Two U.S. food companies have received the go-ahead to sell chicken grown from cultivated animal cells in a production facility. It’s the first time meat grown this way will be sold in the U.S.

  • strykerx@kbin.social
    23·
    2 years ago

    I don’t get how it could be less environmentally friendly than traditionally grown meat from cows or whatever. Cows need to support not just the meat growing systems in the their bodies, but everything else…and they need to live for years, with constant food and land.

    • HubertManne@kbin.social
      13·
      2 years ago

      Yeah that comment does not make much sense. Our bodies have to function every day moving around and doing things. The lab grown stuff just needs to make cells. It should be much closer to growing fungus or yeast.

    • ChimpanzeeThat
      3·
      2 years ago

      You’re right and I think the commenter was sprouting bollocks. Reddit used to be plagued with comments like that which are simply meant to cast doubt, and aren’t based on facts.

    • Ferk@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      Cows are not the best choice, but bioreactors are still worse. At least with current tech.

      From this article:

      It’s a complex, precise, energy-intensive process, but the output of this single bioreactor train would be comparatively tiny. The hypothetical factory would need to have 130 production lines like the one I’ve just described, with more than 600 bioreactors all running simultaneously. Nothing on this scale has ever existed—though if we wanted to switch to cultivated meat by 2030, we’d better start now. If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.

      All of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator. That’s where things get complicated. It’s where critics say—and even GFI’s own numbers suggest—that cell-cultured meat may never be economically viable, even if it’s technically feasible.

      […]

      Humbird spent more than two years preparing his analysis for Open Philanthropy. The resulting document, which clocks in at 100 single-spaced pages with notes and appendices, is the most comprehensive public study of the challenges cultured meat companies will face. (An abridged, formally peer-reviewed version has since appeared in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering.) Their future doesn’t look good. Humbird worked off the assumption that the industry would grow to produce 100 kilotons per year worldwide—roughly the amount of plant-based “meat” produced in 2020. He found that even given those economies of scale, which would lower input and material costs to prices that don’t exist today, a facility producing roughly 6.8 kilotons of cultured meat per year would fail to create a cost-competitive product. Using large, 20,000 L reactors would result in a production cost of about $17 per pound of meat, according to the analysis. Relying on smaller, more medium-efficient perfusion reactors would be even pricier, resulting in a final cost of over $23 per pound.

      CC: @ChimpanzeeThat @HubertManne