The Lab-Grown Meat Revolution That Never Arrived
Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't
In 2013, Mark Post served a $330,000 lab-grown burger, sparking a gold rush of 140 companies and $3 billion in investment. A decade later, the meat never materialized: costs soared, regulators balked, and conservative states banned it. Today, cultivated meat is sold in just one store worldwide. A vegetarian writer visits North Carolina's Bezos Center to see if the industry can still deliver.
Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere. We’re not doing that in the state of Florida.
- swiftcoder
> Then, suddenly, the nausea hit... The problem was not the flavor, not the texture, but the knowing. The Knowing. Knowing about the fat tank, about the sticky white substance...
I feel like squeamish people are probably not the best ones to write about novel meat products...
- Balgair
Man, I'm so glad I don't trade stocks.
I was so convinced that these meatless meats were going to be the next big thing.
One thing I think they missed out on was getting to 'close enough' and 'much cheaper' and then just pivoting.
Like, why stay with simulating the 5 or so animals we harvest? Just go off and make up new ones!
Like, here's a jackalope burger, or a unicorn burger or something. Tie into marketing!
"Exclusive to BurgerKing, the Iron Man 5 burger! Now through August 29th only!"
Put in some strange spices, vary the texture, give it a red and gold swirl, let the imagination run wild.
Can you imagine what business a Spiderman burger patty or sausage link would do? K-Pop demon hunters branded chicken-ish nugget like things?
- dinkblam
it is sad how the lobbying of old evil industries like tobacco and animal-killing can convince the politicians and the public to outlaw and demonize their less-evil competition like vaping and lab-grown meat to make sure to hold on to the status quo.
but why write more than 7000 words to communicate a simple point (lab-grown meat was promised 1-2 decades ago but failed to arrive and won't arrive in the foreseeable future)?
- lordnacho
I'm a bit surprised that we got disembodied intelligence before we got deathless meat. If you'd told me in the year 2000 that one of these would happen, I'd have put my money on the meat.
- Semaphor
I had long given up on lab-grown meat. It started feeling like fusion, always around the corner, but never there (or at least not in an affordable way).
What replaced almost all ground beef (except in burgers) for me, was Jackfruit. More specifically, the combination 90% pea protein, 10% jackfruit. Granules that can be rehydrated with boiling water in 2 minutes, price competitive with discounter mince, no extra ingredients, no high carb count. It has a good texture and tastes mostly like whatever you season it with.
- dr_dshiv
Would it make the meat industry more ethical if happy drugs were made available to animals? If I had to choose between a meaningful (even if I didn’t know it when living), blissful unnatural life and none at all, I’d choose the former.
It’s the negative affect and suffering (stress, pain, boredom etc) that is the bad part of eating animals.
(I think— I know others have thought more than I on this topic)
It just seems like an easier tech solution might be promising
- shrubble
Turns out that nature is a lot more efficient at producing meat; I don’t think this will change for a while, if ever.
Bugs for chickens, grasses/grains for cattle and omnivorous pigs are their own kind of bio-reactor…
- ticulatedspline
I think the dream will never die, but it might go underground for another turn.
Problem was that broadly there's two categories to compete in. "Superior product" , and "cheaper". the last round of artificial meat was neither.
I genuinely believe that eventually we'll have a proper "biological revolution". much like many inorganic technical revolutions have shaped the world (AI being one of the most recent) I think we'll have a breakthrough that opens the doors to the kinds of biological technologies from science fiction.
At that stage I would anticipate an assault on both categories. Ground beef/chicken/pork of sufficient quality that undercuts factory farmed meat. But also superior products. the best wagyu in the world is just tissue, a collection of cells. I can certainly imagine a future where chunks of meat at that quality or even better roll out of vats. softer and more marbled than any real meat because it's not limited by the conditions of being grown within a functional animal.
And when it's better or cheaper people will buy it, and squeamishness will abate as it becomes normalized. that the meat may be more humane will be a nice value add but never enough to prop up the product itself.