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Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

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Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#71

Post by DamnYuppie »

jonknee wrote: post #60
dasil003 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's foolish to assume that some novel and highly processed food item is going to be safer than something which we've been eating for thousands of generations. Basing the conclusion of safety based on a piecemeal analysis of the components hand-waves away the entire complexity of digestion and metabolization.

Slaughterhouses and packaged meat are a pretty recent invention, certainly not one we’ve evolved with over thousands of generations. Is it really more natural to open a cellophane package of ground meat that comes from who knows how many animals?

What makes you think slaughter houses were needed? That just made things more "efficient". Humans and our ancestors have been eating meat since we have been a species.

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#72

Post by colordrops »

aswanson wrote: post #55
edison85 wrote: post #41

This, crispr, and self driving cars are my favorite up and coming innovations that just seem mind boggling and that will make a profound impact in our lives. I think it is realistic to see widespread use of all 3 in the next decade. The social media, apps, cloud, big data, and phone innovations have been neat but I'm looking forward to disruptions in non tech arenas. Space, electric and hydrogen fuel cell cars, so ma…

It's telling that space, electricity generation, crispr, self-driving cars, and this are thought of as 'non tech', but messaging apps and phones are.

It seems that "tech" has come to be a colloquialism for "digital".

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#73

Post by KGIII »

mmisu wrote: post #31
emmp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? As long as its vegan margarine. Its clean of at least a subset of ethical concerns that many foods are not. Clean is a very overloaded word though so I certainly see where you're coming from, but it works just fine for me.

Calling meat grown in a lab clean meat is just a marketing gimmick that could potentially make people believe they eat natural grown meat.

It does confuse me, as a term. Pretty much every bit of meat that I eat was harvested and processed by myself or my neighbor. Given that we are going to be the folks eating it, it's pretty clean.

I clean my fish, deer, moose, beef critter, fowl, etc... I clean them very well. (They are delicious.)

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#74

Post by lovemenot »

adamnemecek wrote: post #14
grizzles wrote: post #10

Lab grown meat is the industry I'd pick if I had to pick where the next rags to world's richest person will come from. Can it be scaled & beat conventional slaughter economically? I'm betting that it can. And it will disrupt a 100B+ annual industry.

I agree to some extent but selling physical products, let alone perishable products is an insane endeavor.

You assume the massively successful product would the lab grown meat itself.

It might be, but perhaps a bigger hit could be elsewhere: in licensing technology; support services; leasing lab equipment; consumable ingredients or something else entirely.

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#75

Post by CamelCaseName »

colordrops wrote: post #72
aswanson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's telling that space, electricity generation, crispr, self-driving cars, and this are thought of as 'non tech', but messaging apps and phones are.

It seems that "tech" has come to be a colloquialism for "digital".

It is not that surprising given that the most apparent technological advance in our lifetime has been the internet.

I would be curious to see what "technology" was a colloquialism for different periods in time. My suspicion is that it would refer to the most impactful and visible innovations of that time.

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#76

Post by mmisu »

maxerickson wrote: post #28
emmp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? As long as its vegan margarine. Its clean of at least a subset of ethical concerns that many foods are not. Clean is a very overloaded word though so I certainly see where you're coming from, but it works just fine for me.

It would probably be illegal to market a product that wasn't butter as "Clean Butter", because there are rules about labeling things as butter. So I won't be surprised if the animal products industry lobbies for rules about what can be called meat (or if such rules already exist). Of course such labeling concerns don't apply to an internet discussion, but they do indicate that people care about what's in a name.

> Of course such labeling concerns don't apply to an internet discussion, but they do indicate that people care about what's in a name.

Calling something clean meat, based purely on arbitrary ethical grounds, implies that what other people eat and call meat is somehow unclean. It is a value judgement on the others.

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#77

Post by pulverizer »

dasil003 wrote: post #48
ggreer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If fake meats had come first and animal meats were just now coming to market, people would make similar arguments about health effects... and they'd be warranted. With animal meat, one has to worry about salmonella, e. coli, staph, and other pathogens. These food-borne pathogens kill about 5,000 Americans a year and make millions sick.[1] Also, cooking meat creates carcinogens.[2] If fake meats were as dangerous as t…

I think it's foolish to assume that some novel and highly processed food item is going to be safer than something which we've been eating for thousands of generations. Basing the conclusion of safety based on a piecemeal analysis of the components hand-waves away the entire complexity of digestion and metabolization.

Just because human race survived thousands of years eating certain food does not mean that food is safe in today's standard.

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#78

Post by nitwit005 »

jonknee wrote: post #57
nkkollaw wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a dumb idea to base one's argument regarding these things on price. As a new tech it will cost a lot (like computers once did, now you can get one for $5), but the price will eventually go down. Perhaps my generation won't enjoy fake meat like a real steak just because of the idea, but younger people won't mind. Personally, I'll take anything that can stop killing all those animals to then throw away huge quanti…

Well the Impossible CEO has a good point in that if we can grow tissues on demand in a reliable and efficient process the first use will not be for food but for healthcare. Why grow quarter pounders when you could save lives and grow organs?

Growing an organ means you need it to genetically match the person, have all the different tissues hooked up together correctly, and somehow grow it faster than normally happens. And you need that fast growth to turn off before you put it in someone.

Growing a vat of meat tissue just means you get a lot of cells to absorb nutrients and reproduce. It's likely multiple magnitudes easier.

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#79

Post by FeepingCreature »

maxerickson wrote: post #61
yellowapple wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually, though, lab-grown meat is actually meat. It's possible that it'd have to be labeled "synthetic" or "lab-grown" (similar to how synthetic diamonds are named), but claiming that meat is not meat is nonsensical.

Well what's the definition of meat? A typical simple one is "animal flesh". Cells grown in a vat aren't flesh, they are a tissue culture. Note that I'm not particularly animated by the issue, I just don't agree that it is as simple as "claiming that meat is not meat".

This seems like a particular definition of "flesh" that's not particularly germane to meatness. Lab meat is made of the exact same animal cells that regular meat is, the tissue just happens to never have inhabited an animal. When we eat meat, we don't value the fact that the cells we're eating were once part of an animal, we mostly value the taste.

It seems to me that this isn't a necessarily property of meat but a contingent one caused by the fact that meat used to only be possible to produce from animal flesh.

Re: Billionaires and big ag are joining venture investors to fund lab-grown meat

#80

Post by FeepingCreature »

ericd wrote: post #54
ggreer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's foolish to assume that some novel and highly processed food item is going to be safer than something which we've been eating for thousands of generations. It's not that processed foods are particularly safe, but that meat is unsafe in a way we're accustomed to. Again: every year, meat-borne pathogens kill 5,000 Americans and cause illnesses in 1% of the population. Fake meats simply don't cause those r…

And coal plants kill far more people than nuclear ones. It's just not as obvious that they're the cause to those who are sick. Who is to say that eating an equivalent amount of this fake meat product wouldn't cause a far greater number of deaths and reduction in quality adjusted years? It will be much harder to tell, because the problems aren't as obvious/acute, and there are always a huge number of confounding varia…

We don't know what properties this meat will have; we do know what causes regular meat to be harmful, and fake meat does not share several of those particular factors.
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