Singapore Approves a Lab-Grown Meat Product, a Global First:
First, meat came from farms and forests. Then, it came from factories. More recently, entrepreneurs have been making it from plants.
Some have wondered whether there's a more advanced approach: Could meat be grown in a laboratory, from existing cells? That effort has faced multiple challenges, from skepticism over something that comes from a lab to questions about what governments might think.
The nascent laboratory meat industry won a small victory Wednesday on that last point, as an American start-up became the first to win government approval — in this case, an announcement by the city-state of Singapore — to sell the fruit of its labs to the public in the form of "cultured chicken."
The company, Eat Just, is based in San Francisco and describes its product as "real, high-quality meat created directly from animal cells for safe human consumption." Singapore's Food Agency said on Wednesday that it had approved the product for sale as an ingredient in chicken nuggets.
"This is a historic moment in the food system," Eat Just's chief executive, Josh Tetrick, said by telephone on Wednesday. "We've been eating meat for thousands of years, and every time we've eaten meat we've had to kill an animal — until now."
Singapore's move is "the world's first regulatory approval for a cultivated meat product," said Elaine Siu, the managing director of the Good Food Institute Asia Pacific, a nonprofit organization that promotes cultivated meat and plant-based substitutes for animal products.
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[...] [In March], the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit that represents the alternative protein industry, published a techno-economic analysis (TEA) that projected the future costs of producing a kilogram of cell-cultured meat. Prepared independently for GFI by the research consulting firm CE Delft, and using proprietary data provided under NDA by 15 private companies, the document showed how addressing a series of technical and economic barriers could lower the production price from over $10,000 per pound today to about $2.50 per pound over the next nine years—an astonishing 4,000-fold reduction.
In the press push that followed, GFI claimed victory. "New studies show cultivated meat can have massive environmental benefits and be cost-competitive by 2030," it trumpeted, suggesting that a new era of cheap, accessible cultured protein is rapidly approaching. The finding is critical for GFI and its allies. If private, philanthropic, and public sector investors are going to put money into cell-cultured meat, costs need to come down quickly. Most of us have a limited appetite for 50-dollar lab-grown chicken nuggets.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @01:49PM (4 children)
eom.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RedIsNotGreen on Friday December 11 2020, @01:50PM
>The growth medium for the Singapore production line includes foetal bovine serum, which is extracted from foetal blood, but this is largely removed before consumption. A plant-based serum would be used in the next production line, the company said, but was not available when the Singapore approval process began two years ago.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @02:06PM
Get used to this people. For the next 20 years idiots will be citing this study as proof. See also Lancet article on autism/vaccine link.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @04:47PM (1 child)
What kind of BBQ sauce do you recommend?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @07:36PM
Baby kittens, microwaved and blended.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @02:28PM (3 children)
I'm already working on meat grown from human cells. (Mine, of course.)
Already got a name for the product: Eat Me(TM)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @03:19PM (1 child)
I'm removing the first step and making my human cells available to anyone willing to suck them out - females only.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @03:50PM
Zombie females.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Friday December 11 2020, @04:37PM
Unfortunately there's more than just ethical reasons to not eat human meat.
Eating your own species has an incredibly high transmission rate for diseases, prions, and parasites, which are already well adapted to their new hosts(making cows eat cows is where mad cow disease came from after all). When "Lab grown meat" becomes affordable it'll be "factory grown meat" and any beliefs you might have about sterility will be much more questionable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @05:19PM (7 children)
I grew up in the sixties and seventies when Tang was the latest rage and our idea of the future was that people would all eat pills and supplements, because we thought then that we knew everything there is to know about biology and nutrition. Oh, and it was also the time of industrialized agriculture when we believed we could exploit land intensively by using pesticides and chemical fertilizers because, again, we thought we knew everything about ecosystems and soil dynamics.
Then it seemed like humanity had finally started to come to its senses when people started to go back to more natural, healthy foods and good old-fashionned cooking, and more ecologically sound, more sustainable agricultural practices.
Now it seems that it's all going to shit again: Roundup, GMO's, neonics. And now fucking lab grown "meat" for crying out loud !
Look, we get it: You don't like the thought of poor animals being killed after a life of misery and suffering in industrialized farms. Then don't eat fucking meat !.
Eat plants. There's plenty of them to go around, even though they are still being grown in large, industrialized farms, and they are still being killed. But you can't hear them scream, so that makes you feel so much better.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 11 2020, @06:20PM (4 children)
No, just you.
Meat consumption is continuing to climb globally, particularly in China and India. So your "just eat plants" message is clearly not resonating and not realistic. Even if it levels off and decreases, the demand for meat is not going to suddenly plummet by 90%.
"Lab grown meat bad" is a knee jerk reaction, just like "GMO's bad". There is nothing inherently wrong with either. "Good old-fashioned cooking" can be less healthy than processed foods if you are eating the wrong stuff.
You also imply that lab-grown meat isn't "meat", which is FUD [soylentnews.org]. It's made of animal cells arranged into tissues. Maybe the particular arrangement isn't natural, too orderly, etc., but I doubt you would notice it in something like a ground beef substitute. If they get the texture of a steak wrong, don't buy it a second time.
Lab-grown meat could easily be of a higher quality than traditional meat since there is no need to throw a bunch of byproducts in. You just don't grow those parts in the first place.
The jury is still out on ecological impact [cnbc.com].
Finally, I leave you with this [cnn.com]. Don't vomit on your keyboard?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @06:48PM (3 children)
You seem to have completely missed the point I was trying to make. Maybe this is due to my less than stellar mastery of the english language (which is not my native language). Or maybe you were biased to start with in favor of lab grown meat and didn't bother trying to understand my message when you perceived in my first few words an attack on what you believed in, and therefore read all the rest with the idea not of understanding, but of finding the flaw and debunking.
So I'll try to keep it short and simple: Lab grown meat is a solution looking for a problem. It doesn't address any of the global issues about worldwide food production, waste, and distribution. Or the more fundamental problems of human overpopulation, wealth distribution, or the fact that, so far, humanity is basically acting like a cancer of the planet.
Lab grown meat is one thing, and one thing only: A business model. A way to make money by exploiting the extremism, irrationaly and intellectual inconsistensy of vegans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @07:42PM
If you're eating burgers or nuggets, you're eating ground up bones, feet, snouts and genitals. Might as well switch to plants, I get it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday December 11 2020, @07:52PM
It could address some of those issues. For example, it could put the entirety of meat production nearby or inside of cities instead of hundreds or thousands of miles away, due to the smaller land area needed, no need for grazing land, verticality of a lab-grown meat factory, etc.
Oh no, lab-grown meat is not a magic bullet that can end income inequality! ...Said no one.
I disagree entirely. The "no animal suffering" benefit (if you want to call it a benefit) of lab-grown meat is just a single line on a list of potential advantages. I also don't think that many vegans are waiting in breathless anticipation for lab-grown meat and will instantly switch back to being carnivores.
The purpose of lab-grown meat is to substitute for meat that is already being consumed. As I said, global meat consumption is continuing to rise [ift.org]. If lab-grown meat can be cheaper, higher quality, more environmentally friendly, etc., then it should eventually be used instead of meat from cattle and poultry to make hamburgers, chicken nuggets, taco filling, meatballs, and other basic meat products that are consumed by the billions each year. I think it could be used to make high quality steaks too, but first things first.
I hope you are not confusing lab-grown meat (made of cultured animal cells) with plant-based fake meat products that companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat make. You may remember that the Impossible Burger has a blood-like substance called "heme" in it. It is somewhat strange that vegans would want to consume a plant-based product that aims to be indistinguishable from meat, right down to the bleeding. But it is their choice to make.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 13 2020, @12:35PM
You probably should have said that in the first place. Sorry, not a language issue. Look at what you wrote [soylentnews.org] earlier. First paragraph is a complaint about past food fads. The second briefly mentions some boilerplate ("and more ecologically sound, more sustainable agricultural practices") which is the only place where your writing mentioned those "global issues" (peripherally) and that paragraph was really about pushing your food fad, vegetarianism. So no, your point wasn't about the global issues or the fundamental issues.
Instead your point seems to be that humanity has moderately messed up nutrition and agriculture over the past century so don't eat artificial meat. My take is that artificial meat checks off the right boxes. Don't want to hurt animals and still eat meat? There you go.
As to whether artificial meat can make a dent in those global/fundamental problems? Well, it does make meat more plentiful. That checks off wealth distribution and feeding those people a more nutritious diet. I bet it can be done with a lot less real estate than herding cows - maybe even less than growing the equivalent amount of high protein plants on a farm (you don't need sunlight to grow meat). There's probably some land use efficiency there.
Like shooting artificial fish in a barrel, eh? I'm not seeing the problem with that. That aids wealth distribution from virtue signaling vegans to people who can spend that money better, like on developing tastier and more nutritious artificial meat options.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @10:47PM (1 child)
This is all going to be much ado about nothing. Having tasted farm raised fish and shrimp, I suspect that lab grown meat is going to be a self-limiting industry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @11:02PM
McMeat?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @11:13PM (2 children)
Lab grown meat requires, on the whole, high quality inputs.
Carefully purified water (probably, at least, osmotic filtering).
High quality, high purity nutrients.
Carefully cleaned and maintained environment.
By comparison, your rangeland cattle have broad appetites, drink creek water and live rough.
I'd really love to see a detailed analysis from agronomists and environmental scientists and economists with knowledge of logistics. For now, I'm deeply suspicious.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2020, @02:58AM (1 child)
It's also a mono-crop with no evolutionary forces to protect it despite the high evolutionary forces to consume it. One mistake and an entire factory has to be shutdown, all product destroyed, then fully sanitized. Both plants and animals have immune systems, this doesn't.
Last I heard, lab grown meat gets a lot of their nutrients from soy. Meaning you have all the deforestation, soil degeneration, and other issues related to soybean farming. Compare that to cattle grazing on grasslands which maintains the circle of life while enriching the soil and diversity of the region. Don't forget many grasslands are in areas where normal crops won't grow. Plus you get bones, organs, skin, and fur from the animals too. Fur is a renewalable resource for clothing, unlike the oil-based clothing you're currently wearing and which releases micro-plastic particles everywhere. Eating organs, skin, and bone marrow is excellent for your health. They are all superfoods and have vastly higher bioavailability of their nutrients than plant sources. Switching to primarily lab grown sources mean we'll miss out on all these things. I guess eventually we'll be able to grow them, but at that point you might as well grow the entire animal and put your research into finding ways to better take care of it. I'm sure we'll genetically redesign them, well, we're already manually doing that.
Then there's the fact that we don't know enough about nutrition to be able to say if the grown meat is good enough over a long period of time. There are tons of chemical compounds in plants (and thus natural meat) which we've never researched. It's certainly possible that we eventually discover some of them are important for optimal health. If we aren't artificially adding those to the grown meat then it isn't going to have any. Hell, the media still pushes that red meat is bad for you and that fiber is important for health. That's completely backwards! I have no trust in the nutritional claims of lab grown products. I'll bet you money they start fortifying it with unhealthy things to sell more of it, like adding sugar. Even the high-end 100% pure, extra-virgin olive oil was found to actually be up to 40% soybean oil. Remember that scandal? It resulted in some products being thrown out but nothing happened to those companies. They'll resume similar practices if they haven't already and the issue stems across most products, not just oils. You simply can't trust things like this anymore so you're forced to buy local if you want to know what you're actually getting.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 13 2020, @12:40PM
We would be its evolutionary force. And you've already described the solution to contamination: "shutdown, all product destroyed, then fully sanitized". It's not rocket surgery.
Or these naturally occur in the grown meat. You've already described a product that heavily borrows from existing natural food sources. And one can always add artificially what one doesn't add naturally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2020, @08:05PM (1 child)
'Soylent' Dawkins? Atheist mulls 'taboo against cannibalism' ending as lab-grown meat improves
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/6/richard-dawkins-mulls-taboo-against-cannibalism-en/ [washingtontimes.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 13 2020, @12:41PM