Comment by clomond | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clomond | Hacker News Reader

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You are missing the core technology point that drives the underlying thesis here - ‘every manufactured good, gets cheaper per unit as you make more and more of it’.

Whether this is from the lab, a recipe of plant inputs, or some other currently unknown thing - if you are able to develop and commercialize a product around a ‘specific technology’, you can drive the cost of that down through experience and scale.

Animals are a VERY thermodynamically inefficient way of converting plants to ‘high quality proteins’. We have automated the crap out of the food processing system. There are no material efficiencies left to be had. Compare that to options which are on paper thermodynamically superior (I.e. not supporting the life of an animal to only use their muscle tissue).

By taking a technology with a much higher theoretical efficiency, and then scaling that up - creates the classic technology disruption scenario. ->‘It’s the cheaper version of X commodity, why wouldn’t I choose that?’

> Animals are a VERY thermodynamically inefficient way of converting plants to ‘high quality proteins’.

That would be pertinent if they were eating the same foods, but they don't eat the same foods. They eat the stuff we won't eat, produced largely either as a byproduct of the production of the foods we do eat or produced on lands that cannot support the foods we eat.

The more efficient we get in producing plants to eat, the more efficient byproducts there are for animals to eat, so you get a continuous relationship of meat becoming cheaper as other foods become cheaper. Economies of scale can only get you so far when the raw material inputs are your main cost centre.

The industry will have to move towards using those 'waste' products in order to be competitive, but at that point you're essentially just replicating animal processes and you're up against a 'machine' doing the same that has had millions of years to develop itself.

> Animals are a VERY thermodynamically inefficient way of converting plants to ‘high quality proteins’. We have automated the crap out of the food processing system. There are no material efficiencies left to be had. Compare that to options which are on paper thermodynamically superior (I.e. not supporting the life of an animal to only use their muscle tissue).

This really is such a cool take on it that it bums me out to say…

>why wouldn’t I choose that?

…because I just[0] don’t wanna eat fake meat.

[0] On a very deep, perhaps primal level. I can feel it rooted so far in my brain it’s hard to convey. Rather eat peanut butter at every meal.

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