Building muscle in the lab
ethz.ch
ethz.ch
If we ever reach that point, whoever's in the market to capitalize on the opportunity is going to be very well off.
Same goes for this new obsession with roach milk and bug eating. They want to turn the real thing into luxuries and exports while the working poor eat bugs and lab grown slop.
The claim about being good for the environment is a red herring used to get a certain segment of the population excited for it. Make no mistake, factory farming will continue to exist because the Uber rich will happily pay for it both domestic and abroad.
Select food and Ag.
They have no conspiratorial desires except to make money. If there's a market for animal-sourced protein they'll go there; if there's a market for synthetic meats likewise.
That cheaper product isn't actually better in most cases, it's filled with poorer quality magerials and lab engineered chemicals.
The working poor then buy it because it looks like the original product. Except it isn't. Its filled with questionable chemicals and industrial processes that have an unknown effect in the human body.
See the replacement of lard for seed oils and how the obesity epidemic came from that. Beef lard which was once a cheap cooking oil is now an expensive premium product.
What ends up happening then is the original product becomes a premium product and is priced accordingly.
Since America doesn't make anything, the only thing we export in significant quantities are food stuffs, especially meat. That meat gets sent abroad to places like China where they make more money than you and are able to afford the original product you are now priced out of.
So you end up eating grasshoppers and lab grown mystery slop.
> "Since America doesn't make anything"
The top exports of United States are Refined Petroleum ($83.3B), Petroleum Gas ($70.9B), Crude Petroleum ($67.6B), Cars ($55.4B), and Integrated Circuits ($51.3B) sauce: https://oec.world/en/profile/country/usa#latest-data
>"That meat gets sent abroad to places like China where they make more money than you and are able to afford the original product you are now priced out of."
Why would the original product get more expensive if people like it and supply continues? There is now increased supply in comparable products which brings prices down. Also, China is a quite poor country. The median income is $4,500.
I don't care what the 1% do, never did. If it tastes good and if the texture is good I don't mind eating lab grown food. With meat we aren't quite there yet.
Not that I care that much, if I eat salad from one process or the other.
I just don't think Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Singapore eat that much meat.
China hlused to be number 1 but they've been reducing their meat purchases since the late 2010s for obvious reasons.
It could also potentially become a cheap source of high quality nutrition if enough advances were made.
Cows are self-motivating bioreactors that vaguely maximize inputs as possible. You don't need to hire a tech or buy freezers or buy pipette tips or clean an industrial reactor for a cow to make grass into beef. Evolution has provided us a method which has reached some local thermodynamic minima. Not so much with Impossible patties.
And anyway, afaik, lab beef still has BSA as a necessary component, so you need cows to make fake cows.
Eat a goddamn bean, dorks.
Cows produce a _ton_ of waste, are brittle and require a lot of care and energy. A lot of that energy is subsidized in some form or another, in places where cattle are produced in large quantities. They are very resource intensive.
Our ability to iterate and optimize with technology is comically faster than evolution. Cows are, more or less, unchanged in the modern era, and will likely stay as they are for the considerable future.
Conversely, if we produced convincing synthetic beef in a lab today, do you think that process would go unchanged for a decade, two decades, a century, without improvements in energy and other resource consumption?
If you produce beef in a lab, you don't require farmers, or farm hands, or truck drivers, or veterinarians, or butchers, and so on.
A tech and freezers and pipette tips and an industrial reactor sounds like a step up to me.
(Also arguably beef cattle likely require more refrigeration than artificial beef ever could.)
It's not a horrible comparison. It's an obvious one. Pardon me if I'm not swayed by your proclamation.
The important point is that I don't think anybody's actually broken down the difference
As it is, artificial beef requires more shepherding than co-produced. It requires consumable goods and equipment and human intervention and specialized equipment. Yes, these will all get better. Maybe it'll get better.
But I suspect that biology will always be more efficient at specific manufacture than human industry unless it's for small molecules.
Human innovation is faster than evolution. An order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude is a huge advance hard-on through cleverness and huge capital investment, but cutting down a zero or two still leaves a long path compared to hundreds of millions of years of evolution. So it's only a million years or a hundred thousand years or a thousand years to find something.
Refrigeration of artificial beef will only remove the energy required to cool bones, not the initial need. I'm sure you could sterilize and shrinkwrap a cube of lab meat and shelf-stock it like a carton of soy milk, but I don't see it happening.
Eat a goddamn bean.
I’m not even fully willing to say “we will not make a room temperature superconductor” or “we will not make cold fusion” as a hill I’m gonna die on. Efficient artificial beef seems downright likely in comparison.
Artificial meat isn't going to get around shipping or storage. Maybe they'll figure out how to obtain the necessary growth media from something other baby cows.
I don't think fake meat will go away. I think the trick is whether we can offset enough energy via renewables. But I don't think it can ever require less input energy than a cow in a field. You have to replace it with human labor or constructed machinery, and both will always require more than water and grass.
It will always take more energy to make a bean burger than to eat the bean, but people will still do it I suspect.
RTSC and CF haven't happened yet. The latter is a hill that seems fit to die on, as it's pretty far from physics. The former seems plausible enough, but maybe other high temp SC's point to ambient conditions on Earth being completely unfavorable.
One pathogen can ruin an entire isolated mass of tissue.
If you want to grow meat at scale, this becomes a lot harder and is currently an unsolved problem. And it isn't trivial.
https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...
You're making the same mistake!
Most of the energy that goes into cows is used to maintain their homeostasis and move them around from one patch of grass to the next. Best case scenario, 20% of the energy makes it down the line - 5:1 calories consumed to calories provided. Compare to shrimp where the numbers are more like 2:1 and we've got a huge range of efficiencies just within the animal kingdom.
The problem isn't that the cow eats free from photosynthesizers, it's that they've had several hundred million years to evolve together. The dream is to eventually short circuit the process via engineering by feeding energy from solar inputs directly into producing edible muscle fiber.
It "just" that engineering something as efficient as evolution is really, really, REALLY hard.
I understand the point of lab meat. I'm not convinced that the engineering required to produce it will thermodynamically be more efficient than a cow in a field.
So, again: eat a goddamn bean.
So here I am drinking rainwater and lecturing an Englishman. I assume it works out well for me.