Companies are engineering meat in the lab. Will anyone eat it?:
Sitting in a booth in a hotel lobby in Brooklyn, I stared down the lineup of sliders, each on a separate bamboo plate. On the far left was a plant-based burger from Impossible Foods. On the right, an old-fashioned beef burger. And in the middle, the star of the show: a burger made with lab-grown meat.
I'm not a vegan or even a vegetarian. I drink whole milk in my lattes, and I can't turn down a hot dog at a summer cookout. But as a climate reporter, I'm keenly aware of the impact that eating meat has on the planet. Animal agriculture makes up nearly 15% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, and beef is a particular offender, with more emissions per gram than basically any other meat.
So I'm really intrigued by the promise that cultivated meat could replicate the experience of eating meat without all that climate baggage. I had high hopes for my taste test. Could a lab-grown burger be everything I dreamed it might be?
[...] The burger on my plate was actually only about 20% lab-grown material, Krieger explained. The company's plan is to blend its cells with a base of plant-based meat (she wouldn't tell me much about this base, just that it's not Ohayo's recipe). Plants can help provide the structure for alternative meats, Krieger says. One other major benefit to this blending technique is financial: the lab-grown components are expensive, so mixing in plants can help keep costs down. My colleague Niall Firth wrote about this process of blending lab-grown and plant-based meat (and Ohayo Valley) in 2020.
[...] It was definitely different from beef, but maybe not in a bad way. To me, the lab-grown burger had a strong resemblance to the one from Impossible Foods. The texture was similar, which makes sense since it was mostly made from plants.
Taste-wise, I thought the lab-grown meat may have been a bit closer to the beef burger, but I found myself wondering if I'd feel the same way if I didn't know which was which. Was my brain tricking me into thinking it tasted more like meat, since I knew that there were animal cells in it? I took bites of all three burgers again to try to figure it out. I'm still not sure.
[...] There are a lot of unanswered questions about lab-grown meat, including whether companies will be able to produce it at commercial scale, how expensive it'll turn out to be, what the climate impacts will actually look like, and whether anyone will eat this in the first place.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday May 29 2023, @03:36PM (8 children)
I'll eat it happily, if they can achieve price party with traditional beef.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday May 29 2023, @03:45PM (5 children)
*parity
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Monday May 29 2023, @04:59PM (4 children)
I'd say if you could achieve price parity, that might call for a party. I've tried a Burger King Impossible Burger. It wasn't any better than their cowburgers. I have yet to eat any fast food burger that tastes like real meat.
Rather than fake meat, how about we do it by reducing animal ag's emissions footprint? With animals, there's no more CO2 than plant agriculture, but there's methane. Feed the cows a diet that makes them fart less, and capture their farts. And remember, landfills release a lot more methane than animal farms.
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(Score: 4, Touché) by mcgrew on Monday May 29 2023, @05:05PM (1 child)
Also, those cows are going to fart whether you eat them or not. Well, at least until you DO eat them.
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(Score: 3, Touché) by acid andy on Monday May 29 2023, @05:40PM
Guess that's a joke. If you're being serious, agriculture won't breed as many of them when the demand's no longer there.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday May 29 2023, @07:48PM
Animal production at scale requires a lot of agriculture, so a fair calculation would roll that in. Free range animals eating grass isn't bad, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Tork on Tuesday May 30 2023, @02:26AM
Personally I think that is a winning, if slower to take hold, approach... stop trying to replace an existing burger and make a new one. Honestly I crave that specific burger and occasionally treat myself to one. That mindset is a good deal more likely to win me over in the long term.
ps a good cook who knows how to compose the entire flavour of a dish is both a priceless hero and a magician in my book.
* I think Impossible meat is made from beans but I may be mistaken.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Monday May 29 2023, @07:24PM (1 child)
> I'll eat it happily, if they can achieve price party with traditional beef.
I'll eat it. Or at least try it. But for me to buy it parity with traditional beef isn't enough. It would have to be cheaper. Much cheaper.
Which I guess they could arrange by just jacking up the price of real beef. But to swap out real beef for an equally prices product that is somehow inferior? Nah.
It's interesting to read the last part there where the author can't be sure if she is just tricking herself into the taste. Valid point. So she doesn't appear to be sure about if the all beef is the same as the partial beef, only that the partial beef taste more like beef then the utterly fake veggie "beef" which we can all just assume taste like (insert expletive of your choice). So beef with some beef taste better then beef with no actual beef in it but not as good as actual real beef. So the all beef product taste the best then. They have ways to go there. So if the price isn't a lot lower why would you eat the inferior tasting product?
Also from the picture in the article. They all look bad. They look undercooked/grilled and there like no condiments or sauces or anything. Not how I would have my burgers. But then I guess it's all about the "beef" and they don't want it to be hidden by the other things. But then why include a bun? Why not just have them on a plate and eat them with a knife and fork?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gznork26 on Monday May 29 2023, @08:19PM
Perhaps the entry point for commercial uses would be things that combine ground beef with other things. That way you don't have to approximate the mouth feel, and the taste is modified by the other ingredients. So, for example, pre-made tacos, lasagne, meat sauces, and even macaroni salads that include browned ground cow. The hardest challenge would be to put it up against an actual burger, or if you're going for the high priced products, an actual steak.
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 4, Troll) by VLM on Monday May 29 2023, @04:27PM
Why do the entryist people always try to make unhealthy plants taste like real food (meat)?
Why doesn't anyone try it the opposite way, and make an overly complicated industrial process that inputs delicious freshly grilled steaks and outputs cold goey oatmeal vegetarian mush? Why turn industrial waste into fake meat when you could turn real meat into fake bitter Brussel Sprouts or pre-wilted from the factory fake kale?
An interesting thing to consider, in the long history of hyper-processed industrial chemical plant waste masquerading as food, it always seems to end up awful and unhealthy when extensive research is done (AFTER its being sold, of course). Seed oils, corn syrups, margarine, artificial sweeteners, transfats, none of this stuff is good for anyone or anything to eat. IF lab grown meat by some miracle turns out to be healthy, it'll be the first time in culinary history some weird substitute filler material made in a chemical plant is healthier than the natural product its trying to clone.
If the point is conspicuous consumption, we already have $50/pound exotic meats. If the point is attention grabbing by loudly proclaiming holier-than-thou status via a restrictive diet, why give up healthy meat, when there' so much better alternatives to give up (ethanol, corn syrup, pretty much anything from a chemical factory at this point in 2023, artificial colors and flavors in general, etc) I just don't see from a marketing perspective who the market is supposed to be, there doesn't seem to be one beyond the people who normally have a sexual fetish over trying to force people to eat bugs. Just let those people continue their fetish of bug eating and skip all this "fake meat" that no one buys.