More broadly, it's not really about cell-cultured meat. It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever which can be ingratiated in to the food supply chain anywhere. The huge success in culturally normalizing the consumption of 'beef balls' and similar '<highly processed, derivative, nominal protein identity> balls' in markets like Thailand to my critical eye largely stem from the beef ball factories of Shantou in Guangdong. Make no mistake: those people are making bank selling total bunk for real bucks.
Poverty will be the driver.
Economically, it's hard to pass up plants. They've literally evolved over millions of years to produce the goods using almost nothing in resource terms. Somehow the world just needs to learn to love Indian food and stop expecting protein and lipid dense meals.
Side note: "in to" should be one word - "into".
The corn syrup based foods are cheap, tasty, and really easy to eat. It's too bad they have no nutrients besides calories.
The rest of the world seems to use sugar from beets/sugar cane/coconuts?
Correct me if I'm wrong, I base the above statements on a rant by an American coworker about how the corn lobby managed to somehow force American food producers to exclusively use relatively high calory corn syrup as a sweetener as opposed to much lower calory sweeteners.
No, corn syrup is used in food and drinks all over the world.
Personally, I have nothing against corn syrup so long as the sweetness actually tastes nice and appropriate for what I'm consuming.
Corn syrup is also a lot better than artificial sweeteners which all taste like hot garbage and make me literally ill.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/495946/consumption-share...
...Diabetes prevalence was 20% higher in countries with higher availability of HFCS compared to countries with low availability, and these differences were retained or strengthened after adjusting for country-level estimates of body mass index (BMI), population and gross domestic product (adjusted diabetes prevalence=8.0 vs. 6.7%, p=0.03; fasting plasma glucose=5.34 vs. 5.22 mmol/L, p=0.03) despite similarities in obesity and total sugar and calorie availability. These results suggest that countries with higher availability of HFCS have a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes independent of obesity.The problem is that US government subsidies for corn and soy have created an entire class of products that are cheaper than any alternatives.
If we removed those subsidies, there would be far less incentive for companies to use them.
We have at least some options for this already. Mycoprotein is one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn#Production (apart from the plant isolates)
> [...]
> It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever
Personally I follow fermentation based (bacteria based) proteins with interest, potentially they can have an even smaller footprint than plant based protein.
Like Solein ( https://solarfoods.com/solein/ ), which has now been accepted as safe for human consumption in one country: Singapore.
So they're not always behind the curve.
Maybe one day - the potential of fungi is amazing. It's a whole world that is fundamental to ecology and comparatively poorly understood or mapped. However, I remain skeptical at present once you factor in one or both of the lab costs (steel vats, process control, power consumption, thermal systems, and lab employees) and the raw inputs (fermentation doesn't happen on thin air).
By the time you've grown the raw input, why not just grow a food crop?
I feel virtue-signalling regulatory moves are meaningless. Case in point: many markets are totally unregulated, by your logic they're ahead of the curve. I don't disagree.
For life generating protein is a byproduct of other goals. It seems possible that we can do better.
Hell yeah. I'm not really a fan of the lab grown meat aspect but I'd try a wooly mammoth burger.
I bet the taste would depend more on the tastes of the team making it than the actual flavour profile of a mamoth.
The way I was thinking about it is that how meat tastes depends very much on the excretion system of the animal removing waste products from the tissues. And those functions (the lymphatic system, the circulation, the kidneys, the bowels, the lungs) are not present in the lab grown meat tissue. We are obviously providing those functions artificially but I wouldn't be surprised if these artificial attempts are "worse" than the real deal at their job. After all the real chickens spent millions of years co-evolving these support functions with their tissues.
Plus what the tissue is fed! Some say they can taste if the cow was fed corn vs grass. Whatever the lab grown meat is fed must be even bigger difference from the original.
> There are several additional steps needed in order to make it palatable.
Makes sense. I wasn't even thinking about those, just the growing conditions. But of corse! And I bet while these were developed there was a ton of "prepare, taste, spit it out in disgust, adjust" cycles. With extant animals in theory at least you can do it scientifically by having blind taste tests comparing the real meat with the lab grown one. With mammoth, or anything else extinct, we would be guessing and making things up even more.
(Or perhaps Neolithic people would pity us and our culinary traditions—the bland, meaningless ennui of takeout fast-food. The true enjoyment of mammoth steak, we shall never know, is what it tastes when you've chased it down yourself for three days on foot).
Swiftie Burgers. Kardashian hot dogs. Nixon ribs.
Would love to see an article about this if you have one. Just curious is all.
Huh... I figured that china would account for most of their food imports, but that's not actually the case.
https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/SGP/Yea...
Surprisingly France and the UK are high up there, despite being geographically distant industrialized countries (e.g., not primarily based on agriculture). I wonder if this is because this is showing dollar value imports and these places export high cost food products? ... is it just champagne from France?
Edit: oh my god it is champagne (or more generally spirits: https://tradingeconomics.com/singapore/imports/france)
Malaysia makes a lot of sense; there is a lot of cuisine overlap, it is right next door, and Singapore actually started its modern life by getting kicked out of Malaysia. (That whole saga is interesting; as far as I know Singapore may be the rare example of a country unwillingly becoming independent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_in_Malaysia)
When you would be able to import the labmeat ingredients for at least 8x times the result weight of the imported meat.
Where S. would get these ingredients domestically?
1) It's a small island, but it's also a major trading port. Which means its whole economy is already geared towards importing food from neighboring countries.
2) On the other hand: no domestic industry to disrupt! No domestic farming groups lobbying against meat substitutes, which may push research/distribution furhter along.
They're also big on future-proofing and environmental awareness in general as they have a very long term stable government that looks 10-100 years ahead.
Given the money going into lobbying states to make it illegal in the US, I can only assume that it must have some chance of success.
The one thing it raised was that cultured meats do not have any sort of immune system. Thus if they are not produced in, what amounts to, TSMC level sterile environments there is the potential of entire batches being rendered useless as bacteria have a feast. There was also a lot of issue with scale, things I am sure you are aware of.
For specialty meats, yeah it makes sense.
But for pure scale I am a bit more hopeful on things like Precision Fermentation of yeasts as being a much more viable meat alternative. Turns out things like Quorn were way ahead of there time in that sense.
Two examples of non-meat protein advances: fungal-derived cheeses, and protein extracted from duckweed.
I'd love to know the major ones, or whatever you can share.
I'm much more optimistic about lab grown meat than most people. In fact I would love to invest in some lab grown meat companies. The more I know the better.
One way this business might make sense would be to sell boutique cell-cultured "specialty" meats, like scallops, veal, and wooly mammoth (yes, it's been seriously considered). They're not nearly as price-sensitive, and the scale is smaller. Here's hoping we can ease the burden on endangered populations and mitigate the inherent cruelty of some of those industries with cell-cultured alternatives.