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Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells

wildtypefoods.com

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

#141

Post by an_opabinia »

iamwil wrote: 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…

Succinctly: When people defend meat eating as part of their cultural heritage, they're defending a marketing campaign from the last 80 years.

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

#142

Post by cheese_please »

andrewla wrote: post #94

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…

While I definitely understand your concern, I also think we can see this as a fascinating opportunity to improve the nutritional value of meat. These muscle cells in culture will generally speaking continue to produce the proteins, ECM components, etc. that they normally do, but we can also take advantage of genetic manipulation, metabolic engineering, and nutrition engineering to make them achieve more. A paper came out last year (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109671762...) in which mammalian cells (bovine primary and immortalized murine muscle cells) were modified to produce plant proteins without loss of phenotype. From the abstract:

"... to endogenously produce the antioxidant carotenoids phytoene, lycopene and β-carotene. These phytonutrients offer general nutritive value and protective effects against diseases associated with red and processed meat consumption, and so offer a promising proof-of-concept for nutritional engineering in cultured meat."

It may also be worth mentioning that cultured meat offers other potential gains in the arena of human health -- no need for antibiotics in a sterile manufacturing setting (so not contributing to antibiotic resistance), vanishingly low risk of foodborne illnesses and novel viruses like covid-19, etc..

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

#143

Post by kakkun »

iamwil wrote: 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…

I don't think it's accurate to call salmon a "garbage fish" (though I've known salmon sushi all my life). It's been the classic protein of choice for traditional Japanese breakfasts (akin to having eggs for breakfast in the West) and a very common rice ball filling.

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

#144

Post by an_opabinia »

andrewla wrote: post #94

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…

> The push for heavily processed synthetic meats seems like a huge step backwards

Regardless of how accurate that is, "ultra processed foods" is a recent, poll-optimized anti marketing campaign keyword from the American meat industry.

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

#145

Post by andrewla »

toiletfuneral wrote: post #101
andrewla wrote: post #94

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…

Wait till you find out how unnatural most meat is. Its totally full or hormones and ammonia...And just to get ahead of the inevitable response, no, the vast majority of consumers do not buy grass fed / free range / whatever. Its a dodge and impossible to scale to current consumption levels based on land availability.

I mean, the animals that the meat is made from are living creatures, capable of reproduction and all the usual functions of those animals. We have not been able to shortcut biology in this regard; we are just working on the fringes of natural variability.

In other words, the fact that we have biological systems that are achievable by breeding natural stock is a backstop against producing "food" that did not co-evolve with us. No guarantees, of course, which is why it's a heuristic and not a hard-and-fast rule, but I'd much rather have meat from living animals that have to survive than lab-produced meat that we have reductively arrived at by trying to mimic the observable properties of meat from biological organisms.

GMO presents significant challenges to this, as does clonal propagation of mutant varieties of fruit trees, both of which result in things that, while not necessarily bad, have developed outside the range of what natural variability could produce as viable systems.

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

#146

Post by indigochill »

vessenes wrote: post #13

Boy I really wish I knew more about the science here. I can't tell if it's yucky, so they don't discuss it, or if it's vapor, so they don't discuss it. That said, their photo looks like something I would at least taste! Matrix-grown meat seems to me like something that will have its place in the world, especially if the net environmental impact is favorable. So, Wild Type: more details, yo.

> ...especially if the net environmental impact is favorable.

Probably a stupid question, but is it possible for artificially grown meat to have a net positive environment impact? This seems like it parallels the "vertical farming" idea, which has its own pitfalls relative to traditional farming, like being powered by polluting power sources or the concentration of contaminated water.

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

#147

Post by andrewla »

cheese_please wrote: post #142
andrewla wrote: post #94

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…

While I definitely understand your concern, I also think we can see this as a fascinating opportunity to improve the nutritional value of meat. These muscle cells in culture will generally speaking continue to produce the proteins, ECM components, etc. that they normally do, but we can also take advantage of genetic manipulation, metabolic engineering, and nutrition engineering to make them achieve more. A paper came…

All due respect, I do not feel like you understand my concern.

"Improving the nutritional value" is exactly what I am railing against. The idea that we understand human nutrition in any quantitative way is not realistic. It involves attempting to reduce complex systems to a small set of things that we can understand (making the system more "legible") is dangerous and represents a huge failure of what James C. Scott calls "high modernism".

By the time that we figure out that one of the nutrients presented is harmful unless it is accompanied by mediators naturally present in real foods it will be too late to fix these processes.

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

#148

Post by wwarner »

an_opabinia wrote: post #141
iamwil wrote: 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…

Succinctly: When people defend meat eating as part of their cultural heritage, they're defending a marketing campaign from the last 80 years.

Source? I've been reading the opposite.

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

#149

Post by UglyToad »

cheese_please wrote: post #130
hutzlibu wrote: post #69

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 prolife…

Plus as a lapsed-vegetarian I'm excited for lab grown meats even if there's an animal killed at some point in the process. It's impossible to choose a food without at least some harm. How many fish are killed by fertilizer runoff or damming for irrigation or whatever else is needed for all forms of agriculture?

I'm going to assume a non-zero amount. So my view is the aim with all ethics-based dietary choices with the motivation of avoiding harm to animals is basically to optimize for least animals killed per calorie per 'sentience' unit or whatever.

All food choices are inherently non-zero in animal suffering and I don't think it's reasonable to hold lab grown meat to any higher standard.

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

#150

Post by oh_sigh »

raldi wrote: post #87

What I'm looking forward to is lab-grown meat that improves upon nature. Imagine pigs didn't exist but someone figured out how to make bacon in the lab. What do we not have on this Earth that makes bacon seem like chicken breast? What might we invent that's three levels past otoro?

I agree in looking forward to it, but it is also possible that human taste and desire has evolved in conjunction with what food sources are available(either genetically or socially), so it really might be that bacon(or whatever) is actually the most delicious thing in the universe for humans.
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