Lab-grown meat (probably) won't save us
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- čas přidán 2. 08. 2023
- Is meat grown in a lab the future of food - and is it actually any good?? I took a road trip to find out.
**A HUGE thanks to GOOD Meat for letting me visit their facility and try their product, and to Finless Foods for providing a quick visit and some very helpful information.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰 𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘁𝘆-𝗴𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘁𝘆:
-Allan, S. J., De Bank, P. A., & Ellis, M. J. (2019). Bioprocess design considerations for cultured meat production with a focus on the expansion bioreactor. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 3, 44. doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2019.00044
-Circus, V.E. and Robison, R. (2019) Exploring perceptions of sustainable proteins and meat attachment. British Food Journal, 121 (2). Doi: 10.1108/BFJ-01-2018-0025
-Derrick Risner et al, Environmental impacts of cultured meat: A cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment, bioRxiv (2023). DOI: 10.1101/2023.04.21.537778
-Garrison, Greg L.; Biermacher, Jon T.; Brorsen, B. Wade (December 2022). "How much will large-scale production of cell-cultured meat cost?". Journal of Agriculture and Food Research. 10: 100358. doi: 10.1016/j.jafr.2022.100358.
-Humbird D. Scale-up economics for cultured meat. Biotechnol Bioeng. 2021 Aug;118(8):3239-3250. doi: 10.1002/bit.27848.
-Kim S, Beier A, Schreyer HB, Bakshi BR. Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of a Novel Cultivated Meat Burger Patty in the United States. Sustainability. 2022; 14(23):16133. doi: 10.3390/su142316133
-Stephens N, Di Silvio L, Dunsford I, Ellis M, Glencross A, Sexton A. Bringing cultured meat to market: Technical, socio-political, and regulatory challenges in cellular agriculture. Trends Food Sci Technol. 2018 Aug;78:155-166. doi: 10.1016/j.tifs.2018.04.010.
𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱 (𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲) 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀:
-www.scientificamerican.com/ar...
-www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc...
-www.mckinsey.com/industries/a...
-thecounter.org/lab-grown-cult...
𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗲𝗿-𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗱 𝗺𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝘀𝗸 𝗹𝗼𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀:
-GOOD Meat
-Finless Foods
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Since you said you are doing videos for other alternatives,
Can't discuss much
But I worked with the impossible burger. The science behind it is fun, and it is almost convincing at being budget frozen beef.
One thing that you didn’t cover that I’m curious about is the nutrient profile of lab meat vs its farm grown predecessor. There’s a vast array of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, etc in their most bio-available forms that I get from a cut of red meat that I’m skeptical I would get from a lab grown version. Did you by any chance get to discuss that aspect of the food with anyone?
The bio reactors used for this are the same as used for the pharmaceutical industry, if it was possible to scale up to more efficient sized reactors I think big pharmaceutical corporations would have done it already.
My only question is how many years should it be tested to what it does to our diet. We see what hf corn syrup has done to our diet.
@@rettony3878
Heres the thing
One, they test anything like this to begin with just because,
But
Two, this is literally just meat.
In terms of "what it will do to you" it will do exactly what regular meat does. The semi-artificial nature of this is biochemically irrelevant.
Important side note, conventional meat is also heavily subsidized.
Also, there is a major distinction in terms of harm to nature between chicken, pork and beef. Pork is noticeably worse, and beef is even way worse than anything. So it does not make much sense to focus on chicken first as the company from the video does in terms of environmental impact. But I guess that they chose chicken as it is easier because beef is barely edible, if it does not have fat in it, which complicates the manufacturing a lot.
Exactly, most people complaining about the cost of cultivated meat would have their eyes pop out when they realise the true cost of the conventional meat industry. Even if net emissions are higher, the savings in water and land resources alone are monumental.
that's true, the more optimistic estimate of large scale production at the moment is looking to be about $29.5 per pound, nearly equivalent to beef (although that's at break-even and doesn't consider distribution costs, two facts that would likely increase costs pretty significantly). still, if it was subsidized at an equal rate, the end product would be affordable
Yes, and meat substitute meals in fast food places have gouged up prices so they can sell the meat meals for cheaper.
Not it mention the crops used to feed them. Namely Corn.
"Don't count your chickens before they're extruded" is an idiom that sounds right out of a YA novel about saving a cyberpunk world by finding the mythical last patch of real nature.
Cringy; had to get it out.
@@pedrosampaio7349 Thanks, Pedro.
@@pedrosampaio7349maybe... but is it not accurate in many ways? I assume you're not exactly the target demo for YA novels.
Wait!
Lab grown meat is NOT meat grown in Labrador retrievers?
Well... That changes only a couple of minor things.
Wall-E
Being one of the few people that has also tried this stuff… people are going to be shocked when they see how close the whole-breast texture is to the real thing. Incredible feat of tissue engineering!
GOD YOU'RE SO PRETENTIOUS, JUST EAT NORMAL MEAT!
No I won't be surprised ,I'm not eating meat that comes from a lab and for your own sake you shouldn't either. Let go of your fear and guilt
@@Perma10Time will tell.
@@Perma10Also looks like someone accepted it.
Well, it IS the real thing, more or less.
What I'm equally excited about is lab cultivated dairy! It's already on the market in the form of a few ice creams and it's much easier and cheaper because they're growing microbes that produce casein, not growing animal cells. And our demand for dairy is massive, and the dairy industry also isn't great even though animals don't die to produce milk
Yeah, I'd like to hear more about this, AFAIK no major youtubers have covered this. I love meat and dairy and them. However, I'd easily quit bovine meat and have a hard time giving up on cheese.
Me too, I haven't ate/bought red meat or cows milk in a decade, but cheese is a hard sell for me.
@@srpenguinbr that's a very common sentiment, and a big part of why this is so important! A piece of the whole conversation that I find really interesting is the language they use around it, because they're still trying to figure it out. They want to communicate that from an ethical standpoint it's vegan, but they also really need to make it clear that it's real dairy and it is not safe if you have an allergy! And the marketing/shelf placement is tricky, too. Is it shelved with other vegan products where people will see it if they're looking for more ethical alternatives but they might assume it's made from plants and therefore has a different taste/texture and isn't an allergen risk? Or do they shelve it with regular dairy where people may not understand that it's different and why it may be a little more expensive?
Good, I was wondering where we where about dairy products, I'm happy to hear there's some progress. It looks like the final barrier will be producing lab eggs
I would be so much more interested in this than lab-cultivated meat. Mammalian cell culturing is so much more expensive than bacterial fermentation.
For some vague context: early commercial solar power cost 100s of USD per W, now it's measured in 10s of cents per watt; and that was just in the 3ish decades that I have been alive.
I don't know if any of these lab meat ventures will work but the fact that there are so many different possible methods; does suggests that there is a lot of room for advancement.
That was my thought, assuming cultivated meat catches on, I would imagine methods would be highly refined and advanced as well as the processes being increasingly subsidized meaning that the costs would drop dramatically. As far as the emissions issue, I imagine that refining the process would ultimately solvs this issue as well, at least in comparison to the negative environmental ramifications of raising and processing massive amounts of livestock. As Kate noted, the science is extremely new so with proper funding and support this could revolutionize the hunger crisis within a few decades
yeah, I really believe this kind of thinking that there are so many hurdles and it's expensive is such a bad mindset to have for an innovation with such huge potential (even if it doesn't succeed mainstream, it's at the very least worth a shot) and your stance is applicable to so many other areas of technology including genome sequencing, airplanes, electrical hardware, the list goes on!!! We never got anywhere with tech advancement by being pessismistic and counting our downfalls.
also to note in 2013 when cultivated meat was debuted it cost over $300,000 for a single burger patty. We've come quite a long way in a single decade
Video said that she’s not sure if it’s workable in the long term. But that depends on what we’re calling “long term”. 10 years? 50 years? 100 years? 500 years? We can make a LOT of scientific and technological progress in a century.
Well, the issue here is that cultivated animal cells are old, like very old… And it still costs a ton to produce in large quantities.
Now that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement and costs won’t go down, it’s just to say that we aren’t talking about a completely groundbreaking technology being refined till its cheap, we’re talking about a relatively mature field where groundbreaking innovations will probably be needed in order to bring costs down.
If it turns out that the process doesn't work in larger bioreactors (scaled-up), then it can still be scaled out with multiple smaller bioreactors (scaled-out). That would, however, mean more land dedicated to meat cultivation, more up-front cost associated with building the facilities to cultivate, and other effects cascading from the need to scale out
Or just have the production centers scattered across the land where there's demand.
There will be less CO2 emissions if the lab meat is produced in your town that if it comes from a production center far far away
@Wrulfy That's still the type of scaling out i'm talking about. multiple small batches is always going to have more production cost than one big batch for the same throughput
@@Wrulfy Simon Clark has made a video about CO2 Emissions for food products. Usually only about 5% of the total greenhouse emissions is from transport. The vast majority comes from land use.
They could reduce the land requirements by doing something similar to vertical farming, where they simply use smaller reactors over many, many levels of a very tall building, though that would also probably raise the costs and energy for harvesting.
@@Ruhrpottpatriot I mean, it's already said in the video that the technology would most likely use only a fraction of land compared to traditional agriculture. Land use is pretty much only to grow crops to feed the animals, so of course it will be much less intensive if we feed the cells with what I assume is water and homogeneous nutrients instead of corn and soya
From former quality assurance/regulatory affairs experience in clinical trials, this video is ***on point*** in regards to a summary of the issues we're facing regarding scaling from prototyping to mass manufacturing. I've been looking forward to cell cultured "meat substitutes" for over a decade, but we're still in no way close to that future. In fact, the whole of the meat substitute market has these issues, because we cannot ignore the root industries necessary to build these supply chains. Monocrops, steel production, chemical sourcing and manufacturing, and the fact we still have to use petroproducts in so many of these, is a huge hurdle.
I'm absolutely rooting for it, but I have no illusions about the huge leaps in technology and regulations that will be necessary to get there.
I really like these longer form videos! Sometimes a 'minute' isn't enough for these topics
If cultivated chicken were to become mainstream, would how we perceive chicken doneness change since we no longer have to worry about salmonella? Would medium rare chicken be a thing?
No problem about this. Chicken carpaccio will be fine too.
Cook that all the way.
Have you ever accidentally eaten chicken that was still raw? The texture is so gross 😅
@@randomanda Yeah, but we still haven't tried lab-grown raw chicken. It could be delicious for all we know!
Medium rare chicken is already eaten as a delicacy in parts of the world where salmonella is not a problem. You can find it in certain parts of Japan for example. The texture takes a second to get used to but it is remarkly similar to seared tuna.
My biggest confusion is how the manufacturers might replicate fat distributions within the tissues. It's all well and good to have lots of protein, but fat is a core component of flavor in meat. Without it, the meat comes across as dry and fairly tasteless, or burns really easily. If the fat is added as shortening or just by mixing vegetable oils, it will taste markedly different.
Can’t you just do the same thing with fat cells?
@@cosmologicalturtle9528Fat cells are reliant on having the right fatty acids provided within cholesterol. I’m no doctor, but I would bet that imitating the lipoprotein system is way harder than the amino acid system.
Meat needs Fat, especially for those on a low carb diet. They need fat in their diet to survive.
@chesterpanda the nature of this nutrient matrix allows the tissue to grow in a nutrient medium without the same vascular requirements of flesh in a body. Fat isn't necessary in the tissue, just the lipids in the medium.
The cost is probably calculated without subsidies. Fair enough, but killed meat (at least in the US) is massively subsidized by the government. If cell cultured meat had access to that level of money, I’m sure it could be comparable to killed meat in price.
How much of a difference are we talking here? Lets just talk ground beef. At the store it's something like $4-5 per lb right now. How much more would it be if there were no subsidies?
The video was flashing some really high price tags for the lab grown meat, so would this change really make the two close in price?
@@lkjkhfggdI'm actually quite sure it would. Our tech is only going to get better, just a few years ago, cultivated meat was 10 000$ for a single small piece of I remember correctly. Now it's being sold for as little to 60$. There is no doubt that we will be able to potentially get cultivated meat to be cheaper than conventional because think about how much actually is subsidised in the meat industry: the animal feed, the animal equipment, the gas to run the transportation operations, on and on and on.
The video really ought to have mentioned government subsidies of the meat industry, because the presentation as it stands implies that the comparative cost is simply a technological problem, and not also a political one.
Way too much reporting on climate change makes this same mistake.
@@lkjkhfggdYou are looking in the wrong direction. The grown meat, like the animal meat is not subsidized by pound. The businesses themself are subsidized with tax exempts and institutional services. Meat growers will get the same subsidization, when they are on the market. His question, which he failed to formulate, is, should we stop subsidizing animal meat beforehand, to push the grown meat, without founding a whole new industry into existence.
The answer is obviously no. Not because it would be the wrong thing to do, in our situation, but because no politician could sell it. It's the same with our energy production. We know what should be done and we do, what can be done, without strangling our GDP right out.
'Killed meat' that's a good one. Im gonna start saying this ⩣
Using ithkuil for the vats is a stroke of genius
I am not a crazy person so i don’t know what the symbols mean, but props for using such an interesting conlang for an equally interesting topic!
oh damn, i thought that script looked familiar
I for one would be all for 3d printing my own food on demand, ala food replacator from star trek. Good times.
Assuming the environmental and taste/texture stuff ends up in the right place, I'm super on board with lab meat!
I'm a cultivated meat researcher and this video is so well made, capturing the process of making it and the caveats of its sustainability aspect so well, wonderful! I think that hybrid products (think impossible burger but with 10-20% cell cultured fat) is a very compelling alternative that really elevate the flavor of existing plant based meat alternatives, while helping greatly to attenuate the economic infeasibility and potential sustainability weakpoints of full-blown cultivated meats. (Happy to talk about it more)
Thank you for your work!!
Small typo, I think you meant FBS or Fetal Bovine Serum. It's used a lot in cell cultures both for industry and research because of the growth hormones it contains. It's a byproduct of a slaughter house but they sell it to labs for hundreds and thousands of dollars. Notoriously different batches often have slightly different concentrations of hormones so labs will often buy an entire batch in bulk so the variability doesn't mess with their experiments.
This year, I did an essay about environmental issues and used an article talking about cultured meat. Fun to see MinuteFood talk about it.
One thing I think that is not mentioned in this video is that while we can now grow meat cells in big metal containers, we can’t also grow the immune systems, so the meat soup is defenseless against virus or bacteria, so the production environment needs to be basically sterile. I think this is another problem with scaling up: if we scale up vertically (bigger cans), then the biology doesn’t work because cells can’t get nutrients in and waste out in time; if we scale up horizontally ( more cans), then quality control becomes an issue since we need lab-grade production environment everywhere.
I'd like to see lab-grown fruits and vegetables too. You always hear about how much land and water it takes to grow almonds, for example, maybe cultured vats of almond milk is a better way to go.
Hydroponics have already (mostly) solved this problem. They produce far greater yields with far less space taken up and resources consumed.
I used to work in a lab and I wondered about the use of Fetal Bovine Serum in lab-grown meat, thanks for answering that in this video!
yes, actually there are many companies that are building alternative FBS like Multus, Cell Crine, and many others all of them through different alternative solutions, also there is a Korean company that is developing an algae-based serum for cell proliferation and respiration, personally I'm very excited about the recent advances and how the cell. ag community is tackling these challenges.
I love how you always dress up some of the stick figures, and seeing how many I recognise. I was never expecting the Pokémon gym leader Milo
Loved the drawing of Jolyne Kujoh
I have been hearing that the future of cultivated meat is probably going to be as an additive that goes into what's otherwise generally vegetable-based meat alternative products, to give it that authentic meat taste even though most of the product is not actually meat.
Which of course makes me think of that old Buffy the Vampire Slayer where the Double Meat Palace fast food chain is suspected of having some kind of nefarious paranormal something added to their meat (like, human blood or something maybe), but (SPOILER ALERT) it turns out that the secret ingredient in the meat ... is meat. Most of which is actually a vegetable-based meat alternative. They just add a "meat process" to make their veggie patties taste meaty.
not bad of an idea!
@@bywonline Anyone who is vegetarian/vegan for ethical reasons should have no reason to object to the "real meat" being added to this since it's *not* actually real meat, no animals were involved, it's basically just a microbe genetically modified to produce the same proteins as animals do, and even the strictest vegans have no problem with eating microbes.
@@Pfhorrest My husband and I have been 100% vegetarian for 51 years. We don't want our meat substitutes to taste like meat. (We like Morningstar sausage for example.) We don't even like Impossible burgers because they taste too much like meat. BUT for those who want to eat meat, I'm glad that there are plant based meats on the horizon that will become available for them. (Note: I ate a lot of meat until the age of 23.) What I'm waiting for is the fermented milk and cheese. Even Anheuser-Busch is already making fermented eggs.
I love this channel but you may be surprised to hear my favorite thing about it is the easter eggs in each video when it comes to the animations. Pop culture characters from all across everything show up to do whatever Kate is talking about and it's so great
Thanks for this video!!
Like how you mentioned both the promising and detracting factors of lab grown meat. Really refreshing compared to wholely positive/negative videos on the subject
0:45 lmao love the random Jolyne
This was a fine video, and does answer some of the questions I had about the end product (flavor, firmness, etc). It will be interesting to see what this industry does in the future.
I can't wait for cultivated mammoth burgers to hit the supermarkets.
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I'm thinking that as we switch to more and more renewable energy sources to power the vats, and as the production gets cheaper and more efficient, it's good long-term solution.
If youre taking suggestions for a great ag video topic, I believe one of the most important topics in agriculture sustainability is the art and science of plant breeding. Most of the work done is crossing plants to make better ones, maybe mix in some genomics ect. Getting more yield per acre (alters the denominator of CO2/food unit, including each gram of meat), plus breeders invent new crops like white flesh strawberries, all colors of tomatoes, mustard greens that taste like lettuce, prettier apples and so on. Thanks for the great videos educating people!!!
Thank you for this! I've wondered about this... Not only have I had concerns about environmental impact, cost, and taste/texture of lab grown meat, I'm kosher, so I had concerns about how any actual animals involved are treated. This sounds like the beginning of a good option!
Please keep in mind that nearly ALL animals are extremely sick when they are slaughtered due to cramped conditions and force feeding. Just because they are slaughtered in a “kosher” way, it doesn’t mean they are.
@@parkerhahaha I hear you. Sick animals are not kosher. And I was referring to how they are treated through their lives, not only at moment of death.
@@parkerhahaha Depends what country you are in. Cattle in my country are grass fed and finished, out on pasture all the time with trees to shelter under. No 'force feeding' (which is actually impossible where cows are concerned 😂), no hormones, no antibiotics.
All we need is animal proteins. It can be a powder to make shakes. Or a powder mixed with vegetable oil to form something like cheese or milk.
It may be easier to genetically modify algae to produce more proteins easier to digest for humans.
3:50 did you mean FBS (fetal bovine serum)? I read that it was still being widely used, as there aren't very many good alternatives available.
Yep, we sure did - oops! It's not widely used anymore, especially by companies actually trying to go to market (although the alternatives ARE indeed more costly).
Is the plant based FBS substitute commercially available? I worked at a pharmaceutical company and didn’t understand why we used FSB if there are viable substitutes
Awesome video as always! But I was also very impressed with the creative face-obscuring "Kate's Going Places" logo :)
I don't understand the "ick" people. I mean I'd understand if someone was cautious because of the possibility of contamination etc but that kind of danger is also present in the traditional meat industry. I've heard a friend of mine say that they wouldn't want to even try it because "it was never alive". This is unfathomable to me, we can grow human skin in a vat!
Sure, but I bet your friend wouldn't eat vat-grown human skin either.
Lol can't eat anything that didn't first experience life, that's a new take from meat eaters
@@ShankarSivarajan They _already_ eat their own skin every day. Any food they have to chew scrapes off cells from the cheek, forcing it to have to rapidly grow back due to the scraping forces
To say that the "overwhelming opinion" is in favor of a certain viewpoint is just not something you can fairly judge would be an understatement. Also, even if it is a popular opinion, as a vegetarian I have a similar but opposite impulse. Lab Meat makes me squeamish because it is animal flesh, which is gross, but since it isn't actually from a dead creature then I'd rationally be more open to trying it.
I think mycelium will take significant meat market share before lab grown meat even reaches price parity with traditional meat. Growing mycelium is significantly easier than growing animal cells. Also based on the taste tests done mycelium products don't seem to be far off from real meat taste.
The carbon is less of an issue, because with this kind of bioreactor, on-site carbon capture can be immensely effective. That said, the scaling and nutrient cost is a massive barrier to work around
Replacing meat with lab meat seems to be task on the order of replacing human labor with robot labor
Can we get an episode on plant-based meat now? Taste and scalability?
Iwant that to be the future, not just for food, but for the medical applications it could have, imagine actually being able to grown organs without having to use a pig as a bioreactor, and have the end result be functional
For food really, if things are really that bad environmentally speaking, just move on to a bean based product
The future of meat is the meat we eat today. Its pretty much impossible to replace any time soon.
This is a prototype tech, remember pcs weighted tons when they came out. Also methane gas is literally unimportant part of the process because you work in a closed environment with filters that can be tuned to capture the methane gas even sell it for profit. So we would both find a sustainable way to produce meat and sustainable way to produce methane.
This tech needs a few thing going on to be viable tho.Firstly like indoor farming it needs electricity prices to fall a lot to lower the cost.Second is a process that faster and more precise. Last one can be made with research but for first one we need to wait.
Is that FSB or FBS? I've done plenty of cell cultures and used FBS (Fetal Bovine Serum). I've never heard of FSB but I could be wrong.
FBS - our mistake!
Personal belief: this alone won’t save us. No single solution will. This will be one of many solutions needed to save us.
Do you think it's worth investing?
@@constantchange1145 yes
@@BrowncoatGofAZ have you?
@@constantchange1145 no I haven’t personally invested. I don’t have the income for that.
@@constantchange1145 I don’t have the income to invest
That is so cool!
Scientists at the University of Massachussets have recently figured out a way to bypass the need for growth factor, cutting costs by up to 90%.
Looks like someone here underestimated the rate of the acceleration technological advancement again. Problems exist to be solved, and we're getting faster and better at it with each passing year
Looking for alternatives to getting meat the "normal" way is a good idea, and I fully agree with your concerns. But IMHO the easiest way to tackle the problem at its root would be if humanity manages to reduce its meat consumption. If demand drops enough, it should hopefully be an incentive for the producers to migrate to "better" meat sources that treat the animals better. I personally am totally fine with only eating meat 1-2 times a week, there are more than enough delicious recipes that work just with plants and/or fungi ;)
My question is since animals are a massive part of our diet and since these farm animals are everywhere, what are they gonna do with all of them when we don't need them anymore? You can't exactly throw them in the wild because they'll be picked off by literally everything that eats them, and I doubt these large scale farmers will wanna spend thousands of dollars just to keep all these animals as pets, basically.
@@eggsandbacon892 It's not like humanity will instantly switch from meat to something else, it will be a process over years or even decades. Some meat-producing companies will migrate to reducing the amount of animals and giving them a better life, some will close down completely and sell their remaining animals, and some will probably keep going and just sell the crap meat to other companies that work with it.
Something similar happened to eggs from those horrible cage farms, they didn't vanish, but instead of selling their eggs through supermarkets, they now sell them to bakeries and other food producers that need eggs.
@@eggsandbacon892this is just speculation, but I doubt the meat market would cease to exist in a matter of days. It's more likely that demand would start shrinking over the years, and the number of animals being bred would reduce accordingly. By the time a farm goes out of business its "last generation" of animals would hopefully be small enough to be adopted by random people or be transferred to sanctuary. They could also end up simply being slaughtered and sold (or sold and slaughtered) to recoup costs. That said, the situation is so highly hypothetical that it's almost pointless to try and work something out.
Just to clear something up. Meat isn't inherently freaking delicious. I was an avid carnivore until 2013 before going vegetarian. After some time you stop craving it, and after some more you stop missing it altogether.
When the new plant-based meat substitutes started coming out (think the beyond brand, for instance) I was excited at the idea of finally tasting meat again. To my surprise, when I tried it, it definitely reminded me of the taste of meat, but I wasn't particularly psyched about it. Not because the product wasn't 100% the same as meat (it was close enough to me), but as it turns out you grow out of it. I mean it's fine, and I can have it from time to time, but it's not something you crave after a while.. now I drool over plant-based foods that I've grown to love just as much as I used to love meat during my days of being an omnivore.
Yup! It doesn't feel like real food for me.
Obviously "deliciousness" is subjective. Is that all your point is?
Is it possible that this wasn't "growing out of meat", but rather the plant-based alternatives simply were not good? Our bodies are evolved to depend on many nutrients we can only get from meats, so it's normal for the body to want meat. I think we should be focusing our energy on making the meat industry more sustainable and also finding better balances in our diets, for example instead of eating as much beef as we do, we could eat more chicken, fish, etc. Living entirely off of plants and artificial supplements to make up for lost nutrients does not seem like a very healthy way to live over many years...
@@fluffmiceter1846In my opinion, plant based alternatives can be just as tasty, but I will happily choose the inferior option sometimes for the greater benefit of others. And it's great that you think not eating meat doesn't seem like a healthy way to live long term but if you read the scientific literature on this, a vegan diet is just as healthy 💚
Hey there! Loove your videos. Can you do one on the new supplements used to reduce enteric fermentation in cows and how that impacts the sustainability of the beef produced.
Apologies for this trivial question that has nothing to do with the topic, but can anyone tell me what the cool looking text on the meat growing vats we see is a reference to?
One other important question that wasn't addressed in this video: how does the nutritional composition of vat grown meat compare to the natural version?
Realisticly there is no big difference. We only eat cells... and a bit fat... anyway while consuming meat. If the cells can survive, it is pretty much the same, or they would not be alive in the first place. Also, i don't see a real big future for this kindof meat anyway, its too specific and expensiv. Where it will shine is exactly in chicken-nuggets, as hamburger, as replacement for milk and cheese in 90% of the products. All that stuff.
it would probably be healthier since you can more easily control the amount of fat that's added and eliminate cholesterol. Also no pathogens so zero risk of getting food poisoning
protein wise it be basically identical, fat wise it can be varied. the main difference is the all micros (that has been studied and known to be important) need to be add as a direct to human supplement (which might not work as natural would) since a lot of meat nutritional vaule comes from external sources
Certainly interesting! I would definitely like to try it out if I could get my hands on it in the future
If current fake meat like Beyond (which is just ground up cheap commodities) is still more expensive than meat there is just no way lab meat can be competitive after adding all the lab grade tech, ultra refined inputs, unbelievably strict quality control, etc.
Also, people only look at the meat but not the inputs. A cow eating a mostly grass & silage diet is less net carbon intensive than extracting lab quality glucose/aminos from fertilizer intensive grain & soybeans (which ironically creates an even bigger mountain of silage to feed to cows).
Wow! That was actually far more optimistic than I thought it would be. I, too, fall into the meat paradox. It's great to hear the perspective of someone who is genuinely skeptical and has reasonably high critical expectations as opposed to either Vegans, or cultivated meat producers, both of which would be inclined to praise anything that wasn't utterly repulsive just because it advances their personal agenda. Thank you for your service! 😉
This is an awesome video, and the subject is something I have been thinking about a lot recently. You really hit the nail on the head. It's really unclear how this can be scaled up to fill the same position as the agricultural industry. Let's assume we get past the gross out factor of eating food grown in a vat, and that it's nutritionally complete, healthy, non-toxic (basically no conspiracy theories), how can, what is essentially the pharmaceutical industry, be scaled up in order to provide food for the entire world? And let's say we get past this, we are a very resilient and innovative species after all, what will be the ramifications of doing this? How will it affect agricultural regions? Will it put the millions of farmers, farmhands, businesses, supply chains that are built around agriculture out of the job? Will we have enough skilled labor to operate these food growing facilities? Will skilled labor be required? Can a common layman reasonably be taught to do these jobs or will they require a diploma? If we do build up this infrastructure, how resilient will it be to supply chain shocks, changes in the market, etc? This is completely uncharted territory, and it's unclear if we can rely on this industry for such a critical resource of food!
Not to mention... What happens to the many species we've essentially genetically engineered to _be_ food? Animals like cows bear essentially no resemblance to their pre-domestication selves, and if left to "go wild", they just die.
@@Chocomint_Queen Same as any other species? If we ever got to the point where it was not financially viable to raise livestock then the few who escape being butchered would need to either adapt to nature or die
As technology advances, old jobs disappear and jobs new jobs emerge. This has been shown throughout history many times. Furthermore, this would only effect the farmers that hold animals. We would still need to get our vegetables and wheat from farmers .
Most large scale factories have complicated ideas behind them, but the process is still caried out by common layman. I do not see why this would be different for bioreactors. As mentioned in the video, producing beer is (somewhat) similar and common layman are perfectly fine working in those factories.
@@luukr7293 You make good points, although I think that if we reach a point where we can accurately recreate a ribeye, veggies and staple crops won't be too far behind. And you definitely are not wrong about jobs changing, which is normal, but that the bar of entry is inherently higher for a job in a genetics facility as opposed to say a farmhand. I risk turning this into a political debate by saying this, but let's all keep a level head, but often low skill jobs like this are even occupied by illegal immigrants and migrants, what happens to those people whose lives depend on it? What happens to the people in Middle America whose identity and economies are centered around agriculture? What happens to John Deere and their thousands of employees building tractors? What happens to fertilizer production companies? Will all of these people from all of these differents industries, all of these different ethnic backgrounds, all of these different economic statuses, all of these different education levels have a place within the new system, and will the bar of entry be the same? This is what is unclear, will we stick the landing, or will we screw over 10s of millions of people who have been doing basically the same thing for all of human history?
6:12
This is the answer. The raw material usage for lab grown is insanely small, and the electrical grid is only going to get greener over time.
The potential cost floor of lab grown is so low it starts being feasible to make these setups portable and modular for pooper communities/countires to get balanced diets for far cheaper than they would otherwise, and with way lower carbon footprint
This also makes mass cattle cultivation not market competitive. No need to burn the amazon, all that land can be reforested
Great point, lab grown meat doesn’t only reduce the need for livestock, but it also reduces the need for habitat destruction.
Proposing lab meat for ‘poor communities’ is a slippery slope. You eat it!
@@lekudos
Ideally it's for everyone, an actual real meat becomes an occasional nice thing, like for Christmas or something.
On a long enough timeline, the artificial stuff starts tasting better than the real thing because it can be engineered to be perfect basically
@@Ryukachoo I just bristled at the thought that some people are proposing this as a solution for deprivation whilst the rest of us continue eating half kilo steaks from Costco. If you go to stores in poor communities, the contents of the food freezer is of such low quality already …. As I said, slippery slopes 💀
@@lekudos The poor quality is mostly result of factory farming methods. Lab grown meat has the potential to be way better for you for way less cost, since you skip trying to optimize growing an entire organism for slaughter, and go straight to just duplicating the cells.
This IS one of my favourite channels in CZcams. If you ever need a mathematician I'd be honoured to collaborate
As funny as it sounds, I'm all for lab-grown meat replacing traditional meat so long as it's capable of matching it in price, emissions, texture and flavour complexity. ..and I'm a butcher so this industry has the potential to end my career. Though for me my biggest concern is how those lab-grown cells interact with our own body. Mostly due to the potential cancer-like complications arising from them though this is more down to a lack of information on how each company handles the cells than paranoia.
3:45 I'm guessing that by FSB you mean FBS (Fetal Bovine Serum)? If so that was one of my big questions about the process. Thanks for answering it.
Yes, I was also confused. They indeed probably meant FBS.
Wow, I just realized this industry is at that magical point where someone makes one innovation that revolutionizes the market!
Think of how many people we credit with some big invention or process that changed an industry we rely on and made it a cornerstone of our daily lives.
This is when that happens! Sometime in the next decade, someone will come up with something that looks so common sense with hindsight that we'll wonder how we never thought of it before, and suddenly this will start to become a standardized and rapidly consumer-friendly market, changing the food industry forever! We'll look back on this video in like 30 years and laugh at how we couldn't see how obvious one particular solution was!
or it'll go the way of the "miracle" products Radium or DDT where someone discovers some part of the process is incredibly dangerous to us or the environment and it'll have a rapid collapse outside 3rd world countries.
I have high hopes for cultured meat.
It means that we no longer need to slaughter or hunt animals to eat meat or to feed meat-eating animals that we are caring for. It also means that the amount of animal agriculture can be scaled way down, as we would only need animal agriculture for the hopefully small market for butchered meat; and for milk, eggs, honey, wool, and other animal products that don't require the death of the animal; and to breed better specimens for new cell cultures to create different and better varieties of cultured meat. The animal agriculture that remains could be far more humane.
It might mean we can conserve land and water and reduce pollution, hopefully. It would mean we don't have to worry about the overuse of antibiotics in our meat, nor worry about animal borne diseases from the harvesting and eating of meat.
It might mean we can engineer the meat to have different tastes, smells, flavors, textures, behaviors, appearances, nutritional profiles (reducing unhealthy components and increasing healthy components), and other culinary and health conscious properties.
If it can be effectively scaled up while bringing the price down, it may even help alleviate world hunger.
Fun fact: we already do not need to slaughter or hunt animals to eat meat 💚
@@user-ef8kc4rv7n how so? Unless you're talking about amputation, that's an oxymoron
Out of curiosity, do any of your sources go into detail about the FBS alternatives?
I've always loved the idea of lab grown meat and super hoped for the process to be nailed down
Nowadays technology advances pretty quickly and this technology is very promising. Unless something terrible happens, I do think this is where the future lies
Secrecy also creates skepticism among providers so better deals are unconsidered.
It's true we have no idea what it will cost and whether people will be willing to pay the price. But my hope is that it remains viable, even if as a niche product, and that the technologies used to produce meat can then be used to produce other tissues (like hearts for the purposes of transplants).
My take on artificial meat is, that it just has to taste good. I don't really care what it is made of, mushrooms, vegetables, other proteins, or lab grown “real” meat. At the end, I want to eat something good, and if they make mushroom sausages that taste good (for me) and aren't more expensive, then I'm happy to buy those instead of killing animals. And if it doesn't taste exactly like real chicken breast, but I like the taste, then I'm also going to buy that.
Kronk want taste
You're gonna love the second video in this series...
I am very confused, but pleasantly surprised, from the Ithkuil labels on reactors 🤔
Glad I found this comment! Now we just need a hyper-specific English translation :D
Same
animal body is the environmentally most friendly way of cultivating animal cells
~80% of our meat consumption is basically over-seasoned textured protein. We could replace so much of that by vegan alternatives without much effort.
Lab meat is in a tough spot because it is too expensive to compete with soy & co. in the low-end meat replacement sector, and not good enough to compete with real meat in the high end sector.
I really hope that these problems can be solved. I don't even mind a slightly odder texture or a little less "juiciness".
3:47 FBS, probably. Fetal Bovine Serum.
Oops - thanks!
Full Points (I think) for using Edward Elric (FMA) when talking about assembling floating cells into coherent tissue! Or if I’m wrong… nothing to see here :). Thank you for the work and the content. Enjoyed it as always!
This was actually more positive than I was expecting. I really hope it does end up solving a lot of the current issues with meat agriculture but only time will tell
Artificial meat has to become much cheaper before it hits the stores. It must be produced at much higher quantities to get cheaper. And it must hit the stores before it is economically sound to increase production.
It's a chiken and egg problem.
how did you comment 3 hours ago???
@@Donuts_random_stuff Science
It's a matter of investment. A huge amount of money has to be gambled on this idea. If it works you get the next big thing. If not well, you lose your money. Exactly like Uber for example
@@Donuts_random_stuff To get the bang out of mu buck that I put forth on Patreon I always try to do a meaty comment.
Looks like this chicken and egg pun didn't land. Too much introduction. People taking my comment seriously...
A chain of grocery stores (or fast food restaurants) could invest in the production, if no one else will.
Even if it's slightly worse for the environment, it's still a win IMO if it tastes reasonable and can mitigate the chicken genocide. Factory farms are a level of cruelty I can barely fathom.
Especially if it's already better on water, land and chemicals usage. All the better if it produces less greenhouse gases on top, but all this is already good for the environment
Dude, i understand the sentiment, but global warming is quite a much bigger issue than animal cruelty. Those chickens wont be saved if this whole planet just goes up in flames
I think it is worth, greenhouse gases is only one of the problems of climate change
although the current political climate has practically reduced the climate problem into a single dimension with carbon emission
You can personally get around that guilt by buying local farm grown meat. There's websites that can ship the meat right to your door. Stores are already selling organic pasture raised chicken eggs, so you can buy those and know the chickens they came from are living happy lives.
If you just don't like the idea that an animal was murdered, there's not much to be done about that, but anywhere in the world you go animals are killing and eating other animals, so it's not like it's unusual.
All the living things require a healthy environment and time's running out for us to prevent permanent damage, so I prefer the environmental benefits. Sorry, chickens
I’m personally very excited for this to hit the market!
It will greatly reduce animal suffering in our world.
Does the broth which is used for cultivating meat an animal product?
I think its an important thing to have with veganism for people with health issues who cant be vegan
I always wonder if it's a culture thing or a mindset thing or something cuz like I've never felt a reason to feel bad about eating meat before and I still don't feel bad about it. But so many people lately seem to feel that way. I'm sure there's some anthropological or sociological or ethnological explanation for this but I'm too sleepy to think about that.
For me it was two things: first looking into actual cruelty with "factory" produced meat and trying to limit that by buying local, organic etc. Looking more into the science regarding animal consciousness (or lack thereof) and capacity to actually suffer and realizing that we don't "need" animal protein to prosper (high consumption definitely is detrimental) made me completely forego it. This took me 5 years or so to realize ... I also try to buy goods not produced in sweat shops etc. But you can only do so much before going crazy ...
No amount of consumption will solve overconsumption. Unfortunately lab grown meat and vegan/vegetarian solutions often imply even more consumption and industrialization. The key is, animals/meat do not pollute on their own. Animals exist in a natural cycle and only start to pollute when they're farmed industrially, which overproduces and generates incredible amounts of waste. As a consumer, your best avenue is to buy local meat, if you eat meat at all.
Likewise, carbon dioxide does not pollute on its own. Nature produces far more co2 than we can. However, the small amount of co2 we produce is enough to upset the balance and harm nature. The long-term systemic solution is to end the extraction of fossil fuels altogether, if not dismantling our profit-driven capitalistic system altogether.
Tldr: de-industrialization, a solarpunk energy system, and a low-waste "library" economy are the solutions. Not more industrialization, fossil fuels, and a proposed "shareholder capitalism" system with fast production rates, low quality, high waste, and uneven distribution.
At these scales, History has shown that capital costs almost don't matter. Operating costs do. If the equipment is expensive to maintain then it's not going to happen.
Along with the other reasons not to eat meat, I'd add factory farming causing horrible living conditions.
I never feel guilty. I need my protein
Finally someone with a brain
It's not like the cells are just lifeless building blocks either, those are alive too, just as plants are. No matter what one does, living always comes at the cost of something else alive. I really despise the discrimination.
@@commanderblargh6300 of course, every living thing eat other living things to survive. Humans aren't different.
The only advantage of this artificial meat is that it'd cruelty free.
I think it will become heavily subsidised and as expensive as the production is, we can't just ignore how expensive conventional meat is to produce either. Cost is one thing, but I think animal cruelty will also cause people to be more willing to spend more. I'm personally one of those half vegetarians because I love meat so much but If I can eat meat that is actually better for animals and hopefully the environment (we'll have to see the conslusions on that one, thought I think the 2400% is deffinitely research paid for by the meat industry) I'd love to forgo 'real' meat.
I'm vegan but very interested in this!
One question I have is about the nutritionL value of lab meet. Does it have the same Amino acid profile as real meat and does it contain vitamin b12?
I remember early to mid 2010s, I heard the idea of lab grown meat. I was excited hyped about it.
Now, I'm a bit worried about heading a society that government or the wealthy controls the food. I'm forced either to have Tofo or subpar quality meat. Meanwhile the wealthy and powerful would have farm grown meat.
It's pretty much already the case, I don't see how that would change significantly with lab meat
Meat giants like Cargill ($165 billion revenue 2022) control the market in the US.
What cottage industry or small-time ranch has the means to produce lab-grown meat at scale without being able to achieve the level of efficiency inherent to a larger installation? Worker co-ops would be a far more efficient way to arrange things
can't wait to have a chicken sized cube of chicken meat at the dinner table to share
The unholy meat obelisk has returned in prime form
Isn’t that already what could happen if you formed chicken nuggets into a cube mold instead of hand-shaping them?
@@tylerphuoc2653I worked at a accursed deli for 3 months, and yes it is.
This sums up my own thought about the subject as well. I don't eat meat for all of the reasons mentioned in this video, but if this industry could deliver on their promises I would consider eating it! Just doesn't make much sense if it turns out to be more resource intensive or emission heavy...
One small correction: it's FBS, fetal bovine serum, not FSB. That's the russian secret service i believe ;)
The arguments laid out in this video lead to a whole different conclusion for me. The fact that we can already do this for a price that is not that far from something reasonable makes me very hopeful that this will be a viable solution. There are so many companies working on a solution that it becomes improbable that none of them is scalable.
Similar for the carbon emissions. I put way more value in the lower estimates. With time, these processes will only get more efficient. So even if we're not at the lower estimate today, we will get closer and closer to it.
Im looking forward to it mainly for the humane angle.
Im a huge carnivore but if i can get that without something dying for me, I'll be happy.
The other interesting take on this is that cuts and qualities of meat that are really expensive compared to others may not have that problem in cultivated replicas, as, from what i can tell, printing a replica of a prime grade filet mignon vs a select chuck roast isn't likely to be much different in difficulty.
But we shall see!😊
You already can, I don't know if you've tried many meat alternatives lately but some are very good, better than meat even 💚
@@user-ef8kc4rv7n
I know, i worked on getting some of them out there.
Respectfully though,
None are as good let alone better than meat. Best thing I've found tastes like a convincing but still shitty hamburger... Like a hamburger i wouldn't eat even if it was real meat.
For the time being I will stick to the real thing.
I see little reason to think that eating meat itself is inhumane in some way. Humans (and millions of other animal species) have always been killing and eating other animals for survival. It is part of life and a normal piece of the food chain. Only in the current era do some humans in the world have the privilege to choose to live a vegan life.
If your issue is on the mistreatment of farm animals (which I do believe is a valid thing to care about), then a solution already exists, which is to buy meat from local farms where the animals were raised on a pasture and had a happy life. There's even websites that already exist where they can ship that meat right to your door.
Also a carnivore (though less so than I used to be) and would buy cultivated meat exclusively if available, price be damned. I think it's cool as hell. And I don't get the "ick" factor everyone is talking about--I get waaaay more of an "ick" factor thinking about my meat being sliced off of a dead animal than originating from a bioreactor in some clean, sanitary manufacturing facility.
@@JohnVance
Unfortunately a lot of people think "artificial=bad" so anything more human involved than they expect puts them off... Which is ironic since cooking is basically just chemistry experiments you can eat anyway XD.
I mean.. it's not a meat paradox .. it's just people being hypocritical and morally weak. ( is we are talking about taste)
Taste vs killing an animal is not a paradox.
Cultivated meat is mostly a moral thing for reducing harm, no? ( and of course profits because ...capitalists tendrils)
3:56 - It's actually FBS, which stands for Fetal Bovine Serum. FSB is the KGB descendant organization.
Its a new product still in early development. Luckily as more interest is generated costs with production will become much cheaper as they find new more efficient ways for each step. We saw a similar trend with solar power, which has become far more affordable than it was a few years ago. But things like this need as much of the original hype as they can get to get to that point. Maybe with less land needed for agriculture there will be more available for forests and natural habitat.
I would just try to electrocute the mush to make it contract
Use lightning on a dark & stormy night.
@brothermine2292 can't forget the candles and the ritual knife lol
I'm more of the mad witchdoctor than the mad scientist... although that's only like 51%49%
definitely interesting.
I work in a pharmaceutical company, and when we got a tour in the process developement, we were told, that in most cases if you are able to make it in 200 litre tanks, it isn´t that much harder to scale it further up to production scale. (I´m not a biologist that was just what was told to me). I am confident, that also the food industry will improve on this. And if they have a breakthrough, they probably can market it pretty good. just to compare it with the drug development, the meat will have the advantage that you can use the whole cells, which is much more then the actual active substance for medicine. also the demand will be much higher, so even more potential to scale up, and also to divide the research cost (which is the most expensive for new drugs). also for meat, you probably don´t have to research every few years for a completely new effect like you have to with medicine.
Another technology which might beat out lab-grown meat is animal products produced with Precision Fermentation. PF dairy products are already in stores under brand names like Brave Robot ice cream, Bored Cow animal free dairy milk, and Strive animal free dairy milk. They use the PF dairy proteins made by Perfect Day. There is also a PF cream cheese. PF cheese is to come.