More frankenfood. When will we learn ?
Learn what, exactly?
Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab
21–30 of 158 posts
Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cell culturing has a history of the requisite procedures being brought to scale when necessary (insulin production for one classic example). I'm not arguing that the scale is the same. Obviously, comparing a highly evolved animal literally designed for producing meat vs. the natural insulin production of a pig is completely different. But, the evidence says the procedures scale well, given enough time. Would this som…
Is chicken really designed for producing meat? Speaking in exclusively in terms of resource consumption, it seems like a lot of resources would be wasted by the bird on a lot of necessary, but wasteful (from the point of producing meat) activities (e.g. moving?). I am not a biologist, so I am genuinely curious...
It's less a biological question, and more a question of the laws regarding meat production where you live. IIRC, in the US (just some states I believe), chickens for example don't need to have space to move at all, except maybe a few inches. We quite literally turn them into machines for producing meat, at scale.
Further, the breeds of chickens used for meat are usually for meat, eggs for eggs, etc - at least at the industrial scale.
Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab
#23After not eating meat for over 20 years due to the environmental and ethical concerns over how it's conventionally been made, I was lucky enough to be at the tasting described in the WSJ article. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/@sethbannon/i-just-ate-meat-for-the-first...
Can you speak to the cost? The WSJ article says it currently costs $9,000 per pound to produce the "clean meat". Does that mean you ate something like a $900 chicken? (Assuming you had a small sample)
Another startup, Impossible Foods, is selling burgers (with let-animals-live beef) for $15. Their technique seems to be slightly different, mixing lab-made heme with vegan ingredients.
https://www.impossiblefoods.com https://nishi.momofuku.com/nishi/menu/lunch/
Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you speak to the cost? The WSJ article says it currently costs $9,000 per pound to produce the "clean meat". Does that mean you ate something like a $900 chicken? (Assuming you had a small sample)
The costs are still too high for commercial viability but they're dropping rapidly. In 2013, the first cultured burger cost $330,000 to make. Just under a year ago, Memphis Meats was at $18,000/lb of clean beef produced. Now they're at $9,000/lb. This is before any sort of efficiencies from scale, and before many steps of the process have been anywhere near fully optimized. They expect their costs to reach 2 cents/g…
2 cents per gram translates to $9.07 per pound of Memphis Meats' cost. Assuming they skip the distributors (unlikely) and sell straight to retailers, it will be easily double that at the retail level, $18.14 per pound. They are more likely to end up around the $25-30 per pound price point at retail once all is said and done.
That's starting to wander into dry-aged beef ribeye territory at a higher-end version of common grocery chains, and sale pricing numbers at Whole Foods Market. It predictably starts out as a luxury good, but as others have noted, cell culture-based processes have historically scaled pretty effectively. So probably 2-3 more decades after that with continuous refinements will bring it down to a price point that even the middle class will look at, so that's pretty exciting it is getting so close.
What is the regulatory outlook for these products? Will they be regulated as pharmaceutical (due to the bioreactor origin) or food, or is this an issue currently being negotiated and discussed with government? I imagine investors would strongly prefer a food regulatory treatment.
Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab
#25At $9,000 per pound of meat, this is not going to be replacing real meat from animals anytime soon. Chickens are already highly efficient when it comes to converting feed into edible meat. I'm skeptical that cell culture will ever be able to come close to the same level of efficiency. Cell cultures need to be sterile, the sugars, growth factors, and other nutrients used need to be highly refined. These are not requir…
> this is not going to be replacing real meat from animals anytime soon Put your prediction on PredictionBook? It's a great way to keep track of your predictions, and learn to be calibrated (e.g. to have about 80% of your predictions-of-80%-likelihood be correct, which doesn't come naturally to people). http://predictionbook.com/
Huh, that actually looks pretty cool. Are there any stats on e.x. how often someone's "80% correct" predictions are actually true?
Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you speak to the cost? The WSJ article says it currently costs $9,000 per pound to produce the "clean meat". Does that mean you ate something like a $900 chicken? (Assuming you had a small sample)
The costs are still too high for commercial viability but they're dropping rapidly. In 2013, the first cultured burger cost $330,000 to make. Just under a year ago, Memphis Meats was at $18,000/lb of clean beef produced. Now they're at $9,000/lb. This is before any sort of efficiencies from scale, and before many steps of the process have been anywhere near fully optimized. They expect their costs to reach 2 cents/g…
That's awesome! Any source on the 2c/g by 2021 goal?
Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab
#27Though I'm a meat eater, I have a strong suspicion that the arrival of high-quality meat alternatives will cause a societal shift away from eating meat to the point where it would become rare. As it is, giving up meat is a huge decline in quality of life and its easy to rationalize meat consumption.
It needs to be actually comparable in quality and the price needs to come way down though first. It's easy to imagine a future where the _best_ meat is actually grown in this way and is nonetheless cheaper than more environmentally friendly than raising animals.
And of course, then it becomes possible to build meats that correspond to no actual animal
Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab
#28After not eating meat for over 20 years due to the environmental and ethical concerns over how it's conventionally been made, I was lucky enough to be at the tasting described in the WSJ article. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/@sethbannon/i-just-ate-meat-for-the-first...
I wish the tasting was done with simple preparations, so we can read about how it tastes compared to regular meat. After all, even pastured chicken tastes wildly better than conventional chicken.
Also, seemed like the Chicken was fried. Everything tastes great when it is fried.
Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab
#29Though I'm a meat eater, I have a strong suspicion that the arrival of high-quality meat alternatives will cause a societal shift away from eating meat to the point where it would become rare. As it is, giving up meat is a huge decline in quality of life and its easy to rationalize meat consumption. It needs to be actually comparable in quality and the price needs to come way down though first. It's easy to imagine a…
How is it a huge decline in quality of life?
Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab
#30Though I'm a meat eater, I have a strong suspicion that the arrival of high-quality meat alternatives will cause a societal shift away from eating meat to the point where it would become rare. As it is, giving up meat is a huge decline in quality of life and its easy to rationalize meat consumption. It needs to be actually comparable in quality and the price needs to come way down though first. It's easy to imagine a…
How is it a huge decline in quality of life?
When you stop doing what you like/love, it's a huge decline in quality of life.