outside of silicon valley marketing materials, lab-grown meat is ridiculously expensive or straight up doesn’t exist. deer has immune system, grasshopper has immune system, stainless steel reactor full of cell suspension doesn’t. in order to prevent entire batch turning into mold or something, every starting material has to be pharma-grade and every operation has to be performed in sterile technique. it’s all fine for products like insulin or vaccines where single dose fits easily in sub-mg range, but if you try to price meat like this, it won’t be ever competitive for this reason alone.
but it gets worse, because people who try to do that are some random techbros without engineering background. strangely enough, this doesn’t matter, because every enterprise of this kind just rides on VC money. predictably, they burn it all. as long as you can attract it, things are good and for that all you need is good pitch. We’ll solve single cell meat with nanotechnology! We’ll solve single cell meat with 3d-printing! We’ll solve single cell meat with blockchain! We’ll solve single-cell meat with chatbots!
if you believe these people, world is simple and future is bright. i know many of you all on lemmy do.
i’ll say more: these people are selling imagined future where you can save the world in some measure (go vegan), and you don’t have to give up anything in the process (eating meat), as long as you Buy Our Product! then there are credulous marks primed for luxurious gay space consumerism, but magic tech that allows for it is just beyond the corner, then they disappear. but people still believe, and are disappointed when they have to make even tiny sacrifice on their own. newsflash dipshit: future won’t be convenient
That’s an overly negative take. Yes, there are serious challenges to the production of lab-grown meat; Wikipedia provides a good summary. This isn’t a business that’s ready to take off soon. But humans who are actually smart and do know what they’re doing are working to solve these things.
The challenges are serious, and anyone telling you “world is simple and future is bright” about the future of this industry, yeah, that’s bullshit. I’ve never heard anyone say that, and I don’t know where you heard that from. It might never be a viable industry. But it’s not just a gimmick to keep fleecing VC investors.
it’s not a business, it’s a set of startup pitches for people who believe in californian ideology. you’ll make a great vc, never let reality and limitations of physics and biology get in way of your plans
we don’t even know how little we know about finer details of immunology
but you know that? go and sell this idea somewhere in bay area. it doesn’t matter if it’s all wishful thinking, i won’t stop you, and maybe you’ll get to meet Elizabeth Holmes
what I find silly about going “vegan” is that it’s roughly 5% of the US population. Let’s say you boost it to 10% with all the posturing about saving the planet. Getting 50% of the population to half their meat consumption would have 5x the impact.
Trump utterly destroying the US’s economy may very well be the best thing for global warming. No one will be able to afford meat. It’s rice and beans for everyone!
republicans chasing ghosts, episode 2137
outside of silicon valley marketing materials, lab-grown meat is ridiculously expensive or straight up doesn’t exist. deer has immune system, grasshopper has immune system, stainless steel reactor full of cell suspension doesn’t. in order to prevent entire batch turning into mold or something, every starting material has to be pharma-grade and every operation has to be performed in sterile technique. it’s all fine for products like insulin or vaccines where single dose fits easily in sub-mg range, but if you try to price meat like this, it won’t be ever competitive for this reason alone.
but it gets worse, because people who try to do that are some random techbros without engineering background. strangely enough, this doesn’t matter, because every enterprise of this kind just rides on VC money. predictably, they burn it all. as long as you can attract it, things are good and for that all you need is good pitch. We’ll solve single cell meat with nanotechnology! We’ll solve single cell meat with 3d-printing! We’ll solve single cell meat with blockchain! We’ll solve single-cell meat with chatbots!
if you believe these people, world is simple and future is bright. i know many of you all on lemmy do.
i’ll say more: these people are selling imagined future where you can save the world in some measure (go vegan), and you don’t have to give up anything in the process (eating meat), as long as you Buy Our Product! then there are credulous marks primed for luxurious gay space consumerism, but magic tech that allows for it is just beyond the corner, then they disappear. but people still believe, and are disappointed when they have to make even tiny sacrifice on their own. newsflash dipshit: future won’t be convenient
That’s an overly negative take. Yes, there are serious challenges to the production of lab-grown meat; Wikipedia provides a good summary. This isn’t a business that’s ready to take off soon. But humans who are actually smart and do know what they’re doing are working to solve these things.
The challenges are serious, and anyone telling you “world is simple and future is bright” about the future of this industry, yeah, that’s bullshit. I’ve never heard anyone say that, and I don’t know where you heard that from. It might never be a viable industry. But it’s not just a gimmick to keep fleecing VC investors.
it’s not a business, it’s a set of startup pitches for people who believe in californian ideology. you’ll make a great vc, never let reality and limitations of physics and biology get in way of your plans
It would be cool if the could grow an immune system too
we don’t even know how little we know about finer details of immunology
but you know that? go and sell this idea somewhere in bay area. it doesn’t matter if it’s all wishful thinking, i won’t stop you, and maybe you’ll get to meet Elizabeth Holmes
Sweet can’t wait to be on Forbes 30 by 30
that’s the spirit
what I find silly about going “vegan” is that it’s roughly 5% of the US population. Let’s say you boost it to 10% with all the posturing about saving the planet. Getting 50% of the population to half their meat consumption would have 5x the impact.
Trump utterly destroying the US’s economy may very well be the best thing for global warming. No one will be able to afford meat. It’s rice and beans for everyone!
yeah it’s maximalist and in some ways impractical, not to mention some other considerations like carbon emissions