Razib had Virginia Postrel, former editor of Reason magazine on to talk about "synthetic" meat. It is hard to keep in mind that synthetic meat is real meat, just not made on an animal. It is not a collection of plants juggled and doctored to imitate meat. She had recently eaten sushi-grade salmon and was unable to tell the difference with the real thing, except that the shape was a little odd. My son in Nome might be able to taste-test a difference, but maybe not many. There was discussion about what types of meat and fish were going to be focused on earlier, and price point will be a deciding factor. There's not going to be much point in fabricating chicken from chicken cells because chicken is already cheap. The salmon is an entry point because there is a surge in demand for the sushi grades, and supplies are hard to keep up. So even though in making salmon they have to replicate the environment down to changing the temperature and salinity at various stages, just like an anadromous salmon would experience, it's likely to be worth it. It's not that complicated (or so they said).
You would think that a good ribeye would be next up for production, but that's even more complicated. You can't just grow the stuff in a dish or even on a rack. You have to mimic the frequent movement and exercise of a cow in order to build the muscle and have the right proportion of fat. The tissue has to grow on a gyrating, exercising rack. At that point you might just as well just use a cow, right?
The line reminded me of a discussion at pub night years ago when my son had just bought his automatic Husqvarna mower and was describing what it did. You don't program it, it wanders around the property up to the underground electric fence boundaries, cutting as it goes, doubling back over the yard many times before it is finished. My young farmer friend, who you just met in the discussion of making maple syrup chuckled and said "What you are basically describing is a cow."
So more power to cows, whose actions are more complex than they look. And don't worry to much about people trying to talk you into eating this manufactured meat. It's beef without methane, which should keep them off our backs for at least another generation. Sure, there are people who are pushing this in the hopes of sneaking in rules that we have to eat only plants or even reconstituted bugs or whatever, but this takes one of their main complaints away - now that they've figured out that automobile engines aren't the only cause of greenhouse gas. (There also jets, too, but that's another story.) Not that they'll be fully rational about this - a lot of it is about feelz - but that's no cause for us to go and be irrational ourselves.
7 comments:
I will happily eat eggs and dairy products. I would happily eat meat not grown on a living creature, well try it anyway. For me, as a not particularly good Buddhist, its taking a life, at least a higher form of life, that is the problem.
I can get some movement would be necessary for development and especially marbling but that ribeye comes from the part of the cow that doesn't exert much effort jogging around the feedlot. I'm thinking pork might be a sweet spot since it, like chicken, isn't marbled and the size of animal would seem to scale better from a fish. The other obvious application, especially for something approximating natural beef, would be to grind it with fatty cuts to a 85/15 blend for all the various chopped and formed beef products.
Looking at the history of these green initiatives I tend to agree with your analysis that meat won't be outlawed. What's going to happen is that monetary incentives will be given that might work (Solyndra) but far more likely will be various rules and regulations that will simply make it uneconomical to raise meat animals.
There it is...some people will still be able to eat meat, but it won't be us plebes.
I don't have complete information on how the lab grown meat is grown, but from what I've heard so far, it is being grown using tissue culture methods that have been established in scientific research for growing all sorts of cell types in vitro. Such tissue culture requires nutrient solutions to feed the cells with all the things they would normally be getting from the bloodstream. The component used in largest quantities for this purpose is FBS - fetal bovine serum, "a byproduct of harvesting cattle for the meatpacking industry" (ThermoFisher). So, unless and until they've got another way to make the feeding cocktail, lab grown meat will be grown using animal extracts. So, regarding resources, environment, and ethics, your mileage may vary.
I was reading this as a cattle-truck was stopped at the stop-sign outside, and two cows within were loudly expressing their opinions.
The UK is currently experiencing a shortage of tomatoes and other veggies in the supermarket, an issue which is most proximally because of UK indoor-farmers shutting down production due to rising energy costs making it non-economic. (post-brexit import-bureucracy bottlenecks making quick substitution from abroad too slow).
It's interesting to look at the US per-capita consumption of the various meats over the past century. I suspect that lower-cost -- and availability of refrigeration for transport and distribution -- has increased meat's proportion in our diet, and that it could be as easily substituted out largely by reducing portion size if it starts becoming more expensive again.
I suspect that it is quite easy to underestimate the input costs of a beef-cattle or dairy operation, but I still conceive it as much more resilient to energy and supply chain shocks than synthetic meats.
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When we bought our current place it was short-term cheaper and better for our cash-flow to continue the previous owner's lawn care arrangement than to acquire equipment suitable for the size of the place. It's certainly worked out well when we've needed to spend extended time away.
I anticipate that our lawn-care guy will retire in the next few years, however. Having become used to not needing to make time (or even think about) the need to regularly mow, that Husqvarna robo-cow is looking really appealing for when that time comes.
I am interested in V. Postrel's reaction to the reactions to her piece. It doesn't seem to occur to her that she herself lives in a sheltered bubble. And the impulse to dump the readership into political buckets should be curbed. If you see the world that way, it's probably a good idea to get out of the bubble.
A Gallup poll in 2018 found distinctive differences by political inclination. 11% of self-identified liberals are vegetarian, compared to 2% of self-identified conservatives and 3% of moderates. So only in a liberal bubble will even one out of 10 of readers have a problem with eating meat.
Who's the target market for the product? For myself, it's rather like hearing a Catholic introduce a product to allow eating meat on Friday. Interesting as a religious practice, but not my religion. How many people feel guilty about eating meat? How many people would switch to this sort of product over climate anxiety? I have to say as an agnostic on religious beliefs, it's hard to take the climate anxiety of the private jet and mega yacht investor class seriously. Behavior refutes piety.
Salmon is a good entry point because there isn't a Salmon Farmers lobby in US politics.
Not every invention counts as progress. I would expect WSJ readers to be very familiar with the failure of experimental companies. There is still a baby formula shortage in the US, which is a mark against centralized, industrial food production. I'd rather have a million independent farmers than a few fragile factories.
The salmon farmers lobby would be "Stronger America Through Seafood (SATS)"
Not as strong yet as the fisheries lobby, which doesn't like them much . ..
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