1st lab-grown meat product cleared for human consumption in the U.S.

[DonR]

They have... in fact I'm surprised the chicken version is released first, as everything I've read the last few years has been around lab grown beef and the missing fat content.

Probably going to target chicken nuggets and "popcorn" style. No texture is needed and the taste is pretty much destroyed anyhow.

 

[Destination: Moon]

I was excited by Impossible Burger for about a year, but the smell while cooking was too much like meat for my meat-averse wife. Between the cost and the variable availability, I pretty much gave up on that variety of faux meat. Gail goes for butter and cheese, otherwise is mostly vegan and eats some plant-based meat substitutes. I'm not really a vegetarian but want to keep the Mrs. happy,. As real chicken doesn't disturb me, I continue to eat it, so this new product doesn't appeal to me, Chicken doesn't have the environmental impact of beef, but just in case anyone's interested, rabbit has less environmental impact than chicken. The carbon footprint of a Big Mac is just atrocious.

BTW, didja notice that Soylent Green is set in 2022?

You'd be surprised at the demands the poultry industry places on the environment. From the feed to waste disposal to the billions of plastic containers, bags, toxic chemicals, antibiotic resistant bugs created..... Avian viruses - some zoonotic ....And on and on.

Of course this product will also come with it's own slew of costs and issues. But the suffering, bio waste and illness concerns will hopefully be absent.

The impossible meats and similar are incredibly good..... But not too great from a health perspective. There is a tremendous need for meat replacement that needs to be filled. It would be great if this is widely accepted

 

[SIY]

I'm intrigued to try it. I wonder, though, if it will cause a bad body reaction since I may not have the right enzymes to process it.

 

[JSmith]

Sensorial and Nutritional Aspects of Cultured Meat in Comparison to Traditional Meat: Much to Be Inferred

Cultured meat aspires to be biologically equivalent to traditional meat. If cultured meat is to be consumed, sensorial (texture, color, flavor) and nutritional characteristics are of utmost importance. This paper compares cultured meat to traditional ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Is Lab-Grown Meat Healthy and Safe to Consume?

<p>It goes by many names: cultured, cell-based, cultivated, lab-grown meat, etc. As the names imply, it is a meat alternative made in a lab via...

www.centerforfoodsafety.org

JSmith

 

[BlackTalon]

my understanding is many companies are going after been, and much fewer are going for chicken. So less competition if you are trying to get your first product to market and get noticed.

 

[Steven Holt]

The question is -- does it taste like chicken??

 

[kongwee]

Nah they add heaps of oil to those "no meat" burgers etc., vegetable, canola etc., to replace the fat as fat is taste. They are extremely processed too... seems weird to me to use plants to make something that tastes like an animal product.


JSmith

Even more weird with premium price tag. How the progressive liberals around the world able to eat these stuffs 3 meal everyday? I could only afford starch base "meat" in my neighbourhood vegetarian stall. I could only spend $4.30 on vegetarian meal. Chicken rice only cost $4.5.

 

[tonycollinet]

Even more weird with premium price tag. How the progressive liberals around the world able to eat these stuffs 3 meal everyday? I could only afford starch base "meat" in my neighbourhood vegetarian stall. I could only spend $4.30 on vegetarian meal. Chicken rice only cost $4.5.

Economies of scale. If "this stuff" were manufactured in the same quanties as actual meat, it would probably be cheaper. Conversely if there were only a couple of farms in the world farming beef with a total of 100 head of cattle, a steak would cost you
$10,000 - probably more.

 

[Bleib]

Even more weird with premium price tag. How the progressive liberals around the world able to eat these stuffs 3 meal everyday? I could only afford starch base "meat" in my neighbourhood vegetarian stall. I could only spend $4.30 on vegetarian meal. Chicken rice only cost $4.5.

This is just very new, that's why it's so expensive. But eventually this should require using less energy than growing animals which then have to be killed and a lot of waste thrown away. There's a higher loss here.

 

[kongwee]

Economies of scale. If "this stuff" were manufactured in the same quanties as actual meat, it would probably be cheaper. Conversely if there were only a couple of farms in the world farming beef with a total of 100 head of cattle, a steak would cost you
$10,000 - probably more.

Beef is the most expensive meat in my country, never goes down. Beef steak started at least $10. It is like organic food being priced at premium and never back down even overproduced.

 

[voodooless]

Economies of scale. If "this stuff" were manufactured in the same quanties as actual meat, it would probably be cheaper.

What? Crops? They are grown on a massive industrial scale already. If cookies can be made cheaply, so can all that vegan stuff.

This is just very new, that's why it's so expensive. But eventually this should require using less energy than growing animals

You think these vegan foods cost more energy and resources than meat production at the moment?

 

[JayGilb]

I've butchered thousands of them. Lotsa birds and some cattle with pigs in there too. Chop off the heads on birds and all the rest a 22 long bullet slightly above the center of the eyes and then a sharp sabre butcher knife stuck in the throat and slash it open. Some of them where buddies... So it hurts sometimes and ya grit your teeth and get'er dun. So some faux chicken that tastes pretty good is a good thing I think.

Exactly, I've butchered many animals and also realize that while these animals have a brief life, at least they had one. Treat them with respect while they're here and dispatch them quickly and painlessly.

 

[Bleib]

You think these vegan foods cost more energy and resources than meat production at the moment?

As others have pointed out, volume matters. But suppose you just feed a muscle energy rather than a whole animal (increased transports too), it's quite given that this could be a revolution on how we eat food. Even on spaceships one can grow only the good parts..

 

[tonycollinet]

What? Crops? They are grown on a massive industrial scale already. If cookies can be made cheaply, so can all that vegan stuff.

But lab grown meat is a new technology and manufactured currently in tiny quantities. When that changes it will be cheap.

Even plant based meat is manufactured in microscopic quantities compared to dead animal stuff.

 

[voodooless]

@tonycollinet and @Bleib, fair enough, if you refer to factory grown meat vs vegan food, I can agree.

 

[JSmith]

JSmith

 

[voodooless]

I would not trust anything this guy tells you, he’s a total idiot

 

[JSmith]

I would not trust anything this guy tells you, he’s a total idiot

I only watched the first one actually and the 2nd was a YT "recommendation", so I only skimmed that video.

Even more weird with premium price tag.

Every major fast food burger place here has one or more meat free patty options that pretend to be meat... even pizza too.


JSmith

 

[Marc v E]

Actually, I think it's a good idea.

Less taxing on the environment and should be quite easily scalable.

I would buy it myself.
I do wonder if it will taste good.


Tbh though, the quality of meat in very popular food chains is so low, that I think the taste of it won't be an issue, as long as it passes a certain threshold. So for large scale consumption it will quite easily be suitable. Funny, and so counterintuitive that companies like Pepsi buy ev trucks and large food chains will probably be the first to use labgrown meat.

 

[JayGilb]

What? Crops? They are grown on a massive industrial scale already. If cookies can be made cheaply, so can all that vegan stuff.


You think these vegan foods cost more energy and resources than meat production at the moment?

Most of our food is grown to feed other animals that we then consume. When raised in a feed lot style of enclosure, it requires a huge amount of resources to feed and cleanup after these animals.
My son contracts out to companies that design and build manure pumping and digester systems on stunning scales. He sent me videos from a farm in Central New York state
where multiple 16" waste pipes were being installed in a trench along with power, communication, water lines, etc... for a new addition to a dairy barn.
They were already milking 20k head before the addition.

The manure is pumped into holding ponds where it is slurried into a thicker concentrated liquid manure and the methane is collected and used to power the dairy farm. The slurried manure is pumped out to fields by massive pumps where tractors pull the end of the hose around to spread the solution. He once showed me a photo of a server room on a farm in Nebraska that probably rivaled one in a community college. Sensors and cameras in every building. Gates are opened and animals shuffled to milking parlors where robots scan their teats and apply the milkers.

Then one day, ol' Bessy's (now a number on a RFID tag) gallons of milk per day drops below the lower limits of an algorithm and the gate opens after she is done milking for the last time and is rerouted to a pen destined for a meat processing plant.