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Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

wildtypefoods.com

121–130 of 199 posts

Re: Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

#121

My girlfriend and I have both spent years working in Sushi restaurants, and judging by those pictures alone, this "salmon" falls short of our fat requirement. I.e., it's kind of lean looking. We'd try it even at the high price point, but only if they come up with a fatty "salmon belly" edition.

I would have expected that lack of colouring as well for lab-grown salmon meat.

Wild salmon meat gets its pink shade from eating krill/shrimp according to https://qz.com/358811/heres-why-your-farmed-salmon-has-color...

Farmed salmon doesn't get enough krill/shrimp so the farmers have to add colouring to the farmed-salmon diet to get something close to the colour of wild salmon. see previous qz.com link.

At least you won't have to worry about microplastics in the lab-grown salmon meat. see https://www.ecowatch.com/are-microplastics-in-your-salmon-fi...

Re: Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See the comments below - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905472 ~$200 for a 6-piece sushi roll.

Is there hope for some kind of law for the price steadily decreasing over time as efficiencies improve, like Moore's law for computer chips or the exponential increase of solar efficiency?

I've seen that in the scope of the technology life-cycle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_life_cycle

Once it's taken off sometimes there is reference to the the manufacturing s-curve. That would be on the Wikipedia chart, going from when the R&D has traction to where increasing scaling increases volume and reduces costs of the product.

Re: Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

#123
post #76

As a curiosity and side note, Salmon wasn't always eaten by the Japanese as sushi. It was considered a garbage fish that you'd grill due to its likelihood of being infected by parasites. It was the Norwegians that had a surplus, and was looking for a new market to open up that salmon sushi became a thing. https://medium.com/torodex/salmon-sushi-is-not-a-japanese-in... The Norwegians probably won't pay attention to th…

Yes, I was thinking to myself that 'sushi-grade salmon' was an oxymoron.

Only in japan

Re: Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

#124

This movement towards synthetic meat seems very antithetical to the natural foods heuristic. Isn't what we've learned over the last half-century or so that processing food in an attempt to make it more nutritious/uniform/etc. generally involves a reductive analysis of the value of the food and in doing so destroys most of the actual nutrient value? The "shopping at the edges of the market" thing is a tolerably good h…

Isn't what we've learned over the last half-century or so that processing food in an attempt to make it more nutritious/uniform/etc. generally involves a reductive analysis of the value of the food and in doing so destroys most of the actual nutrient value? Pretty much. I had a boss who was very sanctimonious about her lunches. She would hover over other people and say, "I never eat processed foods." Then she'd put a…

I've found that the louder someone is in general, the less likely it is that they use logic in general. :-)

Re: Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a different reaction on seeing it. Yes, it has the striped pattern, but the texture looks completely wrong. Compare their image now with e.g. https://i.redd.it/12cdw2wb55p01.jpg . It's superficially similar; the 'early tasting' picture you link to looks _better_ from a texture perspective, to me. That doesn't mean it's not tasty, but I would not choose this over the real thing (traditional preparation? idk).

Compare crab stick to the real thing. People still eat poor imitations if it tastes good.

Heck, I prefer surimi to crab!

Re: Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

#126

This movement towards synthetic meat seems very antithetical to the natural foods heuristic. Isn't what we've learned over the last half-century or so that processing food in an attempt to make it more nutritious/uniform/etc. generally involves a reductive analysis of the value of the food and in doing so destroys most of the actual nutrient value? The "shopping at the edges of the market" thing is a tolerably good h…

> This movement towards synthetic meat seems very antithetical to the natural foods heuristic.

I can't take that heuristic seriously while eating any kind of fruit or vegetable, given how selective breeding has turned them all into utterly unnatural creations, even the so-called non-GMO varieties. At that point, "natural" just means "not using any technology developed after an arbitrary cutoff date" and it's meaningless.

Re: Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

#127
post #55

Wonderful! I hope they publish the yucky details, it could be really interesting. Also, I know this will be an industrial process for a long time, but I'm having fun imagining a day where a hobbyist can grow meat cultures at home. Like an advanced version of maintaining a sourdough starter.

I've got good news for you! The Shojinmeat Project's (https://shojinmeat.com/wordpress/en/) mission is the "democratization of cellular agriculture." They develop methods for DIY cultured meat (recently someone posted about developing a cell culture medium out of Red Bull). They do have a slack channel, but it's not super active recently. They're pretty active on Twitter though, and their website is a great resource. I would highly encourage you to also check out some of Yuki Hanyu's (founder) talks on YouTube; he's great.

Re: Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

#128

The possibilities with this are so exciting, as someone who eats a vegetarian diet due to environmental and moral concerns with the meat industry. It appears on their website that this is real & ready to sell. I thought large-scale lab-grown meat was still 10-20 years in the future... Does anyone know the pricing? I didn’t see anything on their website, but I feel like it must be expensive. Also, did they pick salmon…

I'm not an expert on WildType's specific process, but I've read that while mammalian cells need to be grown at ~37 C 5% CO2, fish cells can be grown at lower temps due to differences in biology. I just read a paper where salmon cells were incubated at 13 C and 3% CO2. Could be that they're expecting energy cost savings with no need to pre-warm media, heat bioreactor, etc., but it's also possible that cooling will be necessary (depending on the location of the plant) or that mammalian metabolism will produce enough heat that bioreactor heating may not be an issue. I think the jury is still out on that. So maybe they just looked at where they could find their niche in a market with lots of pork, beef, and poultry companies already? Or maybe the founders really cared about marine ecosystems?

Re: Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

#130

From the landing page, there is this great claim: "the chance to eat the foods we love without sacrificing our food ideals" But not information on how it is produced. So I won't know, whether it really matches my food ideals. I mean, how does it get produced? From real fish stem cells? So still, there needs be dead fish in the process at some point? So how many fish do you need to kill, to produce one portion of sush…

I don't know about WildType specifically, but it's not necessarily true that a salmon would need to die at any point in the process. Cells from a simple muscle biopsy could be cultured for this purpose, and a single biopsy may have the potential to produce a great deal of cells depending on the culture conditions. Or they may have developed an immortalized salmon cell line from an initial biopsy that they can proliferate indefinitely (though this leads to questions about genetic drift after a certain number of population doublings; I'm sure they would have a bunch of frozen vials to restart from early passage numbers every few batches though).
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