This is starting to sound like a process which will require untold quantities of anti biotics and preservatives.
Building lab grown tissues and not just cell lines is what's being worked on now, for any purpose not only food.
https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...
I wish they'd just sell the fish cells, alone. Would love to try that.
It makes it easy to wonder if there's a connection between that fact and the types of diseases, particularly auto immune and inflammatory diseases, that occur in the population.
It would be funny if the one seed oil you're OK with is mustard seed oil, the oil closest in composition to canola, the one oil anyone has a legit gripe about (it doesn't taste very good).
It’s people ignoring the mountain of evidence that such a switch would be a backwards step for health outcomes and claiming the opposite because they read a book by the usual rogues’ gallery of science misinterpreters (Taubes, Teicholz, Shanahan).
I don't care either way; let the mustard oil flow. I don't buy the mustard oil thing either. Just don't pretend that mustard oil is somehow healthier than canola. Use whichever fat tastes best to you.
I've got a bottle of Uncle Roy's cold pressed extra virgin "spicy" mustard seed oil at my local Spar.
The label reads "erucic acid free", so I'm guessing they somehow remove it?
It even has the awful pun of "The healthy Oilternative".
I understand they also remove (most of?) it from Canola Oil.
It’s particularly popular in the northern state of West Bengal in India, where it’s used in dishes such as achaars, a pickled condiment used to add an acidic spice to a wide variety of dishes.
Through careful breeding processes, the group of scientists were able to produce rapeseed plants with low levels of erucic acid. The oil, later to be named canola oil (can- for Canada, -ola which stands for “oil, low acid”) soon became a commercialized, easily marketable hit with both the public and science community alike (Fisher, 2020).
The FDA has approved one brand of edible mustard seed oil that’s produced from a cultivar bred explicitly for its low levels of erucic acid.
Still digging for the brand
This is pretty vague. Similarly ~50 years ago, people were not eating as much meat as they do today.
So is it also easy to wonder if there’s a connection between high canola consumption and the fact we’re living longer than ever?
Smoked and canned salmon are often packaged with similar oils and flavor additives.
Also canola oil is now considered on par or healthier than olive oil. Soybeans are one of the worlds few complete plant protein sources with a high quality protein and widely consumed all over the world to both animals and humans to much beneficial effect. Sunflower oil is the least healthy thing here, but still considered quite healthy without excessive heating.
I always find this is looked over and a double standard. You can raise an animal on a diet of anything along with medication, drugs, and supplements, and advocates will label the beef/chicken/pork product as "meat" and "natural" as if it was a single pure ingredient. But then if a non-meat alternative like a burger is mentioned, every individual ingredient used gets scrutinized, even if that ingredient is often fed to farm animals like soy or grain.
That mapping seems correct to me, as a lot of the objections here are free-floating one-offs that presume these background assumptions more so than they are apples to apples comparisons intent on clearly comparing them in totality.
They already sell those at the seafood aisle.
So, basically a salmon-flavored jelly? I'm actually ok with this as long as there is no harmful substances involved. I wonder how's the texture once it's cooked or grilled.
This came as a shock to me. The macronutrients don't lie, though. Fish is protein and a little fat, carb content is fractions of a gram, and these labels are telling me that there's more carbohydrate than protein.
The ingredient labels that the FDA allows, do find a way to lie. If you read a ten-ingredient label that says "Ingredients: Beef, wheat flour, corn flour, oats, textured vegetable protein, canola oil, vegetable oil, xanthan gum, carageenan, salt", and tell people that this is the highest-percentage ingredient to the lowest-percentage ingredient ordering, most people will assume it's >75% beef, but all the label is saying numerically is that it's >10% beef; If every other ingredient was in the 9.0 to 9.9% range then the beef input would be around 1/6th of the material. Add more ingredients and this can be manipulated even more.
I also don't think this is comparable. Blended Alaskan pollock had an immune system before it hit the cold chain.
Why doesn’t the FDA require explicit percentages be listed..?
In the US, the invisible hand of the market will surely push a food producer to regulate itself effectively.
"4-5 grams of protein per 100 gram serving" "fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae"
Real Coho Salmon is about 20% protein and 7% fat so we're looking at less than 20% of the important parts being salmon. I retract my previous comment. It's not Salmon.
I believe the FDA defines a minimum of 40% of a meat product to be made of that meat to be labeled as that meat (eg. beef hotdogs needs to be made of 40% beef) and I'm not sure if this qualifies as that.
As a benchmark, the tuna used in a Subway tuna sandwich is 100% tuna, the beef in Taco Bell beef tacos is 88% beef, and the chicken in McDonald's Chicken McNuggets is 100% chicken but make up 45% of the nugget.
That is a world I don't want to live in.
To be fair I live in Australia which does seem to have much stricter labelling requirements than the US.
The proof-of-concept marketing name "I Can't Believe It's Not Salmon" illustrates the fundamental problem here. Can lab-grown salmon be labeled as just plain "salmon"? Can it reside in the meat department right next to farm-raised and wild-caught salmon fillets? Does it always have to be prepended with "cultivated"?
It’s kinda like how they’ve started calling chocolate type products that have never seen a cocoa bean ‘chocolatey’.
Do we accept we are in a dystopia yet?
(Almost nobody who goes in to a restaurant is fooled by "Fish" in quotation marks on the menu; it's an alarming enough call-out to make anyone aware of it)
If a consumer has an expectation that what they're eating and drinking are specific things, they would be well served by learning to read the label(s). Nobody is serving these things outside of niche restaurant experiences and calling them the exact same thing as their OG counterparts.
e.g, Almond _milk_ has been a thing for centuries now. Everyone knows it's not from a cow, yet we call it milk because the end product is similar enough that people get what the point is. Humanity will likely do this until the heat death of the universe. You should probably just get over it.
If you're going to be this disingenuous then I'm not going to bother responding past this. shrug
"cultivated" is not meant to mislead, it's meant to find an agreeable label that communicates the product provenance.
Tissue culture in general is more like cancer than not like cancer, even when using "non-cancerous" cell lines. But cancerous and "immortalized" cell lines are particularly useful in cell culture because they don't snuff themselves out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line
> In addition to water and cell-cultivated salmon, our saku contains fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae, soy (an allergen), potato starch, konjac (a root vegetable), beta-carotene and lycopene (natural colors), carrageenan (an extract from red seaweed), and natural flavors.
Think about why each of these things are in there:
• Fats — because the parts [tissues] of the salmon that we eat, have not just muscle cells contained in them [the part that tastes + mouthfeels + cooks like salmon], but also fat cells (adipocytes), to contribute the taste + mouthfeel + cooking properties of "fatty tissue" [which is how we expect salmon to be] vs "lean tissue". And sure, the people creating this thing could have another tank growing "salmon-derived adipocytes", with some hormone bath to trick those adipocytes into absorbing and metabolizing nutrients from the environment to grow heavy with fat... but why bother? (That actually sounds dangerous, in fact — you might end up eating big doses of fish hormones trapped in the fat.) At the micro level, a little sphere of fat is a little sphere of fat; you can use a salmon adipocyte, some other kind of adipocyte, or even just a skin of sodium alginate, and the taste and texture of the result will be identical, as long as the fat inside the bag has identical properties (glyceride chain length, mostly).
• Natural colors and flavors — weirdly enough, because salmon by itself wouldn't look or taste fully like salmon; because the look and flavor come not just from what the salmon itself produces via the action of its cells/proteins/DNA, but also from "impurities" — things the salmon eats, that end up depositing into the salmon's tissues over time.
• Starch, caregeenan (and the implicit ingredient, water) — together, a simulacrum of (slightly-viscous) salmon blood. Using water alone wouldn't work; it's too thin, it'd just run out of the muscle tissue like a water from a sponge, desicating the tissue over a span of minutes. You need some thickener to prevent that. (I suppose you could make salmon blood plasma + platelets. Might be more nutritious if you did. Probably doesn't make much of a difference to taste or texture, but this might be a v2.0 goal of theirs.)
• Soy and konjac — a simulacrum of connective tissue, i.e. collagen. This is likely the matrix holding the cells in place. There's no such thing as "cells stacked directly on other cells"; there needs to be some non-cellular tissue matrix that binds them together. (Think "meat glue." Is a chicken nugget chicken?)
Why not actual collagen as a matrix, or maybe, say, gelatin? Why not ground-up shrimp as a colorant instead of beta carotent + lycopene? Why vegetable oils instead of animal fats? In all these cases, probably because their goal with these ingredients seems to be to only build this salmon out of plants + cells, rather than any animal byproducts. An unstated premise here seems to be that they want to design the process such that no matter how far it gets scaled up, there's no point at which it would be more economical to switch one of the ingredient sources from "make it in a bioreactor" to "get it from an animal byproduct sources", and at even further scale, "drive animal slaughter to get said byproduct as the product."
AFAICT, this is almost the closest thing you will ever be able to get to something you can call "salmon" — or maybe more specifically, "animal-harm-free salmon" — that can be created solely in a lab.
(To be wacky, you could, in theory, genetically engineer a... tree, or what-have-you, that would metabolically synthesize the salmon blood plasma, the salmon connective tissue, the salmon-prey-species tissue trace impurities, etc.; and also act as a host to a commensal salmon cell population; eventually putting all that together inside a fruit or something. Pluck and peel the fruit — salmon muscle tissue. We're probably 50 years from understanding genetic engineering well enough to do that; and even then, it'd probably be operationally impractical, due to salmon muscle tissue rotting at any temperature a tree would grow at.)
Simple answer: they're cutting corners -- increasing shelf life, decreasing production costs, and overall increasing profits, like many of the big food corporations operating today.
Buying some filtered animal-derived blood plasma on the open market and letting the tissue grow/soak in it, would likely be a lot cheaper than precision mixing+dispersing of thickeners + reverse-pressure-gradient tissue impregnation of those thickeners. Food-grade blood plasma is the lowest-demand animal byproduct there is — it's what gets rejected out of even blood-sausage manufacture.
Same with collagen vs., specifically, carrageenan — collagen's cheap in bulk and works great for getting animal cells to stick to it; carrageenan's expensive, finicky to work with, and there are concerns about the carcinogenic effects of its long-term consumption. Many food-product manufacturers have moved away from previous formulations containing carrageenan; companies are only sticking with carrageenan at this point if there's nothing else that works within their constraints. Judging by other carrageenan-containing products, those constraints are probably something like "plant-derived; solid at room temperature; melts in your mouth; decent compressive strength, yet tears easily under tension."
And vegetable oils would be cheaper than animal fats... but vegetable oils with the same set of health guarantees as salmon (i.e. "omega-3 rich" vegetable oils) are not. And their product does claim to have the same health benefits as real salmon; so presumably they are aiming for that omega-3:omega-6 ratio target, since it's usually the headline "health benefit" of eating salmon. Which means they're probably buying, continuously-measuring, and mixing different oils to hit that ratio — similar to what orange-juice processors do to create a homogeneous juice.
While that type of infrastructure is certainly possible, there's no clear way to scale it like there is for cellular culturing.
And the result might be pretty disappointing even if you did it. Picture a human who spent their whole life in a coma in a hospital bed — they'd have zero muscle mass, fragile bones, etc.
However, you might be able to get around this by hooking the animal's body up to a synthetic brainstem that sends computer-controlled impulses down the spine – such that you've got e.g. a bunch of brainless salmon strapped in place in a flow tank, whose bodies are constantly being told to breathe, swim forward, open their mouths to capture food when food is released into the tank, etc.
I think that, besides the scalability challenges, the reason this approach isn't more looked into as an avenue of research, is that the ethics of cellular-cultured meat are really clear (there is nothing experiencing pain there; there aren't even nerve cells to sense or relay pain), while the ethics of brainless whole-animal cultivation are... non-obvious, to say the least.
I hear.
It's certainly not fish.
Also it's the mostly same ingredients that farmed salmon is already packaged with.
Meat, bread, eggs, dairy, onion, herbs, spices.
Industrial food has a lot of things which are much less recognizable as food.
Degrees of separation from something alive which I'd like to eat to the ingredient matters to plenty of people.
Isn't that the ingredient in lab grown salmon? Also things you're calling "much less recognizable" are basically varieties of vegetable oil.
And milk from a cows udder, how is that not gross?
You know there's puss and blood in cows milk because they all have raw infected udders from being milked non stop by a machine?
Enjoy your meatloaf!
Vegitables are grown IN THE DIRT THEY ARE BY DEFINITION DIRTY, FIGS CONTAIN DIGESTED WASPS, nearly every agricultural product contains at least a little bit of BUGS, FRUIT IS THE REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS OF A FLOWER.
Sigh.
I will never understand how so many defend the expeller-propelled and solvent laden oils as somehow pleasant and natural…
An expeller is just a screw press. Get your terminology right if you're going to chase the latest food demonizing fad.
And yes, lots of oils are extracted by mashing up biologicals mixing it with a solvent like hexane and then evaporating off the solvent leaving a trace <1ppm behind.
I filled my gas tank today and did some spray painting without entirely appropriate ventilation. I'm sure most people regularly expose themselves to a little bit of organic solvent on a regular basis without a second thought or moralizing about it.
I'm perfectly fine eating something that was alive, so long as it was treated with respect and was killed humanely. Doing so connects you, a living being, to other living beings that are part of the circle of life, which live and die the same way you and I will.
People don’t care as long as it tastes good. The current methods we have for farming meat do not scale and we need to work on alternatives. Meat is tasty and people want to eat it.
Innovation will continue in the lab grown meat sector and when it eventually scales it will over take traditional methods. Current factory farming is anything but natural and there is plenty of harm being done.
Would you say the same thing about killing other humans for food? If not, why not?
I'd ask the poster a similar question though. If a monkey or chimp was treated with respect and killed humanely, would they eat that?
What does this mean?
Not sure about fish but mammals produced for meat are usually killed before adult age. Is that "killed humanely"?
Where is the line drawn?
Explain to me the difference between disrespect and being cattle-bolted through the skull.
When the fish is yanked out of the factory farm and suffocated in air or chilled and frozen alive do you think they experience this respect we're talking about? If so, where?
Does the operator say thanks to each fish before their brutal, agonizing, often prolonged for market death?
'respect' is about the most stupid thing I can think to bring up when referencing loss of life in animals.
It's a meta human concept that means nothing other than the mans approval of method -- it means nothing with regard to the animal or the suffering.
I think if you could choose between that and being slowly consumed by five or six coyotes from the ass forward, you'd go for the cattle bolt. I have a ton of problems with the US meat industry (to the point where I only eat meat once a month or so unless somebody is throwing it away), but there are ranchers out there who do try to do their best for the food they raise.
I actually do think, if we solved all the other problems in the world and had time left over, it would be right to intervene in nature to stop the harms you described too, and that conversation is a pandora's box of its own. But I don't think the upshot of these harms in nature is that we're also allowed to engage in similar harms at any scale we choose, as long as the badness isn't as bad as what happens in nature. Mainly because that comparison sidesteps the role of unique human moral responsibility and implies an unmade argument that analogies to nature can serve the function of authorizing human-initiated moral harms.
The "connection" you're advocating appears to be a more a romanticized free association (along the lines of "we are all stardust") than a specific conceptual argument accountable to the interests of the animals being harmed.
In light of the fact that similar compounds are added to the majority of farmed salmon for similar reasons, the comparison shows that the objection is likely a fallacious appeal to nature, purporting that something is good because it is "natural" or "normal" rather than presenting any objective evidence to argue their point.
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their correct name
- Confucius
They need to call this tankcellfillet or something on those lines. Companies must not be allowed to get away to slap the tag healthy on clearly harmful foods and get away.
>clearly harmful foods
Want something even grosser? Go catch a salmon and then look at how many parasites are in _every_ fish.
If you have ever eaten salmon, you've swallowed tons of parasites in all stages of their lifecycle.
The parasites are part of the circle of life and are in no way gross to me.
Sorry you feel that way.
For most of human history eating meat riddled with maggots was part of the circle of life, is it weird to be grossed out by eating meat riddled with maggots?
Surely if it was good enough for us to live on back then, it’s part of the circle of life and should be totally fine. Right?
If one’s no longer acceptable because we don’t do it any more, then surely if lab meat gets established then we’ll look back at that parasite-riddled salmon with the same revulsion as we do the maggots.
Even ancient man avoided parasites when possible. Parasites can kill you, regardless of how natural they are.
Dog shit and nightshade are part of the circle of life too, but they seem to be avoided by most.
Something being good because it's 'part of the circle of life', whatever that means, is as blind and irrational as 'all upf is bad by virtue of being defined as upf.'
Life isn't as simple as black and white.
> "We harvest the cells from our tanks and integrate them with a few plant-based ingredients..."
Gross. This should not legally be allowed to be marketed as salmon, at all.