Dutch firm Meatable can turn pig stem cells into sausages 60 times faster than farmers can rear pigs.
Meatable can now transform cultivated cells into sausages in a record four days
Technically kosher because there's no cloven hooves?
I culture cells for a living. Not that these are the only ways, but the most common and effective ways to grow cells in the lab is to add either FBS (fetal bovine serum) or BSA (bovine serum albumin) to the culture media. Currently we don't mass produce BSA in an animal free manner and FBS is by nature an animal product. Granted, that the products of one animal may in fact allow manufacturers produce more than enough 'animal-free meat' to overcome this but I haven't seen any numbers. I'm interested in hearing more about these techniques going forward and in determining if animal-free products can really be produced animal free.
Do you use Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS) to make your meat?
No, for a simple reason: we’re committed to making meat without causing any harm at all to animals. So we’ve developed a production process that doesn’t require FBS.
That's what they say.
A man of culture I see
I culture cells for a living.
Sorry, this is all my addled GenX brain could think of when I read that.
😁
Asking the real questions!
Yes, very Kosher.
source: porky the pig
Sausage seems like the perfect entry point for this technology. People don't really care what goes in them as long as it tastes good. It's also a lot more forgiving from a texture perspective. It would even be feasible to expand to more exotic sausages like pheasant or alligator.
I know i'm in a significant minority, but I care a great deal what goes in processed pork products (or rather, my gut cares). I've yet to pin down which "preservative" commonly used in pork/pork-like products I'm allergic to, but I have a serious problem with even Kosher Hot dogs.
Basically, if its not fresh homemade bratwurst or sausage, I just can't eat it.
I'm sure that, if these methods continue to become more viable than their livestock counterparts, then the need to use at least some preservatives will decrease... hopefully.
Man, that's gotta suck. Not knowing exactly what's causing the problem can mean it being a problem unexpectedly with other things.
One problem I've noticed with currently available meat alternatives is that they are even more processed than real meat.
Some ideas you've probably already considered:
It’s also a lot more forgiving from a texture perspective.
This is also why I see milk and eggs being easier to develop. Non-animal dairy actually already exists (see: Perfect Day Foods), though I've only seen it in a few products.
You have to compete with plant based sausages though which, unless some big breakthrough happens, will be much cheaper. They'll also probably taste pretty similar cause this is only generating cells, they'll have to add in a bunch of other artificial stuff like heme to make it taste like a sausage at which point I'm not sure if people could taste the difference between animal cells and plant cells as the base.
As someone who really enjoys meat but tries to eat vegetarian (and does so 99% of the time), I can't say that I've ever been impressed by the taste of a non-meat sausage. Every single one I've had has left me wishing I'd just had falafel instead. Fortunately falafel is delicious and cheap
Notably, though, vegetarian haggis - which is essentially just a large sausage - is usually pretty damn good. I have no idea why it seems to end up differently. Maybe because haggis depends less on the meat flavour in the first place?
The big difference will be if they can generate fat cells too.
People don't really care what goes in them as long as it tastes good.
American, I presume?
Bingo!
I'm skeptical. It's been really picking hard to get those things to grow in a vat. This would be a huge breakthrough, and popsci has a way of leaving out critical, fatal details.
Sustainable sources of real meat without killing animals are very welcome! Good luck to them because killing things to eat meat is the worst.
My hope is that these alternative meat industries also factor in job creation opportunities for people who are working in conventional meat production right now—if there’s populist pressure towards moving for more lucrative and safer jobs in lab-manufactured meats, that would be help reduce pressure from farm industry lobbyists, I think.
But the above is a secondary goal (and maybe the responsibility of another party), and shouldn’t distract from the primary goal of researching methods to create sustainable, cruelty-free lab-manufactured meats!
people who are working in conventional meat production right now
The industry is ripe with conditions that at least approximate human trafficking and anything lab-grown sounds like basically completely automated, and where it isn't you need highly skilled professionals. Not of the "is dexterous and can learn to make a clean cut fast" kind, but of the "degree in cell biology" kind.
Jobs for people without advanced education are getting rarer and rarer, that isn't going to change, and don't look to industry to change that they have the exact opposite incentive. If, OTOH, you introduce something like an UBI soon you'll have a gazillion people getting into pottery or knife or furniture making or whatnot, again doing actual crafts because it's economically feasible because you don't have to sell your stuff for prices only rich people can afford just to make a living.
Honestly you will not need a college degree to run a bioreactor. It won't be automated because it'll consist of cleaning, taking out the outputs and refilling the inputs. You do for inventing the reactor, but not for running it.
Whoever's overseeing many of them will need a degree, but labor will mostly still be labor.
If, OTOH, you introduce something like an UBI soon you’ll have a gazillion people getting into pottery or knife or furniture making or whatnot, again doing actual crafts because it’s economically feasible because you don’t have to sell your stuff for prices only rich people can afford just to make a living.
Fair point. If I’d had the time for it, I’d be encouraging or supporting my local representatives for working on this.
Real basic question first: where are they getting all those stem cells?
Here’s what they say on their site: https://meatable.com/
I couldn’t find the exact procedure details.
Than you have to wait a bit. At this juncture in time, vegan alternatives have yet to gain popularity, and those are mashed plants. This is quite a step up. If you feel like making a difference don't wait for this and reduce the .eat consumption altogether regardless of its origin.
This sounds like good news but what I don't want is one big corporation replacing hundreds/thousands of worldwide farmers and having total control over the cost of selling this to consumers.
Most of the production in the us already comes from 2-3 giant corporate farms. It is simply more effeciant.
Those farms receive immense subsidies as well. No, it's not efficient, it's just what the US economic system produces.
We do have a number of excellent meat alternatives now, which use relatively simple processing steps and legumes, wheat etc. as base material.
As such, I imagine, they will remain cheaper than lab-grown meat and if we can get past people's reservations with them, I feel like they would offer a much more direct path for farmers to get paid, as well as the opportunity for various smaller companies to compete in doing that processing.
I've been waiting for that for so long. Just hope governments and people give it a fair chance instead of jumping rashly negative conclusions just because it is lab grown. So is beer, and cheese, and most other things we consume.
I mean, with modern sausages, it's mostly trash or overpriced. They taste like they have 5% meat, 95% sawdust.
No idea where you get your sausages but look elsewhere
Italy's politicians in a fantastically backward and utterly brain farted move has made "synthetic meat" outlaw, for study, production, sale and consume, like already some months ago, just to please the local (read: national) farmers lobby. Or at least they adverised as they did... forgive me I kinda lost hope and interst as well.
Gotta love the totally-not-neofascist Meloni government :(
I like the idea, and I hope it scales to be significantly cheaper than murder sausage
Is that what you call your penis now?
hot
OK, but how does it taste?
Sausage is smart since you can get away with a lot of textural sins, and it's already expected to be packed with sodium.
Follow-up questions will also include price.
I mean it also heavily depends on the exact version of sausage. We already have fake Mortadella made from peas (I think) which I can not (or barely) tell apart from the real thing. And at the other end of the sausage spectrum, Chorizo or Sujuk have enough spices, paprika and/or garlic and cumin in it so you can probably hide a lot of stuff instead of pork in it. Though I haven't yet found a fake version of those which I liked. And sometimes my German nature gets in the way. I've had sausage abroad. And some people put actual ground-up pigs in there and the product still doesn't taste of anything I'd call sausage. I also had those british-style breakfast sausages with a really weird consistency. It's really quite some variety with sausage, already. And I still need a good plant based alternative to Salami and pepperoni on pizza.
give me vegan-friendly bacon and I'm in. Sausage is easy.
Properly mixing up fat and meat to make something like pork bellies is really really had.
Fantastic. I can't wait to have cruelty free meat products
Still won't stop the "alpha male" types from hating it because they base their entire personality around doing what they think wi make other people mad.
This won't stop douchebags from being douchebags?
What the fuck does this have to do with the article?
the entire concept implies a way to eat meat without having to slaughter animals.
I'm not exactly what you would call concerned about meat as a food source. I'm fine with it. But anything that can break the need for industrial farming is a damn good thing imo.
I'm eager for a good product to come to market so I can at least try it. So far, there hasn't been one that's available that's priced well enough to be a viable choice, nor that matches expectations of taste. Textures have gotten good though.
But I think a sausage format is a great place for cultured meats to break into because there's a wide range of ingredients with different flavors already. We're used to sausages being fairly varied in taste and texture, so adding a new type is less of a "new food" barrier. Tbh though, it's gotta be better than veggie sausages, those are pretty meh at best.
This stuff was basically ready to go minus scaling up two decades ago. They were still working on adding marbling and texture into steaks that could fool you in a blind test, but amazed it’s taken this long to get to sausages.
I think you got your timing wrong. The first prototype of cultured meat was presented 2013 and costed about 250.000 € back then. "Minus scaling up" was and is a pretty big issue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/05/world-first-synthetic-hamburger-mouth-feel
Ok but how long does it take to get the stemcells
Very relevant question that the article doesn’t answer unfortunately.
Just copying my answer from above. Not to say that this is what they're doing for sure, but generally stem cell cultures these days are sourced once then replicated forever.
or does the pig, that takes 60 times longer to grow give you 10000x the meat?
Wait until pig cancer cells turn into sausages 90 times faster
You've read much Margaret Atwood, then?
Uhh. That's meaningless? What's the energy/resource usage comparison.
Every one of these claims so far has been 100% Elon Musk style “FSD is ready to ship right now in 2017” kinds of claims.
There was a great article in the New Yorker (or one of those style mags) a month or so ago that just ripped the industry apart about the billions of dollars spent on products that were overhyped and never shipped. I know that we’re feeling the pain of contraction right now, but we were dumping buckets of money into ideas that were not vetted - it was like the late 90s.
So, like with autopilot for cars, I will believe it when I see it.
Only meaningless on one scale. It seems like a huge improvement on the animal cruelty scale.
If they used human stem cells, cannibalism? Maybe. Tasty? Probably.
Soylent Sausage. Long Pig, Short Links!
Does this mean no more plastic fed to pigs?
Rednecks on Facebook are already getting butthurt about this like this and asking lab grown meat to be banned
They're going on about stuff like cancer or whatever
okay, but what's the resource consumption like? that's the major issue with meat farming - it takes all the resources necessary to grow food for the animals, and also all the resources necessary to keep and grow the animals themselves. If you need more meat in the same timeframe you can always just raise more pigs.
Quick search shows that it is better from a resource standpoint for pretty much all resources:
https://scienceline.org/2019/01/the-truth-about-lab-grown-meat/
Is it better for the environment?
That’s a definite yes. A 2011 study found that clean meat produces 78 to 96 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions, uses 99 percent less land and between 82 and 92 percent less water. Research at the Good Food Institute has concluded that a cell culture the size of one chicken egg can produce a million times more meat than a chicken barn stacked with 20,000 chickens, according to Emery. Energy costs, too, are much lower — and no animal parts are wasted, he adds.
“We won’t be growing the bones and the skin and the intestines that take up resources,” Emery says. “We’ll be vastly more efficient in the land we use.”
How much will it cost?
Experts say cost is the main obstacle standing between consumers and clean meat products.
In 2013, the first clean burger cost $325,000. While the price has decreased dramatically since then, current estimates range from $363 to $2,400 per pound, making it much more expensive than regular meat. (A pound of conventionally produced lean ground beef costs less than $6. Organically raised beef typically costs about a dollar more.)
JUST’s Birdie says the company is pushing hard to drive down production costs. “How do we make these products in order to compete with the price of a Big Mac?” she asks.
The biggest expense, she says, is protein used to feed the cells as they grow. In an effort to improve cost efficiency, JUST has developed a robotic platform capable of screening thousands of proteins to find the best at spurring growth, she says.
And this was from a decade ago. I imagine they've improved the resource need quite a bit since then.
I mean, theoretically this makes only the parts we want to eat and makes it directly instead of an offshoot of all the other biological processes like growing to the right age and ratio and growing the parts needed to keep it alive all that time. So my ass pull non educated thought process would assume the end result should require faaaaarrr less energy assumption for the same amount of meat?
I'm not exactly sure, but I think we can combine pork growing vats and AI to create a new species.
Make way for a bit of porkbeef and some chick-eye steak for the adventurous.
So when can we realistically expect this to be a thing?
ah would you look at that, no mention of quantity.
It's 60 times faster, there should be the volume of an entire pig's worth in like 2 weeks.
There is a magical process that is called "upscaling". More relevant is the cost of things, which likely will be higher here.
"60 times faster" is a scalability claim. A pig can make a pig's worth of meat in about 6 months. That is a rate, that is a quantity over a time. In fact actually doing the math, increasing that rate by 60 times mean the same quantity over 3 days!
Scalability has been the hurdle for all lab grown meat projects. This is claiming to have it beaten, Im asking for the proof. Show me the scale, show me the results, if they stopped at a thin film of meat cells covering a petri dish, they havent scaled up anything yet.
Let me guess, the stem cells are harvested from pigs?
Presumably they culture more, but obviously the first cells would have had to. Some of these companies have been very particular about sourcing their starting cells non-lethally from sanctuary animals or whatever, because why not.
Generally stem cell cultures these days are sourced once then replicated forever.
That’s pretty incredible, with no noticeable degradation between replications? I know very little about stem cell cultures.
Likely, but stem cell harvesting is not as horrible for pigs and doesn't require thousands of them either. It's certainly a massive improvement.
That's kinda the point‽
Price? With the economy, it'll be cheaper to wait for the pigs to reach our local market instead
What a short sighted opinion my dude.
I have 19/19 sight. Thank you very much
It's expensive and not without issues now, but it's a new technology. But it's also harder to market for the masses, who may indeed prefer the animal to the bioreactors for their own prejudice. I do not expect cultured meat to be cheap and available anytime soon.
Pigs eat pigs
True but we're not here to discuss your badge bunny mom.
Good news for pigs. I'll be delighted to see factory farming disappear and be replaced by tech like this.
Except for the pigs raised for stem cells? Which I think somehow is an even more distopian concept.... Maybe just a different flavour.
Note: I am actually in the comments looking for the answer to my question "how many stem cells?". Like per lb or whatever... What's the ratio?
The article answers your question
It involves nothing more than pulling a single cell once from a pig without causing harm.
The whole "stem cells from a fetus" thing certain groups try to spread is false. Technically stems cells can come from a fetus, but they generally don't. We even have methods to turn regular cells into stem cells I'm pretty sure. This doesn't do anything more than taking cell(s) from a pig one time and they can be grown on their own potentially forever. No other pig needs to be involved.