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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.
Growing meat in their Axlotl tanks......
The Gholas... They're made of meat!
Huh?
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!”
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.
But then it turns out that the $300 meat machine you bought could've just been replaced by hand squeezing the meat packs you buy.
The first vat-grown hamburger cost $325,000. The cost is now about $12 per pound. That is a decline in price by a factor of 30,000 in four years. Progress happens.
Well, it could eventually get cheaper to grow meat rather than raise the animals. It could also have implication for places were it is inconvenient to raise animals. Think in the polar region or the desert. Also, raising animal is not environmentally friendly and my not scale to a 10 billion human population at US consumption rate.
Some people object to eating animal products (7+ million in the us, 350+ million in the world) but may not object to grown meat which could be a trillion dollar industry in itself.
With vat-grown meat, we can also avoid the methane emissions from cows that contribute to AGW.
I do not object, per se, to eating animals. Animals are yummy, and it's not my fault. However, the very instant a passable, affordable, non-animal meat product becomes available, I'm in. I would very happily do without the killing aspect of eating delicious animal protein.
I'm a long term member of the other PETA... People Eating Tasty Animals. And there is a place for many of nature's creatures; right next to the mashed potatoes and gravy.
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Calling it fake meat would be inaccurate. Soy deli slices are fake meat. This would be meat, just not from an anaimal.
As for "if you dont eat meat why eat this?", anyone who doesnt eat meat because they have an ethical issue with killing an animal but still enjoys the taste and values the level of nutrition provided by meat would be very interested in this.
On top of that, there are many of us who love eating meat but recognize that it's a very inefficient means of making food in a world where food and water scarcity is becoming more and more of an issue and who believe this could be a great way to get meat with less resources used.
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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.
dyslexic jihadists get 27 vegans.
Table-ized A.I.
Because you have to put a lot of perfectly good food into those animals to get far less food out of them.
Current meat production practices are unsustainable when expanded to a global scale.
So unless you want to maintain the first-world/third-world gap, meat production or consumption has to change.
Since we all know the latter is not going to happen any time soon, we need to tackle the former.
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The "A" stands for "anthropogenic" (man-made), not "anthropomorphic" (man-shaped). So the analogous word you want is "bovogenic" (cow-made).
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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.
Superficially it will look like meat, but when you study the details, I'm sure you'll find plenty of differences. The chemicals that make up a piece of steak, for instance, are not all made locally in the muscle that it's cut from. For instance, the iron comes from red blood cells that are made in the bone marrow. The B12 vitamins are made by bacteria in the gut of the animal. Other things are made in the liver, spleen, gut, kidneys, and even the skin, and all transported through the bloodstream, where they infuse the muscle. Other things come the animal's food, or are made by microorganisms that form a symbiotic relationship with the animal. For instances, cows can survive on grass, but grass contains very little protein. The cow's stomachs work as fermentation tanks, using fungi and bacteria to create proteins (among other things) from grass. If you do a chemical analysis, you'd probably find thousands of different chemicals, made in different places. Some of these chemicals may be vital for our health. Some of them, we haven't even identified yet.
The problem with "fake meat" is that all these nutritional deficiencies are hidden. People just a piece of meat by taste, smell, and texture, not by availability of nutrients. At the same time, the industrial producer is only interested in profit, so they have every motivation to cut corners and produce a cheap but tasty piece of food, with little regard for nutrition.
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.
Unless you know what's going into the vat you can't say that for sure. Most likely something has to be done to stave off the molds, bugs and other vermin that is going to be on the factory floor and in the source product (given the source is plant material)
Keeping a lab clean is relatively easy, keeping an entire factory where food-products are grown and handled are going to attract something.
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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.
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cows can produce it all from a few plants,
No, there are lots of things cows cannot make from plants. That's why they have 4 stomachs, where they get a lot of help from a bunch of microorganisms to do all the hard work for them.
as you can get everything you need from a varied vegetarian or vegan diet.
Deficiencies in vitamin D, calcium, iron, zinc, and especially B12 are pretty common among strict vegans. And that's just the obvious things we know. To get enough B12 as a strict vegan, you basically need supplements, as it is not naturally found in plants. For the other nutrients, you need to spend considerable effort to get a diet that's balanced and varied enough. Just for a fun challenge: try to come up with a vegan menu that contains all nutrients that you can find in a 1 oz serving of liver (that's one good bite)