Is Cultivated Meat for Real?

If you think about the Earth, it receives a large amount of solar energy. While it makes the world habitable it does a lot of other things. A big one is that the Earth stores this energy in various ways. Plants are an example of this. Photosynthesizing plants, in particular, convert solar energy into sugars.

Animals come along and eat those plants and convert the plant's stored energy into protein. You can think of the plant and animal kingdom as just a massive funnel that converts solar energy into the smallest organisms that successively collects into the largest animals and plants.

Traditionally, we would eat wild animals that were essentially "free". So if you have to create that much proetein and energy from scratch in a lab, you're suddenly paying for all the steps leading up to that that being a grown animal. Obviously we have farm-raised cows that do require inputs but they're still largely eating grown feed.

It's oddly similar to creating people to work. If you had to pay for and build a person it would be incredibly expensive and time-consuming. Like imagine if Amazon had to "farm" people to work in their warehouses. They'd be spending millions of dollars for one person and it would take 18+ years. It just wouldn't be economical or make any sense.

Butinstead we create new humans all by ourselves, pay for their eduction (either directly or indirectly), pay for their food and shelter and so on. So by the time that person becomes an adult, Amazon can pay them $15/hour to work in their warehouse.

So while we create new humans for reasons of our own, from the perspective of a company who really only views you as a labor unit to create value for them, we're "subsidizing' the creation of those new labor units.

That means it's really difficult for an AI/ML system or a robot to compete with a human because that human is "subsidized". Obviously automation happens but, so far at least, it's only really for the most menial of tasks.

You can buy a calf for like $100-500 IIRC. Put it in on some land with somne grass and fresh water and in a small number of years, it'll be a cow that will produce hundres of pounds of meat. It's taken a lot of energy to get there but most of that energy is free.

Lab-grown meat will have to pay that energy cost. That's why I think it'll have a difficult time competing.

Most likely the same places they already do.

Ideally, GM the cell lines and make them photovores or electrovores, have them synthesise their own nutrients from air and rock — but that's a way off.

> Sustainably raised meat is the most environmentally friendly way to feed people.

Not even today.

Right now, a lot of livestock is a middle-man between plants and us, and we could feed more people for less money just by eating a fraction of the crops that are used to feed the animals.

Meat is a preference, widely chosen as people get richer, it's not a "best option" in terms of health or economics.

In the meantime, oils, juices, dairy, pulps and perhaps flours seem like prime candidates for cultured production, either biologically by fermentation, tissue culture etc, or just direct synthesis (esp. oils, fats).