> Then, suddenly, the nausea hit... The problem was not the flavor, not the texture, but the knowing. The Knowing. Knowing about the fat tank, about the sticky white substance...

I feel like squeamish people are probably not the best ones to write about novel meat products...

Man, I'm so glad I don't trade stocks.

I was so convinced that these meatless meats were going to be the next big thing.

One thing I think they missed out on was getting to 'close enough' and 'much cheaper' and then just pivoting.

Like, why stay with simulating the 5 or so animals we harvest? Just go off and make up new ones!

Like, here's a jackalope burger, or a unicorn burger or something. Tie into marketing!

"Exclusive to BurgerKing, the Iron Man 5 burger! Now through August 29th only!"

Put in some strange spices, vary the texture, give it a red and gold swirl, let the imagination run wild.

Can you imagine what business a Spiderman burger patty or sausage link would do? K-Pop demon hunters branded chicken-ish nugget like things?

I worked in this industry for almost five years. Even the “fermented” alternative meats (bacterial, fungal cell culture) which were basically a drop-in fit with existing large scale fermentation plants were still not cost-competitive with chicken. Some were on par with beef if you made some hand-wavy assumptions about scale.

The killer was usually the downstream processing required to clean out off-flavors and colors, which was required to get even a passable product (these are just protein powder fillers at this point, not whole cuts), but ballooned CapEx and cut yield such that cost went back up to like, A5 Wagyu levels.

I’ve sat in the awkward tasting sessions the author describes, and they’re all the same. The attendees muster up a “that’s pretty good” - but we all know nobody would ever choose to buy this unless they were forced to.

Now that I’ve been out of it for a while, it’s pretty obvious to me what the problems are. Cost, obviously. Taste and texture simply aren’t there. And “the knowing” is real. I never got over imagining the whole factory process involved in the production. I’m sure vegans would say the same about animal farming, though. So my conclusion was, the only way this technology becomes relevant is if people are forced to use it. And that’s either because you’re cruelty-free by choice (small fraction of the population), or because the cost of meat suddenly skyrockets, which today, is not looking that likely. Keep in mind as well that meat costs would likely be driven by feed costs in such a scenario, which also impacts cultivated meat. So it’s ultimately a process efficiency play, and you’re competing against eons of evolution.

it is sad how the lobbying of old evil industries like tobacco and animal-killing can convince the politicians and the public to outlaw and demonize their less-evil competition like vaping and lab-grown meat to make sure to hold on to the status quo.

but why write more than 7000 words to communicate a simple point (lab-grown meat was promised 1-2 decades ago but failed to arrive and won't arrive in the foreseeable future)?

I'm a bit surprised that we got disembodied intelligence before we got deathless meat. If you'd told me in the year 2000 that one of these would happen, I'd have put my money on the meat.

I had long given up on lab-grown meat. It started feeling like fusion, always around the corner, but never there (or at least not in an affordable way).

What replaced almost all ground beef (except in burgers) for me, was Jackfruit. More specifically, the combination 90% pea protein, 10% jackfruit. Granules that can be rehydrated with boiling water in 2 minutes, price competitive with discounter mince, no extra ingredients, no high carb count. It has a good texture and tastes mostly like whatever you season it with.

Turns out that nature is a lot more efficient at producing meat; I don’t think this will change for a while, if ever.

Bugs for chickens, grasses/grains for cattle and omnivorous pigs are their own kind of bio-reactor…

Would it make the meat industry more ethical if happy drugs were made available to animals? If I had to choose between a meaningful (even if I didn’t know it when living), blissful unnatural life and none at all, I’d choose the former.

It’s the negative affect and suffering (stress, pain, boredom etc) that is the bad part of eating animals.

(I think— I know others have thought more than I on this topic)

It just seems like an easier tech solution might be promising

Why eat meat at all is the big question? Impossible and Beyond satisfy the taste and craving without the nastiness.

There might not be much of a market for it. Vegetarians and vegans are used to industrially processed protein substitutes but most of them don't really want meat and its flavor. In contrast, many non-vegetarians want natural high-quality products from real animals, they don't want to eat industrially processed lab meat. A market would have been low-cost ultra-processed meat products but for that it seems that lab grown meat is too expensive.

This can still change though, if the products of animal farming were to become more expensive and with higher mandatory quality standards, as they in my opinion should be.

People have fetishized animals so much that creating synthetic goop in the form of flesh somehow got billions in founding. Omnivores eat meat, even herbivores do it sometimes, get over it.

I think the dream will never die, but it might go underground for another turn.

Problem was that broadly there's two categories to compete in. "Superior product" , and "cheaper". the last round of artificial meat was neither.

I genuinely believe that eventually we'll have a proper "biological revolution". much like many inorganic technical revolutions have shaped the world (AI being one of the most recent) I think we'll have a breakthrough that opens the doors to the kinds of biological technologies from science fiction.

At that stage I would anticipate an assault on both categories. Ground beef/chicken/pork of sufficient quality that undercuts factory farmed meat. But also superior products. the best wagyu in the world is just tissue, a collection of cells. I can certainly imagine a future where chunks of meat at that quality or even better roll out of vats. softer and more marbled than any real meat because it's not limited by the conditions of being grown within a functional animal.

And when it's better or cheaper people will buy it, and squeamishness will abate as it becomes normalized. that the meat may be more humane will be a nice value add but never enough to prop up the product itself.

To a large extent it's probably explainable through meat industry lobbyism and shadow campaigns over the years.

I was hoping for Deathless Meat [1] Looks like this does not happen anytime soon.

[1] see https://www.daniel-suarez.com/changeagentsynopsis.html

Even if I very much hope to live to see a profitable production of animal proteins without growing and killing animals, I do not believe that there is the slightest chance that this approach, of the "lab-grown meat" will ever succeed to produce meat that is tasty and cheaper than e.g. chicken breast.

In the long term, the only way to produce artificial meat that looks like natural meat, but is cheaper, would be to create a a genetically-engineered multicellular organism, derived from some fungus, which would feed like a fungus, but which would grow some parts containing muscle tissue, instead of growing mushrooms.

In the short term, there already exists the technology to produce protein powder with the same composition as natural whey protein concentrate or as egg-white powder, but obtained from a culture of some genetically-modified strains of the fungus Trichoderma, which have been modified to secrete the desired animal protein, instead of an enzyme that is secreted by the unmodified strains.

There exist some startups that hope to eventually sell such fungus-produced animal protein powders, initially as ingredients for industrial food processing. Unlike "lab-grown meat", this technology has the potential to achieve a lower cost than the protein powders made from cow milk or chicken eggs.

For some people, like myself, the availability of such a protein powder as a cooking ingredient would be enough to eliminate their dependency of any natural animal protein sources.

I have eaten only proteins from vegetable sources for about 4 years, but eventually I gave up, because that forced too rigid constraints in what I could eat without exceeding the calories threshold that would make me gain weight rapidly and without exceeding the cost of a diet including meat, while also taking too much of my time with plant protein extraction at home, because the commercial plant protein concentrates are much more expensive than meat, so I do not consider their use acceptable.

So now I still eat vegan food that I cook myself, but when cooking certain dishes I enhance their protein content with whey protein.

Thus for me whey protein from a fungal culture would already be enough, but for those who want the taste of meat without killing an animal, that is much farther in the future, after we will understand much better the relationship between genome and multicellular growth and morphogenesis.

(This reminded me why I stopped reading magazines: they have low information density. They are more creative writing, journaling rather than terse and factual)

My take away on the answer to the headline question is:

Currently the lab grown meat is too expensive and not good tasting enough to compete with real meat and plant based alternatives exist so - not it’s time yet.

- you can thank tyson foods and their allies for crushing the entire industry

I eat meat and like it, but I also feel kind of sorry for cows, sheep, pigs, chickens etc.

I was initially positive about lab grown meat, but then you realise that Kraft Foods or someone will get hold of it and turn it into the most unhealthy slop you could imagine.

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