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Vegan Mayonnaise Company Starts Growing Its Own Meat In Labs, Says It Will Get To Stores First (qz.com)
Chase Purdy reports via Quartz: The maker of vegan mayonnaise has been working on getting lab-made meat onto dinner tables everywhere. It's just that nobody knew about it. Hampton Creek -- a company that built its name on plant-based condiments and vegan-friendly cookie doughs -- today revealed that, for the last year, it has been secretly developing the technology necessary for producing lab-made meat and seafood, or as the industry likes to call it, "clean meat." Perhaps even more surprising is that Hampton Creek expects to beat its closest competitor to market by more than two years. Since it was founded in 2015, Memphis Meats has raised at least $3 million from five investors for the development of its meat products, according to Crunchbase. By contrast, Hampton Creek -- just a 20-mile drive from its Silicon Valley rival -- has raised more than $120 million since 2011. It's one of Silicon Valley's unicorns -- a company that has a valuation that exceeds $1 billion.
Yeah, but they're a tiny bit labor and resource intensive. With lab grown meat, you might be able to grow yer own on the kitchen counter top.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
With vat-grown meat, we can also avoid the methane emissions from cows that contribute to AGW.
People are vegan for different reasons. Some are vegan for health reasons, Some are vegan for the environment, but most are vegan because they are against killing animals that feel pain.
You dont really need to..
You can do things in a processing line you cannot do on a feed lot. (and vise versa.)
Feed lot: You can never keep it free of feces. The animals produce and exrete it in copious quantity. This creates an environment rife with dangerous microbes.
Processing line: No feces. At all.
Feed lot: You cannot keep it even 70% free for microbiota. It is open air, open environment. Germs from all over get all over it.
Processing line: Microbes only get introduced at inlets and places where there are breaks in the closed environment of the processing system. One can keep much the intake free from microbiota by keeping inlets heated above 250F, with a cooloff section before it gets to the main processing line. If your culture system involves cultured whole blood as well as meat on scaffolds, then you also get cultured white cells in the mix, meaning microbes in the line are less of a problem.
Keeping the goop from getting contaminated is less of a chore than keeping the system from plugging up though. Fibronectin and whole platelets in the system (if fed on cultured whole blood) will have the same trouble that artificial heart valves and artificial hearts have: getting coated in blood factors and then having blood and other tissues adhere there.
You assume that a sole hunter would hunt one animal for himself only. This assumption is false and an animal as large as you describe would give a sole hunter the finger. You also assume that the hunter would be able to find and kill a large animal every day, which is even more ridiculous.
The typical size of a hunting party is 3-4 men. So at 125*3000 ~ 375.000 kcal/kg per carcass out of which the hunters would consume 9000kcal/kg to recoup the 8 hour run there is plenty left over for the rest of their group. The average size of a hunter gatherer band can range between ~12 to 50 individuals. If we assume a meat consumption of one kilo of meat per day for each individual in a group of 30 hunter gatherers, one carcass like that would last them for four days. However, a group of 30 would easily be able to field two hunter teams of 3-4 men each (or women, since women hunted in some of these societies) with, one group hunting and one either preparing for a hunt, or inbound with a carcass. At the same time these 6-8 people are out hunting the rest of the group would be out gathering fruits, vegetables, seeds roots herbs to supplement the diet and easily matching the contribution of the hunters while others are making equipment, clothing shelters etc... in short religionofpeas numbers seem perfectly plausible to me, especially since hunter gatherers ate every scrap of the animal down to the offal and the marrow in the bones and then used inedible parts including bones to make arrowheads, harpoons spear heads, knives and sinew to make rope, thread and as a component in bow making. Leather of course would not have been wasted either nor would horn or the wool of the animal if any. Many apex predators leave that stuff behind, a large animal killed by humans was likely to completely disappear simply because every bit of it's carcass was used up for some purpose.
Lean meat is certainly not high in calories and humans can only metabolise a few hundred grams of protein per day without getting problems with their health. Ever heard of "rabbit starvation"?
I think that if hunting was an inefficient activity humans would not have continued doing it for millions of years. Rabbit starvation is also one of the reasons why the women would be out gathering fruits, vegetables, seeds roots herbs to supplement the diet while the hunters were doing their thing. There is a good reason why hunting and gathering is a package deal. I live in a region where there are still aboriginals who largely live off of hunting and let me tell you something, these are supremely practical and no-nonsense people who would not bother with hunting if meat was not a viable source of nutrients. They certainly would not hunt animals purely for the fun of, many of them still pray for the spirit of the animals they kill.
Keeping a lab clean is relatively easy, keeping an entire factory where food-products are grown and handled are going to attract something.
It's not going to be an open vat. It's going to be a closed reactor. Even fruit paste (you know, like what they make those little fruit filling cookies with... or fruit roll-ups) is cooked in a sealed system — it's vented, but it's not permitting unfiltered atmospheric air to mix with the fruit paste.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"