Can you explain the significance of your statement?

Surely the meat we all eat is dead along with the immune system and then cooked.

IDK what they're talking about but I could imagine a pathogen that evolved on real animals having a field day at a meat farm without an immune system to fight back it would be reliant on the human operators cleanliness and other procedures.

Granted it might be much harder to have the initial infection happen in the first place since it's just a chunk of meat in a lab (no animal to walk around and get injured or otherwise interact with the environment, no poop, no lungs etc).

It will be interesting to see this technology develop.

That's not that much different from existing industrial environments like brewing, or making mayonnaise or other things. I don't think that's much of a hurdle to have to overcome.

Mayonnaise as an example is interesting, although the time that the mayonnaise exists for is probably shorter than meat.

With beer and other fermented stuff, the fermentation is a disinfecting process. For example people used to make really weak beer to drink instead of potentially drinking dirty water with something in it that would make you sick.

I'm talking about while you are growing the meat, whether it be in a natural system that is self-regulating and with an immune system, or in a vat where any contamination will spread rampantly. That's one of the biggest problems with lab-grown meat: if you make it at a scale that is economically feasible, the chance for contamination is so high that very few batches will make it through the process, and will have to be discarded instead.

We do large batch cheeses and beers and other things like that; which are similar enough that they'll offer useful pointers. "Meat" cultures might well be more subject to contamination because of the conditions required, but still. It's not a new problems and there's solutions that have worked for similar cases.

I do not think they will be able to compete economically with the backyard chicken, for example; but I'm not worried that they can't produce a safe product.

Those are much simpler yeasts and molds being cultivated. Meat cells are much more complex from an inputs/outputs point of view, and much more prone to contamination, especially at scales that are economically feasible.

Maybe they'll do it mostly robotically in a clean room type environment, with UVC blasting everything other than the actual growth medium.

I'm not an expert but it might be that the cultures we have chosen for beer and cheese and so on are those that outcompete most others while still not being harmful in by-products to us. This might take a while for lab grown meat.

Can't we solve this at least temporarily with a sodium rich environment? It seems to be effective for safe fermentation. I have no idea whether the biochemical reactions necessary to produce the meat though would be inhibited if we did this.

Try injecting yourself with saltwater and see what happens. The osmotic effects won't just affect the undesired cells. It will also affect the desired cells.

Firstly, please don't give people dangerous advice even if it's obvious you're not serious. It may not be obvious to them. Don't inject yourself with anything.

Secondly, you're literally describing a saline drip.

Depends on the salt content. If you try things you read in comment sections on the internet, maybe you shouldn't be on the internet.

talking down to people while you're telling them not to do something harmful usually just inflames their interest in doing it. look at how calling people stupid or evil for not following covid precautions or for looking into poorly-studied treatments worked out. no need for a patriarchal superiority complex here

>talking down to people while you're telling them not to do something harmful usually just inflames their interest in doing it. look at how calling people stupid or evil for not following covid precautions or for looking into poorly-studied treatments worked out.

That seems to mostly be an American phenomenon.

If I've learned anything from Bell Labs and Frank Capra, it's that blood is pretty similar to seawater.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=08QDu2pGtkc

If I had to opine, I would say an immune system would attack foreign antigens and anything that needs to be eliminated while the animal was alive so the meat would be… healthier?

Animals are deuterstomes, meaning there is a nonsterile side, which is the skin and everything between the mouth and anus. Then there is the inside, which is sterile and protected by the immune system. If your blood or muscle tissue has bacteria, you are headed for a septic death or gangrene.

(This isn’t a sarcastic or Socratic question, just genuine curiosity)

Is there some aspect of the immune system that remains active and providing protection to an animal, or parts of an animal after it’s slaughtered?

Not being exposed to air, for one. That's why it's safe to eat a rare steak (where the surfaces exposed to air are cooked to kill bacteria) and why it's not safe to eat rare hamburger (where all the meat has been exposed to air through grinding the meat).

> and why it's not safe to eat rare hamburger (where all the meat has been exposed to air through grinding the meat).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett

> permits mett to be sold only on the day of production

Sounds like Germany's laws acknowledge that non-fresh mett poses the same dangers as store bought hamburger.

Sure, but this is chicken, which is already notably porous, which is why it’s generally considered unsafe to eat rare chicken, even if it’s been well cooked on the outside.

At least for that aspect, I’d think the protection is less relevant. I would be very curious how that’s handled with other meats, like lab grown beef. I’d be more hesitant about lab grown beef, if the cooking instructions prevented cooking it rare.

> That's why it's safe to eat a rare steak

The USA department of agriculture begs to differ. https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Is-a-rare-steak-safe-to-eat

Personally I never place much trust in random comments on the internet.

So if the USDA recommends this, what's the reasoning behind allowing restaurants to sell rare steaks?

Look at almost any menu in any restaurant that serves steak and you’ll find a little asterisk, and a note about the USDA’s recommendation at the bottom of the menu.

The USDA has not made it illegal or unlawful to cook steak rare. They recommend against it. A lot of people like rare steak, and will pay a restaurant to prepare a rare steak. So they do.

They recommend 145°F, which is medium-well. Experiential outcomes suggest pretty strongly to me that forcing all steak to be cooked medium-well or greater is wildly overly conservative.

There's also steak tartare, which isn't cooked at all.

> Experiential outcomes suggest pretty strongly to me that forcing all steak to be cooked medium-well or greater is wildly overly conservative.

Do you mean you grew coltures of bacteria from various levels of cooking and compared? Was this work peer reviewed?

I do not mean that. (That would be experimental rather than experiential.)

Order of magnitude, ~15% of beef consumed is quality steak cuts. US residents on average eats 67 pounds of beef (so 10 pounds of steak) per year. If eating steak cooked less than medium-well was dangerous in a practical/meaningful sense, it would be common knowledge (based on lived experience) that steak should be catastrophically over-cooked as a food safety measure.

USDA has been trying and failing for decades to make a visual aid that accurately communicates the balance of a healthy diet. and they ban foods that people in other countries have eaten for 1000 years (while allowing them for pets). they are both inaccurate and overly conservative with nutrition and health guidance

It's more like the USDA is begged to differ.

They exist to be an ultimate authority, and that constrains them from presenting a compromised position, even if that compromise is something people find widely acceptable. The USDA simply isn't in a position to guarantee enough safety in this case to balance against their liability.

Safety is compromise. Eating rare steak is risky, but most of the risk is mitigated. Getting sick from eating rare steak is, itself, rare.

If I understood your comment correctly (I'm sorry if I didn't) - isn't it grown in essentially sterile conditions, so lack of immune system isn't an issue as I must imagine it shouldn't be able to communicate any transmissible diseases?

The sterile conditions become more fragile and easily contaminatible the larger the batch gets. So they need to increase the size of batches to make it economically viable, but increasing batch sizes makes it more likely to get contaminated, which kills the whole batch. Then you have to dispose of bio-waste material that has been contaminated in a safe and economic fashion, which is a whole different set of problems.

That’s correct. The challenge is that ensuring perfect sterility during production is tricky at scale. A small mistake could ruin a large batch of food, lowering total yields and raising costs.

Ideally the production process would include something analogous to the immune system to make it more robust. For certain contaminants simple outcompetition by probiotics might suffice.

The alternative, natural meat, is even trickier to keep sterile at scale. This is why it is advised to cook meat fully. The presence of bacteria on natural animal meat is common.

This is a misleading statement. We don’t even try to keep slaughtered meat sterile during production; the animal’s immune system makes that unnecessary.

We don't keep natural meat sterile during production because it would kill the chicken, which results in zero output of chicken.

Chickens' immune systems are quite fallible, and they do not keep the chicken in a sterile state. Chickens are full of dangerous bacteria despite having an immune system.

Yes, you understand correctly.

It's more than "common" it's almost 100% guaranteed.

"Sterile conditions" isn't really a thing without temperatures high enough to cook the meat.