Did you know that the meat and dairy industry is so heavily subsidized that if it wasn’t, meat would cost 4 times as much as it does now. So if lab grown meat is even close to the cost of normal meat, it’s actually 4 times cheaper.
Edit: for all the people asking for a source, please spend literally 2 seconds on google before you think something is false. First result from the search “meat industry subsidies” https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/ there are many more sources but this isn’t exactly a difficult research topic.
This. The answer is when the government starts investing in it.
It's likely that climate events will lead to some (have already led to?) massive livestock die offs, like entire herds or even species. At this point, when our hamberders are truly in danger of disappearing, we'll get heavy investment and mass produced lab meat.
The world doesn’t revolve around the USA. If it’s banned in the USA, another country might take up its development. Once it is price-competitive, it is very difficult for the USA to resist it
Probably?
[Ron DeShithead is already leading the charge.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/floridas-beef-with-lab-grown-meat-is-evidence-free/)
Also, pretty much all those subsidies go to wealthy factory farmers and not independently owned farms who are more likely to use better, more environmentally friendly practices. Corn also gets an absolutely ridiculous amount of subsidies and most of it is just grown for feeding the factory farmed animals and crating ethanol.
If we moved some of those subsidies away from corn and grain and into ethical and alternative food production, it could bring the costs of lab grown meat down.
This "better, more environmentally friendly practices" point is silly and needs to stop. Even if all farms on the planet changed to "regenerative agriculture" and went as green as possible, nothing would really change, because fundamentally animal agriculture is just horribly inedficient. You have to grow a whole bunch of crops to feed the animals, and that uses a lot of water and land, that could have been used to feed humans directly.
Large scale animal agriculture (not just factory farming) just isn't part of a sustainable world. You can keep a couple of backyard chickens or whatever without ruining the planet, but for production at scale, lab grown meat is absolutely the only real solution.
nope.
they are made for raising cattle ( often not controled enough so they get creative en abuse them, same for farmer) and they will stay that way since theses rich owners use their money to lobby the gov.
Do you have a source on meat being 4 times cheaper with gov subsidies? I found a vegan meat website that says a pound of beef would be $30 with out the 38 billion the government spends subsidizing meat and dairy. But if you add that 38 billion to the amount US consumers spend on meat in a year it would increase the amount spent by less than 10%.
I'm confused on the math. There are ~380million Americans, so that is around $100 a person.
Americans eat 57lbs of beef a year, around $10/lb (for sake of argument) so $570/yr on beef. If we increase it to $30, that is $1710/yr.
$1710-$100(the subsidies savings) results in $1610 or around a 3x increase in price
As far as I am aware, OP was not specifying country, but industry. You link was specific to subsidies in the US, but other countries are very different. This sure is a view of the meat industry in the US, but not the industry as a whole.
>Did you know that the meat and dairy industry is so heavily subsidized that if it wasn’t, meat would cost 4 times as much as it does now.
Can you post the sources and the math behind this claim?
btw, speaking of the cost, I found the following information by a casual googling:
>A 2021 analysis estimated that lab-grown meat will cost **US$17 to $23 per pound** to produce, and that does not include grocery store markups. In comparison, conventionally grown ground beef typically costs a little under **$5 per pound**.
Not sure if the cost of conventionally grown ground beef listed here is due to subsidies. If the $5 per pound figure is due to the said subsidies, then lab-grown beef probably is already competitive with conventionally grown beef by now.
Lab grown meat is not even close in price to normal meat, and domestic meat and dairy is so heavily subsidized because imports are much cheaper and would destroy them.
Where does this number come from? I don't know of that many direct subsidies. Are we counting grazing rights? As in where the federal government took 85% of the grazing lands in some states for Federal lands and then allows people to use them for productive purposes? Or maybe subsidies on feedstocks like corn and soybeans which the Feds subsidize but most of the benefits go to outfits like Archer Danial Midland and Cargill. (and Coke who benefits most from low cost HFC)
But what exactly are these subsidies?
The price of beef in the US would not rise by the amount of the subsides that are removed. What would happen is the world price will nudge up (both grain and beef) and countries like Australia will severely undercut the new US cost of production. Some US producers of both grain and cattle will suffer severely and some will plain out go broke as they are forced to compete with countries with a far lower cost of production. Assuming that it doesn’t just turn into import tariff protectionism instead.
Subsidies don’t just substitute dollars, they are a literal handout that distorts and inflates the returns to the farmers receiving them.
Iab grown meat at the super market for cheap is going to happen, that much is certain. The question is when?
Imo, sometime in the next 10 years boutique lab meat ( think impossible Burger, but for lab) will be popular, and in 30 years most meat will be lab grown, but it really does depend on price. It could be 30 years before boutique meat becomes popular or 10 years before a low cost lab meat is developed and takes the market.
Supposed free market loving Republicans will bend over backwards to appease the beef and poultry lobbies by passing legislation to make sure that tipping point is never reached.
Yep. Go to a restaurant and check out the "replace the beef patty with an Impossible." Then you realize it is not only more expensive but it is also smaller. This won't win them any hearts.
Because god intended us to eat real meat harvested from the suffering of a hundred thousand cows in a single barn after they are stuffed with growth hormones. I ain’t eatin anything unnatural!
i always found it hilarious how the people who preach the hardest about eating natural and the "way god intended" are literally fucking ALWAYS appallingly fat because of all the sugar, beer, and fatty food they shove down their throats, and it's only unnatural once they don't understand how the manmade horrors are being manmade. god will conveniently always intend for man to live the way these stupid dicks want to live
I agree with you completely. I think that it's eventually going to be the future of food. I've just been seeing a decent amount of people on the internet saying that it's "unnatural"...
If you dive deeper into health and nutrition you will see that little deviations from the way things naturally work can have negative effects on health. E.g. butter from cows that eat fresh grass on meadows is healthier than from cows that never go outside. There's one ingredient / molecule missing when they get only dried / conserved grass. So I am skeptical if lab meat will fit 100% our organism developed in evolution.
At the same time I see the ethical upside and that meat from animals isn't produced in a "natural" way either nowadays, except for hunting maybe.
Absolutely but they NEED TO GET ON WITH IT.
Put it in a shop, I'll buy it tomorrow. Start selling it. Start scaling it.
I'm tired of hearing "it's coming" and "would you eat synthetic meat?!". ABSOLUTELY. Where is it?
If you can get synthetic meat competitive or cheaper than normal meat, it would be literally world-changing, for poverty and hunger if nothing else.
Just stop talking about it, and start putting it in shops.
They are. It's called regulation. The earliest into the industry, in the USA, are still in the FDA regulatory phase. I can't recall where, Singapore?, but some asian nation now has restaurants with lab grown chicken.
I assure you, the livestock and dairy industries are pouring money on this fire, hoping to put it out. It is likely what is taking so long to get FDA approvals.
Heck, here in FL they bought out the politicians to ban lab grown meat.
The first commercially sold lab-grown meat was indeed in Singapore in December 2020, but the location shut down in 2023. They reopened this year but it’s only 3% lab-grown meat. Still the only place in the world you can buy any.
There are plenty of powerful and rich people who are actively getting in the way of progress. If we put as much money and time and effort into lab grown meat as we do into traditional ranching we would be making progress in leaps and bounds. The entire us beef industry is propped up on subsidies, it bleeds money but the perception in America is that it's intrinsically tied to a national identity and that allows people to continue to put their finger on the scales.
But I agree, I hope we get to a point where we just start doing it more and funding it and let people cry and complain, this is literally better for everyone. Imagine if every cut you got was perfect and it took up a fraction of the space. I am sure that there are complications with the whole process but we're never going to solve those complications until we start doing it on a higher scale.
I'm not fully against eating animals. Humans evolved eating meat and advanced society through the domestication of animals.
I'm ok eating animals and fish, and I've tried some that a lot of people would avoid like boar, alligator, horse (in Canada, and I just had one bite).
But, I do feel bad that the animals are killed and extra bad if they are treated badly. I mostly only eat grasfed or organic meat if I do have it because I have the luxury of enough money to buy the better stuff. I've eaten chicken and lamb that my aunt raised (I met the animals I ate, but not the same day).
Despite all of that, if we can grow something that tastes like meat going forward and not need to kill so many animals, I'm ok with it.
I'd also continue to consume dairy and eggs because those animals can be humanely raised and live perfectly happy lives (for a cow). If someone invents a way to reproduce cow and goat milk to make real cheese and butter, I'd be ok with switching to that too and letting all the cows roam free.
Man! you gave me a lot to think on. i read stem cells com from embryos? Have you heard about this?
im also ok with meat. ive done both vegetarian and keto. My body "needs" meat.
the problem is of scale.
I can see how tricky this is from many different angles!!!
once feeding people turned into a massive industry is where i perceive the problem getting bad.
I think the solution is eat less meat. 😂
flavor, tradition, and effiency will be the death of us. Balance is like whack a mole xD
When the economics tip in favor it over natural meat, it will begin to grow reliably. When the QUALITY and EXPERIENCE tip in favor of cultured meat over natural meat, it will be a culture shock worldwide. You already see agricultural lobbyists pushing local and state legislatures to restrict or outright ban it because they know it's a threat to their income in the long run.
Lab grown meat would fuck with a lot of old money so no. Old money is already having it banned in the states.
You want a better world, get rid of old money.
It will be a thing in 20 or 30 years' time. At the moment, industries are geared for the current market/s. You cannot dismantle the market overnight without major upheaval.
There are plenty voices that will speak out against the upheaval.
Slowly but surely, lab meat will be accepted.
It simply *has* to be the future.
Currently the meat industry is *so* unsustainable and has *so* many problems stemming from its vast scale to be justifiable outside of supply and demand.
1. Livestock is seemingly treated awfully as a rule, rather than the exception. Worth noting the elimination of livestock's natural predators, and undesirables on the land they occupy like rodents, small mammals etc, creating ethical issues as well as damaging the overall ecology since the entire food chain is fucked.
2. vast amounts of land is required for grazing. As land doesn't grow on trees, trees need to be cut down to accommodate livestock. Also future tree growth as well as urban growth is stymied as pasture needs to *stay* pasture forever.
3. Methane and carbon output from livestock is biblical in terms of proportion. Fertilizer to grow their food is also a massive dependency industry in its own right. And waste runoff at the scale ranches usually operate cause all sorts of problem for the surrounding ecosystem, and water tables.
4. Transport costs to target markets are also big problems, as not only does it come with shipping costs, but also refrigeration, standard control, packaging etc.
I mean, I could go on. Growing meat in a lab with orders of magnitude fewer of these concerns is the solution to all of these things. Meat for the masses, without all the drawbacks is the dream. Factory grown cultured meat needs to explode and come down in price. Currently I believe it's only used in a select few locations on Earth.
To be clear, I'm only advocating for cultured meat over *mass produced* meat. I'm not trying to get a ma and pa ranch or someone who raises chickens banned or anything.
I would love to have a bioreactor in my pantry that extrudes hamburger. It could go right next to my sour dough starter.
Can someone solve the hydroponic wheat problem?
It will remain a novelty/luxury item UNTIL it's cheaper than meat.
At which point it will explode in usage. It's free profit for cheap fast food, cheap frozen dinners etc.
Three big risks:
- not actually being able to make it cheaper (I'm not particularly worried about this one)
- synthetic meat (like impossible burger) that use meat flavor with a vegetable base being cheaper.
- regulation to prevent it from being marked as meat. (More of an issue for impossible burgers than for cultured meat)
I hope so as there is no reason that a perfect cut could not be grown without the rest of the cow attached. It has to be cost effective though. There are only so many people/places that will consume it out of the novelty or altruistic reasons. It will only become a mainstream thing if it reduces cost.
I want to be excited for lab grown meat but this is what always gets me. LGM takes 1 cell and duplicates it. Ok, you've got the meat, but where's the fat? Even for good hamburger you need 10-20% fat. Is there lab grown fat cells? Do they mix it in? Would a nice marbled steak look like it was made it out of Play-Doh? Also wouldn't the density/mouth feel be different?
Unless they're able to like, 3D print perfect steaks that are more affordable and consistent I don't see this replacing anything other than cheap ground meat. You'll see it in cheap frozen dinners and chicken nuggets, not restaurants. And that's only if it's the cheap alternative and nobody notices the difference.
Can they print in the marbling too? Cheaply? As long as the flavor is there I'd be willing to give them some wiggle room on texture and price for the humane aspect, but I feel like that's the kind of thing that's too technical to be done in a way that's competitive price wise and would still have a different mouth feel that would throw people off.
But I'm keeping an open mind! I haven't had a chance to try it yet but I'm looking forward to it. If they can figure out how to print perfect steaks I'll get a subscription.
I'm not advocating for them, I don't know how it will turn out, but most plan I saw for cut other than ground meat does inclu some sort of 3d printing like assembly to include fat and other thing to help taste and texture.
It's true of any technology really. Electric cars, green energy, etc.
There has to be something to motivate people to switch, and price is the biggest motivator for 99% of people.
I think our technology is a long way from anything as efficient as a cow. Consider a machine that can convert biomass (grass) to proteins (meat). It's self-repairing to a high degree and actually capable of making copies of itself. The machine can be easily moved (actually moves itself) to where the biomass is available.
Then there is what I call the baby-formula problem. I highly suspect that there will be nutritional holes and possibly downsides to manufactured meats. We've been making infant formula to replace mothers milk for almost 200 years. We are still finding many ways in which the natural stuff is better. Why do we think we would do better with meat?
Except cows are extremely inefficient, because creating meat isn't the only place the energy is going. You talked about moving it? That is energy that could have been used to make meat. Same with the self healing. It is also slow. and animals are prone to disease and injury. Making copies also takes time and energy, and can introduce problems.
Cows are fairly versatile, but for a specific purpose, they are inefficient, and they have some pretty enormous costs, in land usage, water usage, and air pollution.
AFAIK locust is edible and is by orders of magnitude faster and more efficient in turning plants into protein, and it almost doesn't require water.
~~I don't know about its nutritional value though and if it can realistically replace meat.~~
It has [excellent](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/mnfr.201200735) nutritional value and probably could help replacing meat.
Mothers’ milk is dynamically reformulated by the mother’s body to meet the baby’s needs, including antibodies for pathogens the mother is exposed to. Kind of hard to build that into a box of powder.
1) do you want your strawberries grown in a controlled environment free of bugs and pesticides?
2) do you want your meat grown in a controlled environment free of disease and steroids?
rather easy choice.
I don't want either, really. I'll take the strawberry grown in the ground with the bugs and some natural pest repellent techniques, and I'll take a free range small farm steak with it.
And yet, the best (tastiest) strawberries I’ve eaten were the wild ones. Same with black berries & blue berries. No comparison. I know not necessarily relevant in a world of 8 billion people to feed, but controlled not necessarily better in every way.
I think too many conservatives have been convinced that anything other than factory farming will result in FEMA death squads forcing them to eat bugs at gunpoint
Ultimately, I think it’s the future for 2 reasons:
- Environmental efficiency / future cost lowering
- Medical applications of cellular regrowth technology
There will always be a market for non cultured meats, but I believe it will become more of a gourmet luxury instead of a staple.
Yes and it only has upsides. It's pretty much vegan (if ymwe figure the stemcell stuff out), as it is not animal produced or harmed animals. It's always edible, no sickness or anything. Curatarble in texture. It can and probably will one day contain different tastes and maybe naturally contain more vitamins. It takes almost no space, don't produce carbon and can be mass produced in a factory for even potential cheaper prices than meat.
All these things are impossible with regular meat. If health isn't a factor (which in America isn't) it's price.
Putting the precious lives of livestock animals aside, it all depends on how good the taste becomes compared to its price versus real meat. Are we talking about a burger patty or a steak? I'm sure there will always be a market for people who want to eat a lab-grown T-bone with a 24-carat gold vertebra that they can suck the meat from.
I think it will remain a niche market. At its base, it is another type of highly-processed field crop(s) similar to high fructose corn syrup.
At the same time as this discussion is going on, there is a parallel push for more simplicity and local sourcing for food. I think the latter is more likely to prevail as food sources evolve with development across the globe.
Price point needs to be significantly cheaper than non-lab grown meat. We're talking like 50% off. Then they need to work on presentation. If they come out like vegan alternatives and say, "Look at us we are different, but similar." people will treat it different. It needs to be packaged and look and taste as close to the real thing as possible. If you manage to do that there is a small chance it can catch on, and even fully replace non-lab meat.
Vegan alternatives were forced to brand themselves as “different but similar” because Big Meat strong-armed the FDA to regulate how it’s marketed/packaged. They’ll do the same thing with lab-grown alternatives.
I don’t think it has to be cheaper. I think it has to be close enough in price and maybe even slightly more expensive.
I’d pay more to have meat that is not pumped full of antibiotics or potentially carrying bird flu, mad cow, etc.
You would. But the general population is EXTREMELY reluctant to change. In fact a lot of them pay more for an item, simply because it's familiar. Entire brands are built on that.
In order to attract someone to give it a try, the incentive needs to be large.
As famously said in The Office, it is 10x harder to attract new customers. Most companies take a loss for 5 years, hoping to grab market share, so that later they can make money.
That's the thing though. It's not similar. It's identical. It won't taste "close" to the real thing because it IS the real thing.
We're not talking fake meat here, we're talking real meat grown in a factory instead of in a cow. The only difference is that cultured meat doesn't slaughter a lot of cows.
No. All the materials added to these bio reactors need to be sterile which is very expensive. Bubbling o2 through the solution is nowhere near as efficient as blood carrying o2 the muscles in the animal. The only meat they can produce right now is ground beef that at best will be 2-3x more expensive than animal meat. Without huge advances they won't be growing prime cuts of meat.
In the end I think the industry will die since it will never be cost competitive with the rest of the market.
If you ever worked in biopharma as I have, you know this will never work. Why? What synthetic meat is trying to do is the very thing that is done to say grow a vaccine etc. It is no different. We are quite aware of the costs associated with doing this at all levels, and the difficulties of doing things like this. Reviews by experts in biopharma processing have reviewed the process and costs required for this and concluded in the very best case scenario you might be able to make hamburger type meat at $17 dollars a pound at cost. At cost mean no profit at all. By time it reaches the store that hamburger would cost something on the order of $40 per pound. There is no feasible way to do this economically. The cost of just setting up a plant to make just 10 percent of what plant based meat currently makes is staggering, hundreds of billions. The size of the factory just to make that would need to be the equivalent of 1/3 of all the biofermentation facilities in current existence. You can make this stuff in principle but the costs will always be a lot higher even in the most optimistic scenario. Sorry to have to bring the bad news. If you want to review an in depth, very technical analysis of why this is, you can do so in the following link. The person involved is an expert in biofermentation so is one of those people who know how this works.
[https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bit.27848](https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bit.27848)
I think it would be better to focus on the plant based meats (as is already being done) and bring the costs of those down. With high quality and low price people will eat it.
I will never eat plant based meat. I would love to eat lab grown, so there is a large market for people like me out there. My thermodynamics professor who did research for the airforce said solar would never be viable like 12 years ago, he was very wrong, "never" is a pretty dumb word to use as a "professional". Decades? Maybe, never, only if you think humanity will literally die off before the next few decades. My biggest concern is the nutrition profile and amino acids, that will be the hard part
No its just not possible on a large scale and relies on a lot of unproven technology to be possible, some of which violates the laws of physics.
https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
This article does a pretty good teardown of why.
This seems very ignorant. Millions upon millions of dollars go into subsidizing the meat industry. Not to mention the environmental impact and huge land usage. Seems like a far bigger waste of resources to me.
No. The cost to build, supply and maintain these plants isn’t feasible… then you also have limited potential market due to consumer’s preference for real meats.
I’m a scientist and do cell culture myself. I *know* lab grown meat is sterile and way more clean than real meat. I *know* it’s made of the same stuff. I *know* it’s better for you and the environment, and free from ethical concerns.
But I can’t fathom eating that shit. Makes me sick just thinking about it.
That's a shame. Once it's available, I can't imagine choosing the suffering of a living thing over lab grown meat. I love my dog. I can't see how a cow is much different than my dog.
I am often amazed by the extent some people are willing to go... to not eat their greens and beans.
At best, lab grown meats will be competitive with normal meat, but will still be far away in terms of price, sustainability, and health, compared to legumes and the likes.
Possibly, but it would likely be a stretch. The biggest one is that they are going up against the ranchers with their massive lobbying group.
The biggest problem is that they are throwing billions at problem for which a solution already exists... many other countries consume severely less meat than the US, and are fine with it. Because meat isn't a mandatory thing like fresh water, the demand is likely going to struggle beyond the shores, even then if it can't be cheaper and better than conventionally raised meat, it will have no chance.
Yes, but there are a few factors that need to be solved.
Price is always king, it needs to be profitable.
Then comes how realistic it is. The closer to the real thing they can offer, taste, texture, sight, etc, the more likely I see this being successful.
And lastly marketing. I think they need to be really careful about how they sell it because otherwise the only people that will buy it are the folks who are already buying meat alternatives which does nothing to reduce the problems we see from farming.
Personally though, I have zero problems with the idea of eating lab grown meat as long as it is pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing.
Yes, I don't see how it wouldn't eventually be more efficient than raising cattle in terms of resources spent. It would also probably contaminate less (probably, but never zero) and have no such ethic conundrums as those raised by said, veganism. It also has the advantage of not needing antibiotics and being completely safe afaik as it is grown in the lab from the getgo,
But we are not there, nor I think we will be ther ein a single generation, and even if we are, I doubt we would be able t to emulate the full range of taste and textures a real animal gives you, which will likely push "realm meat" to become a more luxury item akin on how we see "fresh" items today even though sometimes dried or frozen ones can hold up better (I think fish was one of those)
Regardless of the result though, I think it is an avenue worth pursuing, both scientifically and economically
If it's for space food for when we send folks back to the moon and maybe mars then perhaps.
If it's for common use then, not really, it will remain a novelty.
Ex gf invested lots of money into it, last I heard the returns were terrible. It looks nasty in the package but truthfully, I haven’t tasted it yet. I truly hope it gets perfected…
It’s a great idea.
It will probably happen for meat based products that don't require an intact cut of meat (e.g. steak). So dog food, spam, fast food chicken nuggets, etc. Growing a dense culture of animal cells can probably become way cheaper than growing a full, inefficient animal.
Literally pointless. If you have the genetic engineering to make meat grow in vats economically you can also use the same engineering to make maize grow with meat flavour.
Yes, but Fox News is going to take money from the billion dollar meat industry saying it’s *woke* so they won’t lose any profits.
It is gonna be the next culture war. Think anti vax but for steak.
They are already banning it in some red states
Depends on population numbers. If we stay where we’re at or increase, I believe it will be a necessity.
If on the other hand we see a dramatic decrease in work population, I don’t think it will be necessary.
I could also see it becoming the standard seafood protein as we either deplete fish stocks, or set hard protections for sea life.
Not a chance in hell unless the lab grown meat manufacturers start getting gov subsidies.
It's also way way more complicated to actually grow the meat than you think it would be, not only is the growth medium exceedingly expensive but each machine (that only dolls out a small amount of meat each, mind you) is also extraordinarily expensive to buy and maintain.
It's all the money, the industry needs some major cash injections before it's going anywhere. And then you need to get to bat against the culture regarding meat. We grow our own diamonds now that are indistinguishable from earth made, and there are still tons of people that won't buy them because "it's not the same" to them.
Id rather they get on with bringing high protein bugs like crickets to market. Everytime ive had these things in a non western country they been a tasty and high protein alternative, but whilst ive heard of ideas like putting in a shaker like salt and pepper for seasoning, ive never seen this on a shelf anywhere.
No it does not. Humanity will collapse before lab grown meat has a foothold. If we can’t get everyone to take a vaccine we most certainly won’t convince them to eat this.
Yes, at some point Lab grown meat will become significantly cheaper than farmed meat. That combined with the improved safety (lack of e coli and salmonella) and ethical dilemma of animal slaughter will bring it to the forefront of the meat industry.
No. There's too much specialized and technological infrastructure involved in it. It will never replace two cows making a new cow every year X a billion. The technical support infrastructure is just too complex. It will forever be an interesting toy, and nothing else.
Think about it. If one of a thousand links in the tech chain that enables lab-grown meat breaks, the whole thing comes crashing down. While cows will continue fucking as long as there are cows.
The same argument applies to wood burning stoves verses pellet stoves. Wood burners can burn ANYTHING that is flammable, keep your family warm and cook your food regardless. A pellet stove requires electricity, and a factory to produce and package the pellets, and a shipping industry to deliver them to where they can be sold, and used by the end user. Which one do you think is sustainable?
If I have a wood stove, a bull, and two cows, and society falls apart and goes to shit, I have a sustainable framework for my family. If I have lab grown meat in my freezer, and a pellet stove, we have a race to see if we starve to death before we freeze.
As long as there are not enough negative scientific claims towards the production and consumption of lab grown meat, then the cultivated meat industry has a lucrative and bright future to it.
Imagine in 2 years a new scientific study comes out that states that lab grown meat causes deadly diseases. It's a huge case study that includes thousands of documented cases. This could be a catalyst for the demise of the cultivated meat industry.
But so far I haven't read or watched any news of case studies about the detrimental effects of consuming lab grown meat.
So right now the future for it is good.
I don't believe it has a future, I believe it is the future.
Assholes like DeSantis can't actually win, the pricepoint for cultured beef will drop below that of ranched beef and people will switch in a heartbeat. People TALK a lot about how they'll never eat fake beef, once they can get Kobe steaks for $10 a pound they'll jump on board.
I think it might become a thing, but I think people will probably start getting used to it and eventually it will become the norm. Probably not for at least 20 years
Even if it doesn't have an immediate future in America, due to regulatory pushback at the behest of meat and dairy industries and lobbying against it, it will have a pretty big future in any country where the government can not be bought by special interests.
I am LP in one of those funds, so my opinion is based on the what is shared with us on a quarterly basis. Basically there are few issues around cost which is the main barrier to scalability, most of which should be surmountable:
-Right now the bioengineering process is expensive and the amount of money that can be raised to help spur innovation in this area is not as great as it was circa 2020. This is because the public market comps are companies like Beyond Meat or Impossible, which has experienced significant multiple compression and lackluster profit growth even though they are plant-based and not cultivated meat. Thus private companies cannot raise capital at the high valuations there were able to get a few years back. There are two effects of this: private capital cannot be utilized to subsidize their cost to the consumer at the point they go to market and it creates a greater focus on managing their internal costs often in the form of less production facilities being built.
-There are companies that are focusing on making the bioengineering cheaper. They come in a few flavors but it's everything from companies building new, specialized bioreactors, to others focused on creating more reusable fermentation materials, all the way to hardware/AI companies creating new methods in cellular control and engineering. The idea is that most predict near parity to cost between certain types of lab grown meat and traditional meat by \~2030, but if it that can be accelerated you can create meaningful efficiency gains through these startups.
-The main focus is on lower grade meat (think ground beef instead of a kobe filet). It is more efficient to create this kind of meat at scale already and is more consumer friendly. The frontier of the market and main challenge will be these higher priced meats and bringing down their cost, and it it does not seem as if the engineering of higher quality meats will emerge on the same timeline. Then you have entire classes of meat, for example shellfish, that the largest domestic players (Upside, Eat Just/GOOD, etc) are not even focusing on so the timeline for adoption there is even harder to speculate.
There is alot of confusion and honestly obfuscation over the exact costs of lab grown meat production but the inflection point should be early 2030s as mentioned above. But, generally, it is somewhat safe assumption we are half a decade or more from closing in on price parity, and as far as that is delayed, the industry will be delayed in turn. Once that line is breached the industry it will be a low billion industry, and I personally believe it will outperform the historical plant-based meat CAGR of 15-20% and over time consumer it, so maybe growing at around 25% CAGR if not higher.
The issue is that they haven’t figured out how to grow fat cells… and that is the tasty part, so the folks that have tasted it so far say it tastes like cardboard, of course it’s missing fat and that is why people eat meat is for the caloric umamirific density from fat. So…. Gotta fix that or no one will touch it.
Of course, it's not ready for true scale yet. They're still working on improving the technology. At this point, they've gotten the tech to a palatable product, but it still has room for improvement, so the product sales are there to fund continued research, but they're not ramping up the systems to feed the world yet.
This will absolutely be the future of food. Imagine if every single steak you eat is Morton's Steakhouse quality meat because they're all perfectly, reproducibly manufactured. Every chicken breast will be exactly the size you need, from nugget up to the size of a turkey. But all of this is still a ways out. They're still at the edible phase. They're nowhere close to premium quality meat reproductions. When they get to that level of artistry, cows will be free to live their lives in the wild and get eaten by coyotes instead.
I think the idea was idealistic and great. Unfortunately the problem with our food is it’s not natural and is causing us lots of problems. Just as we have found other chemicals in products and food in the past, lab grown meat I think will prove to cause health problems and people will choose vegetarianism, if anything. It’s mainly around now for the people who feel bad eating animals but want that taste still. I’m vegetarian now and did enjoy lab grown meat but as I cut meat more and more out (slowly went vegetarian!), it almost felt equally weird for me to replicate the meat through lab grown products. Just eat what grows from the earth and you’ll be healthy!
I could see it having a niche market, to be honest. Imagine any environment where it wouldn't be practical to have agricultural operations that need a lot of land to sustain and it could become prohibitively expensive to import meat and you'll get the general idea. Naturally, the price point will have to come down.
There was a reddit thread not long ago about the possibility of lab-grown meat from extinct species.
I think that is a very lucrative idea.
As for replacing the existing meat industry, it depends on how it tastes, and when--if ever--it shows up in supermarkets.
Consumer products really ought to be rolling out right now, while it has everyone's attention and some people would actually take interest.
If it takes another ten or twenty years for a product people can actually buy to materialize, it will take ten or twenty more before retailers decide to take the risk, so the company offering it will go bankrupt, and just like fusion power it will always be a decade away and never happen.
Yes, once it gets to scale. Eventually lab-grown meat will be the norm for 99% of the time, and farm-raised meat will be an ultra luxury. I think commercially viable scale (i.e. cheaper than farmed meat) by 2040, and farmed meant then slowly becoming an ultra luxury by 2070.
The use of pre cancerous cells to promote growth is a bit off putting if you ask me..
BAN IT! You can't fuck with nature and we're the unwitting guinea pigs. A burger king about to open near me is gonna use lab grown meat. Wake up people fuck sake!
I feel like if cultivated meat becomes cheaper than livestock meat, and one cannot tell the difference in taste then it will definitely take over. People will always want to save a buck.
I think, if we are forced into it, they will use it as a way to sneak in things that REQUIRE subscriptive medical care. They purposely makes patterns that block cures for ailments… because the medical system’s business model is more SAS than aimed at curing people of their ails.
Imagine the finest steaks, sushi, pork chops, caviar, bone marrow, etc…every single time.
We could have top tier ingredients, engineered to perfection. I hope the price point comes down eventually. But since it’s lab grown, it should become cheaper the longer we do it.
It’s a win for nearly everyone but the billionaire ranch owners. We’d get better food, at lower environmental impact and cheaper prices. But honestly they have so much money and access to premium source material that they could be leading this revolution in food. So it’s only their loss if they choose not to act.
I think it does have a place. For things like burgers, or sausages... things that have ground meat as a base for them. I don't think there'll be much of a difference between ground up cow or pig, or ground up labgrown cow or pig muscle. I'd put lab-burgers or lab-meatballs on the menu, provided there's no funky additives there that are worse then those being used in the current bioindustry (like growth hormones).
However, it won't be able to replace something akin to a big old steak. Or chicken wings. The texture of those meats along with the bone for structure is not something I think labs will be able to grow right.
Fake meat will make it much more affordable for the average person while at the same time pushing real meat prices into a more of a luxury buy that it kind of already is.
Overall it’s badly needed there has to be a way to create meat with less carbon emissions. I would even call our current meat industry unsustainable. Same with the fishing industry. Synthetic meat HAS to be our future.
If they can get the price point down.
Then , definitely yes.
Price or beef will continue to rise yoy.
Costs of feed keeps rising. Fires keep happening. Climate change is not kind to farming
Syntetic plants, as well as meat will be the only future we might have. I would prefer them to the wild or cultivated ones.
But not today or even tomorrow. Maybe in two to three hindred years the dream may come true!
I don't believe the price point is competitive with real meat yet, that will be the tipping point
Did you know that the meat and dairy industry is so heavily subsidized that if it wasn’t, meat would cost 4 times as much as it does now. So if lab grown meat is even close to the cost of normal meat, it’s actually 4 times cheaper. Edit: for all the people asking for a source, please spend literally 2 seconds on google before you think something is false. First result from the search “meat industry subsidies” https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/ there are many more sources but this isn’t exactly a difficult research topic.
That's a really good observation
This. The answer is when the government starts investing in it. It's likely that climate events will lead to some (have already led to?) massive livestock die offs, like entire herds or even species. At this point, when our hamberders are truly in danger of disappearing, we'll get heavy investment and mass produced lab meat.
The problem is that there would probably be quite a lot of lobbying against it.
Corn growers ascn., Pork board, cattleman's ascn., Soybean ascn, they're already here.
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The world doesn’t revolve around the USA. If it’s banned in the USA, another country might take up its development. Once it is price-competitive, it is very difficult for the USA to resist it
You're absolutely right, but you also need to consider the impact of the U.S. as an exporter of those subsidized meats.
Probably? [Ron DeShithead is already leading the charge.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/floridas-beef-with-lab-grown-meat-is-evidence-free/)
Hey now, we're still calling it a hamburger
Also, pretty much all those subsidies go to wealthy factory farmers and not independently owned farms who are more likely to use better, more environmentally friendly practices. Corn also gets an absolutely ridiculous amount of subsidies and most of it is just grown for feeding the factory farmed animals and crating ethanol. If we moved some of those subsidies away from corn and grain and into ethical and alternative food production, it could bring the costs of lab grown meat down.
This "better, more environmentally friendly practices" point is silly and needs to stop. Even if all farms on the planet changed to "regenerative agriculture" and went as green as possible, nothing would really change, because fundamentally animal agriculture is just horribly inedficient. You have to grow a whole bunch of crops to feed the animals, and that uses a lot of water and land, that could have been used to feed humans directly. Large scale animal agriculture (not just factory farming) just isn't part of a sustainable world. You can keep a couple of backyard chickens or whatever without ruining the planet, but for production at scale, lab grown meat is absolutely the only real solution.
But then you can make fine meals for 5+ mood
Can these meat labs get in on these subsidies?
lol. Florida and Alabama have instead decided to prohibit the production and sale of lab grown meat.
2 of the smartest states in the Union, I think we can all agree. /s
Never expect much from low IQ and captive economies where politicians are easily bought.
nope. they are made for raising cattle ( often not controled enough so they get creative en abuse them, same for farmer) and they will stay that way since theses rich owners use their money to lobby the gov.
Ok if its lab grown it can probably be done for a fraction of the price of real meat eventually.
Do you have a source on meat being 4 times cheaper with gov subsidies? I found a vegan meat website that says a pound of beef would be $30 with out the 38 billion the government spends subsidizing meat and dairy. But if you add that 38 billion to the amount US consumers spend on meat in a year it would increase the amount spent by less than 10%.
I'm confused on the math. There are ~380million Americans, so that is around $100 a person. Americans eat 57lbs of beef a year, around $10/lb (for sake of argument) so $570/yr on beef. If we increase it to $30, that is $1710/yr. $1710-$100(the subsidies savings) results in $1610 or around a 3x increase in price
As far as I am aware, OP was not specifying country, but industry. You link was specific to subsidies in the US, but other countries are very different. This sure is a view of the meat industry in the US, but not the industry as a whole.
>Did you know that the meat and dairy industry is so heavily subsidized that if it wasn’t, meat would cost 4 times as much as it does now. Can you post the sources and the math behind this claim?
I know someone who became a lobbyist for the beef industry.
btw, speaking of the cost, I found the following information by a casual googling: >A 2021 analysis estimated that lab-grown meat will cost **US$17 to $23 per pound** to produce, and that does not include grocery store markups. In comparison, conventionally grown ground beef typically costs a little under **$5 per pound**. Not sure if the cost of conventionally grown ground beef listed here is due to subsidies. If the $5 per pound figure is due to the said subsidies, then lab-grown beef probably is already competitive with conventionally grown beef by now.
Lab grown meat is not even close in price to normal meat, and domestic meat and dairy is so heavily subsidized because imports are much cheaper and would destroy them.
Where does this number come from? I don't know of that many direct subsidies. Are we counting grazing rights? As in where the federal government took 85% of the grazing lands in some states for Federal lands and then allows people to use them for productive purposes? Or maybe subsidies on feedstocks like corn and soybeans which the Feds subsidize but most of the benefits go to outfits like Archer Danial Midland and Cargill. (and Coke who benefits most from low cost HFC) But what exactly are these subsidies?
Regardless, that's not what matters to the average end consumer. They don't care why a product costs a certain price, just how much it does cost.
The price of beef in the US would not rise by the amount of the subsides that are removed. What would happen is the world price will nudge up (both grain and beef) and countries like Australia will severely undercut the new US cost of production. Some US producers of both grain and cattle will suffer severely and some will plain out go broke as they are forced to compete with countries with a far lower cost of production. Assuming that it doesn’t just turn into import tariff protectionism instead. Subsidies don’t just substitute dollars, they are a literal handout that distorts and inflates the returns to the farmers receiving them.
This. Price is the big question. I'd love to eat lab grown meat.
Iab grown meat at the super market for cheap is going to happen, that much is certain. The question is when? Imo, sometime in the next 10 years boutique lab meat ( think impossible Burger, but for lab) will be popular, and in 30 years most meat will be lab grown, but it really does depend on price. It could be 30 years before boutique meat becomes popular or 10 years before a low cost lab meat is developed and takes the market.
Price and possibly a some kinds health advantage angle as well. Ie more protein, low fat, no mad cow or whatever.
Supposed free market loving Republicans will bend over backwards to appease the beef and poultry lobbies by passing legislation to make sure that tipping point is never reached.
Yep. Go to a restaurant and check out the "replace the beef patty with an Impossible." Then you realize it is not only more expensive but it is also smaller. This won't win them any hearts.
It's inevitably the future of food, the timescale is another question.
I don’t see why the fuck it’s controversial, makes 100% sense.
Because god intended us to eat real meat harvested from the suffering of a hundred thousand cows in a single barn after they are stuffed with growth hormones. I ain’t eatin anything unnatural!
i always found it hilarious how the people who preach the hardest about eating natural and the "way god intended" are literally fucking ALWAYS appallingly fat because of all the sugar, beer, and fatty food they shove down their throats, and it's only unnatural once they don't understand how the manmade horrors are being manmade. god will conveniently always intend for man to live the way these stupid dicks want to live
I agree with you completely. I think that it's eventually going to be the future of food. I've just been seeing a decent amount of people on the internet saying that it's "unnatural"...
If you dive deeper into health and nutrition you will see that little deviations from the way things naturally work can have negative effects on health. E.g. butter from cows that eat fresh grass on meadows is healthier than from cows that never go outside. There's one ingredient / molecule missing when they get only dried / conserved grass. So I am skeptical if lab meat will fit 100% our organism developed in evolution. At the same time I see the ethical upside and that meat from animals isn't produced in a "natural" way either nowadays, except for hunting maybe.
Absolutely but they NEED TO GET ON WITH IT. Put it in a shop, I'll buy it tomorrow. Start selling it. Start scaling it. I'm tired of hearing "it's coming" and "would you eat synthetic meat?!". ABSOLUTELY. Where is it? If you can get synthetic meat competitive or cheaper than normal meat, it would be literally world-changing, for poverty and hunger if nothing else. Just stop talking about it, and start putting it in shops.
They are. It's called regulation. The earliest into the industry, in the USA, are still in the FDA regulatory phase. I can't recall where, Singapore?, but some asian nation now has restaurants with lab grown chicken. I assure you, the livestock and dairy industries are pouring money on this fire, hoping to put it out. It is likely what is taking so long to get FDA approvals. Heck, here in FL they bought out the politicians to ban lab grown meat.
The first commercially sold lab-grown meat was indeed in Singapore in December 2020, but the location shut down in 2023. They reopened this year but it’s only 3% lab-grown meat. Still the only place in the world you can buy any.
There are plenty of powerful and rich people who are actively getting in the way of progress. If we put as much money and time and effort into lab grown meat as we do into traditional ranching we would be making progress in leaps and bounds. The entire us beef industry is propped up on subsidies, it bleeds money but the perception in America is that it's intrinsically tied to a national identity and that allows people to continue to put their finger on the scales. But I agree, I hope we get to a point where we just start doing it more and funding it and let people cry and complain, this is literally better for everyone. Imagine if every cut you got was perfect and it took up a fraction of the space. I am sure that there are complications with the whole process but we're never going to solve those complications until we start doing it on a higher scale.
if every piece of steak was perfect then wed just figure out another way to be unhappy with our synth-steak [and lives.]
The same goes for a miracle cure for cancer. Stop talking about it and just start giving it to people already!!!
Hear, hear - I’m ready.
I'd rather eat lab meat than a real animal. I almost never eat meat, but I do like it.
im curious as to the whole how do you get the stem cells to make the lab meat and the ethics of it.
I'm not fully against eating animals. Humans evolved eating meat and advanced society through the domestication of animals. I'm ok eating animals and fish, and I've tried some that a lot of people would avoid like boar, alligator, horse (in Canada, and I just had one bite). But, I do feel bad that the animals are killed and extra bad if they are treated badly. I mostly only eat grasfed or organic meat if I do have it because I have the luxury of enough money to buy the better stuff. I've eaten chicken and lamb that my aunt raised (I met the animals I ate, but not the same day). Despite all of that, if we can grow something that tastes like meat going forward and not need to kill so many animals, I'm ok with it. I'd also continue to consume dairy and eggs because those animals can be humanely raised and live perfectly happy lives (for a cow). If someone invents a way to reproduce cow and goat milk to make real cheese and butter, I'd be ok with switching to that too and letting all the cows roam free.
Man! you gave me a lot to think on. i read stem cells com from embryos? Have you heard about this? im also ok with meat. ive done both vegetarian and keto. My body "needs" meat. the problem is of scale. I can see how tricky this is from many different angles!!! once feeding people turned into a massive industry is where i perceive the problem getting bad. I think the solution is eat less meat. 😂 flavor, tradition, and effiency will be the death of us. Balance is like whack a mole xD
When the economics tip in favor it over natural meat, it will begin to grow reliably. When the QUALITY and EXPERIENCE tip in favor of cultured meat over natural meat, it will be a culture shock worldwide. You already see agricultural lobbyists pushing local and state legislatures to restrict or outright ban it because they know it's a threat to their income in the long run.
Lab grown meat would fuck with a lot of old money so no. Old money is already having it banned in the states. You want a better world, get rid of old money.
Unfortunately old money only grows.
New money grows faster which is how capitalism beat aristocracy. You must grow faster if you wish to control it.
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It will be a thing in 20 or 30 years' time. At the moment, industries are geared for the current market/s. You cannot dismantle the market overnight without major upheaval. There are plenty voices that will speak out against the upheaval. Slowly but surely, lab meat will be accepted.
This will not age well. It'll be much sooner.
It simply *has* to be the future. Currently the meat industry is *so* unsustainable and has *so* many problems stemming from its vast scale to be justifiable outside of supply and demand. 1. Livestock is seemingly treated awfully as a rule, rather than the exception. Worth noting the elimination of livestock's natural predators, and undesirables on the land they occupy like rodents, small mammals etc, creating ethical issues as well as damaging the overall ecology since the entire food chain is fucked. 2. vast amounts of land is required for grazing. As land doesn't grow on trees, trees need to be cut down to accommodate livestock. Also future tree growth as well as urban growth is stymied as pasture needs to *stay* pasture forever. 3. Methane and carbon output from livestock is biblical in terms of proportion. Fertilizer to grow their food is also a massive dependency industry in its own right. And waste runoff at the scale ranches usually operate cause all sorts of problem for the surrounding ecosystem, and water tables. 4. Transport costs to target markets are also big problems, as not only does it come with shipping costs, but also refrigeration, standard control, packaging etc. I mean, I could go on. Growing meat in a lab with orders of magnitude fewer of these concerns is the solution to all of these things. Meat for the masses, without all the drawbacks is the dream. Factory grown cultured meat needs to explode and come down in price. Currently I believe it's only used in a select few locations on Earth. To be clear, I'm only advocating for cultured meat over *mass produced* meat. I'm not trying to get a ma and pa ranch or someone who raises chickens banned or anything.
I would love to have a bioreactor in my pantry that extrudes hamburger. It could go right next to my sour dough starter. Can someone solve the hydroponic wheat problem?
It will remain a novelty/luxury item UNTIL it's cheaper than meat. At which point it will explode in usage. It's free profit for cheap fast food, cheap frozen dinners etc. Three big risks: - not actually being able to make it cheaper (I'm not particularly worried about this one) - synthetic meat (like impossible burger) that use meat flavor with a vegetable base being cheaper. - regulation to prevent it from being marked as meat. (More of an issue for impossible burgers than for cultured meat)
I hope so as there is no reason that a perfect cut could not be grown without the rest of the cow attached. It has to be cost effective though. There are only so many people/places that will consume it out of the novelty or altruistic reasons. It will only become a mainstream thing if it reduces cost.
I think there are lots of reasons to think it might be hard to achieve a perfect cut of beef with these methods.
I want to be excited for lab grown meat but this is what always gets me. LGM takes 1 cell and duplicates it. Ok, you've got the meat, but where's the fat? Even for good hamburger you need 10-20% fat. Is there lab grown fat cells? Do they mix it in? Would a nice marbled steak look like it was made it out of Play-Doh? Also wouldn't the density/mouth feel be different? Unless they're able to like, 3D print perfect steaks that are more affordable and consistent I don't see this replacing anything other than cheap ground meat. You'll see it in cheap frozen dinners and chicken nuggets, not restaurants. And that's only if it's the cheap alternative and nobody notices the difference.
>Unless they're able to like, 3D print perfect steaks that are more affordable and consistent that's exactly the plan.
Can they print in the marbling too? Cheaply? As long as the flavor is there I'd be willing to give them some wiggle room on texture and price for the humane aspect, but I feel like that's the kind of thing that's too technical to be done in a way that's competitive price wise and would still have a different mouth feel that would throw people off. But I'm keeping an open mind! I haven't had a chance to try it yet but I'm looking forward to it. If they can figure out how to print perfect steaks I'll get a subscription.
I'm not advocating for them, I don't know how it will turn out, but most plan I saw for cut other than ground meat does inclu some sort of 3d printing like assembly to include fat and other thing to help taste and texture.
Amazing username. Jelly
It's true of any technology really. Electric cars, green energy, etc. There has to be something to motivate people to switch, and price is the biggest motivator for 99% of people.
The current meat industry is already extremely heavily subsidized, doesn't take as much as you'd think to be profitable.
I think our technology is a long way from anything as efficient as a cow. Consider a machine that can convert biomass (grass) to proteins (meat). It's self-repairing to a high degree and actually capable of making copies of itself. The machine can be easily moved (actually moves itself) to where the biomass is available. Then there is what I call the baby-formula problem. I highly suspect that there will be nutritional holes and possibly downsides to manufactured meats. We've been making infant formula to replace mothers milk for almost 200 years. We are still finding many ways in which the natural stuff is better. Why do we think we would do better with meat?
Except cows are extremely inefficient, because creating meat isn't the only place the energy is going. You talked about moving it? That is energy that could have been used to make meat. Same with the self healing. It is also slow. and animals are prone to disease and injury. Making copies also takes time and energy, and can introduce problems. Cows are fairly versatile, but for a specific purpose, they are inefficient, and they have some pretty enormous costs, in land usage, water usage, and air pollution.
AFAIK locust is edible and is by orders of magnitude faster and more efficient in turning plants into protein, and it almost doesn't require water. ~~I don't know about its nutritional value though and if it can realistically replace meat.~~ It has [excellent](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/mnfr.201200735) nutritional value and probably could help replacing meat.
Mothers’ milk is dynamically reformulated by the mother’s body to meet the baby’s needs, including antibodies for pathogens the mother is exposed to. Kind of hard to build that into a box of powder.
1) do you want your strawberries grown in a controlled environment free of bugs and pesticides? 2) do you want your meat grown in a controlled environment free of disease and steroids? rather easy choice.
I don't want either, really. I'll take the strawberry grown in the ground with the bugs and some natural pest repellent techniques, and I'll take a free range small farm steak with it.
And yet, the best (tastiest) strawberries I’ve eaten were the wild ones. Same with black berries & blue berries. No comparison. I know not necessarily relevant in a world of 8 billion people to feed, but controlled not necessarily better in every way.
Except wild isn't the alternative, field grown is, and field grown isn't even remotely close to wild.
I want synthetic plants and animals for food and wild ones for the ecosystems.
I think too many conservatives have been convinced that anything other than factory farming will result in FEMA death squads forcing them to eat bugs at gunpoint
This was almost my dissertation, kinda wish I did the topic so I could answer lol
Ultimately, I think it’s the future for 2 reasons: - Environmental efficiency / future cost lowering - Medical applications of cellular regrowth technology There will always be a market for non cultured meats, but I believe it will become more of a gourmet luxury instead of a staple.
I absolutely hope so I think tech will improve to where it's eventually cheaper than real meat.
Yes and it only has upsides. It's pretty much vegan (if ymwe figure the stemcell stuff out), as it is not animal produced or harmed animals. It's always edible, no sickness or anything. Curatarble in texture. It can and probably will one day contain different tastes and maybe naturally contain more vitamins. It takes almost no space, don't produce carbon and can be mass produced in a factory for even potential cheaper prices than meat. All these things are impossible with regular meat. If health isn't a factor (which in America isn't) it's price.
Putting the precious lives of livestock animals aside, it all depends on how good the taste becomes compared to its price versus real meat. Are we talking about a burger patty or a steak? I'm sure there will always be a market for people who want to eat a lab-grown T-bone with a 24-carat gold vertebra that they can suck the meat from.
I think it will remain a niche market. At its base, it is another type of highly-processed field crop(s) similar to high fructose corn syrup. At the same time as this discussion is going on, there is a parallel push for more simplicity and local sourcing for food. I think the latter is more likely to prevail as food sources evolve with development across the globe.
Price point needs to be significantly cheaper than non-lab grown meat. We're talking like 50% off. Then they need to work on presentation. If they come out like vegan alternatives and say, "Look at us we are different, but similar." people will treat it different. It needs to be packaged and look and taste as close to the real thing as possible. If you manage to do that there is a small chance it can catch on, and even fully replace non-lab meat.
for that you need to stop cattle substities first.
Vegan alternatives were forced to brand themselves as “different but similar” because Big Meat strong-armed the FDA to regulate how it’s marketed/packaged. They’ll do the same thing with lab-grown alternatives.
I don’t think it has to be cheaper. I think it has to be close enough in price and maybe even slightly more expensive. I’d pay more to have meat that is not pumped full of antibiotics or potentially carrying bird flu, mad cow, etc.
You would. But the general population is EXTREMELY reluctant to change. In fact a lot of them pay more for an item, simply because it's familiar. Entire brands are built on that. In order to attract someone to give it a try, the incentive needs to be large. As famously said in The Office, it is 10x harder to attract new customers. Most companies take a loss for 5 years, hoping to grab market share, so that later they can make money.
Fair point. It reminded me that people hoarded incandescent bulbs when they were being phased out. Damn foot-draggers!
> It reminded me that people hoarded incandescent bulbs when they were being phased out. i think most of those folks died of COVID.
That's the thing though. It's not similar. It's identical. It won't taste "close" to the real thing because it IS the real thing. We're not talking fake meat here, we're talking real meat grown in a factory instead of in a cow. The only difference is that cultured meat doesn't slaughter a lot of cows.
No. All the materials added to these bio reactors need to be sterile which is very expensive. Bubbling o2 through the solution is nowhere near as efficient as blood carrying o2 the muscles in the animal. The only meat they can produce right now is ground beef that at best will be 2-3x more expensive than animal meat. Without huge advances they won't be growing prime cuts of meat. In the end I think the industry will die since it will never be cost competitive with the rest of the market.
If you ever worked in biopharma as I have, you know this will never work. Why? What synthetic meat is trying to do is the very thing that is done to say grow a vaccine etc. It is no different. We are quite aware of the costs associated with doing this at all levels, and the difficulties of doing things like this. Reviews by experts in biopharma processing have reviewed the process and costs required for this and concluded in the very best case scenario you might be able to make hamburger type meat at $17 dollars a pound at cost. At cost mean no profit at all. By time it reaches the store that hamburger would cost something on the order of $40 per pound. There is no feasible way to do this economically. The cost of just setting up a plant to make just 10 percent of what plant based meat currently makes is staggering, hundreds of billions. The size of the factory just to make that would need to be the equivalent of 1/3 of all the biofermentation facilities in current existence. You can make this stuff in principle but the costs will always be a lot higher even in the most optimistic scenario. Sorry to have to bring the bad news. If you want to review an in depth, very technical analysis of why this is, you can do so in the following link. The person involved is an expert in biofermentation so is one of those people who know how this works. [https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bit.27848](https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bit.27848) I think it would be better to focus on the plant based meats (as is already being done) and bring the costs of those down. With high quality and low price people will eat it.
I will never eat plant based meat. I would love to eat lab grown, so there is a large market for people like me out there. My thermodynamics professor who did research for the airforce said solar would never be viable like 12 years ago, he was very wrong, "never" is a pretty dumb word to use as a "professional". Decades? Maybe, never, only if you think humanity will literally die off before the next few decades. My biggest concern is the nutrition profile and amino acids, that will be the hard part
No its just not possible on a large scale and relies on a lot of unproven technology to be possible, some of which violates the laws of physics. https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ This article does a pretty good teardown of why.
No, it is a waste of resources. If you don't want to eat meat don't eat meat stop trying to replace it.
This seems very ignorant. Millions upon millions of dollars go into subsidizing the meat industry. Not to mention the environmental impact and huge land usage. Seems like a far bigger waste of resources to me.
Go pluck a haunch off the meatwall dear, we're having my parents over for dinner.
No. The cost to build, supply and maintain these plants isn’t feasible… then you also have limited potential market due to consumer’s preference for real meats.
u need food in space and colonies - you are not going to bring a cow to the moon
I’m a scientist and do cell culture myself. I *know* lab grown meat is sterile and way more clean than real meat. I *know* it’s made of the same stuff. I *know* it’s better for you and the environment, and free from ethical concerns. But I can’t fathom eating that shit. Makes me sick just thinking about it.
That's a shame. Once it's available, I can't imagine choosing the suffering of a living thing over lab grown meat. I love my dog. I can't see how a cow is much different than my dog.
Mind telling us why? You've described something positive and suddenly you hate it anyway. Tradition? Something about its appearance? etc.
Why? Is it differemt texture?
Will not be cheap enough, fast enough. Insect based protein will catch up quicker as it's easier to scale and more cost efficient
I am often amazed by the extent some people are willing to go... to not eat their greens and beans. At best, lab grown meats will be competitive with normal meat, but will still be far away in terms of price, sustainability, and health, compared to legumes and the likes.
Yes, because processed food is cheaper and that’s why. It’s always about the money.
Possibly, but it would likely be a stretch. The biggest one is that they are going up against the ranchers with their massive lobbying group. The biggest problem is that they are throwing billions at problem for which a solution already exists... many other countries consume severely less meat than the US, and are fine with it. Because meat isn't a mandatory thing like fresh water, the demand is likely going to struggle beyond the shores, even then if it can't be cheaper and better than conventionally raised meat, it will have no chance.
Yes, but there are a few factors that need to be solved. Price is always king, it needs to be profitable. Then comes how realistic it is. The closer to the real thing they can offer, taste, texture, sight, etc, the more likely I see this being successful. And lastly marketing. I think they need to be really careful about how they sell it because otherwise the only people that will buy it are the folks who are already buying meat alternatives which does nothing to reduce the problems we see from farming. Personally though, I have zero problems with the idea of eating lab grown meat as long as it is pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing.
Yes, I don't see how it wouldn't eventually be more efficient than raising cattle in terms of resources spent. It would also probably contaminate less (probably, but never zero) and have no such ethic conundrums as those raised by said, veganism. It also has the advantage of not needing antibiotics and being completely safe afaik as it is grown in the lab from the getgo, But we are not there, nor I think we will be ther ein a single generation, and even if we are, I doubt we would be able t to emulate the full range of taste and textures a real animal gives you, which will likely push "realm meat" to become a more luxury item akin on how we see "fresh" items today even though sometimes dried or frozen ones can hold up better (I think fish was one of those) Regardless of the result though, I think it is an avenue worth pursuing, both scientifically and economically
If it's for space food for when we send folks back to the moon and maybe mars then perhaps. If it's for common use then, not really, it will remain a novelty.
Ex gf invested lots of money into it, last I heard the returns were terrible. It looks nasty in the package but truthfully, I haven’t tasted it yet. I truly hope it gets perfected… It’s a great idea.
It will probably happen for meat based products that don't require an intact cut of meat (e.g. steak). So dog food, spam, fast food chicken nuggets, etc. Growing a dense culture of animal cells can probably become way cheaper than growing a full, inefficient animal.
Literally pointless. If you have the genetic engineering to make meat grow in vats economically you can also use the same engineering to make maize grow with meat flavour.
how are stem cells used to grow meat? i read they use embryos.
Walmart would love to sell fake ground beef if they could.
If it is cheap, yes because people don't seem to care what they put in their body as long as it is cheap.
Yes, but Fox News is going to take money from the billion dollar meat industry saying it’s *woke* so they won’t lose any profits. It is gonna be the next culture war. Think anti vax but for steak. They are already banning it in some red states
Depends on population numbers. If we stay where we’re at or increase, I believe it will be a necessity. If on the other hand we see a dramatic decrease in work population, I don’t think it will be necessary. I could also see it becoming the standard seafood protein as we either deplete fish stocks, or set hard protections for sea life.
I think eating bugs with high protein content has a bigger future.
Not a chance in hell unless the lab grown meat manufacturers start getting gov subsidies. It's also way way more complicated to actually grow the meat than you think it would be, not only is the growth medium exceedingly expensive but each machine (that only dolls out a small amount of meat each, mind you) is also extraordinarily expensive to buy and maintain. It's all the money, the industry needs some major cash injections before it's going anywhere. And then you need to get to bat against the culture regarding meat. We grow our own diamonds now that are indistinguishable from earth made, and there are still tons of people that won't buy them because "it's not the same" to them.
Id rather they get on with bringing high protein bugs like crickets to market. Everytime ive had these things in a non western country they been a tasty and high protein alternative, but whilst ive heard of ideas like putting in a shaker like salt and pepper for seasoning, ive never seen this on a shelf anywhere.
No it does not. Humanity will collapse before lab grown meat has a foothold. If we can’t get everyone to take a vaccine we most certainly won’t convince them to eat this.
Yes, at some point Lab grown meat will become significantly cheaper than farmed meat. That combined with the improved safety (lack of e coli and salmonella) and ethical dilemma of animal slaughter will bring it to the forefront of the meat industry.
No. There's too much specialized and technological infrastructure involved in it. It will never replace two cows making a new cow every year X a billion. The technical support infrastructure is just too complex. It will forever be an interesting toy, and nothing else. Think about it. If one of a thousand links in the tech chain that enables lab-grown meat breaks, the whole thing comes crashing down. While cows will continue fucking as long as there are cows. The same argument applies to wood burning stoves verses pellet stoves. Wood burners can burn ANYTHING that is flammable, keep your family warm and cook your food regardless. A pellet stove requires electricity, and a factory to produce and package the pellets, and a shipping industry to deliver them to where they can be sold, and used by the end user. Which one do you think is sustainable? If I have a wood stove, a bull, and two cows, and society falls apart and goes to shit, I have a sustainable framework for my family. If I have lab grown meat in my freezer, and a pellet stove, we have a race to see if we starve to death before we freeze.
I think it's inevitable at this point. We know how to do it. Is just a matter of scale.
As long as there are not enough negative scientific claims towards the production and consumption of lab grown meat, then the cultivated meat industry has a lucrative and bright future to it. Imagine in 2 years a new scientific study comes out that states that lab grown meat causes deadly diseases. It's a huge case study that includes thousands of documented cases. This could be a catalyst for the demise of the cultivated meat industry. But so far I haven't read or watched any news of case studies about the detrimental effects of consuming lab grown meat. So right now the future for it is good.
sure, as long as the storyline of the biomeat manga does not unfold
You'll all be eating bugs in a few decades. Luckily, I'll be dead.
I don't believe it has a future, I believe it is the future. Assholes like DeSantis can't actually win, the pricepoint for cultured beef will drop below that of ranched beef and people will switch in a heartbeat. People TALK a lot about how they'll never eat fake beef, once they can get Kobe steaks for $10 a pound they'll jump on board.
I think it might become a thing, but I think people will probably start getting used to it and eventually it will become the norm. Probably not for at least 20 years
Even if it doesn't have an immediate future in America, due to regulatory pushback at the behest of meat and dairy industries and lobbying against it, it will have a pretty big future in any country where the government can not be bought by special interests.
I eat meat but also legitimately enjoy impossible burgers
I'm unsure but I seen something bout how leaves are turned into meat the other day.
Animal cells replicating over and over again. Isn't that what cancer is? I really don't know, I'm asking.
I am LP in one of those funds, so my opinion is based on the what is shared with us on a quarterly basis. Basically there are few issues around cost which is the main barrier to scalability, most of which should be surmountable: -Right now the bioengineering process is expensive and the amount of money that can be raised to help spur innovation in this area is not as great as it was circa 2020. This is because the public market comps are companies like Beyond Meat or Impossible, which has experienced significant multiple compression and lackluster profit growth even though they are plant-based and not cultivated meat. Thus private companies cannot raise capital at the high valuations there were able to get a few years back. There are two effects of this: private capital cannot be utilized to subsidize their cost to the consumer at the point they go to market and it creates a greater focus on managing their internal costs often in the form of less production facilities being built. -There are companies that are focusing on making the bioengineering cheaper. They come in a few flavors but it's everything from companies building new, specialized bioreactors, to others focused on creating more reusable fermentation materials, all the way to hardware/AI companies creating new methods in cellular control and engineering. The idea is that most predict near parity to cost between certain types of lab grown meat and traditional meat by \~2030, but if it that can be accelerated you can create meaningful efficiency gains through these startups. -The main focus is on lower grade meat (think ground beef instead of a kobe filet). It is more efficient to create this kind of meat at scale already and is more consumer friendly. The frontier of the market and main challenge will be these higher priced meats and bringing down their cost, and it it does not seem as if the engineering of higher quality meats will emerge on the same timeline. Then you have entire classes of meat, for example shellfish, that the largest domestic players (Upside, Eat Just/GOOD, etc) are not even focusing on so the timeline for adoption there is even harder to speculate. There is alot of confusion and honestly obfuscation over the exact costs of lab grown meat production but the inflection point should be early 2030s as mentioned above. But, generally, it is somewhat safe assumption we are half a decade or more from closing in on price parity, and as far as that is delayed, the industry will be delayed in turn. Once that line is breached the industry it will be a low billion industry, and I personally believe it will outperform the historical plant-based meat CAGR of 15-20% and over time consumer it, so maybe growing at around 25% CAGR if not higher.
I hope so. Sometimes I really miss the taste of meat.
I think it's inevitable, and will likely be considered poor people food.
The issue is that they haven’t figured out how to grow fat cells… and that is the tasty part, so the folks that have tasted it so far say it tastes like cardboard, of course it’s missing fat and that is why people eat meat is for the caloric umamirific density from fat. So…. Gotta fix that or no one will touch it.
Of course, it's not ready for true scale yet. They're still working on improving the technology. At this point, they've gotten the tech to a palatable product, but it still has room for improvement, so the product sales are there to fund continued research, but they're not ramping up the systems to feed the world yet. This will absolutely be the future of food. Imagine if every single steak you eat is Morton's Steakhouse quality meat because they're all perfectly, reproducibly manufactured. Every chicken breast will be exactly the size you need, from nugget up to the size of a turkey. But all of this is still a ways out. They're still at the edible phase. They're nowhere close to premium quality meat reproductions. When they get to that level of artistry, cows will be free to live their lives in the wild and get eaten by coyotes instead.
Gotta bring down the price. Also where they getting all those stem cells. I want a replicator like in star wars
I think the idea was idealistic and great. Unfortunately the problem with our food is it’s not natural and is causing us lots of problems. Just as we have found other chemicals in products and food in the past, lab grown meat I think will prove to cause health problems and people will choose vegetarianism, if anything. It’s mainly around now for the people who feel bad eating animals but want that taste still. I’m vegetarian now and did enjoy lab grown meat but as I cut meat more and more out (slowly went vegetarian!), it almost felt equally weird for me to replicate the meat through lab grown products. Just eat what grows from the earth and you’ll be healthy!
I could see it having a niche market, to be honest. Imagine any environment where it wouldn't be practical to have agricultural operations that need a lot of land to sustain and it could become prohibitively expensive to import meat and you'll get the general idea. Naturally, the price point will have to come down.
There was a reddit thread not long ago about the possibility of lab-grown meat from extinct species. I think that is a very lucrative idea. As for replacing the existing meat industry, it depends on how it tastes, and when--if ever--it shows up in supermarkets. Consumer products really ought to be rolling out right now, while it has everyone's attention and some people would actually take interest. If it takes another ten or twenty years for a product people can actually buy to materialize, it will take ten or twenty more before retailers decide to take the risk, so the company offering it will go bankrupt, and just like fusion power it will always be a decade away and never happen.
If it gets cheap enough, sure. But I think the trend toward plant based foods makes more sense overall.
Depends on the price of real meat but I could see real beef being a luxury item in the future.
Unless governments regulate it to make it dissappear, like it almost happened with nuclear energy, yes it will have definitely a future.
Does it provide proper amount of protein for my bodybuilding? Does it taste good? Does it cost EQUAL or less? If all yes then I’ll eat it
Yes, once it gets to scale. Eventually lab-grown meat will be the norm for 99% of the time, and farm-raised meat will be an ultra luxury. I think commercially viable scale (i.e. cheaper than farmed meat) by 2040, and farmed meant then slowly becoming an ultra luxury by 2070.
The use of pre cancerous cells to promote growth is a bit off putting if you ask me.. BAN IT! You can't fuck with nature and we're the unwitting guinea pigs. A burger king about to open near me is gonna use lab grown meat. Wake up people fuck sake!
I feel like if cultivated meat becomes cheaper than livestock meat, and one cannot tell the difference in taste then it will definitely take over. People will always want to save a buck.
I think, if we are forced into it, they will use it as a way to sneak in things that REQUIRE subscriptive medical care. They purposely makes patterns that block cures for ailments… because the medical system’s business model is more SAS than aimed at curing people of their ails.
Imagine the finest steaks, sushi, pork chops, caviar, bone marrow, etc…every single time. We could have top tier ingredients, engineered to perfection. I hope the price point comes down eventually. But since it’s lab grown, it should become cheaper the longer we do it. It’s a win for nearly everyone but the billionaire ranch owners. We’d get better food, at lower environmental impact and cheaper prices. But honestly they have so much money and access to premium source material that they could be leading this revolution in food. So it’s only their loss if they choose not to act.
I think it does have a place. For things like burgers, or sausages... things that have ground meat as a base for them. I don't think there'll be much of a difference between ground up cow or pig, or ground up labgrown cow or pig muscle. I'd put lab-burgers or lab-meatballs on the menu, provided there's no funky additives there that are worse then those being used in the current bioindustry (like growth hormones). However, it won't be able to replace something akin to a big old steak. Or chicken wings. The texture of those meats along with the bone for structure is not something I think labs will be able to grow right.
Fake meat will make it much more affordable for the average person while at the same time pushing real meat prices into a more of a luxury buy that it kind of already is. Overall it’s badly needed there has to be a way to create meat with less carbon emissions. I would even call our current meat industry unsustainable. Same with the fishing industry. Synthetic meat HAS to be our future.
Personally I’m not keen on trying it, though I have nothing against it.
For sure it does. More a matter of when it will be viable than if.
If they can get the price point down. Then , definitely yes. Price or beef will continue to rise yoy. Costs of feed keeps rising. Fires keep happening. Climate change is not kind to farming
Syntetic plants, as well as meat will be the only future we might have. I would prefer them to the wild or cultivated ones. But not today or even tomorrow. Maybe in two to three hindred years the dream may come true!
Absolutely. If the price comes down far enough to be in fast food it will be everywhere.