Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab • Hacker News Board

Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab

#101

Post by jlebrech » Thu, Mar 16, 2017, 9:21 AM UTC

whyenot wrote: post #4

At $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 like saying the engineering sample for a brand new cpu is never going to replace normal cpus because it cost $1bn

Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab

#102

Post by jlebrech » Thu, Mar 16, 2017, 9:26 AM UTC

why is there no brand of tofu marinated with actual chicken. there's no inbetween eating meat and not eating, there should be a "% meat" brand.

Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab

#103

Post by xaldir » Thu, Mar 16, 2017, 9:37 AM UTC

To me it sound an over-engineered solution to a simple problem.

We need less meat from better raised animals. We need to understand that animals are an essential part of a balanced agricultural system. We do not need more food-industry.

Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab

#104

Post by jlebrech » Thu, Mar 16, 2017, 9:40 AM UTC

stagbeetle wrote: post #85

marricks wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up animal products and found a pretty good increase in quality of life. It happened when other changes were occuring in my life, but I lost weight, hung out with other vegans, felt better overall. It can really depend on when you live, but being vegan in most US metropolitan areas is pretty easy these days. As for lab meats, they're great and I'm generally for them, but acting like we don't have viable other s…

> Lentils, beans, nuts, seeds, seitan, tofu, all great sources of protein. This may be true, but all of those either: interfere with mineral absorption, decrease serum testosterone, or are not comparable in taste to animal protein. You may have had an increase in quality of life, but this is not universally applicable to the entire population. Keto is the first thing that comes to mind that increases quality of life,…

Mineral absorption you say? https://saveourbones.com/osteoporosis-milk-myth/

Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab

#105

Post by jlebrech » Thu, Mar 16, 2017, 9:41 AM UTC

digikata wrote: post #40

So why are all the engineered meat startups targeting pretty common meats that are fairly low cost? Why not a something like tuna which is endangered and can sell at a really high cost per pound. Take the Tesla strategy and build for a high-end exotic market that can sustain a high-margin first then get into position for the wider, lower margin market.

or why not human? yum.

Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab

#106

Post by mnw21cam » Thu, Mar 16, 2017, 9:52 AM UTC

thevardanian wrote: post #86

yourapostasy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comm…

You also have to factor in the fact that meat produced in this country is also heavily subsidized by the government.

"This country" isn't very specific.

Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab

#107

Post by tluyben2 » Thu, Mar 16, 2017, 10:04 AM UTC

datamingle wrote: post #28

nicholas73 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, a lot of people eat chicken fried; if this would fix environmental & animal torture issues then it still seems like a good plan.

Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab

#108

Post by david-given » Thu, Mar 16, 2017, 10:13 AM UTC

sprocket wrote: post #52

nicholas73 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> After all, even pastured chicken tastes wildly better than conventional chicken. As a farmer who used to raise pastured chicken, I was always happy to convert people to what real chicken is supposed to taste like.

I love chicken. Finding a chicken I love is surprisingly hard.

...so my father lives in a village in the north-west of Scotland; the butcher there did locally sourced everything (you could buy venison that had come off the local hills; he did amazing venison burgers, made from scrap venison cut with pork). His chickens came from, I think, Black Isle? But they were fantastic. Stuff half a lemon up its backside, rub with olive oil and rosemary, roast, serve with potatoes and plain boiled carrots and peas... sadly, he retired, and the place closed.

I haven't had roast chicken for ages. Dammit, I'm hungry now.

Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab

#109

Post by tluyben2 » Thu, Mar 16, 2017, 10:16 AM UTC

jimmywanger wrote: post #79

marricks wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument boggles my mind. Are we all body builders? Why do we need to eat like them? There's this protein craze going on that we all need to eat the densest sources of protein cause we all look like Arnold. The amount of protein in seeds, tofu, seitan, nuts, legumes is plenty for almost anyone. And if you are power lifting even omnivore lifters take protein shakes after working out usually.

> Why do we need to eat like them? You're shifting the argument. The point isn't that we need to eat like them, it's that we want to, and meat is delicious. > The amount of protein in seeds, tofu, seitan, nuts, legumes is plenty for almost anyone. By that logic, there'd be no point in manufacturing sports cars or macbook pros anymore, because normal cars and Chromebooks have enough power for "almost anyone".

> it's that we want to, and meat is delicious.

Matter of taste? I don't like it much, never did and I grew up in a family were we ate tons of meat and vegetarian was a dirty word. I like 'a bite' of very good beef, but I could never eat a whole steak; just bores the hell out of me and the taste annoys me after a few bites. Chicken I just don't see the point. Next to a programmer I am a cook (own a restaurant) and I find taste very important; always have. So I think 'meat is delicious' is an opinion of yourself (and often people who never tried much else; people who cook 'without meat' (for whatever reason) often cook very bland; then I can understand it; those meals give 'vegetarian' cooking a very bad name and meat 'automatically' would make those better tasting for a lot of people. I wouldn't eat a barely heated up mashed pumpkin without seasoning either); I prefer other things and sure, if there is a bit of meat in something then it can be nice under the right circumstances.

Re: Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab

#110

Post by dnautics » Thu, Mar 16, 2017, 10:22 AM UTC

sethbannon wrote: post #3

After 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...

are you certain the meat was grown 100% animal free (outside of the stem cell line)? As far as I know, higher organism stem cell culture is still not possible without some amount of animal product in the growth medium. For Memphis Meat's burgers last year, for example, fetal bovine serum was used. As far as I looked, they don't make any outward claim of actually being animal-product free (they use cagey terms like "clean", which doesn't have a legal definition, or "from self-reproducing cells"). Fully animal-free meat is a laudable goal, but I wonder if a company that is being evasive about what their current product line is under the pressure of "demoing something, just anything" has the chops to solve the problem of removing all the animal derived products from the growth serum (this is NOT a trivial problem, and some very smart people are working on it because of its arguably less frivolous application towards safe in vitro organ growth for transplantation).

Moreover, an important question is how many replication cycles the animal stem cells use - unless they're hybridized with tumor cells, they will eventually run into the hayflick limit, at which point you'll have kill another animal to obtain more stem cells.