>> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
> I have no experience in the area, but just to point out that you could equally apply some of those arguments to meat production.
> The current meat industry is only cost effective because we've spent the last few millennia optimising the everloving hell out of it
Eh. I'd probably say the meat industry is cost effective because they have a superior bioreactor design: rugged, self-contained, low maintenance, and cheaply replicated. Lab grown meat probably can't compete until they re-invent "animals" in the lab.
The meat industry is also cost effective due to massive government subsidies, at least in the US. Would these subsidies be available to lab grown meat operations?
The New Zealand meat and dairy industries do not receive subsidies after radical market deregulation during the Labour government of '84.
We have a highly efficient and profitable sector, mainly for the reason that we compete in fairly extreme conditions against subsidised international players.
Note that this process incurred significant pain for many individuals while the industry reoriented and consolidated, and I am not inviting any argument around environmental impacts (which I would contend are bad, but also clearly less bad than other countries).
So yes, "natural" meat can be competitive and efficient without government subsidies.
All that is true, but - we also don’t force farmers to internalize the externalities created by their industry.
Southland farmers themselves are saying that if they had to comply with proposed water and soil quality regulations that they wouldn’t be able to exist due to the increased costs involved.
The backlash even from the introduction of a heavy vehicles tax are representative of how much these farmers think they rely on the unpriced benefits they are getting.
> People always say things like this until they are forced to, and somehow find a way.
That is one of two possible outcomes. The other is that the sector just dies off and relocates to another place on earth, where externalities don't have to be considered, maybe for strategic reason. This has happened many times.
> All that is true, but - we also don’t force farmers to internalize the externalities created by their industry.
The net externality is probably positive, and if you want to start evening the slate using externalities then farmers would deserve a subsidy (which is bad policy).
Food is about as high on a supply chain as it is possible to get, and the entire downstream supply chain would count as an externality of the farmer's activity. If farmers didn't produce food we'd all starve to death, but that is absolutely not priced in to how much they get paid.
As I said, I really don’t want to get drawn into the environmental debate, but there is one persistent myth that does need to be corrected: the idea that emissions from “heavy” vehicles are not priced. They are. They’re in the ETS. Reductions in heavy vehicle use due to tax will not reduce carbon emissions at all, as it will be emitted elsewhere in the economy. The only way to reduce the emissions of an activity covered by the ETS is to lower the cap, which can be done without a vehicle tax of any kind.
Farming is thankless, backbreaking, poorly-paid work that often is only viable because of subsidies the government provides, because the government recognizes that without farmers we'll all starve. And you're concerned that they're not paying their fair share. Fine. Good luck with that.
That's not how it works. There is no fair share. He is saying that farmers are not actually paying the costs they make society incur. Therefore these costs are not priced into the meat they produce which would not be that competitive if that was the case. It's a form of subsidy.
The cost of food as a share of income has fallen dramatically over the last fifty years or so. It's not unfathomable that it rises a bit again in exchange for properly pricing in externalities.
and yet if you actually did that, people on the other side of the political spectrum would complain that it's unfair for poor people because they now have a higher food cost burden. Shouldn't the rich subsidize for the poor for these essentials?
So then you get back to the original condition - subsidizing food once again. In fact, this is the reason why they are subsidized in the first place!
No, if you implement a efficient system to transfer wealth, you don't subsidize meat as meat and plant based food are treated equally.
If a less lucky person (or what you call poor) receives money, they are still incentivized to spend the money efficiently. With the money they have available now, they can buy less meat but more plant based food than before.
We could for example lower taxes for those that earn least while increasing water and soil quality regulations (with matching tariffs for imports). This would increase food costs, which would hopefully match the money that people gained through lower taxes.
Meat would then become slightly more expensive than plant, but also have a major benefit for products that don't use a lot of water or harms the soil. Aquaculture would get a big boost, as would alternative method of meat production. The use of farm animals as an ecological alternative to using machinery to keep land clear of unwanted vegetation has become a niche method, and increased water and soil regulations would indirect benefit such farming alternatives.
Please, every time someone proposes farmers lead a less cushioned life we get these huge bitter fights from somewhere. They don't also have to exist here. If you have a vested interest and want your subsidies to continue, that's cool! But there's no need to peddle your salty response to it when literally everyone everywhere has already heard them said many, many times.
We'd probably have to define what "not receive subsidies" means.
I'm pretty sure they don't pay for the damages caused by the methane and N2O emissions caused by the meat production. "We don't have to care about our externalities" is ultimately a form of subsidy.
> The meat industry is also cost effective due to massive government subsidies, at least in the US. Would these subsidies be available to lab grown meat operations?
Why would those subsidies matter when you're comparing a cow to a bioreactor? You can stick the cow in a dirty field and have hundreds of pounds of meat a few years later, as dirt-poor herdsmen with practically no captial have been doing for thousands of years. Its equivalent competitor would be a fussy bioreactor in a clean room that would require millions in capital, as well as high-end expertise and labor. Apparently the "food" is also ridiculously expensive.
What has exchanged is 1) the massive scale of the human population and 2) wider access to animal protein. Without the subsidies, I expect prices would rise for consumers (most farmers are not making vast profits despite subsidies) and that is not a vote winner.
> What has exchanged is 1) the massive scale of the human population and 2) wider access to animal protein. Without the subsidies, I expect prices would rise for consumers (most farmers are not making vast profits) and that is not a vote winner.
But the context here is lab grown meat. If you removed all subsidies from traditional meat production, I really doubt meat would become more than ten times more expensive. From the OP:
> This approach is one factor that helps to cut down the volume of media needed, leading to what sound like impressive results: $18 to produce a pound of cultured chicken, according to a press representative.
> That’s the lowest real-world figure I heard in the course of reporting this story. It could also easily translate into a price of more than $30 dollars per pound at retail—and may never go any lower.
It's worth noting that those numbers are estimates and the facility that is supposed to produce them hasn't been built to validate them.
The country with the most expensive meat I know is Switzerland. The local chains Migros and Coop mostly sell meat produced in Switzerland. Here's the chicken you can usually find on the shelves in Migros:
They have a high income and are really good at ignoring the poor who do the dirty, low paid jobs and at best eat mortadella/baloney, cheese and eggs (doing their part for the planet, unlike everyone else lmao). Just like other western EU countries, tbh.
Switzerland does have poor people. ~10% of the population below the poverty line which is defined around 2.2k CHF/month per person. This definitely doesn't allow for a lot of high quality meat consumption.
Given that Switzerland has a world class chemical engineering and pharmaceutical industry and production facilities already, hypothetical lab-grown meat from Switzerland will probably among the cheaper high quality lab-grown meat in the world.
My understanding of Swiss manufacturing industry is high-end, complicated things. I agree it's likely that Swiss lab-made meat would be the cheapest in the world, but only by virtue of being the only place where it's feasible to make it.
My grandmother had to raise the meat she ate herself. That meant that meat was fairly rare, usually only on Sundays you'd get an actual piece of meat on your plate. Today we eat way more meat than in the past because it's so cheap thanks to subsidies.
Raising a cow is only a part of the problem, and it isn't that much harder to raise 10 cows than 1 cow, if you have the acreage. O(log) at the worst.
Butchering and preserving the meat was the O(n) operation, and usually required O(n) resources to salt or smoke, which could be expensive resources depending on your time and place in history.
Refrigeration changed the game, to where we could preserve the meat as fast as we could butcher it. Now instead of spending days or weeks salting, canning, smoking or curing your meat, you can fill a freezer in an afternoon.
Not that I claim to know how to factor the cost in, but meat production has negative externalities that the industry doesn't pay for. Not to mention things like water rights etc. If the farmers actually paid those costs, my guess is the price gap would close a bit.
> According to recent data from Metonomics, the American government spends $38 billion each year to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, but only 0.04 percent of that (i.e., $17 million) each year to subsidize fruits and vegetables.
A google search for Metonomics returns only results with this exact same quote. What is the source for this, what is meant by subsidizing an industry versus “fruits and vegetables” (ie, Is subsidized grain part of the meat industry? Why would we compare an industry to two specific categories of food?), and what does recent mean?
US meat production is about 100 billion pounds / year, half meat and half poultry. So removing subsidies alone would raise costs by about $0.38/lb, but it may be as much as twice that if subsidies fall primarily on one subsector.
The externalities -- both environmental and the poor labor conditions tolerated in the meat processing industry -- are probably a bigger "subsidy" than the budgetary ones.
> Lab grown meat probably can't compete until they re-invent "animals" in the lab.
Yes, but this also means it's going to be huge improvement over "regular" meat - they don't have to reinvent whole animals, just the parts that matter.
I find it weird to postulate deal-breaking fundamental limits for a process that's a strict subset of a process we've been using and improving for thousands of years.
> I find it weird to postulate deal-breaking fundamental limits for a process that's a strict subset of a process we've been using and improving for thousands of years.
The process that they're talking about isn't anything like the one we've been using for thousands of years. "Lab grown meat" is about growing cells in vats. Very different. It almost feels like trying to make a car cheaper by not having tires and a windshield (and no substitute). Sure you might be able to get something that limps along, but the things you're dropping solve important problems. Trying to grow massive amounts of animal cells with no immune system seems just as foolish.
> It almost feels like trying to make a car cheaper by not having tires and a windshield (and no substitute).
The way I see it, it's like people were buying cars only to hook stuff up to the alternator to power it, and someone figured maybe we should just build a combustion engine in a box, optimized for electricity generation, so we don't have to deal with the rest of the car.
> The way I see it, it's like people were buying cars only to hook stuff up to the alternator to power it, and someone figured maybe we should just build a combustion engine in a box, optimized for electricity generation, so we don't have to deal with the rest of the car.
I don't think that's a good analogy, because it presumes the removed parts were unnecessary for the core function. Trying to find a perfect analogy is a waste of time, but I think yours would be closer to the truth if during their "optimization" they also removed the oil and air filters. After all, who needs those? We're running the engine to covert fuel to power, not filter air or lubricants (but without doing that the engine will get damaged).
With a lot of systems, you can't just remove any component you wish and still have something that functions well. The lab grown meat people appear to have "removed" far too much (i.e. petty much everything).
> Yes, but this also means it's going to be huge improvement over "regular" meat - they don't have to reinvent whole animals, just the parts that matter.
Meanwhile breeding will be working toward the same end from the other direction: minimizing unnecessary animal components. We have chickens that are impaired by the weight of their own overgrown breasts, and very possibly there are already other organs that are withering away under breeding pressure.
Both directions of advancement are disturbing. I think the breeding program, if it reaches this optimal efficiency conclusion, is probably more disturbing. But also much easier.
Maybe that’s the solution. Is there some level of “living” things that has all the same qualities of a cow, but that we would feel comfortable raising and slaughtering in inhumane conditions? If not, what makes eating cultivated tissue better?
Yeah, I know the thought of semi brainless cows all hooked up to some machine, Matrix-style, may seem like a horror show to many, but from my perspective, it's the ethical thing to do. The primary reason I try to cut down on eating meat is from an animal rights perspective - I just can't grok the cognitive dissonance it takes to ooh and ahh over the cute, "human-like" reactions of, say, a cow getting a backscratch on r/aww, while simultaneously munching down on a burger.
If I could eat meat from a creature that I knew felt no pain and basically had no higher emotions at all, I wouldn't have an ethical dilemma over it.
I think we are not discussing ethics in depth enough in our soviety. What specifically is it that is unethical about the meat industry? Is it the way the cows are slaughtered? Is it that we take their life? Is it how they live their life? Can any of these arguments be made void from an ethical standpoint, if they are addressed somehow?
Since this discussion lead into brainless cows, why does that solve the ethics problem? Could it not be argued that it would be even more unethical to breed severly handicapped cows, without ability to experience the world?
Yes pretty much all of the above. Forcing a sentient being to live an existence that it didn't evolve for is extremely cruel. Even animals such as cows and chickens have social and emotional needs that were built into them in millions of years of evolution. A couple thousand years of domestication don't turn them into automata that can be treated as a product whose purpose it is to make our food taste a little better, but which we can easily find substitutes for.
> Forcing a sentient being to live an existence that it didn't evolve for is extremely cruel.
This seems like it would strongly apply to modern day humans living in an extremely complex, sedentary, large scale and atomized world. Much more so than cows even!
It does apply to modern day humans in some aspects and is a reason for a lot of misery and suffering in our world. Obviously I'm not saying that we have a lower quality of life than our hunter and gather ancestors, but a lot of the things that go against our evolutionary environment are the direct causes for much of our suffering. But going back to the actual argument, the the degree to which our lives differ from that we evolved in is obviously much smaller than for livestock.
Inspired by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - breeding animals that want to be eaten is more ethical than killing animals that don't want to be eaten.
> I just can't grok the cognitive dissonance it takes to ooh and ahh over the cute, "human-like" reactions of, say, a cow getting a backscratch on r/aww, while simultaneously munching down on a burger.
Would you have a problem eating meat from a dna manipulated cow that essentially was born brain dead? (Mother isn't but the baby's dna is modified during pregnancy).
If yes because it was modified during pregnancy.
What about impregnation said cow with dna modified sperm.
Cows are mammals and we now do know that we, as mammals, share a common trait which is we love our children so much because it’s an evolutionary advantage for the survival of our species.
So in your scenario, either cows will suffer from giving birth to brain dead children, or at least, not different from today, because we take their children to get their milk.
Brain dead mothers would be ethically ok to me but … that’s really a really strange thought and I feel that there would be unknown issues like how could you know that your cow is sick like a full bag of bacterias if the cow is not showing suffer ?
The ethical problem I have with that scenario is that you'd basically have mother cows lined up, factory style, to give birth. Google "pig gestation crate" to get a sense for what that horror show is like.
Why stop there? Couldn't the mother be brain dead as well?
It's a dystopian idea - breeding zombie cows that aren't alive on a cognitive level - but you can draw parallels to abortions and pulling the plug on brain dead human patients. As a society we somewhat agree rationally that the lack of subjective experience or cognition renders most ethical concerns moot.
From an emotional/intuitive stand point it still grinds a few gears though. Would we be fine with growing brain dead humans for consumption?
There is a significant dissonance there for sure. For example, most people would say that some wars are justified ethically, yet they might change their mind completely if a family member is killed in one. Emotional impact can be a significant part of what you deem ethical. Yet you can't structure broad ethical "rule sets" based on subjective trauma or experience.
The relationship between rationality and emotions when it comes to ethics is really complex, and since it's in the realm of philosophy I don't think there are any clear cut answers.
> semi brainless cows ... it's the ethical thing to do
A second way to make it ethical in terms of animal suffering is to effectively start eating road kill. That is, you raise a farm of cows, treat them well, and eat them when they die naturally.
A third way is to raise a farm of cows, anaesthetise them via their food when they're old enough, and kill them in their sleep. It's more debatable than the above but I believe it's ethical as long as it's done right (which it won't be, in practice).
This all of course ignores GHG emissions and loss of biodiversity due to the need to produce large amounts of feed and large uses of land. But speaking strictly from the cow's perspective, I think it is ethical.
For many (most?) animals, predation or starvation is the "natural" way to die before actual old age would be an issue. Many suffer horribly towards actual old age death.
I think this is a children's tale disney style myth we've grown up with.
I would argue that slaughter is more "humane" if done right.
But significantly better to not breed animals for food to begin with, if there is an alternative. Even if the alternative costs significantly more.
That's the first thing I thought of as well. Other invertebrates would presumably work too. There's already no taboo against eating crustaceans, and mollusks are generally acceptable as well. Though you probably have to restrict molluskivorism (that's my word of the day) to gastropods and other less complex organisms to avoid the ethical and cost problems that would come with cuttlefish, squid, and octopus farming.
On the other hand, meat doesn't really have much of a taste. It's more about the texture. If you forget to add spices to your meat, it tastes like nothing.
That's completely false. Even the most bland piece of meat has some taste.
I understand you don't eat chicken breast without spices or some sauce but most pieces of meat are pretty good as they are, especially if it has some fat.
Maybe if you grew up somewhere where spices are used a lot you can't enjoy food without them, but that doesn't make your comment true.
Imagine an industrial life support system, I would venture our medical tech is either there or almost there for it. The hard part where I'd envision the greatest challenge is an artificial immune system that works in the tanks but absolutely won't harm people after the vat grown products are taken out of the loop.
As a bonus this same type of technology could work for growing organs and any other biological part.
Yes and the article discusses this extensively. The problem is that it's very hard to achieve the necessary level of cleanliness. The article mentions needing to take apart, clean and re-assemble entire plants because some bacteria were hiding in small pits inside imperfect welds!
Similar to how hard it is to clean MRSA or prions. Hot high pressure CO2 does it. (It's cheap, readily available everywhere. It's a process problem. It's hard to do it in hospitals in a safe and automated way because humans, but in a factory the pesky humans are not a problem.)
Not sure the Dune simile is a good one, here... in the prequals they're shown to be humans hooked up to nutrient feed lines. Or that was the point and I missed it...
Insect protein is pretty good. I don't get why people are OK with the messy, cruel slaughter of pigs and cows who have family lives and friends, but eating insects, ugh?
The key is "inhumane". There are many people ok with farming and slaughter, but not in the conditions necessary to accomplish it at the current scale, convenience, and price the world consumes.
I would be really surprised if none of those people had ethical problems with a Matrix-style farm of brain-dead cows too. It's like asking what they prefer between raising brain-dead children in vats vs raising like in the movie The Island. I'm not sure one dystopia is better than the other.
> Ruggedness and low maintenance is kind of debatable. A lot of that is just anti-biotic overuse. Which is a big issue.
Not compared to a bioreactor. From the OP:
> The simple reason: In cell culture, sterility is paramount. Animal cells “grow so slowly that if we get any bacteria in a culture—well, then we’ve just got a bacteria culture,” Humbird said. “Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event.”
> Viruses also present a unique problem. Because cultured animal cells are alive, they can get infected just the way living animals can.
> “There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick,” Humbird said. “Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”
It's like comparing steel plate to a piece of tissue paper. Sure, an armor-piercing bullet can defeat the plate, but pretty much everything can defeat the tissue paper.
The amortized cost is not that expensive. What's big is the price tag on a new fab with all the new tech gadgets from all the vendors (for example when you buy one big EUV machine from ASML and it takes 40 rounds with their special 747 to deliver it).
silicon (the interesting part) inside plastic that you see is quite small and thin. You would need hundreds/thousands of them to approach the size/weight ratio to single steak.
And silicone that needs that high level of cleanliness is not cheap.
Most chips are fabricated on larger/older processes that do not require that high level of cleanliness
The sliced wafer is small, but due to the precision and process requirements everything else is big. Chip fabs have a complete chemical plant in them because they need high purity solvents and deposition feedstock.
That older level of cleanliness is still above a typical pharma factory level cleanliness. (Where there's no laminar air flow and no need for bunny suits, but everything is sterile and consumables like containers, pipes, feedstock is unpacked right before. And there are a number of verification (QA) steps before the finished lot leaves the factory. Just like with chips, just in the pharma/chemical case it can be done in bulk if it's in a homogeneous liquid phase.)
As I have read, that’s primarily a difference between pasture and feedlot breeds; pasture breeds mostly do fine without antibiotics whereas feedlot breeds require constant attention.
Also worth noting that antibiotics in meat production is not only about health. For unclear reasons (or at least, it was unclear years ago when I learned about this) giving cows antibiotics just makes them grow much better and fatter. Presumably, there are bacteria that inhibit growth without making the cows visibly sick. Result: antibiotics get deployed to all cows as a general growth enhancer, rather than focusing on actual sickness.
> I have no experience in the area, but just to point out that you could equally apply some of those arguments to meat production.
> The current meat industry is only cost effective because we've spent the last few millennia optimising the everloving hell out of it
Eh. I'd probably say the meat industry is cost effective because they have a superior bioreactor design: rugged, self-contained, low maintenance, and cheaply replicated. Lab grown meat probably can't compete until they re-invent "animals" in the lab.