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Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods

wired.com

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Re: Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods

#101

Post by hristov »

Animats wrote: post #37

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.

And for some reason I cannot quite process it, even though I generally eat a lot of vegetables. The second most painful trip to the bathroom I have ever had was after an impossible burger. The first one was after a beyond meat burger.

Re: Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods

#102

Post by s0rce »

howlin wrote: post #52
Loughla wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anything is probably possible eventually, you could engineer a fungus to grow and taste like meat. Is it economical and possible with current technology, maybe not.

Re: Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods

#103

Post by jareklupinski »

civilitty wrote: post #68
crooked-v wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I think lab grown meat is closer to a Theranos type scam than most people realize. The problem with Theranos wasn’t that their tech didn’t work at any scale; it’s that blood drawn from finger capillaries is useless for most diagnostic tests that they claimed to do. It’s a very subtle problem that only investors with proper scientific advisors with diagnostic experience caught onto (aka all the biotech VCs, who stayed…

> 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

if we could replace the typical cattle pastures of today with this other system (basically the same idea without needing an organism that has a nervous system attached to it), I think we'll be closer to "making it"

> with an engineered biome that responds to contamination like an immune system

I saw a farmer once demonstrate how their barn has an automatic ventilation system that kicks in when the temperature gets too high :)

Re: Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods

#104

Post by sshine »

tsimionescu wrote: post #72
sshine wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you compare mushroom dry weight, it is more like 10-25% protein. This is without any industrial processing.

Is that relevant? You don't eat dried mushrooms, even if you start with them you have to hidrate them a lot before they are any good.

Yes, it is.

We should measure the protein density at a meaningful state for consumption.

While you can eat some mushrooms fresh and dry, their water density when fried is somewhere in the middle. Closer to dry when processed.

Re: Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods

#105

Post by kikokikokiko »

zvmaz wrote: post #66

I really wish them to succeed. Imagine centuries from now, a future civilisation where human-inflicted cruelty towards billions and billions of sentient beings is ended...

I don't think your definition of sentient is very accurate. Is a chicken sentient? Or a clam? Having a nervous system does not a sentient being make. By that definition a microcontroller with sensors for temperature would be sentient. All natural animal meat is delicious and a reaaaallly efficient way of getting practically all nutrients the human body needs to thrive. I'm always surprised by the level of personal guilty paople feel by simply living the way humans were designed to live.

Re: Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods

#106

Post by explaininjs »

zvmaz wrote: post #66

I really wish them to succeed. Imagine centuries from now, a future civilisation where human-inflicted cruelty towards billions and billions of sentient beings is ended...

Beef cattle are almost always raised on open pastureland. They live a very normal, happy, life for all their years. Yes their last moments are perhaps bad, but then so are ours.

Would you rather not exist at all if it saved you from dying?

Re: Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods

#107

Post by fragmede »

Loughla wrote: post #76
dlkf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent claims that because we don’t eat meat plain, this shows that it isn’t the meat that ”tastes good”, its the seasoning. The fallacy is that we could have applied the exact same logic to the seasoning: we don’t eat steak seasoning plain, therefore it isn’t the seasoning that tastes good, its the meat. By parent’s logic, meat both does and does not taste good. The resolution, which has always been obvious to every…

This is the same site where I read a post about making puree vegetables and freezing them as meal planning, because flavor was secondary to efficiency. So. . .

Vegetables puree? That's amature hour. This is the same subculture that VC-funded Soylent.

Re: Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods

#108

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

Loughla wrote: post #98
raylad wrote: post #24

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…

>when cells are touching each other, they stop dividing. I might be very stupid, but if this is a thing, how do we grow? Aren't, for example, bone cells always touching other cells?

AFAIK the specific patterning and asymmetry of surrounding cells is what convinced the cells to form organs. The inhibition stops random cells in media from forming a big randomly configured organ, ie a tumor. Here is a paper about it,

https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/febs.14...

Re: Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods

#109

Post by jojobas »

nicoburns wrote: post #81
raylad wrote: post #24

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…

> The cells want to grow in a one-cell-thick monolayer all over the inside of the bottle. What they won't do is to grow a double layer. This is because they have "contact inhibition" which is a major mechanism for preventing tumor-like growth: when cells are touching each other, they stop dividing. How does that work inside the human body, where presumably they do form 3D structures?

Tumors grow when various inhibition mechanisms fail.

Re: Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods

#110

Post by 3np »

s0rce wrote: post #99
diziet wrote: post #96

Key takeaway paragraphs for me: "But roller bottles aren’t just problematic due to their miniscule output. They’re also expensive and wasteful, according to numerous biopharma and cultivated-meat industry sources. Each flask is made from sterile, single-use plastic, which must be discarded or recycled once it has generated its 2 to 3 grams of tissue. Given that an ordinary 2-liter plastic drink bottle can easily weig…

I'm not sure the plastic use is super relevant at lab scale, as someone who has worked in lab cell culture the amount of plastic waste is enormous from all the single use individually packed sterile equipment. However, I don't think anyone is planning to scale up plastic single use tissue culture equipment to make food, its just not going to make economic sense. I can't comment on if they are claiming the current pro…

> I can't comment on if they are claiming the current product is made in a scalable fashion or in a lab.

Seems pretty clear from TFA that unless WIRED are grossly misrepresenting facts, current product is made in a lab using roller bottles:

> WIRED sent a detailed list of questions to Upside based on our reporting. In an emailed statement, Chen, the company’s chief operating officer, claimed that our reporting contained a number of factual inaccuracies but did not directly address any of the points raised. Chen went on to say that Upside’s current process for producing chicken fillets was not one the company intends “to scale in its current form.”

> "All breakthrough innovations and transformative technologies, including scaling our cultivated meat products, will take time," Chen wrote in the emailed statement. "Cultivated meat is no exception. Not every research avenue, cultivator, or idea we explore will materialize exactly as we expected."

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