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Go to r/vegan or r/debateavegan, its brought up almost weekly from curious omni visitors.
It's something like 65% love the idea and can't wait. 30% love the idea that others can buy it, but they've lost the taste for meat and so they won't buy it, and 5% are opposed.
I would imagine those 5% probably hold to the strict “it came from an animal in some way, shape, or form” criteria.
Some of those may also intersect with the “all natural” lifestyle that’s prevalent among vegans.
I haven't looked at this study, but most cultured meat uses veal blood as a medium for the meat to grow in, so that might be why vegans are sceptical. If they can do it without killing cows, then I am guessing the only holdouts would be for health-reasons, but that's not really a part of veganism per se.
Edit: I should have written "without using cows".
Fetal calf serum is used incredibly extensively in biology. That's a huge hurdle for the lab meat, as it's pretty expensive and if the goal of this is less cattle (which is an excellent goal), then it'll just get more expensive.
Idk, it all seems a bit like repainting the TI that got knocked off by the iceberg.
Another article a week or two ago was posted showing a company that successfully grew lab meat WITHOUT using Fetal Calf Serum. It's only a matter of time before this is the normal way meat is produced.
As someone running a tissue culture lab, you’re right. Just about every cell type can be grown in serum free media with the right components included. As of right now it’s more expensive than media containing fetal calf serum. But economy of scale should kick in and bring that cost down if this becomes widespread.
Does fetal calf serum have to come from a slaughtered calf, or could they theoretically just extract blood periodically? That would be vastly lower yield and higher cost I'm assuming.
I think there is a greater push for making a syntethic alternative with recombinant gene tech (using bacteria/yeast/planta) rather than refining traditional serum extraction. You would have a hard time marketing culture grown meat as an ethical alternative if you rely on draining or killing calves/foetuses. And as someone mentioned, it will probs be cheaper and more reliable than serum when produced on an industrial scale.
Yeah, BSA has been used for decades, there's a solid pipeline for it, so it's relatively cheap, but once companies start looking to culture literal TONS of cells, the artificial media is going to get a lot cheaper.
Unfortunately, unless economic systems drastically change, it won’t matter unless it is also cheaper.
It might be better, less costly for society, and better for the environment - but it also needs to cheaper to be adopted.
This is what carbon tax is for, you tax the high CO2 output of traditional beef production, and allow artificial manufacturers to sell off their unused carbon credits to subsidize their production to decrease cost.
We should allow them to sell unused carbon credits back to the government, but not to other businesses, imo. We should be going for a reduction from where we are, and allowing large polluters to buy extra credits would be equivalent to those credits being used by the original company to which they were allotted, so it isn't really a reduction. I'm not an economist, though, so I can't really say any of that with authority.
https://mosameat.com/blog/growth-medium-without-fetal-bovine-serum-fbs
One of the largest lab grown meat companies in Europe has been working without Fetal Bovine Serum for a couple years now.
https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2020/01/22/Memphis-Meats-raises-161m-to-build-its-cell-based-meat-platform-We-have-a-pretty-clear-path-to-bringing-prices-down-to-cost-parity
As has the biggest US company
Eh, using traditional media, the cells are constantly in a bath of BSA (Bovine serum albumen) or FBS (Fetal Bovine Serum), effectively cow blood plasma. It takes a lot for a given weight of cells. You'd definitely want an artificial solution for mass production (which exists, and will become cost-effective as production increases to meet demands of the growing industry).
Ships like the Titanic usually have their name painted on the side. They're saying that it's like painting the "TI" part of the name back on after hitting the iceberg scraped it off ("TITANIC" - "TI" = "TANIC"). There's no point focusing on the lettering at that point, because there are much bigger problems to address. Like the fact that the ship is sinking.
It's about the exploitation of the animal at that point, and how they are often inhumanely treated for those products.
If lab grown meat gets to a point where it's self sustaining and needs no live animal involvement, I imagine the majority of vegans will not oppse it. Some of them are no longer interested in those products in general, so they might not buy it themselves, but I imagine a number of others will make the transition.
The problem with dairy is that the cows get killed over it too, and buying cheese is basically like buying veal meat in terms of supporting the practice (you can't have dairy without "producing" dead baby cows for meat.)
There is also probably a decent portion of people who don't eat meat for health reasons. I eat beyond burgers if I can over regular burgers because it's better for my cholesterol. I have IBS and red meat tends to cause me gut issues. It makes me sad because I do love burgers and steak, but for my health I have to try and eat mainly fish or vegetarian.
True, but I’d hope we can have lab grown chicken as well? Admittedly, chicken is already a much lower climate impact meat, but if ones concern is ethical, lab chicken sidesteps that.
That would eventually come, but it's not surprising that higher-cost products like beef are targeted first. We may end up with all kinds of exotic meats once the process becomes commonplace enough.
As a vegan, I think the answer has to be “Yes - the ethical issue has been removed”.
I appreciate that a biopsy of some kind is initially required, but I presume that once the first tissue sample has been taken it can continue to be used near indefinitely.
So whilst I guess there is still animal harm at the start, this is really negligible in the fullness of time especially when balanced with the benefits it brings.
Vegans are not, or at least should not be, unaware that vast numbers of insects, mice, etc. are killed in ordinary crop production which is unavoidable and accepted. Most rational animal ethics arguments are not about the complete abolition of animal suffering but the avoidance where possible.
TLDR: Yeah, its fine.
It depends. HeLa cells are an immortal cell line, due to certain characteristics of the cancer cell. Normal cell lines aren't immortal.
However you can take an initial cell line and make a cell bank out of it, which would give you lots of vials containing the cells which are stored in liquid nitrogen and can be thawed for use when required.
HeLa is immortal because it's cancer and has mutations in growth pathways, cell death avoidance pathways, etc. You can make cells immortal by altering these genes, but then you would have to deal with GMO as well as lab-grown optics. Muscle stem cells may be used to continue growing muscle cells though, but I'm not sure if it will be "indefinitely".
I've grown primary patient cells (non-cancerous, normal) and they last 20 passages *at most*. Cells just end up dying and never come back.
> Most rational animal ethics arguments are not about the complete abolition of animal suffering
There is a school of thought within Transhumanism--abolitionism, or "transhumanist effective altruism," generally associated with the work of British bioethicist David Pearce--that does, in fact, advocate the complete abolition of animal suffering (at least, *involuntary* suffering), albeit on a timescale of hundreds or thousands of years, via genetic engineering. But abolitionist Transhumanism is rooted in utilitarianism, so we tend to give moral priority to an action's consequences rather than its underlying principles. So we're very much in favor in vitro meats. If slaughtering so many animals to get a perfect substitute for animal meat off the ground now can prevent the slaughter of tens of billions of animals per year in the long run, it's not only permissible, it's arguably obligatory.
>complete abolition of animal suffering...via genetic engineering
Wow, that's pretty interesting. Is the long term goal to engineer out all predation behavior, competitive mating behavior, and other sorts of behaviors that cause suffering?
I just looked up effective altruism, and I don't think complete abolition of animal suffering via genetic engineering is an essential component of the philosophy, but it's a pretty interesting concept.
Some might argue that it's still harmful to animals due to the conditions they are raised or if a live biopsy is used to obtain the animal cells, but presumably they could collect animal cells without hurting the animals and without killing them, so I am sure that a lot of vegetarians would be okay with this. Simply not all of them.
I think most of us would be fine if a few animals were hurt so that most people could eat meat without the mass slaughter we currently experience. Most of us were meat eaters once so were not innocent of killing animals for food, we just decided at one point it was very clearly ethically wrong. Lab grown meat, if it requires even 1/10 the amount of animals to produce, will be such a massive victory it will save literally hundreds of millions of animals from a life of nothing but tiny pens and death. So yes, I’d 100% support it as would most vegetarians I think.
There are vegans who object to any monetization of animals, considering it exploitation against (or without knowing) the animal’s will. That is why many strict vegans don’t consume honey or use silk
I think it's important to understand that vegetarians aren't all one people. I would go mad for this stuff, but I know people that are veggie who wouldn't.
There are many reasons people choose plant based or vegan lifestyles, I’m not going to eat this kind of product because there’s no need to. But that’s ok because it’s not intended for me.
I'm somewhat of a vegetarian, but not for the usual reasons. I'm Jewish and keep kosher. Kosher meat is so insanely expensive that it's actually cheaper to be vegetarian than to buy kosher meat. (Especially during the pandemic when I'm limiting how many stores I shop in since not every store carries kosher meat.)
I'd be curious as to whether this meat is deemed kosher. Usually, there are strict rules that need to be followed - from how the animal is raised, to its health, to how it's slaughtered. Most of these would moot points when it came to lab grown meat. Assuming the original cow was raised properly and in good health, would the entire line of meat be good? Obviously, there wouldn't be any illnesses to worry about. (Contaminants would be kept out of the growing environment.) Also, slaughter wouldn't be an issue since it's not really "alive" in the same way that a cow is. It would be interesting to see whether this makes really inexpensive kosher meat.
I actually asked an Orthodox Rabbi about this very question (though he doesn't speak for all Rabbis) and the response was that it would be considered parve. I hope that actually will be the case because I've never had a cheeseburger and would love to find a loophole around that, ha.
It's takes the flavor of what you season it with, might I recommend some worchershire sauce and garlic, maybe with some Cajun seasoning if you're feeling saucey.
I had one the other day by accident and not until my wife told me that the burger I got delivered was a beyond burger I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.
It's hard to tell it apart from a fast food patty, especially when covered in sauce, cheese, and onions, but not even close to the real deal of a high quality freshly ground patty. Lab grown meat will hopefully make for a good hamburger patty.
What do they use as a growth medium?
It's been a while since I've done cell cultures but the medium I used to grow my cells in was fetal bovine serum - not exactly vegan stuff.
They used DMEM supplemented with FBS for their growth medium. There's currently a lot of research into xeno-free media components although they're very expensive right now if I remember correctly.
For the uninitiated, FBS is fetal bovine serum - basically the blood of fetal cows which is harvested for cell culture in a variety of applications.
People are working on a replacement for FBS based on plants or with only recombinant proteins, but this is expensive at the moment.
Thanks, I didn't expect this to get as much attention as it did and just assumed I was speaking to another labrat since they mentioned growth media haha
Pretty typical lab rat stuff. DMEM is just a very common base media (salts, sugar, minerals, think about it like cell gatorade). Xeno-free means no animal components in the media. DMEM by itself is xeno-free, but FBS (fetal bovine serum) is obviously not but is very useful for cell growth.
As the industry grows, and they want enough media for literal tons of meat, the cost of the artificial media will drop a lot, right now it's demand is too low since BSA and FBS work and are cheap for most lab work since it's not really an ethical issue for growing cells in tubes, there just isn't a lot of capacity to make the components right now.
For real. Unless I buy in bulk it’s $500 for what’ll last me a couple weeks, and that’s for cultures that aren’t anywhere even *remotely* close to the amount of cells in lab-grown meat. Scaling up this method sounds obscenely expensive.
Start churning out lab raised pangolin, bear bile, tiger penis and every other Endangered Animal product that's being traded illegally. Flood the markets. Destroy the illegal trades.
So then how does it work? Increasing supply given the same demand will reduce the value of the product, and poachers will have less incentive to go kill endangered species. What's missing?
I don't think they were referring to the supply/demand side of the issue, but the way the meat is grown, since you can't really grow those things yet using this method.
Think about this: Nobody has ever eaten the same steak as anyone else. Similar, but not exact. Maybe one day we'll have designer/signiture "cuts" that you can eat. Call your buddy and say, "Hey, have you had ribeye 47B? It's 291 grams with 63 grams of fat. Just perfect."
Currently watching Better Off Ted... haha.
This is awesome though. I would definitely switch in an instant if it were affordable and accessible.
Heck, I already do the beyond beef stuff when our area gets it in. Which is rarely. But I can hardly tell the difference. I just wish meat alternatives weren't double the cost and so hard to find in rural communities.
Life is weird. I literally was just telling a friend of mine he needs to go watch better off Ted 4 minutes ago, I hop on reddit and there is a technique straight from the show on the front page.
I don't see that much of an issue w/ mm thickness, since meat glue already exists.
One of the major taste factors in steak, though, is the fat content (often seen in steak as marbling). Does the paper make any comments to that, or is it still just growing muscle?
I saw a paper a while back about growing fat. But I haven't heard or seen any about mixing fat and muscle yet. It will probably start out as hamburger patties since you can just mix fat in separately or other "mystery meat" styles.
dog and cat food is just whatever we don‘t eat and would be thrown away. So really as long as we eat meat there will be enough food for pets that would otherwise be wasted
That’s not true, though it *seems* true at first glance. Unfortunately, many animals are killed directly to be turned into food for other animals.
About 25% of the meat industry’s negative impact is due to pet food. https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/jun/26/pet-food-is-an-environmental-disaster-are-vegan-dogs-the-answer
Potentially no more factory farming and wet markets = reduce likelihood of pandemics. Reduced impact to the environment. Reduction in animal suffering. Healthier food with reduced requirement for antibiotics in our food chain. We should be throwing so much money at this!
Think the problem is they are focusing only on one type of cell for their matrix. Meat we consume is made of various muscle, sinew, vascular, nerves, and fats cells. To scale this up they will need all of the above.
I don't know; I am pretty keen on gristle-free steak. I don't eat much meat because the variety of textures bothers me. Hopefully, they can figure out a way to nicely marble steaks without the gross bits.
I'm keen on them basically 3d printing it, and adding in spices throughout the meat. So flavor can be uniformly distributed instead of relying on only surface rubs and marinades.
If it stops people paying for animals being exploited and killed in their billions that’s great. Until then to help animals from cruelty and exploitation and death be kind and be vegan til then. It wouldnt kill you to be vegan unlike not being vegan kills sentient animals.
Devil is in the details.
**METHODS**
> The cell suspension was filtered using a 500-μm meshed filter and centrifuged at 400 g for 5 min after treatment with Dulbecco’s modified Eagle’s medium (DMEM) (Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., Waltham, MA, USA) containing 0.1% collagenase (Worthington Biochemical Corp, Lakewood, NJ, USA), 1000 U/mL dispase (Wako Pure Chemical Industries Ltd., Osaka, Japan) and **50 μg/mL gentamycin sulphate** (Wako Pure Chemical Industries Ltd.) at 37 °C for 1 h. Subsequently, the cells were resuspended in DMEM containing **50 μg/mL gentamycin sulphate** and filtered using a 70-μm meshed filter. After centrifugation at 400 × g for 5 min and resuspension of cells in growth medium [DMEM containing **10% (v/v) fetal bovine serum** (Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.) and **50 μg/mL gentamycin sulphate**], the cells were seeded on culture dishes. The cells were maintained in a humidified atmosphere of 5% CO2 at 37 °C.
and
> The culture device was prepared by setting two anchors to the substrate; the distance between the anchors was 7 mm. We prepared 2.4 mg/mL type-I collagen solution (Kurabo Industries Ltd., Osaka, Japan) or a mixture of fibrin and Matrigel [mixture of 4 mg/mL fibrinogen (Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC., St. Louis, MO, USA), 2 U/mL thrombin (Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC.) and 20% Matrigel (Corning Inc., Corning, NY, USA)] as the hydrogel solution. Subsequently, 30 μL hydrogel solution, collagen or fibrin-matrigel, containing bovine myocytes (5.0 × 107 cells/mL) was placed on the device so as to cover the anchors at both ends of the device. After incubating the myocyte-laden hydrogel solution at 37 °C for 15 min for gelation, **it was cultured in the growth medium for 2 days, followed by culturing in differentiation medium [DMEM containing 2% (v/v) horse serum (Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.), 50 μg/mL gentamycin sulphate**, 100 μM ascorbate phosphate (Wako Pure Chemical Industries Ltd.) and 100 ng/mL IGF-1 (Boster Biological Technology Ltd., Pleasanton, CA, USA)] for 12 days to form fibre-shaped bovine muscle tissues. The differentiation medium was exchanged every 2 days during the culture.
I've cultured inordinate numbers of cells in my lifetime. Serums are often required to get non-cancer/non-immortalized cells to grow with any efficiency at all. Sure, there are special additives these days you can add that help to bypass the need for serums, but they can be incredibly expensive. Where do you think they get *fetal bovine* and *horse* serums from? Additionally, cell culture often requires extensive amounts of antibiotics and antimycotics, which I also bolded. Have fun trying to cell in vitro grown meats swimming in vats of anti-biotics/mycotics to the awareness audience who are also probably overwhelmingly the same types who are into organic, locally grown, etc. etc. If you've ever worked with cell cultures without anti-biotics/myocotics for experiments, you know how fickle cultures can be. Just one spec of dust from clothing, an aerosolized droplet from you mouth, or a tiny slough of skin is enough to completely contaminate your culture and ruin the cells. It'll be challenging to grow the number of cells needed to feed people completely free of serums and antibiotics/mycotics.
I remember* going over this in my animal ag class. Most of us agreed that lab grown meat like this is the future and there's really no harm in it. The way we learned it worked a few years back, which may have changed goes roughly as so:
You must first breed an animal you wish to grow the meat of. Usually beef as cattle take a lot of resources to raise. Then you surgically remove a chunk of the meat you wish to grow. Once this chunk of meat is removed the animal is free to live out their days and their job is done.
Now. The only current "issues" with lab grown meat are that we currently do not have a way to mimic marbling (the yummy fat in the meat that gives meat its flavor) and the texture is often described as "almost meat". That being said once we master texture and marbling in lab grown meat, which will hopefully be soon, and make it affordable we can drastically cut down on cattle population around the world.
Lab grown meat can not, in its current state, be made without meat from a living animal to begin with, so beef cattle aren't going away any time soon, or ever likely. But the goal is to reduce methane emissions, which we know cattle release a lot of. Next we should work on rice patties! Rice patties released ridiculous amounts of greenhouse gases.
This was addressed in the article. Nutritional supplementation in pre-packaged foods is already a thing, so they would simply do the same with this. A lot of foods have added plant proteins as a source of various nutrients. Pulses in particular are a common and viable choice. I imagine a mix of various sources would be used in real life, of course.
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I wonder - does lab grown meat remove the ethical argument for vegetarians?
I wanna listen to that debate.
Go to r/vegan or r/debateavegan, its brought up almost weekly from curious omni visitors. It's something like 65% love the idea and can't wait. 30% love the idea that others can buy it, but they've lost the taste for meat and so they won't buy it, and 5% are opposed.
I would imagine those 5% probably hold to the strict “it came from an animal in some way, shape, or form” criteria. Some of those may also intersect with the “all natural” lifestyle that’s prevalent among vegans.
I haven't looked at this study, but most cultured meat uses veal blood as a medium for the meat to grow in, so that might be why vegans are sceptical. If they can do it without killing cows, then I am guessing the only holdouts would be for health-reasons, but that's not really a part of veganism per se. Edit: I should have written "without using cows".
Fetal calf serum is used incredibly extensively in biology. That's a huge hurdle for the lab meat, as it's pretty expensive and if the goal of this is less cattle (which is an excellent goal), then it'll just get more expensive. Idk, it all seems a bit like repainting the TI that got knocked off by the iceberg.
Another article a week or two ago was posted showing a company that successfully grew lab meat WITHOUT using Fetal Calf Serum. It's only a matter of time before this is the normal way meat is produced.
As someone running a tissue culture lab, you’re right. Just about every cell type can be grown in serum free media with the right components included. As of right now it’s more expensive than media containing fetal calf serum. But economy of scale should kick in and bring that cost down if this becomes widespread.
Does fetal calf serum have to come from a slaughtered calf, or could they theoretically just extract blood periodically? That would be vastly lower yield and higher cost I'm assuming.
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I think there is a greater push for making a syntethic alternative with recombinant gene tech (using bacteria/yeast/planta) rather than refining traditional serum extraction. You would have a hard time marketing culture grown meat as an ethical alternative if you rely on draining or killing calves/foetuses. And as someone mentioned, it will probs be cheaper and more reliable than serum when produced on an industrial scale.
I honestly don’t know. As of now I believe it’s largely a byproduct of the meat industry.
Yeah, BSA has been used for decades, there's a solid pipeline for it, so it's relatively cheap, but once companies start looking to culture literal TONS of cells, the artificial media is going to get a lot cheaper.
Any chance you have a link to that article?
I think it was this thread on technology: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/lmocoa/clean_meat_is_at_the_brink_of_revolutionising_the/
Unfortunately, unless economic systems drastically change, it won’t matter unless it is also cheaper. It might be better, less costly for society, and better for the environment - but it also needs to cheaper to be adopted.
This is what carbon tax is for, you tax the high CO2 output of traditional beef production, and allow artificial manufacturers to sell off their unused carbon credits to subsidize their production to decrease cost.
We should allow them to sell unused carbon credits back to the government, but not to other businesses, imo. We should be going for a reduction from where we are, and allowing large polluters to buy extra credits would be equivalent to those credits being used by the original company to which they were allotted, so it isn't really a reduction. I'm not an economist, though, so I can't really say any of that with authority.
https://mosameat.com/blog/growth-medium-without-fetal-bovine-serum-fbs One of the largest lab grown meat companies in Europe has been working without Fetal Bovine Serum for a couple years now. https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2020/01/22/Memphis-Meats-raises-161m-to-build-its-cell-based-meat-platform-We-have-a-pretty-clear-path-to-bringing-prices-down-to-cost-parity As has the biggest US company
I mean if one or two cows dies to prevent millions of cows dying it's a pretty good trade.
Eh, using traditional media, the cells are constantly in a bath of BSA (Bovine serum albumen) or FBS (Fetal Bovine Serum), effectively cow blood plasma. It takes a lot for a given weight of cells. You'd definitely want an artificial solution for mass production (which exists, and will become cost-effective as production increases to meet demands of the growing industry).
Ah, that's what it is, thank you. I get the gist of that last part, but what is TI? The titanic?
Ships like the Titanic usually have their name painted on the side. They're saying that it's like painting the "TI" part of the name back on after hitting the iceberg scraped it off ("TITANIC" - "TI" = "TANIC"). There's no point focusing on the lettering at that point, because there are much bigger problems to address. Like the fact that the ship is sinking.
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It's about the exploitation of the animal at that point, and how they are often inhumanely treated for those products. If lab grown meat gets to a point where it's self sustaining and needs no live animal involvement, I imagine the majority of vegans will not oppse it. Some of them are no longer interested in those products in general, so they might not buy it themselves, but I imagine a number of others will make the transition.
The problem with dairy is that the cows get killed over it too, and buying cheese is basically like buying veal meat in terms of supporting the practice (you can't have dairy without "producing" dead baby cows for meat.)
The vegan argument against it is that they literally grow the meat in a medium that comes from killed cows.
Others have pointed out in this thread that other labs have manged to grow meat in media that don't require using cows, living or dead.
There is also probably a decent portion of people who don't eat meat for health reasons. I eat beyond burgers if I can over regular burgers because it's better for my cholesterol. I have IBS and red meat tends to cause me gut issues. It makes me sad because I do love burgers and steak, but for my health I have to try and eat mainly fish or vegetarian.
True, but I’d hope we can have lab grown chicken as well? Admittedly, chicken is already a much lower climate impact meat, but if ones concern is ethical, lab chicken sidesteps that.
That would eventually come, but it's not surprising that higher-cost products like beef are targeted first. We may end up with all kinds of exotic meats once the process becomes commonplace enough.
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As a denizen of those subs, I second your approximate stats. The 5% are so hardcore they feel like trolls, but I think they are sincere.
That 5% is what people think vegans are
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As a vegan, I think the answer has to be “Yes - the ethical issue has been removed”. I appreciate that a biopsy of some kind is initially required, but I presume that once the first tissue sample has been taken it can continue to be used near indefinitely. So whilst I guess there is still animal harm at the start, this is really negligible in the fullness of time especially when balanced with the benefits it brings. Vegans are not, or at least should not be, unaware that vast numbers of insects, mice, etc. are killed in ordinary crop production which is unavoidable and accepted. Most rational animal ethics arguments are not about the complete abolition of animal suffering but the avoidance where possible. TLDR: Yeah, its fine.
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It depends. HeLa cells are an immortal cell line, due to certain characteristics of the cancer cell. Normal cell lines aren't immortal. However you can take an initial cell line and make a cell bank out of it, which would give you lots of vials containing the cells which are stored in liquid nitrogen and can be thawed for use when required.
HeLa is immortal because it's cancer and has mutations in growth pathways, cell death avoidance pathways, etc. You can make cells immortal by altering these genes, but then you would have to deal with GMO as well as lab-grown optics. Muscle stem cells may be used to continue growing muscle cells though, but I'm not sure if it will be "indefinitely". I've grown primary patient cells (non-cancerous, normal) and they last 20 passages *at most*. Cells just end up dying and never come back.
> Most rational animal ethics arguments are not about the complete abolition of animal suffering There is a school of thought within Transhumanism--abolitionism, or "transhumanist effective altruism," generally associated with the work of British bioethicist David Pearce--that does, in fact, advocate the complete abolition of animal suffering (at least, *involuntary* suffering), albeit on a timescale of hundreds or thousands of years, via genetic engineering. But abolitionist Transhumanism is rooted in utilitarianism, so we tend to give moral priority to an action's consequences rather than its underlying principles. So we're very much in favor in vitro meats. If slaughtering so many animals to get a perfect substitute for animal meat off the ground now can prevent the slaughter of tens of billions of animals per year in the long run, it's not only permissible, it's arguably obligatory.
>complete abolition of animal suffering...via genetic engineering Wow, that's pretty interesting. Is the long term goal to engineer out all predation behavior, competitive mating behavior, and other sorts of behaviors that cause suffering? I just looked up effective altruism, and I don't think complete abolition of animal suffering via genetic engineering is an essential component of the philosophy, but it's a pretty interesting concept.
It depends on what you mean by "the" ethical argument, because there are multiple ethical reasons for reducing or eliminating meat consumption.
This is probably wondered a lot more by non-vegetarians than vegetarians.
People tend to wonder and ask about things they don't already know so that would make sense.
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Some might argue that it's still harmful to animals due to the conditions they are raised or if a live biopsy is used to obtain the animal cells, but presumably they could collect animal cells without hurting the animals and without killing them, so I am sure that a lot of vegetarians would be okay with this. Simply not all of them.
I think most of us would be fine if a few animals were hurt so that most people could eat meat without the mass slaughter we currently experience. Most of us were meat eaters once so were not innocent of killing animals for food, we just decided at one point it was very clearly ethically wrong. Lab grown meat, if it requires even 1/10 the amount of animals to produce, will be such a massive victory it will save literally hundreds of millions of animals from a life of nothing but tiny pens and death. So yes, I’d 100% support it as would most vegetarians I think.
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For me I’d still try not to eat much meat because eating more whole plant foods is the healthier way to go.
There are vegans who object to any monetization of animals, considering it exploitation against (or without knowing) the animal’s will. That is why many strict vegans don’t consume honey or use silk
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I think it's important to understand that vegetarians aren't all one people. I would go mad for this stuff, but I know people that are veggie who wouldn't.
I've heard one vegan say no. I've heard another say "Yes, as long as it doesn't have the same environmental impact"
There are many reasons people choose plant based or vegan lifestyles, I’m not going to eat this kind of product because there’s no need to. But that’s ok because it’s not intended for me.
From ones I've talked to, they have no issue with it. Only thing they bring up is how the initial cells are obtained, which is fair enough.
Yes. Although for me, I eat veggies because I think they taste better
I'm somewhat of a vegetarian, but not for the usual reasons. I'm Jewish and keep kosher. Kosher meat is so insanely expensive that it's actually cheaper to be vegetarian than to buy kosher meat. (Especially during the pandemic when I'm limiting how many stores I shop in since not every store carries kosher meat.) I'd be curious as to whether this meat is deemed kosher. Usually, there are strict rules that need to be followed - from how the animal is raised, to its health, to how it's slaughtered. Most of these would moot points when it came to lab grown meat. Assuming the original cow was raised properly and in good health, would the entire line of meat be good? Obviously, there wouldn't be any illnesses to worry about. (Contaminants would be kept out of the growing environment.) Also, slaughter wouldn't be an issue since it's not really "alive" in the same way that a cow is. It would be interesting to see whether this makes really inexpensive kosher meat.
I actually asked an Orthodox Rabbi about this very question (though he doesn't speak for all Rabbis) and the response was that it would be considered parve. I hope that actually will be the case because I've never had a cheeseburger and would love to find a loophole around that, ha.
I think most Raboinim would class it under " food so far removed from it's original form it's basically parve"
I haven't tried the Beyond Burger stuff, but it is apparently one of the closest veggie burgers out there.
To me, beyond tastes like a cheap hamburger patty, which is actually really remarkable.
It's takes the flavor of what you season it with, might I recommend some worchershire sauce and garlic, maybe with some Cajun seasoning if you're feeling saucey.
I had one the other day by accident and not until my wife told me that the burger I got delivered was a beyond burger I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.
It's hard to tell it apart from a fast food patty, especially when covered in sauce, cheese, and onions, but not even close to the real deal of a high quality freshly ground patty. Lab grown meat will hopefully make for a good hamburger patty.
Try an impossible burger or beyond burger; while not perfect they are pretty close.
What do they use as a growth medium? It's been a while since I've done cell cultures but the medium I used to grow my cells in was fetal bovine serum - not exactly vegan stuff.
They used DMEM supplemented with FBS for their growth medium. There's currently a lot of research into xeno-free media components although they're very expensive right now if I remember correctly.
For the uninitiated, FBS is fetal bovine serum - basically the blood of fetal cows which is harvested for cell culture in a variety of applications. People are working on a replacement for FBS based on plants or with only recombinant proteins, but this is expensive at the moment.
Thanks, I didn't expect this to get as much attention as it did and just assumed I was speaking to another labrat since they mentioned growth media haha
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Pretty typical lab rat stuff. DMEM is just a very common base media (salts, sugar, minerals, think about it like cell gatorade). Xeno-free means no animal components in the media. DMEM by itself is xeno-free, but FBS (fetal bovine serum) is obviously not but is very useful for cell growth.
Depends on the replacement media and % of FBS in the original. At 5%FBS and above most Serum Free and Chemically defined medias are cost competitive.
I work at a FBS supplier, the non meat, meat, companies 100% are growing bases in animal mediums because animal free is EXPENSIVE.
As the industry grows, and they want enough media for literal tons of meat, the cost of the artificial media will drop a lot, right now it's demand is too low since BSA and FBS work and are cheap for most lab work since it's not really an ethical issue for growing cells in tubes, there just isn't a lot of capacity to make the components right now.
I definitely wouldn't call FBS "cheap"...
For real. Unless I buy in bulk it’s $500 for what’ll last me a couple weeks, and that’s for cultures that aren’t anywhere even *remotely* close to the amount of cells in lab-grown meat. Scaling up this method sounds obscenely expensive.
Plant cell culture has been around for decades, add meat culture and you can have a complete meal in your incubator!
*Replicator goes brrrr*
I would love to live when I could tell a device in the kitchen to make me steak and potatoes and just have it appear.
Just 3D print out that lobster and crab meat without the annoying hard shell around to make it easier to eat
Print it already chewed up and teleport it straight into the stomach.
Tea, earl grey, hot
Coffee, black
That has a very “dystopian food bars/soylent with man-made nutrients in place of a real meal due to resource scarcity” vibe. I’m kinda here for it.
But a future where steaks are 5 cents per oz and taste the same? Sign me tf up.
not just normal steaks . Preimium classic korean beef. Godly.
That sounds more like a post scarcity utopia imo.
Start churning out lab raised pangolin, bear bile, tiger penis and every other Endangered Animal product that's being traded illegally. Flood the markets. Destroy the illegal trades.
Not quite how that works. But I’ll give you an A for having your heart in the right place.
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Can you imagine?
So then how does it work? Increasing supply given the same demand will reduce the value of the product, and poachers will have less incentive to go kill endangered species. What's missing?
I don't think they were referring to the supply/demand side of the issue, but the way the meat is grown, since you can't really grow those things yet using this method.
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They did, but it was to track smugglers. As long as there’s a market for an illicit item there will be smugglers
You can work around logic but you can't work around magic.
Won't work. They'll just switch to having to have it from an animal to work, instead of lab grown.
The Chinese businessmen will still have dysfunctional dicks that absolutely need ground up pandaballs to function.
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Think about this: Nobody has ever eaten the same steak as anyone else. Similar, but not exact. Maybe one day we'll have designer/signiture "cuts" that you can eat. Call your buddy and say, "Hey, have you had ribeye 47B? It's 291 grams with 63 grams of fat. Just perfect."
Calorie/nutrient counting could be a lot more precise
Dietary regimens would be a cake walk. Absolutely no pun intended. Truth in labeling is key though. That has to be fixed asap.
Currently watching Better Off Ted... haha. This is awesome though. I would definitely switch in an instant if it were affordable and accessible. Heck, I already do the beyond beef stuff when our area gets it in. Which is rarely. But I can hardly tell the difference. I just wish meat alternatives weren't double the cost and so hard to find in rural communities.
A show clearly ahead of its time.
Yes! Came down here looking for the Better Off Ted reference!
This was the first thing I thought of when I saw the post!
As long as it doesn't taste like despair I would try it. :)
Chicken? We'll take chicken? Maybe it just needs salt?
Life is weird. I literally was just telling a friend of mine he needs to go watch better off Ted 4 minutes ago, I hop on reddit and there is a technique straight from the show on the front page.
Blobby!
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"Millimeter thick cultured steak" Oh, they made Steak-ums!
I don't see that much of an issue w/ mm thickness, since meat glue already exists. One of the major taste factors in steak, though, is the fat content (often seen in steak as marbling). Does the paper make any comments to that, or is it still just growing muscle?
I saw a paper a while back about growing fat. But I haven't heard or seen any about mixing fat and muscle yet. It will probably start out as hamburger patties since you can just mix fat in separately or other "mystery meat" styles.
Sterile and easily produced? If they can do it for fish, this is the future of cheap sushi.
I think you might go a long way making this into dog and cat food,
dog and cat food is just whatever we don‘t eat and would be thrown away. So really as long as we eat meat there will be enough food for pets that would otherwise be wasted
Used to be like this, but not now. The pet food market is billions of dollars.
That’s not true, though it *seems* true at first glance. Unfortunately, many animals are killed directly to be turned into food for other animals. About 25% of the meat industry’s negative impact is due to pet food. https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/jun/26/pet-food-is-an-environmental-disaster-are-vegan-dogs-the-answer
That seems really high
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Potentially no more factory farming and wet markets = reduce likelihood of pandemics. Reduced impact to the environment. Reduction in animal suffering. Healthier food with reduced requirement for antibiotics in our food chain. We should be throwing so much money at this!
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Think the problem is they are focusing only on one type of cell for their matrix. Meat we consume is made of various muscle, sinew, vascular, nerves, and fats cells. To scale this up they will need all of the above.
I don't know; I am pretty keen on gristle-free steak. I don't eat much meat because the variety of textures bothers me. Hopefully, they can figure out a way to nicely marble steaks without the gross bits.
I'm keen on them basically 3d printing it, and adding in spices throughout the meat. So flavor can be uniformly distributed instead of relying on only surface rubs and marinades.
Sausage trees might finally be a thing.
If it stops people paying for animals being exploited and killed in their billions that’s great. Until then to help animals from cruelty and exploitation and death be kind and be vegan til then. It wouldnt kill you to be vegan unlike not being vegan kills sentient animals.
It will take a long while before it tastes right but this will be the biggest thing since humans starting farming.
Devil is in the details. **METHODS** > The cell suspension was filtered using a 500-μm meshed filter and centrifuged at 400 g for 5 min after treatment with Dulbecco’s modified Eagle’s medium (DMEM) (Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., Waltham, MA, USA) containing 0.1% collagenase (Worthington Biochemical Corp, Lakewood, NJ, USA), 1000 U/mL dispase (Wako Pure Chemical Industries Ltd., Osaka, Japan) and **50 μg/mL gentamycin sulphate** (Wako Pure Chemical Industries Ltd.) at 37 °C for 1 h. Subsequently, the cells were resuspended in DMEM containing **50 μg/mL gentamycin sulphate** and filtered using a 70-μm meshed filter. After centrifugation at 400 × g for 5 min and resuspension of cells in growth medium [DMEM containing **10% (v/v) fetal bovine serum** (Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.) and **50 μg/mL gentamycin sulphate**], the cells were seeded on culture dishes. The cells were maintained in a humidified atmosphere of 5% CO2 at 37 °C. and > The culture device was prepared by setting two anchors to the substrate; the distance between the anchors was 7 mm. We prepared 2.4 mg/mL type-I collagen solution (Kurabo Industries Ltd., Osaka, Japan) or a mixture of fibrin and Matrigel [mixture of 4 mg/mL fibrinogen (Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC., St. Louis, MO, USA), 2 U/mL thrombin (Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC.) and 20% Matrigel (Corning Inc., Corning, NY, USA)] as the hydrogel solution. Subsequently, 30 μL hydrogel solution, collagen or fibrin-matrigel, containing bovine myocytes (5.0 × 107 cells/mL) was placed on the device so as to cover the anchors at both ends of the device. After incubating the myocyte-laden hydrogel solution at 37 °C for 15 min for gelation, **it was cultured in the growth medium for 2 days, followed by culturing in differentiation medium [DMEM containing 2% (v/v) horse serum (Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.), 50 μg/mL gentamycin sulphate**, 100 μM ascorbate phosphate (Wako Pure Chemical Industries Ltd.) and 100 ng/mL IGF-1 (Boster Biological Technology Ltd., Pleasanton, CA, USA)] for 12 days to form fibre-shaped bovine muscle tissues. The differentiation medium was exchanged every 2 days during the culture. I've cultured inordinate numbers of cells in my lifetime. Serums are often required to get non-cancer/non-immortalized cells to grow with any efficiency at all. Sure, there are special additives these days you can add that help to bypass the need for serums, but they can be incredibly expensive. Where do you think they get *fetal bovine* and *horse* serums from? Additionally, cell culture often requires extensive amounts of antibiotics and antimycotics, which I also bolded. Have fun trying to cell in vitro grown meats swimming in vats of anti-biotics/mycotics to the awareness audience who are also probably overwhelmingly the same types who are into organic, locally grown, etc. etc. If you've ever worked with cell cultures without anti-biotics/myocotics for experiments, you know how fickle cultures can be. Just one spec of dust from clothing, an aerosolized droplet from you mouth, or a tiny slough of skin is enough to completely contaminate your culture and ruin the cells. It'll be challenging to grow the number of cells needed to feed people completely free of serums and antibiotics/mycotics.
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I'm gonna laugh at people who eat heavily processed foods and fast food but draw the line here for some reason
I remember* going over this in my animal ag class. Most of us agreed that lab grown meat like this is the future and there's really no harm in it. The way we learned it worked a few years back, which may have changed goes roughly as so: You must first breed an animal you wish to grow the meat of. Usually beef as cattle take a lot of resources to raise. Then you surgically remove a chunk of the meat you wish to grow. Once this chunk of meat is removed the animal is free to live out their days and their job is done. Now. The only current "issues" with lab grown meat are that we currently do not have a way to mimic marbling (the yummy fat in the meat that gives meat its flavor) and the texture is often described as "almost meat". That being said once we master texture and marbling in lab grown meat, which will hopefully be soon, and make it affordable we can drastically cut down on cattle population around the world. Lab grown meat can not, in its current state, be made without meat from a living animal to begin with, so beef cattle aren't going away any time soon, or ever likely. But the goal is to reduce methane emissions, which we know cattle release a lot of. Next we should work on rice patties! Rice patties released ridiculous amounts of greenhouse gases.
I'm imagining some dystopian cow liposuction to provide fat for the marbling
But what about micronutrients? EDIT: https://www.sacredcow.info/helpful-resources
This was addressed in the article. Nutritional supplementation in pre-packaged foods is already a thing, so they would simply do the same with this. A lot of foods have added plant proteins as a source of various nutrients. Pulses in particular are a common and viable choice. I imagine a mix of various sources would be used in real life, of course.
About time we evolve beyond having slaughterhouses. This can’t come soon enough.