Recently tried an Impossible burger and nuggets and thought that if nobody told me it wasn’t meat, I’d have thought the patty was made out of a weird kind of meat, rather than make a connection with the taste and texture of plants. Honestly, I might not complain if that was the only kind of “meat” I could have for the rest of my life.
Well, maybe I’d miss bacon.
I’ve yet to find the opportunity to try lab-grown meat, but I for sure would like to try it out and don’t see much wrong with it as long as it’s sustainable, reasonably priced, and doesn’t have anything you wouldn’t expect in a normal piece of meat.
Also, with imitation and lab-grown options, I’d no longer have to deal with the disgust factor of handling raw meat (esp. the juices) or biting into gristle. I’ll happily devour a hot dog, but something about an unexpected bit of cartilage gives me a lingering sense of revulsion.
I would rather eat a meal that doesn’t pretend to be meat and just be it’s own tasty thing. I don’t need a steak, but I do want a delicious savory thing.
Completely unnecessary. Vegan chefs are wizards nowadays, and can show you how to make replacements for everything you need.
I make vsteak, and vchicken in large amounts about once per week, and use it in recipes. I can share the recipes I use if you like. I make vbacon about once per month, its a bit more labor intensive, but it tastes great.
Even apart from ethics, its 10x cheaper, and doesn’t contain any of the puss, blood, and feces that come in your meats currently.
My spouse and I are foodies and both vegetarian. We’ve had several chefs put together some absolutely incredible vegan/vegetarian dishes.
One of the chefs told us that being a plant-based chef has recently become much more respected in the culinary world. He thought we were at the start of a plant-based revolution in the culinary world. Younger folks are reducing meat consumption more than any previous generation, and there are beginning to be a lot of dedicated vegetarian/vegan restaurants popping up in most medium to large cities.
They’re good for cravings, and absolutely help keep cultural foods alive even when going vegan. However, these days I’m very tofu-pilled (and tempeh-pilled), and don’t really rely on imitation meat.
Existing meat substitutes are so, so much better than they were when I first gave up meat.
Lab-growing is really hard to make work, since muscle just doesn’t like to develop that way, and solves a problem that now barely exists because of the plant-based substitutes.
I don’t like to eat meat, so I also don’t like to eat things that remind me of meat.
I want plants that feel taste and smell like plants, please.
Same. What has been really disappointing for me is that a lot of places where my only option used to be a black bean burger have now replaced that with an impossible or beyond burger. It’s great for people who are trying to cut back on meat consumption so I like that they exist but please stop replacing my black bean burgers!
Which is a perfectly reasonable and valid preference
I personally like the taste of meat, but would prefer eating plants. Meat replacements are perfect for me
I swear people would rather spend a fortune developing sci-fi meat than spend pennies on beans and peas.
Have you tried mushroom bacon? I havent, but seems like an alternative.
They were really helpful in my transition into Vegetarianism. When I first became vegetarian, I pretty frequently craved meat, Impossible/Beyond meat alternatives were great for those times.
Pretty quickly the cravings lessened, after a few months I rarely craved meat at all.
Almost 5 years later, I crave something meaty maybe 3 times a year. Sometimes I want a heavy savory burger during the summer. Impossible meat patties are great for that.
They are also useful for entertaining family and friends who still eat meat. I’ve cooked vegetarian burgers, brats, breakfast sausages, etc. And most people give them pretty rave reviews. I even have had some family members say “I didn’t know you are eating meat again.” because the taste/smell was so close, they thought it was real meat I was cooking.
I can’t speak for lab meat, but it would be pretty cool if we were able to grow authentic meat from cell cultures that were acquired ethically, like painlessly from already dying/dead animals.
At this point, I can’t see myself ever going back to even totally ethically synthetic meats, I just don’t have a strong taste for it anymore. I prefer the health benifits I get from eating cleaner anyways.
I do wish they had a really good Impossible fish, I still often miss a hearty fish and chips with fresh tartar sauce and nice balsamic vinegar dip.
Im game as long as the taste is good and the price is competitive (currently it would have to be the lowest price but if my situation changes I would pay a bit extra but not twice as much. well unless my circumstances changed enough for the spleurge). Im not sure if its impossible or beyond but I have had the bk plant one and the white castle. Both were fine especially in comparison to the fast food places regular fair. For those places I could see taking the plant based on just on taste as their regular burgers sorta suck.
if they were cheaper and with near same nutrition, what’s there to not like? thing is that they’re just not economically viable atm.
Lab grown meat still requires live animals. You still need to collect stem cells to start a culture and you also need fetal bovine serum (blood plasma from baby cows) to keep the cells healthy.
We currently DO NOT have a way to culture mammalian cells without animal blood plasma. We currently DO NOT have a way of infinitely culturing mammalian biomass from a single cell sample. So lab grown meat still needs animals to be raised in captivity and slaughtered, just fewer. It’s not vegan for that reason and won’t be for the foreseeable future unless massive breakthroughs happen in multiple different fields.
IMO a better path to explore would just be to figure out which exact chemicals give meat their flavour and directly synthesize them from raw materials. Have something like a completely artificial bacon powder you can add to a vegan protein source and completely cut out anything to do with animals. We can make every other scent and flavour artificially, why not meat? And it’s not even that hard, a science YouTuber can do it.
I’d like to experiment more of those “not really” vegetable meats, but they’re expensive. Like, the price for 300g is what I’d pay for 1kg of pork sirloin
If they’re tasty, no less unhealthy, and affordable, I’ll eat ’em. Grown muscle tissue isn’t connected to a nervous system, never mind a brain. They’re no more “animal” than tofu as far as I’m concerned.
But I can think of a couple of major likely problems:
- They’ll probably still require more resources (energy, water, etc.) to produce than plants, so I’d probably limit my consumption.
- Given the history of capitalism and the meat industry, I’d be suspicious of them still harming animals behind the curtain somewhere, somehow. The industry ought to be heavily regulated to ensure they aren’t doing that, but again, history shows that under late capitalism they probably won’t be.
no less unhealthy
Yeah, given the history of capitalism, that will not happen. Look, they even made real meat unhealthy just to increase the profit (meat “yield” from animal), with lab-grown meat they would cut corners even further.
Chickens we are given today weight at least 5 times more than chicken 50 years ago (or “heritage breed”) and reach that weight in 6 weeks vs a year. To even buy a heritage breed chicken you need to have time, money and know-how, and you’re still likely to get just a 100 days old chicken.
I can’t even predict how they will enshittify lab-grown meat if it’s ever perfected.
I’m very much not up-to-date on the lab grown meat industry (so take this with a grain of salt), but I have done cell culture.
There’s a reason most scifi with food grown in vats references bacteria, yeast, and algae. Single celled organisms have to be relatively self sufficient. You can grow more yeast/bacteria by feeding plain sugar to it. There are other nutrients eventually needed, but they can be given in simple forms (e.g., oxygen, inorganic salts, etc.) that you can isolate or create through simple chemistry alone.
Vertebrate cells are part of a highly complex system where they require sugars/salts/etc, but also growth factors, antibodies, and a whole host of other proteins, fats, steroids, etc. Some of those can be created in a lab with chemistry or special bacteria/yeast, but for the most part, scientists use fetal bovine serum. It’s a byproduct of slaughtering pregnant cattle, and it contains a lot of those things that are just too hard to create otherwise.
Cells also need to be given the right niche do grow and differentiate into the target cell type, so muscle needs to exercise, arteries need pulsatile fluid flow, nerves need electrical signals, etc. Without an immune system, everything needs to be done in a sterile environment.
All of that adds up to an ecological footprint that’s extremely difficult to reduce below the natural product.
Lab grown muscles don’t need exercise, nor do they need arteries or nervous systems
Your conclusion is simply wrong. Much of the resource requirements in a natural product is the non-muscle portions of the animal, and most importantly the cost of keeping all those cells alive until slaughter
It’s incredibly easy to reduce the ecological footprint, because most of it is not necessary for lab grown meat
I, personally, have grown muscle tissue in a laboratory environment, so I know what it takes to actually grow muscle tissue. What I’m not familiar with is what the lab-grown meat industry practices are, but I just looked into it briefly.
There are 2 companies currently with approval to sell a lab-grown meat product in the US: Upside Foods and Good Meat.
Both sell chicken. Upside Food’s process is outlined in their FDA submission. They specifically state: “several media protein components (e.g., bovine serum albumin, growth factors) are required for sustaining cell viability and growth during the culture process” i.e., they rely on albumin from cattle like I suspected.
Unfortunately, since the “creation of chicken cells” is FDA regulated, but “production of chicken meat” is USDA regulated, that document doesn’t actually go into detail on how the cells are turned into the final product. This Wired article, however, says that they are basically just laying out sheets of the cells, and then manually stacking them to give some structure, which is not a scalable solution. Also, it seems like they are somewhat falling apart as a company not that they are running out of VC money. It looks like they are also trying to pivot into producing some sort of primarily plant based sausage with a little chicken cells thrown in. I’m assuming that’s a last gasp to produce something profitable.
Good Meats, on the other hand, I can’t find as much information on. The equivalent FDA document is on the other side of a link that seems broken. According to what they publish on their site, they are essentially vat growing cells, straining them off, and then extruding them into a shape.
In both cases, I don’t think it’s accurate to call the product “meat” since the cells will not have the structure of muscle cells (long strands), and there isn’t any tissue organization or adhesion to an extracellular matrix. It’s more of a pate even though they called a fillet.
The ecological footprint of both of the companies is greater than just conventional chicken production. I know this because both websites try really carefully to make it seem like they are better, but they can’t say that they are.
Upside foods phrases all of their claims as “what if we could do x, y, and z?” Rather than saying that they can do it. Good Meats similarly has an FAQ of “is it better than conventional?” and their response is “we believe it will be”.
I’m all for it.
Gimme that vat grown cloned shit. I don’t care. Meat is meat. If my guts recognize it as protein then that’s all that matters.
If I had my druthers I’d get rid of industrial meat farming entirely. It is a major contributor to climate change. Plus all the death involved.
And while I was at it I’d end industrial farming all together. We could convert a state or 2 worth of farmland into hydroponic and feed the world. Instead we engineer scarcity and guarantee starvation for profit. It’s fuckin disgusting.
I’d love a future where our food was about being nutritious and satisfying, while being ethically sourced and produced.
The problems we have only exist because capitalism demands ever increasing profits.
I don’t like fast food, beyond/impossible meat is factory produced slop. They even made a South Park episode about it.
Also, with imitation and lab-grown options, I’d no longer have to deal with the disgust factor of handling raw meat (esp. the juices)
Could it be you were never taught to respect the animals we eat? I find that common in people who grew up in big cities / never spent time in the countryside / are young enough to have never seen a pig being dismantled / never fished.
My another point against lab grown meat is that so far any time we tried to manufacture food, within 30 years it turned out to be very bad for us (e.g. obesity epidemic is mainly caused by UPF).
