| everything else), we can basically make a single head of cattle
| as our standardized unit to evaluate the cost & thermodynamics.
|
| Basically at scale is a engineered bioreactor cheaper than the
| natural blood & bones bioreactor? Certainly not upfront unless
| small scale bioreactor in a bag technology... oh wait that exists
| [1]. Sucks that pricing isn't easy to get but I think it is still
| more expensive than fixed/reusable vessels at least over time.
|
| [1] https://www.sartorius.com/en/products/fermentation-
| bioreacto...
|
| It's really hard to know without having more knowledge about the
| specifics of but I think there's a lot of unexplored areas that
| makes these projects worthwhile.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >Basically at scale is a engineered bioreactor cheaper than the
| natural blood & bones bioreactor?
|
| No, it's not. That's what the whole article is about. It won't
| be cost effective, not even _at that scale_. Plus, it gives
| some other physical /pragmatic reasons on why it may not be
| even possible to do it (disregarding costs).
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| It was a question. My main disagreement is not the outcome
| but rather that there was never a real cost breakdown of lab
| vs natural. Personally I found the article's structure makes
| it a bit hard to follow and even more difficult to formulate
| a good response.
|
| However the reports it mentions are pretty good:
|
| GFI (Good Food Institute which represents these lab meat
| companies) https://gfi.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/03/cultured-meat-LCA...
|
| Ezra Klein/Vox/Huw Hughes:
| https://www.scribd.com/document/526220188/Cultivated-Meat-
| re...
|
| Open Philanthropy/David Humbird: https://engrxiv.org/795su
| robbiep wrote:
| It seems you missed the point of the article - which is that
| given some of the fundamentals underpinning the growth of cells
| out of the body, with our current and mid-future predicted
| levels of technology, it is not going to be possible to produce
| economical meat in a lab anytime soon.
| moffkalast wrote:
| So it just needs subsidies to be economical then.
|
| I suppose this is a bad time to mention that commercial
| airlines would all have to close down years ago if it wasn't
| for the tax free fuel they get to use.
|
| If something's useful enough we can make it happen
| regardless.
| hirundo wrote:
| > ... projected [they] could lower the production price
| from over $10,000 per pound today to about $2.50 per pound
| over the next nine years--an astonishing 4,000-fold
| reduction.
|
| The author is skeptical that this is achievable. So how
| many multiples of the current cost of meat should we be
| willing to subsidize? If they could "only" get it to
| $100/lb, should we subsidize around $95/lb? There wouldn't
| be much money left to subsidize anything else.
| avalys wrote:
| "tax-free fuel" is not a subsidy.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >Basically at scale is a engineered bioreactor cheaper than the
| natural blood & bones bioreactor?
|
| A cow walks around and eats grass by itself. A bioreactor needs
| constant monitoring by a worker.
|
| If each and every beef cow was hand-raised by a single human,
| regular beef would be $100/kg too.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I read half the article and skimmed the rest so maybe this was
| addressed and I missed it.
|
| The existing meat industry, in the US at least, is subsidized
| both directly and via corn subsidies. Secondly, it bears none of
| the costs of its externalities. If those were factored into the
| cost of meat used by the report it might make for a more fair
| comparison.
| trhway wrote:
| So, people/companies heavily invested in the animal meat
| production do research and find out that artificial meat
| production will be economically unfeasible. Just like GM found
| out electric cars unfeasible or Shell/BP/etc - solar/wind energy.
| Back then at Sun the Linux/x86 was also considered a joke. Just
| like ARM at Intel. ...
|
| The artificial meat will be not only cheaper, it will be
| healthier. You will be able to customize it for your health and
| well being. And human civilization stopping killing other
| sentient beings - the impact of that is hard to estimate. For
| example it will allow to develop various empathy related areas of
| our mentality which are currently naturally suppressed. That will
| tremendously affect all aspects of human society.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| There's a criminal trial going on in downtown San Jose as we
| speak, of someone who also applied lessons from elsewhere to a
| place where they don't fit: Elizabeth Holmes & Theranos.
|
| Her responses whenever someone challenged her were similar to
| most of the commenters here: "first they say it's impossible,
| then you change the world." She was thinking of computers and her
| idol, Steve Jobs. She would never talk about blood tests and
| accuracy, only about how cool it would be to change the world.
|
| Unfortunately, Moore's Law does not apply everywhere. "Hard
| sciences" are hard. We have it easy in software. Boundless
| optimism is only appropriate in certain domains, not in all of
| them. Most of us on Hacker News (not all of us, I'm sure) have
| spent our lives in the domains where it is.
| new_guy wrote:
| > The New York Times, 1903: "Man won't fly for a million years -
| to build a flying machine would require the combined and
| continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanics for 1-10
| million years." The Wright Brothers made their first powered
| flight 9 days later.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/19/opinion/IHT-1903-wright-b...
|
| https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-30d29e9c0cdc44c7a2cb26...
| Hammershaft wrote:
| There is a meaningful difference between a physicist reporting
| on thermodynamic and biological challenges to a technology and
| a newspaper making breathless and unsubstantiated claims about
| a technology.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Maybe the real future of factory meat is figuring out how to grow
| animals that don't have an appreciable amount of brain aside from
| the minimal bits required to sustain life. Could certainly
| alleviate the moral concerns a bit, even if it doesn't really
| solve the efficiency problem.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Or maybe we just stop eating meat and eat plant based
| alternatives instead.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| No thanks. I really enjoy eating meat and can source it from
| environmentally responsible sources in addition to raising my
| own pigs for meat. The "Lets stop eating meat" is a hollow
| path forward. How about instead we eat _more_ meat that is
| raised in ways that increase the fertility of the land and
| capture _more_ carbon? it 's totally viable if you are
| willing to spend more...
| barbazoo wrote:
| What do you mean by "hollow path forward"?
|
| Sourcing it from environmentally responsible sources might
| work in your case but isn't feasible on a large scale
| required for mass consumption.
|
| And all that obviously doesn't take the animal cruelty
| aspect of it into account.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| My hot take is that meat eating will be the smoking of my
| generation. I say this as a proud degenerate meat eater myself.
| It's been shown to be rather unhealthy; beef is terrible for the
| environment; and most animals are raised in profoundly unethical
| environments. I've noticed more and more people my age going
| vegetarian or low-meat and I can't say I blame them. As much as
| synthetic meat is tempting, the solution might just be to stop
| eating meat altogether.
| rootsudo wrote:
| And I'm 180, eating meat is natural - and has been part of
| human diets for, since, forever.
|
| Humans have been eating eat longer than driving, flying, and
| more.
|
| Beef isn't terrible for the enviornment, is that companies are
| looking at one side of the sustainability of their organization
| and are running profit first. There's most likely reasonable
| ways to improve land use, or even increase cost of meat to make
| it better for the enviornment.
|
| People your age, can't compare 1:1, people my age are doing
| keto, high protein date, carnivore diet, fasting / one meal a
| day and protein is on there, vs soy.
|
| Stopping eating meat is not a solution itself. Especially for
| the world.
|
| Especially for emerging economies and such, hah. The last bit
| really, IMO is just so short sighted and assuming that everyone
| in this world has a choice in their diet, what they eat and to
| tell them "no, meat is bad." is laudable at best.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| I dunno, frequent, daily meat eating is a relatively new
| phenomenon for 99% of the population. For a lot of history
| your worker would eat carbs, vegetables and a tiny morsel of
| meat. Meat is affordable due to grain subsidies, massive
| industries and vastly underpaid workers. Sure, there was a
| period before that where hunting was a primary food source,
| but it's not like humans need to eat meat.
|
| Appealing to nature is also a little suspect. There's a lot
| of things that are "natural" that we don't partake in due to
| changing ethics and mores.
|
| I'll concede that comparing it to smoking is not entirely
| accurate. Smoking is a very binary relation; you are either a
| smoker or not. It's much more likely that people in 50-100
| years will be light meat eaters, i.e. eat meat once or twice
| a week.
|
| Emerging economies may eat more meat. They may also smoke
| more. I agree that it's not always productive to demand that
| an emerging economy follow the rules of a developed economy.
| But a lot of these emerging economies will not be so emerging
| in 50-100 years. It's quite possible the populace will reduce
| their meat consumption as education and concern about the
| environment increases.
| Aloha wrote:
| You analogized it to smoking - there is no safe amount of
| smoking, it _will_ kill you, sooner, and more unpleasantly.
|
| You can consume meat safely, consuming only meat is bad for
| you in the long run, but a balanced diet is good. Broadly,
| we need to eat less meat, our meat consumption needs to
| look like it did 80 years ago, not like it does now.
| Aloha wrote:
| We should eat less meat, not none, just.. less.
|
| Like, anyone who tells you "everyone must be a vegetarian" is
| in my opinion, a fool.
|
| Meat should cost a bit more, and we should feed our meet
| sources as naturally as possible, cows from grass, pigs from
| offal (and other sources, pigs will eat anything), and less
| factory farming of poultry - quite arguably poultry should
| cost 2-3x more.
|
| Similarly, if folks want to lose weight, the best answer is
| just to eat _less_ , and I say this as a fat person.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I agree but important to note that "less" really just means
| similar to what people ate a few generations ago or what
| some people still eat today, like around the Mediterranean
| and Italy. Eating vast quantities of meat has never been
| normal. Traditionally an entire family would consume one
| large animal a year (like a pig) and a few smaller ones
| like chickens. The bulk of the diet should be vegetables.
| concinds wrote:
| I'm a fan of the carnivore diet, and I hate this push for
| "fake meat" with a passion. Corporations are ruining the
| quality of meat (hormones, feed composed of "non-foods" like
| corn, soy, and other proinflammatory nonsense, poor
| treatment, destroying land quality unsustainably); and then
| other faceless corporations are taking advantage of this,
| starting a highly aggressive marketing campaign against meat
| and in favor of their future products, with the obvious goal
| of banning real meat altogether one day, preventing one from
| raising animals themselves, solidifying this false dichotomy
| between corporate fake-meat and corporate "real"-meat. With
| the current push, all across Europe, to ban perfectly good
| cars from being driven, it's obvious that the "moral
| emergency" of climate change will inevitably lead to
| governments feeling entitled to tell us we can't eat foods we
| evolved on, and have eaten for hundreds of millenia. Hard to
| think of something more dystopian. To be hurriedly replaced
| with unproven, non-Lindy, lab meat with zero long-term health
| studies, or other vegan foods (which, in today's worls, sadly
| isn't taken by most people to mean healthy vegetables, but
| mostly sugar-laden monstrosities; corporations love sugar,
| and sugar is a plant!)
|
| Current vegans might rejoice, but all the ex-vegans and other
| dieters who switched to keto or carnivore and experienced
| immediate and (sometimes) lifechanging health benefits will
| be very, very angry at this prospect.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| My take is the opposite. There is some incredible work going on
| at smaller regional farms using cattle to increase grasslands
| and provide a sustainable source of protein. Farming in a way
| that doesn't vilify the cow. _CAFO (concentrated animal feeding
| operation)_ meat will be the smoking equivalent in the future,
| but making the distinction between "dirty:" beef and
| sustainably raised beef is important.
| debo_ wrote:
| I appreciate that a user named 'coldturkey' posted an article
| that's bearish on lab-grown meat.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| created (grown?) just for this submission!
|
| user: coldturkey created: 38 minutes ago karma: 4
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| " Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing,
| shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades
| discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about
| abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I didn't read that as insinuating anything. I saw it as
| noting a congruence between the new name and newly-grown
| meat, just as the top-level post was noting the congruence
| of the user name and the topic. I thought it was funny.
| rangoon626 wrote:
| This is great news for the germ line of humanity
| BSVogler wrote:
| As someone donating every month to foster R&D in this area this
| is very disappointing to read.
| gattis wrote:
| After reading the linked-to Humbird paper, I'm not so sure I
| agree with the glum outlook. A huge chunk of the cost seems to be
| macronutrients, which currently, yes, are very expensive. But
| even the report mentions emerging technologies such as plant
| protein hydrolysates that could be done much cheaper at this
| scale. The problem seems to be that nobody has ever had any
| reason to look into optimizing costs at this insane scale. I
| don't think we should just assume that means it won't get much
| cheaper once we do.
| woeirua wrote:
| The article makes a bunch of points about economics, and those
| may be true now, but there are many products widely available
| today that were at one point considered impossible to produce at
| significant scale.
|
| That said, I think the article raises a few fundamental limits
| that probably cannot be currently overcome: 1 - animal cell
| division times are far too long, and 2 - animal cell cultures
| would be highly susceptible to viral and bacterial contamination,
| which could completely kill an entire culture. It seems like we
| could genetically engineer our way out of these problems, but a
| tractable solution is probably decades away.
| sva_ wrote:
| Interesting when people suddenly create an account, just to post
| one article, which immediately gets pushed to FP. Is HN really so
| important for that?
|
| It makes me wonder who pays which kind of organizations what
| amount for these kind of stunts.
| [deleted]
| 10u152 wrote:
| The point about cattle taking 25 calories in grass to produce 1
| calorie of meat is true but in most places, those cattle get
| their nutrition from grazing grassland that has no arable value.
| The grass grows with no human intervention and they wander around
| and feed themselves. Humans can't eat grass. So it's not really
| "inefficient" in that sense.
| mmiyer wrote:
| 97% of cattle is grown on feedlots, not grass [1]. So massive
| amounts of corn and soy are wasted (as the original article
| notes growing soy for cattle feed leads to massive amounts of
| deforestation)
|
| 1. https://www.nrdc.org/resources/feedlot-operations-why-it-
| mat...
| Zababa wrote:
| 97% of the cattle is grown on feedlots, not grass IN THE
| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. So massive amounts of corn and soy
| are wasted IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (as the original
| article THAT EXCLUSIVELY TALKS ABOUT THE UNITED STATES OF
| AMERICA notes growing soy for cattle feed leads to massiva
| amounts of deforestation)
| manux wrote:
| ...and the USA is a large country of >300M people. It must
| lead in humanity's work towards reducing GHG. What is your
| point exactly?
| deworms wrote:
| This is a variation of the paternising "white man's
| burden" myth.
| manux wrote:
| I fail to see how this is the case, but perhaps I'm
| missing the point you're trying to make? What you're
| referring to is about colonialism, whereas here the USA
| is very much incentivized to work within its own borders,
| on its own food industry. It just so happens that climate
| change is a global problem as well, and the USA being a
| large rich country it has more causal influence on the
| outcome of climate change.
| imtringued wrote:
| Presumably 97% of cattle are dependent on feed imports.
| After all, it means the huge non arable grasslands of the
| USA that people pretend are super important aren't enough
| to feed them.
| Zababa wrote:
| My point was that your comment was wrong as it only
| applies to the USA.
|
| > the USA is a large country of >300M people. It must
| lead in humanity's work towards reducing GHG
|
| Getting China to stop coal would be more effective than
| getting the USA to stop beef.
| manux wrote:
| > Getting China to stop coal would be more effective than
| getting the USA to stop beef.
|
| Fighting climate change is not a game of "what would be
| more effective" and ranking solutions (especially in
| between countries), it's a game of "what are ALL the
| things we can realistically do". Both _must_ be done.
| Zababa wrote:
| > Fighting climate change is not a game of "what would be
| more effective" and ranking solutions (especially in
| between countries), it's a game of "what are ALL the
| things we can realistically do".
|
| I don't agree. We have limited time and energy to act.
| Getting people to stop beef in countries where it's not a
| problem is a waste, compared to using that time and
| energy to focus on a more important problem. I think
| focusing on moral imperatives instead of the most
| efficient actions is actually dangerous, as it's a denial
| of the reality we live in.
| sinemetu11 wrote:
| > Getting people to stop beef in countries where it's not
| a problem is a waste
|
| It's a problem. Most americans consume way more meat than
| what they could possibly need and they do it because
| they've heard they need lots of protein which could come
| from many other sources besides dead animals.
| graton wrote:
| Are they raised their entire life on the feedlot? If not what
| percentage of their life is on the feedlot?
| gruez wrote:
| AFAIK:
|
| >Are they raised their entire life on the feedlot
|
| no.
|
| >If not what percentage of their life is on the feedlot?
|
| about half.
| debo_ wrote:
| Do you know what percentage of total meat production is
| represented by pasture-sustained animals? Because my
| understanding is that it is very small.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| my understanding is that most cattle are fed on a combo of
| both. on pasture initially then moved to feedlot later in the
| process to fatten up
| Zababa wrote:
| In France that's ~70% of what cattle eats. I feel like most
| of the information about things like that is very USA-
| centric.
| kova12 wrote:
| No matter how small %% it is, lab meat is not grazing at all
| missedthecue wrote:
| 93% of a beef cattle's lifetime diet consists of food that is
| not in direct competition with the human food supply, such as
| grasses or agricultural waste (cornstalks and such).
|
| https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/print-
| publications...
|
| pdf warning
| [deleted]
| dudus wrote:
| Reference needed for (in most places).
|
| I always heard most cattle is fed grain and have no access to
| pasture.
| 10u152 wrote:
| You're right, I have experience but only in Australia. The
| number of barn raised and or processed grain fed cattle is
| almost 0.
| EL_Loco wrote:
| That's true for some countries, not all.
| nso95 wrote:
| This is correct. Most would also say grain fed tastes far
| better than grass fed.
| rvense wrote:
| I'm guessing you're talking about America?
|
| 50% of the surface area of Denmark is dedicated to growing feed
| for pigs, and we import a lot as well. All that land could be
| used for growing food for people directly, or for other things.
| Since there's basically nowhere in this country where you're
| more than five kilometers away from some sort of settlement,
| almost all of it is interesting for other developments as well.
| So at least here, some of us would very much like agriculture
| to change.
| s0rce wrote:
| I've wondered about this since so much alfalfa and corn are
| specifically grown on arable land to feed cattle. What fraction
| of beef calories is derived from non-arable grazing lands?
|
| There is also the extensive use of water to irrigate pasture in
| arid areas just to feed cattle. That water could be used more
| efficiently. to grow food directly.
| pengaru wrote:
| In the US there's endless fields of corn grown to feed
| livestock.
| mcguire wrote:
| Currently, technically, no. Most of the corn fed to livestock
| is the remains left after distillation for alcohol.
| pengaru wrote:
| [citation needed]
|
| Here's mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_
| in_the_United_...
|
| 33% livestock feed, 27% ethanol, 11% "other" (which
| includes beverage alcohol according to the above link)
| Ekaros wrote:
| Billion dollar industry easily, but at what margins?
| abraae wrote:
| This article reminds me of the fever over insect apocalypse.
|
| Techy types love to imagine swarms of tiny drones taking up the
| job of pollinating our plants when the bees die off.
|
| I can only imagine that anyone thinking like this has never kept
| bees or simply watched them in amazement as they do their job,
| entirely undirected and uncoordinated by us. The ultimate low
| tech solution, working reliably and consistently for millenia.
|
| Lab-grown meat feels the same to me. Yes, it seems clear we
| shouldn't continue consuming pasture and methane intensive foods
| like beef.
|
| But does that mean we try and replicate that product by hurling
| science at it - trying to do ourselves what nature already has
| worked out? At huge cost in $$ and in distraction while we take
| our eye off of the more important things?
|
| I'd say as humans we would be better off getting a little
| pragmatic about this and a bit less arrogant about our ability to
| re-shape nature.
|
| Instead of looking for artificial beef, how about just
| substituting chicken every second time we eat? That would move
| the needle enormously on environmental impact. And requires no
| new technology at all.
|
| Same goes for elaborate carbon capture technologies. Why even
| bother when our planetary economy continues to incentivise people
| burning fossil fuels in unimaginable quantities?
| igetspam wrote:
| Why not vegetables? Is meat really a requirement for every
| meal?
| nso95 wrote:
| As with most things, I would expect scaling up production to
| reduce the costs drastically...
| rexreed wrote:
| According to the article, that expectation is not meeting
| reality.
| villasv wrote:
| Abundant evidence of that assumption being wrong is the whole
| message of the article
| dang wrote:
| Since the article's title and subtitle are both linkbaity, we
| replaced the title above with representative language from the
| article body.
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