Would You Eat Lab-Grown Meat? | Fork Knife Pipette
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- čas přidán 21. 04. 2022
- What is cell cultured meat? In this collaboration with Merck KGaA Darmstadt Germany, I want to talk about a new type of meat that could change the game for some, but not all, of these variables: cell cultured meat. Some companies have started to create “animal-free” meat, where they take a biopsy from an animal, say, a cow, extract stem cells from that biopsy, and then grow them artificially in the lab, making potentially infinite amounts of cells. But hurdles stand in their way: production, cost, and environmental issues that might prevent this meat from making it to market. In this video we’ll explore how new science might help to overcome these barriers!
Learn more about Merck KGaA Darmstadt Germany’s Sustainables Initiative: www.emdgroup.com/en/sustainab...
#sustainableliving #sustainability #alwayscurious
Citations:
1. www.scientificamerican.com/ar...
2. www.ft.com/content/5e884010-0...
3. www.emdgroup.com/en/research/...
4. cedelft.eu/publications/tea-o...
5. thecounter.org/lab-grown-cult...
6. techcrunch.com/2022/01/10/is-....
7. www.theguardian.com/food/2021...
8. www.fao.org/news/story/en/ite....
9. www.nature.com/articles/s4301...
10. www.cnbc.com/2019/10/19/lab-g..., www.fastcompany.com/90612190/..., brightly.eco/lab-grown-meat-s...
11. www.thermofisher.com/us/en/ho...
12. www.nature.com/articles/53743....
13. www.foodingredientsfirst.com/... www.foodingredientsfirst.com/... ; thespoon.tech/meet-three-star...
14. www.emdgroup.com/en/research/...
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There are a few issues with the information in this video that give a deceptive impression of the data. First, the meat consumption in Europe and north America combined isn't actually falling by a statistically significant amount, which is actually shown in the graph but contradicted by the spoken words during that segment. Individual countries in those areas have a lowering meat consumption, but others have an increasing amount of meat consumed.
The other thing is that, because the graph shows the meat consumption per area and not per capita it gives a very skewed view of what the actual meat consumption problem is and where it is concentrated. Richer populations eat more meat and meat is a huge part of the American cultural hegemony when it comes to food. The current meat consumption in china, one of the countries with the highest growth in meat consumption over the last few decades no matter how you slice it, is still lower than the Netherlands on a per capita basis and just a bit higher than Belgium, 40% more than Ukraine and double that of Georgia. these are the 4th lowest to lowest meat consumption countries in Europe per capita.
I'm not saying Alex is intentionally deceptive. The problem is how, systemically and rather consistently, the data around this issue is presented as if the we should look to change the way Asia and Africa are developing to solve the problem of climate change while giving European and north American people ways to externalize the problem on an individual level. And, I believe strongly that cultured meat is not much more than an avenue to this end. We cannot buy ourselves out of our responsibility for this issue.
Thanks for this reply. I definitely wasn't trying to be deceptive, and I appreciate your thoroughness here, because it's possible that I misunderstood some of what the report was presenting. I absolutely don't want to perpetuate the idea that Asia and Africa need to change their development to solve climate change: I think that's pretty problematic, and shifts responsibility away from countries like the US who have real power to change things but aren't. My goal with that data was really just to suggest that consumption patterns and consumer interests are changing, not to assign blame. I really regret if it came across that way. And as I mentioned towards the end, I think this may turn out to be something closer to a speciality or luxury good, not something that is right for everyone or is going to solve all of our issues.
Also I'm gonna pin your comment to the top, because I think it makes important points.
@@AlexDainisPhD I was mostly thinking, these points need to be part of this discussion. Blaming as a whole, but especially individual people and specifically those who just genuinely want to get the information out there for other reasons than just marketing a product is very unhelpful. This should be about responsibility, not blame. And most of the responsibility should lie with those who are able to but such expensive luxury products on a regular basis.
I'm glad to hear you are receptive to such thoughts.
Yeah, I totally agree. I think there are a lot of parallels to the whole carbon footprint idea: yes, I try to keep mine small, because every little bit helps, but also I acknowledge that all of us turning our lights out in each room doesn't hold a candle to making big corporations change how they use energy. Individual responsibility is good, but we need systemic changes to actually make a difference.
That's one of the reasons why I tried to make it clear here in this video that while being an ovo-lacto vegetarian is the "right" environmental move, we shouldn't expect or even want everyone to do it. It's just not accessible to everyone, and also some people don't want to! For many people, meat is an affordable, accessible, efficient way to feed themselves or their family, and making sure everyone has food is the number one priority. Personally, I eat meat, but I've been trying to move towards more and more meat free options because I have the flexibility/finances to be able to do so. So I feel like I'm the "optimal" consumer for this kind of product: I'd love to eat meat without killing an animal, and I have a scientific curiosity towards the process. I dunno how much of a market-space "me" is, lol, but I do think that if this was a thing I'd want to move in that direction, because I can. But I can acknowledge that me as an individual choosing a cell-cultured meat or a veggie nugget isn't going to solve the real issue.
@@AlexDainisPhD To fulfil my obligation to the stereotype I will say I am vegan. But, that is a personal choice based on what I am and am not comfortable with and the availability of alternatives in my situation, as in the Netherlands there isn't really a big difference between meat and alternatives when it comes to cost. However, I might need to start eating animal products in the future because of disability. So, because I don't know what others are dealing with I'm not about to judge them for not making the same personal choices I did when it comes to this issue.
I hope I didn't come across as judgmental or like I was attacking you, because that isn't my intention. Because I like your channel and the way you go about talking about the subjects you discuss.
Crazy how I used to follow you well before my PhD days and now I am doing a Phd (partly inspired by you) in cultured meat. Feels like coming full circle :D
Really great video -- well researched and presented! ( Thanks for all of the links) I'm glad you mentioned Wild Type! I'd definitely try it.
I'm so glad you enjoyed it, and that you appreciated the links--this citation style has been working well for me, and basically allows me to think about it like a lit review! And I can't wait for Wild Type to start being available, I'm super curious about it!
This is high quality science content. I found your channel a decade ago and it’s inspiring to see that you have kept your passion for science all this time. It takes a lot of effort to make videos like this complete with citations. I might show this to my students once I start teaching.
Missed your videos!!!
Me too! It's been a really weird year, but I'm trying to get back into making my own videos. I've been trying to get this food series off the ground for a while, and I have so many ideas for it, I just need like an extra 3 hours in every day!!!
Hey Alex, I miss you!
wow the mental gymnastics this pharma harlot engages in are incredible
Welcome back. Miss you and your videos.
Thank you! I'm really trying to figure out how to bring a little more life back into the videos on this channel :)
I can't help mentioning Royal Society's article "The broiler chicken as a signal of a human reconfigured biosphere". In that 2018 paper researchers discuss making this domestic bird a marker species of the Anthropocene Epoch. Growing a tremendous amount of broilers and other animals for food adds tons of bones to the future fossil record. I suppose if we suddenly stop doing that and start to eat a cell cultured meat, it will mean a dawn of a new geological epoch. I'm certainly looking forward for that to happen :)
I'd be curious about how many of those bones actually survive in the fossil record, though. And already a lot of European countries have laws in place that require non-recyclable waste to be incinerated (the heat being used to generate electricity and potentially district heating) before it can go into landfills. So those landfills today look different to a decade or two ago, even without lab-grown meat.
That's a good point, but besides the developed countries there are also developing ones. The World Bank has estimated that worldwide about 37% of waste is disposed of in some form of a landfill. Open dumping accounts for about 33% of waste, 19% is recovered through recycling and composting, and 11% is incinerated for final disposal. This numbers are from their report "What a Waste 2.0" released in 2018. I have no reason to think that today's situation is different. So there are still plenty of ways for bones to be preserved for future paleoarchaeologists.
Would totally try it! :D
I've been a vegetarian for ethical reasons for several years, but honestly, sometimes a burger or piece of chicken sounds really good. If they can get FBS out of the manufacturing process (and bring the price down just a bit), I'd definitely be willing to pay a premium for lab cultured meat every once in a while. In the meantime, I think it is going to be a no brainer for people who aren't willing or able to give up meat themselves but still want to reduce meat consumption for ethical and environmental reasons.
Excellent video! Has all the info I could ever need on this topic
Thank you for this amazing content!
I'm so glad you enjoyed it!!
I'm really looking forward to this happening. Can't wait to get back to eating bacon or salmon again. Or Stilton or Parmesan cheese if anyone develops cultured milk.
I don't think I would eat cell cultured meats - at least not regularly. I've been vegan so long I don't miss meat, and I think plant based meat alternatives are perfectly fine substitutes. Though there was a years long gap between eating meat and trying an impossible burger, so I might not be the best judge of that :). I am, however, super jazzed by the science behind it and the possible societal/consumer impacts.
I've also heard about progress on fake lactose, casein, and whey protein. In my opinion, cheese alternatives are no where near as good as the fake meats. I imagine the microbiology behind trying to get milk alternatives to deliciously spoil like cow milk is an interesting challenge.
Give Tyne Chease a go if you're in Britain. Made from Cashews. Lush it is, but quite expensive so it's a once a year treat, like Christmas time. But I agree about animal meat alternatives, can be amazing and way better than mock cheeses, basically pure coconut oil, which is as bad for health as regular vile dairy 🤢🤮
Linda McCartney's quarter pounder burgers, Lincolnshire and Chorizo style sausages are the best 😄😋
Great video
What's your opinion of the "Pig Kidney."? That is organs grown in animals (particularly pigs) with the genetic markers for their specific species removed; making the organs essentially blank mammal organs.
Would absolutely try!
I'd like to try it, but I'll stick to plant-based meat alternatives. Also, I'm very certain that there are many people who will not like labgrown meat because it's not "natural" for them, as if natural is good and the reverse is not.
Yes, I would buy and even pay more for lab-grown meat.
Even though it isn't perfect yet, I hope it will benefit further research and development of lab-grown meat production, so we will end up with a future of no animals suffering.
90% of my diet is vegetarian, so yes I'd give it a try 😋 The vegetarian meat substitutes are yummy!
I’m on the side of diversity. I kinda want to see lab meat become feasible, mostly because it’s cool, but not at the cost or for the purpose of eliminating the traditional meat industry. What happens if we switch to an entirely lab-based meat industry, and _then_ it becomes unsustainable for some reason; for example we hit Peak Oil, which _is_ going to happen sooner or later, and we still don’t have another sufficiently cheap source of energy for homes and industry, let alone mass transit of food. What then? Trying to completely eliminate regular meat is just digging your own grave. People need to eat _less_ meat, not just replace it with fancy science meat or settle for none at all.
Oh yeah, totally agree: I think this is one of many options of the future, between normal meat, veggie meat, lab-grown meat, no meat... For me it's all about getting options rather than putting all our eggs in one basket, no matter which basket that it.
If I was on a blimp with you and you offered it ( assuming it was cooked well )……I might take a “no thank you” bite….lol.
Oh man, imagine eating future foods while riding in a sky yacht... the dream.
@@AlexDainisPhD agreed…lol.
Those earrings are dope af, but also yeah, I'd try lab-meat, but have heard that getting the texture correct is still a hurdle b/c of missing contributing factors that aren't provided by growing cells in container (scaffolding, muscle use... etc).
Yeah I think for the forseeable future this kind of meat would be easier to make into burgers/sausage/nuggets/sashimi (in the case of wild type), stuff that has less of a structure. I think making a steak-structure out of cells would be much much harder.
I would absolutely be down to trying out lab grown meat, but I do think that once it hits the market, the communication around it has to be transparent. Especially when it comes to real environmental impact and use of animal products - since those are the reasons people are most likely to switch. We need less "feel good" marketing, and more factual data, so that we can make informed decisions.
Too bad that transparency isn't expected from the factory farming industry. If not for animal rights activists breaking into those facilities and filming what happens within everyone would still be blissfully unaware and the industry would be even less transparent.
Ive not looked in to the details of how this all works yet, so this may be a very silly question but: Could you make Dodo meat? That is, without cloning one or a hybrid of one back in to existence and facing a bunch of ethical concerns, could you just make a slab o Dodo flesh.
That would be significantly harder: because you can't start with fresh dodo cells, you'd probably need to go through a semi-dextinction process (like George Church's group is trying to do with mammoths) and then get cells to make a slab of meat. But I could imagine you could do that with just cells and maybe not a whole bird/hybride? But I just did a quick google and it looks like last month a report was published saying scientists had extracted a dodo genome from a specimen in Denmark so... not impossible?
Soylent Surf and Turf… mmmmm.
I'm totally down to eat some science meat! I love your channel! Keep being awesome!
Yay science meat!
So if we eventually get to a animal free meat society. What happens to the cows. Do they just go extinct?
No we grant them the same rights as cats or dogs and stop exploiting, mutilating, violating and slaughtering them as a commodity.
Do we tell the other omnivores, they need to stop eating meat, too? Where does it stop, Brain? -Sincerely, Pinky
She's so cute!
Producing meat this way is safer, healthier and more eco friendly, and no animals have to suffer or die to get it.
So count me in!
I'll have the Tiger steak 🐯 🥩
I'll stick with my plant proteins. At least I know what I'm eating then.
Seriously doubt that I would touch the stuff, because at the end of the day, it's still exploitation to me. They're still gonna have to enslave other animals to use them as giant skin graft machines. I'm very happy with animal meat alternatives such as the Linda McCartney's quarter pounder burgers, Lincolnshire and Chorizo style sausages. They're the best! 😄😋
However, I do see it as a step forward, even if it is a soggy and lazy one. If it's done right, then it's WAY more sustainable when it comes to environmental issues like enormous land use, absurd quantities of fresh water and grain.
Also, lab grown meats basically abolish wretched dairy and factory farming's filthy run off into rivers, which causes giant dead zones in the Oceans 🤮
Well done for staying pretty neutral and objective throughout, and at the same time keeping thing very thought provoking. More than your typical scientist 👍😉😜
Farming bugs and having more of a bug based diet is the actual answer to environmental and economical issues including our own health, but that would never go over with the overly consuming narcissistic nature of our society.
This could be said with a lot of things in general for society as a whole, but someone somewhere needs their luxury goods, validation, and abundant wealth.
I'm 100% in on trying these types of meats. Great video Alex. Always love the food science.
I'm super glad you liked it :) I really wanna do more food science--it's so much fun to research.
I don't think it's a given that you wouldn't need antibiotics for cell cultured meat. I think it might be possible that you would need MORE antibiotics so that it wouldn't spoil.
Oh, and by the way, I would definitely TRY it.
Also if a person is vegan and thinks it’s wrong to eat meat then why eat anything that looks like it smells like it or tastes like it?
Exactly...
Being vegan, this video grinds my gears a little. It's just a bit toooo impartial and hedged. You definitely succeed in presenting the science - however, I feel you don't weight up the cost / benefits of what the viewer might do with it. Namely, choosing to eat it or not, once it's here. You say at the end you would eat it - why?
Anyway, always good to see a video from you 😊
Personally, I'd eat it because I like meat, but also don't like that eating meat means killing animals. I've been trying to shift towards more and more plant based options over the past few years, and am slowly cutting more and more meat out, but I'll admit that it's hard: I commend you for being able to commit to veganism! Honestly I think this kind of product would be great for people like me in addition to stuff that already exists like impossible/beyond/etc, to be that bridge or substitute for meat.
Would definitely eat something grown in a lab over the the animals grown and killed unnecessarily in the cruel and torturous conditions they currently are
I would eat it assuming that the cost is competitive.
"Pay 2x-3x the price to save the planet" while 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions and celebrities hop on super-environmentally-harmful private jets to globe trot? That feels discouraging as heck.
At the end of the day, I think cultured meat really needs to first and foremost present itself as a good economic alternative so that people on a budget would consider it. After that, well, get the finer points of taste down for the beef connoisseurs IMO.
Why *replicate* a food when we can *improve* on food? The fact that we excrete waste tells us that food is imperfect. Why not skip replication and pursue individualized, perfected food to minimize human waste? Just an off-the-cuff thought…
Hahahaha whaaaaaaaa?? “The fact that we excrete waste tells us food is imperfect” So in the ideal world animals would not excrete waste? But our waste is just food for other organisms? The fact that plants excrete waste tells us that carbon dioxide is imperfect! Or does the fact that humans excrete carbon dioxide tell us that oxygen is imperfect? Perhaps the fact that we produce waste proves that daddyskygod exists!? PLEASE HELP MY BRAIN!!!
@@SAFbikes You’ve raised an interesting and predictable point… Perhaps breathing *is* an imperfect process. It is certainly a limiter in humanity colonizing the universe. We could begin to improve species to have less reliance on biodiversity and interdependence on biomes… See what happens???
@@JunkAccumulator Life as a whole is a non-equilibrium process, ie a living organism must consistently drive itself away from thermodynamic equilibrium, which in this context is called death. One of the very few ways of doing so is to convert "fuel" to "waste". In this view there is no life without waste. The theoretical study of life is still a growing field but this point has now been quite widely accepted in the community.
You should have taught us in the school. I like science but it is hard to understand it through hard spelled books.
I like you and want to marry you, accept my heart
I would eat it, and for both animal welfare and ecological reasons.
I do have to wonder what's going to happen to the vast herds of animals currently being raised as food stock. Will any of them end up risking extinction just because the individual members of the subspecies are big and constantly hungry for expensive critter food and without any way of providing the farmer with a financial incentive to keep more than maybe a single animal?
The amount of farm animals will slowly decrease over time as demand decreases and ideally they will go extinct. Wild cows have long gone extinct. Farm animals aren't meant to exist. We bred them into existence. Them going extinct wouldn't affect the ecosystem negatively as they're not really part of it in the first place.
Heck no
I'll eat anything if it's cheap.
No it won't be battling climate change. You still need to feed the cells with amino acids, sugars, you need an immune system, build a collagen structure etc etc. But one way would be to create an artificial organism with no brain. Just a big muscle and organs, equip it with a powerful digestive system with things like cellulase and it could turn wood into sugars. There will still be the problem of protein, how do you grow plant protein without harming the environment?
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No
Aww.
@@AlexDainisPhD absolute disgrace... i only eat what's natural
Jumpcuts 👎🏻
Thank you for this amazing content!!!
Glad you enjoy it!