"I think people will look at growing and killing an animal as bizarre"
October 28, 2017 3:45 PM   Subscribe

The business case for clean meat, as the fledgling industry's progenitors prefer to call it, could hardly be plainer. As emerging middle classes in places like China and India adopt Western-style diets, global consumption of animal protein skyrockets. […] But the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates 90 percent of the world's fish stocks are now fully exploited or dangerously overfished. More than 25 percent of Earth's available landmass and fresh water is used for raising livestock. Only one of every 25 calories a cow ingests becomes edible beef. And meat processors often must pay disposal companies to haul away their inedible tonnage--hooves, beaks, fur, cartilage.
But it's not just the financial opportunity that has the likes of Gates and Branson so excited: Meat is an ongoing environmental and public-health catastrophe. Livestock account for 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas production--more than all transportation combined. As meat demand soars, virgin rainforest gets razed to grow feed, and freshwater sources are diverted from drought-prone regions. Overcrowded pig and poultry farms are reservoirs for global pandemics; animals raised in them are pumped full of antibiotics, spurring the rise of drug-resistant superbugs.
posted by Johnny Wallflower (35 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
The problem isn’t meat itself- it’s factory farming of that meat and the amount of meat eaten. There is a lot of land that is marginal and scrub and cannot be converted into farmland without horrible effort and toil. But that marginal land would be perfect for sheep, which one can use for wool, meat and milk. It’s the types of meat and how they are farmed that are the problems. But the idea of lab grown meat just grosses me out completely. I know it’s not rational but, I’d rather eat less meat but have it more humanely farmed than have *any* lab grown meat.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 4:07 PM on October 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


"growing an animal"
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:16 PM on October 28, 2017


If they need fetal bovine serum as a growth medium, though, how does this get us away from raising cattle? I would assume a pound of meat requires a fair amount of FBS.
posted by halation at 4:17 PM on October 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


See, I'm super excited about this. I mean, I probably don't want to be intimately involved with the process, but there's plenty of things in the world that aren't bad that I'd find too gross to be up close and personal with. (Especially when you think about how much of what we eat is the result of basically controlled contamination, from yogurt to bread. I can manage a sourdough starter, but it's still kind of gross if I think too much about what's going on in it.) But yeah, it seems like for about a decade now this has been just over the horizon--I'm not counting on it being commercially available all that soon in a way that might make vegetarian (not even vegan) friends willing to consider it.
posted by Sequence at 4:21 PM on October 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


If they need fetal bovine serum as a growth medium, though, how does this get us away from raising cattle? I would assume a pound of meat requires a fair amount of FBS.


There are viable vegetarian growth media, but they're proprietary as crap
posted by hleehowon at 4:26 PM on October 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


Every aspect of lab meat is going to be patented to hell and back, so why not start with a proprietary growth medium?
posted by ryanrs at 4:36 PM on October 28, 2017


I'm super excited for lab grown meat. Imagine the flavouring possibilities when you can splice in whatever you want into it?
posted by Canageek at 4:41 PM on October 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


Every aspect of lab meat is going to be patented to hell and back, so why not start with a proprietary growth medium?

True, yet...

Why I love any and every detail I scour of George Washington Carver's efforts? He's next to Tesla. I came to these topics through Diet for a Small Planet and Diet for America (each with complicated and challenging intersectional conclusion), but depending on global temperature increases, the model of markets and proprietary protection may be unworkable. Licensing agreements might be subsidized in the interest of security?
posted by lazycomputerkids at 4:47 PM on October 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


I've been stoked for lab meat for years, but the sticking point has always been price. I haven't seen any evidence that the cost can be made reasonable for mass production and consumption yet.
posted by Query at 5:14 PM on October 28, 2017


My favorite vegetarian meat substitute is grown in vats (Quorn--it's the bestest). Bring on the vat-grown animal protein. I'm all about it.
posted by soren_lorensen at 5:18 PM on October 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


My favorite vegetarian meat substitute is grown in vats (Quorn--it's the bestest). Bring on the vat-grown animal protein.

Not sure if this bursts your bubble or not, but most Quorn products do contain milk and/or egg.
posted by paulcole at 5:42 PM on October 28, 2017


When I was younger, read some SF story about a group of adventurers who had their own vat-grown steak in their rocket, and sliced off a hunk for dinner now and then. I believe they named it, which made sense at the time.

I have a couple of friends who are really into synthetic meat substitutes and they're excited about recent developments. I think it would be awesome if we could stop using arable land to grow food exclusively for cows, its so wasteful and inefficient.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 6:15 PM on October 28, 2017


Imagine the flavouring possibilities when you can splice in whatever you want into it

Long pig!
posted by meehawl at 6:21 PM on October 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


When did the world stop reading Faust?
posted by crazylegs at 6:30 PM on October 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Beef grown without cows... tastes like despair.
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:40 PM on October 28, 2017


Imagine the flavouring possibilities when you can splice in whatever you want into it?

Ha! When has corporate agriculture ever given a shit about interesting flavors?

No, the real research will be in making lab meat cheaper, by scaling up the production and relaxing the lab conditions. Disease/spoilage will be a big problem. So we'll make lab meat that excretes its own antibiotics. Of course we will.
posted by ryanrs at 6:44 PM on October 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


When did the world stop reading Faust?

I'll blame it (and much, much more) on the 70s...but artists iterate, here's Bowie's.

Here's a map.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 6:46 PM on October 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


Not sure if this bursts your bubble or not, but most Quorn products do contain milk and/or egg.

I'm not vegan, so that's a-okay with me.
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:34 PM on October 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


Bring on the lab meat. I drove through the town of Bovina, Texas today and it took me a few minutes to realize what I was seeing: corral after corral after corral, all crammed to bursting with cattle. There must have been thousands of cows. Thousands on thousands, jammed together. It was really terrible, just wrong, heartbreaking and that was at 65 mph. I can only imagine how bad it would have been if I had stopped. I’m about 85% vegetarian - I eat seafood, turkey at thanksgiving and every year or thereabouts, if I really crave it, a steak or a cheeseburger (locally sourced free range organic etc - if you eat meat that rarely you can afford it.) It’s an ethical decision and today reinforced that it’s the right one for me. If there was lab grown cruelty free beef so I could stop relying on that annual guilt ridden burger or cast iron skillet full of kale for my monthly iron I would be all about it.
posted by mygothlaundry at 7:45 PM on October 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


@halation and hleehowon, the issue of FBS is addressed in the article:
That remains a distant goal. But theoretically, cultivating meat should have high startup costs but low operational costs: Given the right conditions, living cells divide on their own. The major factor governing costs is the nutrient-rich medium in which those cells grow. All the companies that have successfully grown meat have relied on fetal bovine serum, which is extracted from cow fetuses, as a key medium component. But FBS is expensive, and significantly weakens claims cultivated-meat companies can make about vegan or cruelty-free products. Hampton Creek says it has grown and harvested chicken without FBS, although it has been tightlipped about its methods. Memphis Meats acknowledges it used FBS to start its cell lines but says, "We have validated a production method that does not require the use of any serum, and we are developing additional methods as we speak."
posted by coolname at 8:30 PM on October 28, 2017


Yeah, I read that. I think Hampton Creek has enough money that what they did was sighed, shut up and paid out the butt for the proprietary stuff. Or they're straightforwardly lying about every single element of everything, always possible with those folks.
posted by hleehowon at 10:00 PM on October 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


Ha! When has corporate agriculture ever given a shit about interesting flavors?

Utopian SF Version: The technology is used to replace meat while keeping a complex, juicy, Maillard Reaction filled flavor profile. Hunger and environmental knock ons are vastly reduced.

Real Life Version: The meat is a somewhat acceptable tasting simulacrum. The lower costs to the company are what propel it to public acceptance, the savings are captured by the rentier class, and partially used by them to purchase actual meat, which only they can now afford. There are still substantial environmental benefits, but these are mostly offset by said class rocket-travelling between various megacities in which they vacation and own property.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:06 PM on October 28, 2017 [6 favorites]


. I drove through the town of Bovina, Texas today and it took me a few minutes to realize what I was seeing: corral after corral after corral, all crammed to bursting with cattle. There must have been thousands of cows.

Just as an fyi, most all beef cattle in the US are raised out on pasture or scrub anyway. They just keep them in feedlots like that for the last week to month before slaughter. People have this idea that beef cattle are raised in pens on grain but that would be totally unfeasible.
posted by fshgrl at 10:53 PM on October 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


I’d rather eat less meat but have it more humanely farmed than have *any* lab grown meat.

Humanely-farmed is great for the animal right up to the time it’s slaughtered. Sustaining my life shouldn’t require the deliberate killing of sentient beings.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:20 AM on October 29, 2017 [12 favorites]


The economics of factory farming insects would seem to make much more sense.
posted by dmt at 1:13 AM on October 29, 2017


Mod note: A couple deleted. Let's stick to the post topic of lab grown meat rather than turning this into "veganism sucks: fight me."
posted by taz (staff) at 2:40 AM on October 29, 2017 [2 favorites]


I've long thought that selective breeding of maggots has potential. It might hit that sweet spot between the entirely artificial and the cruel. Minimal nervous system, and we might just get them to grow into steaks. Mmmm maggot steak.
posted by stonepharisee at 6:05 AM on October 29, 2017 [2 favorites]


I was thinking about this the other day. I was eating lunch at one of those Chipotle-imatating chain restaurants, and while the food was ok, I was thinking that there would be no reason not to swap out commodity meat like that for lab-grown pseudo-meat. Honestly, in that moment, it felt wasteful to me to be using an animal (something that deserves respect for the animal's life) for generic fast food, if that makes sense.

The lab stuff will probably never replace a high quality, grass-fed steak or the complex flavors of long-cooking parts like oxtail, but it would definitely be good enough for fast food and a lot of home cooking where the quality of the meat is not in the foreground. I could see using it for, say, meatballs, or spaghetti sauce, and reserving the actual animals for the much rarer occasions when the specific characteristics of real meat matter.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:10 AM on October 29, 2017 [2 favorites]


MetaFilter: I've long thought that selective breeding of maggots has potential

(considered but discarded: "MetaFilter: that sweet spot between the entirely artificial and the cruel")
posted by Spathe Cadet at 6:15 AM on October 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


The sustainability of the maggot steak idea is awfully compelling. If I've learned anything from history and biology, it's that meat left out will spontaneously generate more maggots.
posted by cardioid at 6:54 AM on October 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


Mmmm maggot steak.

Exists.
posted by flabdablet at 8:17 AM on October 29, 2017


re: "adopt Western-style" diets

Now that premise is interesting. One might imagine export of processed meat and live stock by western nations to those notoriously over-populated regions either did not exist or was unrelated to anticipated growth in "protein" preferences or domestic output.

It's difficult to ascertain from the article USDA export data (rate of growth) or an explanation for beef demand in India and chlorine-washed chickens in China.
posted by marycatherine at 11:37 AM on October 29, 2017


look, this is all leading towards black market celebrity steaks and hamburgers cloned from a stray flake of skin, so let's get the show on the road and let the ivory-tower types wring their hands about the "ethics" of it all after i've had a Clooneyburger.
posted by logicpunk at 11:55 AM on October 29, 2017


Why black market? I fully expect Guy Fieri to launch a line of frozen Guy's Flavor Town Hamburgers with Donkey Sauce made with genuine cloned Guy Meat (TM) as soon as it's financially viable.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 2:11 PM on October 29, 2017 [2 favorites]


One day we'll have cheap and widely available lab-grown meat. But that day is a long, long way off. Even if the boffins could get the price below natural meat, the difference will go toward profits rather than savings. It will be priced a little above natural meat in all cases as a little healthy living tax. Source: meat substitutes today remain more costly than the meat they are replacing no matter how low the production cost gets.

Of course one day we'll run out of land to graze cattle. But again, that's far far in the future. There's just too much available land left. Heck, if humanity stabilizes economically across the globe, we may never run out of land as birth rates drop.
posted by FakeFreyja at 7:31 AM on October 30, 2017


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