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Does meat actually taste good though? When has anyone ordered unseasoned chicken? Salt and spices taste good.
Indians have figured out how to make vegetables taste very good (It helps India is perfect for growing spices) But Indians still eat meat, the majority in fact.
I'm not sure about chicken cells but my experience with growing human cells (WI-38 fibroblasts)[1] is that they want to grow in a monolayer. The way we grew them normally was in those roller bottles [2]: you have some tissue culture medium in the bottle (containing fetal calf serum, which is still required to grow mammalian cells AFAIK, another reason most of these companies can't do what they say) and other componen…
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Meat tastes good. Mushrooms taste good, but in a different way. You can want a perfect world, but it will never exist. Like it or don't, solving meat consumption and its effects on the planet is something we'll have to do. That probably involves a meaty substitute for meat.
Does meat actually taste good though? When has anyone ordered unseasoned chicken? Salt and spices taste good.
Adding more ingredients only enhances the flavor, but it’s not necessary if your taste buds aren’t hyperstimulated. Meat tastes good.
The real success in this area is the Impossible burger. It's made mostly from peas and soy, with heme added to produce the bloody meat texture. The heme is made in a fermentation process not much more complex than brewing. Impossible has no problems with volume production - they sell through Burger King and WalMart. Growth rate about 85%/year.
As a long-time meat eater, I find Impossible to be a passable substitute for ground beef in a lot of dishes. If they can get the end user price under control, they could displace a whole lot of beef consumption. At the current price point, it’s not nearly worth it on a taste or economic value comparison with 80% ground beef.
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Meat tastes good. Mushrooms taste good, but in a different way. You can want a perfect world, but it will never exist. Like it or don't, solving meat consumption and its effects on the planet is something we'll have to do. That probably involves a meaty substitute for meat.
Fungi make up one of three primary kingdoms of multicellular life. Mushrooms and other fungus have a variety of flavors already, and some of them are quite meat-like. Given fungus cells are more similar to animal than they are plant, it is possible that they can be selectively bred or engineered to taste more meat-like. I wouldn't be too dismissive of the potential here.
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The fallacy here is pretty transparent. On the one hand, you’re saying meat ”doesn’t taste good” because it is usually not served in isolation. But on the other hand, you claim that seasoning tastes good, despite the fact that it is never served in isolation.
Where is fallacy ? Sugar is sweet I’ve never ordered a cup of sugar in a cafe or seen it on the menu
> Another former employee confirmed that staffers at the company would make jokes comparing Upside to Theranos. that's taking it a little far... their goal is providing an ethical food source, not revolutionizing human diagnoses can't wait for meat-less meat tech to get through its paces and take the time to mature. humans took hundreds of years to figure out how to herd cattle; what's another few years to make it in…
Also, there's a significant difference between "the process works on a small scale, and would work at a large scale if we can solve the reliability/consistency issues" versus Theranos' "the process literally isn't physically possible at any scale and we've been outright lying about it the whole time".
Lab grown meat is full of those kinds of caveats and while no company has committed as egregious a fraud as Theranos, they’re all going to eventually find themselves in the position where they either have to lie to keep getting investments or admit that it’s not feasible and fold.
Personally, my bet is that without advanced bioengineering that can design entire artificial immune systems that protect the growing tissue, bioreactors will just be too expensive to scale up and compete with animals. IMO the only way it’ll work is if we have giant (semi-)open vats like salt evaporation pools that convert solar energy directly into protein and fat, with an engineered biome that responds to contamination like an immune system. And that's probably decades if not centuries ahead of us.
The real success in this area is the Impossible burger. It's made mostly from peas and soy, with heme added to produce the bloody meat texture. The heme is made in a fermentation process not much more complex than brewing. Impossible has no problems with volume production - they sell through Burger King and WalMart. Growth rate about 85%/year.
As a long-time meat eater, I find Impossible to be a passable substitute for ground beef in a lot of dishes. If they can get the end user price under control, they could displace a whole lot of beef consumption. At the current price point, it’s not nearly worth it on a taste or economic value comparison with 80% ground beef.
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I really think the "you don't actually like meat" strategy is counterproductive to the cause of getting people comfortable with alternatives.
Maybe not good strategy but still really interesting question.
Of course, there are also people who don't like the taste of meat at all. But to claim people who like meat actually like the spices is patently ridiculous, not interesting.