My thought process is that if you have to mimic a living environment, you still need to include most of what the natural environment needs. The one artificial meat I’ve read about had the meat growing in vats of some “solution” that mimics the natural environment of the meat (so like a body). Granted, the process in the post may not function like this, but if it does, that process would include:
Heating, because the meat is actually meat, and the cells require heat to function, which still isn’t all that efficient.
Getting rid of the artificial meat’s dead cells and natural waste.
The “solution” itself I imagine is a funny chemical mix of some sort. So getting those chemicals extracted from their sources. (This one is a bit more iffy, I have no idea what the “solution” is, could be demineralised water with beef stock mixed in for all I know).
I can’t imagine keeping the “solution” as clean as needed for food safety laws around the world is an easy feat coupled with the other points I’ve listed.
These are all just speculations, please feel free to prove me wrong on any of them, and be sceptical of my list. But this is what I’m sceptical about with the very lacking information in the post.
The biggest challenge is the bio-reactors, they are hard to scale and require more delicate care than other cultured products because growing muscle, fat and tissue cells is a lot slower than say, getting yeast to reproduce. This a challenge but not a deal-breaker, there are some places already selling cultured meat but it’s still expensive (like, $40 for a burger) because of the scaling problems, which again, come from lack of funding and political pressure.
That said, most other challenges are either overcome or there are companies with solid methodology but no investment capital, and since many places are actually banning or outlawing the sale of cultured meat, we likely won’t see much actual progress until we get corporations out of politics, so maybe never.
Cows right now isn’t even grass, they’re fed mostly grown crops. The trophic energy loss at each stage is generically 10% , so plants to cow to human you lose 90% of the energy each time. So for eating meat you only get 1% of that energy from the sun. If you ate wolves who ate cows it would be .1%.
For energy this will, once it’s at scale, be able to be more energy efficient pretty easily. Because for one cow you have to have the entire life of the parent animal then wait 2 years for the animal to grow up. It has to eat and move around and waste energy that entire time. Less than half of that animal has the desired final product, so you waste more there. So the idea is that with growing this you just start with some cells and then increase their size until you get enough and then package that.
My thought process is that if you have to mimic a living environment, you still need to include most of what the natural environment needs. The one artificial meat I’ve read about had the meat growing in vats of some “solution” that mimics the natural environment of the meat (so like a body). Granted, the process in the post may not function like this, but if it does, that process would include:
These are all just speculations, please feel free to prove me wrong on any of them, and be sceptical of my list. But this is what I’m sceptical about with the very lacking information in the post.
The biggest challenge is the bio-reactors, they are hard to scale and require more delicate care than other cultured products because growing muscle, fat and tissue cells is a lot slower than say, getting yeast to reproduce. This a challenge but not a deal-breaker, there are some places already selling cultured meat but it’s still expensive (like, $40 for a burger) because of the scaling problems, which again, come from lack of funding and political pressure.
That said, most other challenges are either overcome or there are companies with solid methodology but no investment capital, and since many places are actually banning or outlawing the sale of cultured meat, we likely won’t see much actual progress until we get corporations out of politics, so maybe never.
Cows right now isn’t even grass, they’re fed mostly grown crops. The trophic energy loss at each stage is generically 10% , so plants to cow to human you lose 90% of the energy each time. So for eating meat you only get 1% of that energy from the sun. If you ate wolves who ate cows it would be .1%.
For energy this will, once it’s at scale, be able to be more energy efficient pretty easily. Because for one cow you have to have the entire life of the parent animal then wait 2 years for the animal to grow up. It has to eat and move around and waste energy that entire time. Less than half of that animal has the desired final product, so you waste more there. So the idea is that with growing this you just start with some cells and then increase their size until you get enough and then package that.