Launch HN: Micro Meat (YC S21) – Technology for scaling cultivated meat

To those wondering why lab-grown meat instead of going vegan:

People are driven by incentives. People like meat, so instead of asking them to stop eating meat, which most won't do, make it a better option that fits with whatever the asker's goals are. In this case, you'd want people to care about animals or decrease environmental effects, so the way to do that while also considering people's incentives of loving meat is to have lab grown meat, or something close enough like plant-based meat substitutes that taste like meat.

You will never get anything done by appealing to individuals to change their habits wholesale, that's just not going to happen, people are too entrenched in their defaults. You have to appeal to people's wants and desires and bend them towards your own goals. Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat (and now Micro Meat, etc) have got it spot on: economically target the incentives of wanting to eat meat but make them out of non-sentient substances like plants or bacteria growing muscle cells.

That people still consider that everyone will go vegan or stop eating meat altogether is a fantastical view of the world, it has no basis in true reality. There will be more people contributing towards the lessening of the suffering of animals in the next few years via eating these non-sentient substitutes than has ever been achieved in the last century of the modern vegan movement, simply because it seems now finally that larger human incentives are being targeted directly, which is much likelier to effect change than individualistic pandering.

Hello and congratulations on launching!

1) It sounds like the scaffold+medium+environment is meant to replace a vascular network. Have you considered growing a vascular system in/around the muscle tissue (if that's possible)?

2) Assuming you get to bulk samples, are there any plans to "exercise" the muscle tissue (e.g. with electric stimulation) to reach a desired tenderness/texture?

3) Where are you based?

I think this is liable to be an extremely confounding aspect of the venture - that meat naturally grows in the context of a living animals immune system which interfaces with the wider microbial reality. Diverse diseases arise and wane through extremely ancient dynamics which we are not close to having full knowledge or command over. I could not trust commercially driven scientific assurances from the present age, that food of all things can be mass produced safely in such a biologically novel scheme. It is not so long ago since all where shocked by the novel generation and danger of Prions in the food chain, some years later that "Junk DNA" is not in fact Junk, etc...

While some risk of strange new disease would still be chanced - it would be orders of magnitude less extreme if this cell cloning technology concentrated in early days, on mass producing leathers and furs, rather than the very matter we put into our living bodies.

It’s even simpler than that.

There are some people who simply don’t function as well when they don’t eat meat. “But I’m vegan and I do just fine, in fact it I feel better then when I was eating meat”. I don’t doubt you, but I also don’t doubt the ex-vegans who tried and tried, but just felt awful and tired until they reintroduced meat. Different people have different metabolisms, and some people just can’t properly digest certain foods for some reason.

Meat has a much higher concentration of protein and iron than vegan food. Even foods like tofu and seitan (sold refrigerated at grocery stores) are only 50% protein while chicken breast is around 90% and lean fish is almost 100%. The only vegan alternatives which do have a comparable ratio (protein powder, TVP) are basically pure protein extracted from vegetables, the quality and bioavailability doesn’t compare (apparently the human body is bad at absorbing pure nutrients vs. “natural” food that contains them). Many ex-vegans have been consistently anemic, even while taking iron supplements, until they re-introduced meat.

You ignored the part of the GP comment where they agreed with you. The point is that properly managed pasture increases fertility naturally. We need animals to fertilize, or every plant must be grown with synthetic products.