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the only reason i'd have an issue with it is because of the markup on most items like this (looking in your direction beyond and morningstar).
if they can have a sustainable and ethical method of creating food then it should be free to everyone who needs it.
Potatoes aren't even free so I doubt that is happening.
Cheaper food would be a good start, potatoes and rice are incredibly cheap foods.
Lab grown food is legitimately super expensive to make though.
When I got a playstation 2, my stepfather was amazed it had a blue led. They were crazy expensive just a few years earlier and this console just used one for no real reason other than it looked good.
Yeah, and when that price comes we can have that discussion.
Just saying, don't be so pessimistic. I'd definitely try it. Who knows what the future has for us
Oh I'll eat it once I can afford it, I have no problem with that.
At least in the US I'd say it's because the government pumps billions and billions in subsidies to the different farm sectors (70+ billion a year for beef alone). The products you mentioned don't get that funding and don't sell the volume either.
The tricky part of lab grown meat is you need to keep it from being infected.
Keep the factory perfectly sterile.
Any time a vat is colonised by fungi or bacteria or a virus its contents would have to be dumped and the equipment sterilised
That's going to be expensive.
It will need feedstock. It will produce waste CO2
Meanwhile a cow has an immune system and eats low quality grass.
Lab meat will not be able to compete with field grown meat
I'll bet dimes to dollars that it's not that hard to turn grass into labmeat-consumable nutrients. Cows use bacteria to digest grass, anyway, and enzymes are usually pretty easy to make in a lab, too.
IMO the biggest customers for this once it reaches parity with real meat for cost and quality will be companies like McDonalds, Sysco and other companies that manufacture foods in biblical quantities. Once they can save money by doing it, they absolutely will and once they start putting their level of investment into the tech, it will advance very rapidly.
They'll still sell regular meat, the lab meat burger will just be ten times the price
Its possible they will open with that, "cruelty free cultured beef" or some buzz term that sounds better than lab grown. But beyond that think about it on a McDonalds level industrial scale. If they can make each pattie for just 1c less than real beef and they make 2.36 Billion burgers a year...
With real beef they are still at the mercy of weather, diseases running through herds, they have to move the stock, slaughter it, process the carcasses then process the meat. Shouldering the costs and losses the whole way in their margins.
If they can get it to work at sufficient scale McDonalds can build a "lab" with a pattie factory attatched, hell if they can they will grow it pattie shaped. They know "lab grown" isnt a selling point yet, they wont shout it from the rooftops.
I'm imagining the terrible they'll have keeping the factory absolutely sterile, since it won't have an immune system
On the other hand they'll have to make some pretty good medical advances, for example synthetic blood, unless they can also grow bones and marrow
Milk factories already have this solved.
This will not hold anything back, keeping an entire production line sterile is not a big problem.
People get sick drinking raw milk
Large milk factories don't generally output raw milk.
No, to sterilize it they pasteurize the milk. If you use that process on meat you turn it grey
It is the other way around.
Milk comes in contaminated and you have to kill the existing bugs.
With this process, it starts out by killing off everything on the equipment with heat treatment, you then grow your sterile "meat" in a sterile environment.