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Limits to Growth for Precision Fermentation
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- čas přidán 2. 04. 2023
- With concerns mounting about the biodiversity crisis, precision fermentation and cultured meats offer an enticing solution.
Proponents argue that culturing mammalian cells and fermenting macronutrients with gene edited yeast can decrease the land footprint of agriculture by 1000 times all while eliminating animal cruelty.
Skeptics like Dr. Paul Wood question whether the Moore’s law style expectations of cost reductions apply to biological systems and the scalability of these technologies.
Will precision fermentation feed billions of new hungry mouths in Africa and Asia or remain a niche product for eco-conscious wealthy elites?
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My two cents: a cow in this sense is a ‘meat factory’ that has all the facilities for sanitation, nutrition, cleaning, structuring, seasoning etc etc built-in. In exchange, it is very inefficient in terms of energy and resource use and has all kinds of other negative features: feelings, a nervous system, production of shit etc.
But talking of prize: the cost of cattle farming doesn’t take into account the negative impact on climate and biodiversity. Right now there’s not even the slightest compensation for all the damage that’s being done.
Cattle are incredibly inefficient. Even without new technologies. For instance a kilo of beef takes over 1,700 litres of water to produce. A kilo of potatoes, about 30 litres of water. Milk is 1,100 litres of water. Half the world's ag lanc is used feeding livestock. The equivalent plant based balanced diet takes around a fifth of the land. Corpse based farming is bloody inefficient.
This reminds me of the talk about electric cars at the time tesla model s came to market. Or the talk we heard in the 90s when renewables started gaining grounds. Yes, this stuff is complex and very expensive. TODAY. But we‘re talking about the future right? All this doesn’t mean it’s not scalable.
A cow is 4% efficient at producing food while precision fermentation is 60% efficient. A pint of brave robot ice cream using PF at the grocery store costs $5 right now and that’s before industrial scaling.
Ah good deal, 5$ for a dollar of sugar that was NOT produced in a lab. LOL
@@-whackdIt's the whey protein that was made with brewing. Also, how expensive were electric car batteries 20 years ago. And how many cars were electric. And how much do they cost now and how many of the cars being sold are electric.
🤞🤞🤞Gentlemen, please lets keep walking. Eventually the technology will get better. See our jouney along history of humanity: from cooking fire we have arrived here. 🤞
Moore's law was never a law in the first place. It was just an observation about the semiconductor industry that remained true for 40-50 years. I hate that it is called a law as if it has any of the staying power that Newton's, Maxwell's, or the laws of thermodynamics provide. It would better be named "Moore's Observation"
It was marketing trick to persuade to buy product where Moore worked. Moore's law was modified several times. Good history of the term is on Asionometry's channel in this link czcams.com/video/nRJgvX6P8dI/video.html
True
Everyone knows what is meant by "law" in this case.
The interviewer mentions Moore’s Law, but actually Wright’s Law is the relevant law... and Wright’s Law continues to work quite well for predicting price declines in technologies.
So, they're talking about Moore's law when they should be talking about Wright's law. Cellular meat production will take 20 years to figure out. PF probably 5-7 years.
Nobody says Moore's Law applies here (or to solar for that matter). That's a misrepresentation. It's easy to knock down a straw man.
The argument that mammalian cells reproduce slowly is relevant to steak grown in a vat, but not to animal protein produced by micro-organisms.
This will not age well...
He’s getting moore’s law and rights law very mixed up in this video, moores law is generally only ever applied to transistor count on cpus, writes law is the modelling of technologies price decreases over time, not a good sign from a supposed expert
super interesting interview! As someone currently working in the industry (more familiar with cultivated meat) I really enjoyed the conversation. Once there is public and deep debate from a subject you can tell things are moving ;)
Once an equivalent amount of identical protein is the same cost as animal protein, then it matters. Until then, it only matters for processed food slaves who are looking for dyes or whatever garbage they eat in their diet. Most of PF has to do with dyes or even medical peptides/proteins.
I think this is a bit of a straw man Vs RePlanet: They compare Precision Fermentation to wind power, difficult but doable, and cell culture to fusion power, awaiting breakthroughs - Ergo RePlanet is mostly advocating for Precision Fermentation.
I think you need people with opposing views in the same discussion to be meaningful. A cow consumes 43 tons of grass and about 4 tons of water per year. It takes 2 years to mature a beef cow to produce just 0.5 ton of meat. In most Western economies, the dairy and beef industries are heavily subsidised. Additionally, Dairy, eggs, meat and fish use 85% of total Agricultural land to produce just 18% of global calorific food requirements. In doing so, these 4 industries generate 58% of agricultural GHG emissions.
35 minutes in and we're finally talking about Precision Fermentation. Yes - these things are expensive now. But cost curves and economies of scale ARE a thing - look at how cheap solar is now to just 10 years ago? When they scale up, the costs come down. As for the protein qualities - why can't they brew up a few different batches of yeasts that produce a few different proteins, and then mix them together after brewing? For fake steaks this might even be preferable. Imagine a 3d printer with a series of different sized tubes squirting layers of fat PF next to protein PF next to a differently textured PF. Indeed, food techs might even add in a few vegetable fibres to make it different textures - why does it HAVE to be just the one thing? Ice cream? That's just a treat. But mix up the alt-meat proteins and it's good. Here's the Helsinki lab making ravioli. czcams.com/video/6p8pEbt7kjE/video.html
Here are Bao buns - czcams.com/video/DsgpUxec5dY/video.html
It would've been helpful if he or you could've said a bit more about the material and energetic cost of this approach relative to the alternative, because while I'm sure the costs will be high for the foreseeable future, I don't find that very informative myself.
That aside, the main issue I have with this stems from your remarks about "high quality protein". So yeah, chicken is the least inefficient method of getting "high quality" protein, but that presupposes we need it. And the problem is that's just a livestock industry marketing term, which relies on the fallacy of composition. The reasoning behind it is that we have to help our bodies to synthesize flesh etc. by eating flesh (or dairy, eggs, etc.) whose composition most closely mimics our own. But why on earth do we think this? It's like thinking that we must feed cars co2+water because that's what comes out of the exhaust pipe. Our bodies do not need such help, because they've evolved to get most of their nutrients from plant matter, with occasional meat (including human meat, historically) and whatever else we can find. That said, the starting point is plants, because those are obviously not just adequate, but healthiest (which follows from the fact that herbivores naturally live much longer than carnivores -- because more antioxidant consumption, plus less oxidative stress from eating oxidant-heavy foods such as you find in animal bodies)..
So if we want to actually decouple, then one big way this could *technically* be done is simply by convincing the world's population to stop consuming and using animals, and to instead stick to a plant-based diet. The big problem of course being that animal product consumption has been viewed as a status marker for a few tens of thousands of years now, so it's hard to get rid of all of the cultural cachet attached to it. From this, you could say it follows that plant-based meat alternatives / mimickry is rational-ish (leaving aside the health issues associated with it) because we're never gonna get the agro/food corporations to go along with selling fewer-value-added, lower-revenue/profit products than the meat & dairy products that they are currently able to sell because of people's emotional and social attachments to consuming animals. Which is probably true in the short to medium term, especially so long as we don't do anything about capitalism as such. (Which your guest is completely fine with, given his inane remarks about selling africans oligopolist-patented animals and plants, etc.)
I never heard of fermenting protein before now. That's amazing.
Here's a link to the October '22 presentation in Ireland that Dr. Wood mentioned czcams.com/video/PMWz8ePwAQI/video.html
seemed to have forgot about when ev's and solar first came out, very expensive but in 10 years look where we are now.
The unintended cost of GHG emissions on society currently is around €48/ton of CO2e in weather disasters and health costs. A cow produces roughly 7.5 tons of CO2e in its 2-year life-cycle to produce 0.5 ton of meat. That's a cost of €720/ton or €0.72 / Kg that should be collected in the actual price on the shelf. This GHG tax should go into a fund to offset the real costs of GHG emissions on society. This follows the "user pays" principle in taxation. It would be good to have an economist in the debate.
Yeah, the costs per ton might be a bit higher by some estimates, but it should definitely be considered.
It would be really great if you could do a show with Dr. Wood and a proponent of precision fermentation so we could hear both the arguments and criticisms of both sides.
Thanks for that coversation as I was being misled. I am 82. In my short life I've seen 85% of small birds destroyed with roughly the same for animals & fish with sea food. Wild places at least 70% destroyed. Insects 97%. In chickens the taste went out of chickens from deep freezing in the 60's. If I ever allow myself chicken now it is what I imagine sh*t to taste like. The fate of domesticated animals is simply a torture. My father when a small-holder had chickens run around in our large field all day. That ended in 1951 when they all went into barns--at that time. Now it is vast concrete sheds. The male cattle are shot at point blank range. The drugs & penicillin et al going into animals threatens us (See 'The Coming Plague' by Laurie Garrett published 1994.) Simply, we are destroying our world for the living that includes us. I'm grateful for the knowledge but man. I accept various limited things can be done, but...
That was such an informative interview! Many thanks.
Precision Fermentation should be cheaper than soy beans within a few years as they scale up NOT in Silicon Valley - but in Helsinki Finland. That's the alternative meat stuff (NOT stem-cell grown - but the paste which can be made to taste like chicken.)
What is the paste made out of?
@@-whackdIf it is gonna taste like chicken, then chicken proteins. But they don't make it using chicken cells, as those are very difficult to grow. Instead you use yeast, which can of course grow on regular old sugar and some minerals.
Chris, thank you. Always great content.
Consider excising “again” as a transition or throat clearer. It’s an unnecessary crutch in your otherwise excellent prose. 😉
I am watching this (very informative) interview for the second time and my view has been ‘enriched’ by other information sources in the meantime. The message here is not optimistic in a sense, that the prospects are viewed with quite some scepticism. I understand that, because changing our food system, habits and expectation is not going to be easy.
That said, the climate problem is real, the biodiversity problem is real. So my take is that meat consumers better prepare for a ‘grim’ future? Most probably, circumstances will force uneasy choices upon us.
On the other side, I changed to ‘plant based milk’, in casu oat milk, which I really appreciate and can be produced at a much lower price point that (subsidised!) cow milk.
Oats don't produce milk. You are drinking chlorinated oat juice, the cheapest possible product we could feed to horses.
Lots of assumptions being made in his arguments. He might as well be arguing that, based on the very first automobiles, they would never become cost effective.
Ending animal cruelty by not having animals seems a strange way to go about it. Horse numbers fell rapidly when the work function was replaced by machines. Cow and pig numbers will probably fall a lot further as they are not cute and rideable like a horse.
The interviewee has not given any convincing argument against more robust technologies being developed or against the possibilities of economies of scale. He simply argues that if existing pharmacology technologies are used, precision fermentation foods will be unaffordable. He also made his living by producing pharmaceuticals for the live stock industry. Just maybe he is not completely impartial.
A solution to intermittent energy production from wind and solar is the pairing of such facilities with energy storage facilities such as large lithium-ion batteries, or better yet, if possible, kinetic energy storage in the form of artificial lakes at different elevations linked with a dam. I believe England is investing a lot into such kinetic storage facilities but anyone can double check this.
Burger King Germany just dropped their plant based burger to below the price of vorpse based burgers. He's already wrong.
Intermittent energy? Give us a break! If you are going to use renewable energy that means including battery storage in the mix. It is comments like this that undermine the case being made here. Clearly, energy will not be a significant barrier to this technology in the medium term.
Similarly, why was almost all the focus on cell cultivation and so little on precision fermentation for the production of dairy products, coffee, chocolate, various types of oil etc? These alone will disrupt the livestock industry and major sections of agriculture.
Similarly, isn't it possible that cell based meat technology will advance to overcome some of the current difficulties? The tone of the interview was one of raising problems without giving any thought to possible solutions. Thus the interviewer and interviewee fall into the opposite trap of those enthusiasts of these new food making technologies - looking at the subject from only one side.
We were starting to talk about producing food for even people in Africa, weren't we?
And then somehow converted into: but that's not steak.
Can we talk about basic human need kind of food production first?
We want to have a technology that is at least capable to create a much more sustainable source of food, not having a steak right away.
Good point - How do we get to 1,100 calories per day for avg adult female & 1,300 hundred calories per day for avg adult male with the appropriate nutrients?
You are wrong.
Tony Seba is right.
Interesting stuff, but it should be noted that Monbiot has been promoting yeast-based precision fermentation rather than lab-based meats, at least as far as I can tell.
Also, I dislike the takes ignoring the sentience of animals.
Thanks, very interesting. Re world human population hasn't that already peaked? Aren't Russia, China & the west facing serious demographic issues?
I think animal based, Precision Protein fermentation is a bit of a dead end. Yeast based plant Precision Protein fermentation however has a strong future as it has far less energy & feedstock problems than the animal based protein process. And the Yeast based fermentation can be done on an artisanal scale like, Craft brewing.
Can we get Elon to start a PF company?
Here is a prime example of limited imagination. A continuous fermentation process will easily exceed the volume a batch type this dude is talking about.
Haha...oh dear, the guy says at 52:22 that plant based milk is 2 to 3 times more expensive than cow's milk. NO that's completely incorrect, plant based milk cost similar to cow's milk and some plant base milk is actually cheaper than cow's milk. It's also the same with plant based meat, very similar in price to animal meat. I'm from Australia as well and anyone can check the prices of these products at our supermarkets Woolworths and Coles. Also, many, many taste tests have been done and most people can't taste the difference between plant meat and animal meat, in many cases people think the plant meat is the animal meat. His solution is to breed huge freak animals like chickens who already can't stand because their bodies are too heavy for their legs. He did not mention one word about the cruelty towards animals and also not one word about the environment and all the land, water and food that will be needed to accommodate all these huge freak animals he wants to breed. This old guy is what you call a "mad scientist"!!!
Where i am from and he is from and apparently you too its $1.60 liter for cow milk., $1.64 for soy milk and $2.76 for oat milk. it only goes up from there, $3.30/liter for almond milk. I've never met anyone who can't taste the differences between the various nut/grain/legume milks.
Mammoth meatloaf? I’d eat that in a New York minute. Years and years ago I read something about a group of Siberian explorers that came upon a young woolly mammoth carcass. It appeared to be relatively untouched by scavengers and frozen solid. After an autopsy study apparently they cooked up some steaks and chops and had a dinner, and declared it pretty darn good!
@@2509Ed Here in Australia you get expensive cow's milk and cheap cow's milk, you also get expensive plant-milk and cheap plant-milk...so it all evens out. Here in Aus you can get 1 liter of Almond milk for $2.00, that's pretty cheap. I personally buy Sanitarium So Good Regular Soy Milk and I'm glad to say this milk is extremely popular, its often sold out. I never said anything about the taste differences between plant and cow's "milk", I wrote people can't taste the differences between plant "MEAT" and animal "meat".
@@scottmedwid1818 Imagine if they start lab grown "human" meat, many people would love a piece of Musk, thinking it will make them smart or a piece of Cruise, thinking they will turn into rich movie stars. Most humans think eating a tiny docile animal like a chicken makes them strong and smart so just imagine a piece of Musk😂
@@prettynoose888 If plant based 'meat' tasted like real meat and was just as good nutritionally, more people would buy it. I personally am not prepared to pay the same prlce as real meat for some soy based concoction. Make it cheaper and I will though.
Bits arw cheap, atoms are expensive. Silicon valley thinks its just as easy to make money from atoms as it is from bits. Ive a theory that we massively overestimate our technological ability because of this effect.
The thing is, we cannot afford not switching from animal products to some artificial food production. So we cannot have the answer, there are limitations to growth of this and that.
Okay, yes, as was for every technology we have ever had. It just needs some really dedicated people to push those boundaries.
We just have to push on precision fermentation and such technologies as well.
"There are limits so stop thinking about it" is not a really good solution.
No! Stop taking away our food! Stop recommending a new type of food we have no idea if it will make us healthy long term. Quit experimenting with humans!