I'm not sure about chicken cells but my experience with growing human cells (WI-38 fibroblasts)[1] is that they want to grow in a monolayer.
The way we grew them normally was in those roller bottles [2]: you have some tissue culture medium in the bottle (containing fetal calf serum, which is still required to grow mammalian cells AFAIK, another reason most of these companies can't do what they say) and other components. Then the bottles are put on their sides on a roller mechanism, in an incubator with a controlled CO2 concentration.
The cells want to grow in a one-cell-thick monolayer all over the inside of the bottle. What they won't do is to grow a double layer. This is because they have "contact inhibition" which is a major mechanism for preventing tumor-like growth: when cells are touching each other, they stop dividing.
So these guys are trying to grow tissue and what they seem to be doing instead is growing monolayers just like this on the inside of roller bottles, scraping them off, then putting them together again.
One thing that disturbed me was that they need to coat the bottles with porcine gelatin. In that case, a lot of those "chicken" cutlets are actually pork!
> The cells want to grow in a one-cell-thick monolayer all over the inside of the bottle. What they won't do is to grow a double layer. This is because they have "contact inhibition" which is a major mechanism for preventing tumor-like growth: when cells are touching each other, they stop dividing.
How does that work inside the human body, where presumably they do form 3D structures?
It's incredibly complicated and every type of tissue has it's own specific mechanisms for forming it's 3D structure but the short answer is that there is an "extracellular matrix" that forms a network of macromolecules using collagen, elastin, fibronectin, and a bunch more signaling and structural proteins that organize cell growth.
The ECM starts developing in the fetus and figuring out how it grows from a few cells into a bunch of differentiated organs, muscles, bone, etc. is a core problem in embryology (biology in general, really). If we knew enough to make proper meat, we'd probably be steps away from a Jurassic park scenario.
AFAIK the specific patterning and asymmetry of surrounding cells is what convinced the cells to form organs. The inhibition stops random cells in media from forming a big randomly configured organ, ie a tumor. Here is a paper about it,
"But roller bottles aren’t just problematic due to their miniscule output. They’re also expensive and wasteful, according to numerous biopharma and cultivated-meat industry sources. Each flask is made from sterile, single-use plastic, which must be discarded or recycled once it has generated its 2 to 3 grams of tissue. Given that an ordinary 2-liter plastic drink bottle can easily weigh 30 grams, Upside’s current production method likely produces plastic waste more than 10 times faster than it makes meat. “Can you imagine how much landfill waste you’re actually generating?” says one former employee, who was disturbed by the volume of single-use plastic being used at Upside.
Roller bottles also require a lot of tending by human beings, says David Humbird, an independent analyst and bioprocess scale-up expert and author of a comprehensive economic assessment of cultivated meat. Before it can produce its 2 to 3 grams of tissue, each bottle will need to be individually prepared, filled with cells, then periodically opened and filled with new media over the course of several days—a painstaking process that staffers must repeat under sterile conditions with hundreds of bottles before finished cell sheets can be carefully squeegeed out. It’s an approach that requires many hours of work by trained scientists to yield a tiny serving of food.
But the chicken served at Bar Crenn uses multiple animal-derived ingredients. The roller bottles in which the tissues are grown are coated with porcine gelatin to help the cells stick to the plastic surface. An FDA safety dossier submitted by Upside also confirms that it might use bovine serum to grow its cells. The current employee also said that bovine serum—derived from the blood of adult cattle—is being used in the roller bottle process for Bar Crenn."
I'm not sure the plastic use is super relevant at lab scale, as someone who has worked in lab cell culture the amount of plastic waste is enormous from all the single use individually packed sterile equipment. However, I don't think anyone is planning to scale up plastic single use tissue culture equipment to make food, its just not going to make economic sense.
I can't comment on if they are claiming the current product is made in a scalable fashion or in a lab.
> I can't comment on if they are claiming the current product is made in a scalable fashion or in a lab.
Seems pretty clear from TFA that unless WIRED are grossly misrepresenting facts, current product is made in a lab using roller bottles:
> WIRED sent a detailed list of questions to Upside based on our reporting. In an emailed statement, Chen, the company’s chief operating officer, claimed that our reporting contained a number of factual inaccuracies but did not directly address any of the points raised. Chen went on to say that Upside’s current process for producing chicken fillets was not one the company intends “to scale in its current form.”
> "All breakthrough innovations and transformative technologies, including scaling our cultivated meat products, will take time," Chen wrote in the emailed statement. "Cultivated meat is no exception. Not every research avenue, cultivator, or idea we explore will materialize exactly as we expected."
I really wish them to succeed. Imagine centuries from now, a future civilisation where human-inflicted cruelty towards billions and billions of sentient beings is ended...
Beef cattle are almost always raised on open pastureland. They live a very normal, happy, life for all their years. Yes their last moments are perhaps bad, but then so are ours.
Would you rather not exist at all if it saved you from dying?
Not true in the US, the market in question for TFA. Beef cattle are mostly raised on feed lots, fed by crops specifically grown as cattle feed, such as alfalfa. My understanding for US beef is that it's something like 80% from feed lot, 20% pasture.
Feed lots do sometimes come into play for finishing beef cattle, but this takes only ~4 months. And it is very possible to buy pasture&grass finished beef that doesn’t use feed lots at all.
I shouldn't have said "raised", that was wrong, but I just wanted to talk about beef cattle that are not pasture grazing at all, or at least only for a tiny percentage of their lifespan. About 80% of beef cattle go from mother's milk, to feed lot once weaned.
Of course you can buy the other stuff, I said as much.
My point is that this statement is one part deceptive, and one part obviously wrong for the US, the market in question.
> Beef cattle are almost always raised on open pastureland. They live a very normal, happy, life for all their years.
“Once weaned” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The bulk of their life - until month 12-14 is on pasture with the mother. A ~third of those females stay on pasture indefinitely as birthers. The rest go to feed lots (assuming not pasture finished), where they spend the final ~120 days of their life. So at absolute minimum roughly 3/4 of the life is on pasture land.
Let's not ignore how terrible of a life that is. Forcefully impregnated repeatedly and then having your calf taken from you while your body slowly falls apart form abuse. Cows aren't dumb beasts, they have social relationships and care for their calves.
Calves stay with mothers until appropriately developed. Then some leave, others remain. Humans are the same.
But how many human mothers do you know that spend their whole life with 1/3 of their children? To the extent “keeping families together” is something to optimize for, they’re doing better than us.
Not to mention the benefits for us: all the space dedicated to pasture could be dedicated to wildlife or outdoor recreation, and all the high-density facilities fouling air and waterways could be closed. If it works for fish, we could stop scouring the ocean like an Old Testament-style god angry with our creation.
Even the food snobs would be happy, since responsible wildlife management practices would yield a certain amount of expensive, hard-to-get wild meat that they could build a culinary mystique around.
Space that is currently dedicated to pasture is already currently dedicated to wildlife. In fact, grazing cattle on land serves to rejuvenate the land, since the cattle's hoove's serve as little plows, and the cows walk around and poop and pee, which fertilizes the land and allows for insects and bugs to thrive, which helps the bird population, and the little rodents.
In some cases that land was recently deforested. It was previously dedicated to wildlife but now it's dedicated to agriculture which happens to benefit some different wildlife.
Forests are full of trees and trees tend to convert sunlight into wood, something that very little wildlife can eat. There's typically more food available to wildlife on pastures even when farmers try to fend off wildlife. For example, deforestation in Australia combined with a general reluctance of Australians to hunt brought about a kangaroo population explosion that requires government-mandated culls.
> wood, something that very little wildlife can eat
Not all wildlife can be picked up and pet by a human. That doesn’t mean it’s not a living being participating with a vital role in the ecosystem. There was a time before life could eat wood, and that time period is why the energy source is named “fossil fuel” and “dino juice”, that time period was long ago.
It is! I can tell that my interpretation is annoying to you though so I will leave you alone with a question. Who then eats the fungus? And who eats that?
Some fungus fruit bodies are eaten by insect larva, which feeds into birds. Most of the energy stored in the wood is just wasted bypassing any macroscopic wildlife.
If forests were efficient in feeding mammals or birds (i.e. making meat) our farms would have been forests.
Ranchers insist on extinction-level suppression of large predators, probably for sound economic reasons. Wolves can't live on land that is heavily fragmented by pasture, because they'll be harassed and killed.
Yes? What nonstandard non-dictionary definition of "cruel" do you use, that would not apply to eating something alive?
(And presumably also does not describe what happens in factory farming, which is the actual topic at hand, and which wildlife behavior has nothing to do with)
Yes- it’s pretty messed up seeing those wealthy carnivore animals systematically breed, cage and murder billions of the other animals just so it can be conveniently purchased on-demand at their animal grocery store.
Factory farming is pretty messed up. We like to paint a pretty picture of a pasture, and I actually do get to see that in the midwest US, but a lot of the meat people buy does come from horrible conditions.
I don't think your definition of sentient is very accurate. Is a chicken sentient? Or a clam? Having a nervous system does not a sentient being make. By that definition a microcontroller with sensors for temperature would be sentient. All natural animal meat is delicious and a reaaaallly efficient way of getting practically all nutrients the human body needs to thrive. I'm always surprised by the level of personal guilty paople feel by simply living the way humans were designed to live.
Some kind of partial surface rotation inside a horizontal or near horizontal drum Reactor? Combine the best bits of a single surface grow and a large production run with a helical feed surface emitting sheets of the stuff?
> Another former employee confirmed that staffers at the company would make jokes comparing Upside to Theranos.
that's taking it a little far... their goal is providing an ethical food source, not revolutionizing human diagnoses
can't wait for meat-less meat tech to get through its paces and take the time to mature. humans took hundreds of years to figure out how to herd cattle; what's another few years to make it in a lab?
Also, there's a significant difference between "the process works on a small scale, and would work at a large scale if we can solve the reliability/consistency issues" versus Theranos' "the process literally isn't physically possible at any scale and we've been outright lying about it the whole time".
I think lab grown meat is closer to a Theranos type scam than most people realize. The problem with Theranos wasn’t that their tech didn’t work at any scale; it’s that blood drawn from finger capillaries is useless for most diagnostic tests that they claimed to do. It’s a very subtle problem that only investors with proper scientific advisors with diagnostic experience caught onto (aka all the biotech VCs, who stayed far away). “If only” Theranos took regular blood samples from the arm instead of a few droplets from a finger prick, it could have worked but then it’d be just another unsexy competitor in onsite diagnostics.
Lab grown meat is full of those kinds of caveats and while no company has committed as egregious a fraud as Theranos, they’re all going to eventually find themselves in the position where they either have to lie to keep getting investments or admit that it’s not feasible and fold.
Personally, my bet is that without advanced bioengineering that can design entire artificial immune systems that protect the growing tissue, bioreactors will just be too expensive to scale up and compete with animals. IMO the only way it’ll work is if we have giant (semi-)open vats like salt evaporation pools that convert solar energy directly into protein and fat, with an engineered biome that responds to contamination like an immune system. And that's probably decades if not centuries ahead of us.
> the only way it’ll work is if we have giant (semi-)open vats like salt evaporation pools that convert solar energy directly into protein and fat
if we could replace the typical cattle pastures of today with this other system (basically the same idea without needing an organism that has a nervous system attached to it), I think we'll be closer to "making it"
> with an engineered biome that responds to contamination like an immune system
I saw a farmer once demonstrate how their barn has an automatic ventilation system that kicks in when the temperature gets too high :)
i suppose "we're getting the cell growing procedure worked out so that we're ready for when we can make our own stem cells" is a bit more believable than "we're getting the blood pinprick transport device worked out for when we have the sensor technology to do anything with it"
Honestly, the roller bottle approach seems pretty reasonable when they’re making sure that the process is making good chicken. They’ve at least reduced the problem to making giant sheets of chicken-paper.
Honestly, as long as the product isn't contaminated, the consumer doesn't care if it made in roller bottles or futuristic machines. At worse they are misleading investors, but are not endangering the health of consumers.
Theranos on the other hand, actually hurt not just investors but the end consumer by promising them blood tests that did not actually work.
The real success in this area is the Impossible burger. It's made mostly from peas and soy, with heme added to produce the bloody meat texture. The heme is made in a fermentation process not much more complex than brewing. Impossible has no problems with volume production - they sell through Burger King and WalMart. Growth rate about 85%/year.
As a long-time meat eater, I find Impossible to be a passable substitute for ground beef in a lot of dishes.
If they can get the end user price under control, they could displace a whole lot of beef consumption. At the current price point, it’s not nearly worth it on a taste or economic value comparison with 80% ground beef.
It seems more like they price it high because they can. The process isn't expensive. A 68,000 square foot plant makes a million pounds a month, says the company. It's not like lab-grown meat, which is a slow, expensive process.
Amusingly, Impossible's ground beef like product was getting rave reviews from prominent foodies at first. It first appeared only at expensive restaurants.
Then they got Burger King to sell it. Only then was there criticism.
You know how the working conditions in so many meatpacking plants are abysmal, like how Tyson Foods is always making headlines for some heinous shit? I wonder if conditions in Impossible plants are better by default. Fewer occupational hazards or whatever.
I guess awarding the original water rights might now be seen as a subsidy, in the same way as giving away land for homesteading, but that happened a long time ago. That’s not an ongoing subsidy.
Their sausage has already done this. It's almost a dollar cheaper than Jimmy Dean at my local, and the Impossible stuff is indistinguishable from pork sausage.
Blame your restaurants. Burger king has figured out how to sell you two impossible kings for $7. The only reason why people still ask for another $4 to swap out the sysco patty on your $12 brewpub burger is because they can and you are used to it.
And for some reason I cannot quite process it, even though I generally eat a lot of vegetables. The second most painful trip to the bathroom I have ever had was after an impossible burger. The first one was after a beyond meat burger.
Maybe it's just me, but I find myself having zero patience for introductions that set me up with a story. I just glanced over the first two paragraphs, rolled my eyes, and started reading at the third.
On September 34th, Johnny decided to get up from his chair, head outside for some fresh air after sitting in his pajamas at home “working” all day, and do some Satvic Yoga.
That’s when a key line of code triggered on an errant latest-generation DJI Mavic Pro. This drone, manufactured by a “private” Chinese company, then descended 90 feet in only 4.2 seconds, and subsequently crashed. Directly into Johnny’s ass.
Why not just grow mushrooms? Their cells are meaty, super high in protein, and they already exist / the “tech” has already been developed! There is an extremely large selection, some with additional health benefits.
Meat tastes good. Mushrooms taste good, but in a different way.
You can want a perfect world, but it will never exist.
Like it or don't, solving meat consumption and its effects on the planet is something we'll have to do. That probably involves a meaty substitute for meat.
Fungi make up one of three primary kingdoms of multicellular life. Mushrooms and other fungus have a variety of flavors already, and some of them are quite meat-like. Given fungus cells are more similar to animal than they are plant, it is possible that they can be selectively bred or engineered to taste more meat-like.
I wouldn't be too dismissive of the potential here.
I'm not being dismissive, but was instead responding to a completely useless argument based on the ideal. Ideally, people will choose to eat mushroom instead of meat.
An ideal situation only exists in a textbook, and dealing with reality is what we should do, was sort of my point.
I'm not being dismissive of the use of mushrooms as a meat argument. But I was being dismissive of the moral superiority based, "you should do this because it's right" argument being made framed by mushrooms.
Anything is probably possible eventually, you could engineer a fungus to grow and taste like meat. Is it economical and possible with current technology, maybe not.
The only reasons to find ways to end consumption of natural meat are 1. to increase efficiency and 2. ethical concerns relating raising animals in confinement to slaughter and eat them.
The effects on the planet can be completely eliminated with massive expansion of nuclear and/or space-based electricity generation to power vertical farms that a) don't displace natural habitats and b) capture and recycle livestock's methane emissions along with other waste products.
The fallacy here is pretty transparent. On the one hand, you’re saying meat ”doesn’t taste good” because it is usually not served in isolation. But on the other hand, you claim that seasoning tastes good, despite the fact that it is never served in isolation.
Parent claims that because we don’t eat meat plain, this shows that it isn’t the meat that ”tastes good”, its the seasoning. The fallacy is that we could have applied the exact same logic to the seasoning: we don’t eat steak seasoning plain, therefore it isn’t the seasoning that tastes good, its the meat. By parent’s logic, meat both does and does not taste good.
The resolution, which has always been obvious to everyone (except hackernews, apparently) is that flavour is the result of the combination of ingredients. That you typically eat X and Y together doesn’t mean X is tasteless and Y is tasty (or the reverse). It just means X and Y combine to make a good dish.
This is the same site where I read a post about making puree vegetables and freezing them as meal planning, because flavor was secondary to efficiency. So. . .
It's a really silly question. People love the aroma of meat, obviously. Steak is often served with just a bit of extra salt, which has no aroma of its own. The smell of meet on a fire is already delicious, even without salt.
Of course, there are also people who don't like the taste of meat at all. But to claim people who like meat actually like the spices is patently ridiculous, not interesting.
We do eat meat plain. Not poultry typically, but give me a Dutch oven and with little more than some oil and water I can easily prepare a delicious 3 hour braise of chuck roast that can gently shred apart with a fork. The fat is delicious, it melts out to a liquidy goodness that bathes the meat. Get a nice charred sear on both sides before adding the braising liquid, you’ll have flavorful goodness.
Adding more ingredients only enhances the flavor, but it’s not necessary if your taste buds aren’t hyperstimulated. Meat tastes good.
When cooked, most meats have the necessary fats needed to bring out great flavor. Anyone who has done primitive camping can tell you just how good meat cooked in various ways is!
It does to me -- but I think there's a good point here (even if unintentional):
Meats have _textures_ that vegetables don't have. Someone else mentioned how the Impossible Burger replicates "the bloody meat texture". For many folks, that's going to be as important as the taste.
I love vegetables but sometimes I just want a hamburger -- or kung pao chicken, or lamb kadhi, or many other dishes where I _like_ the taste and texture of the meat, and I don't have a better replacement.
I think I looked into the protein amounts back in my vegan days and was disappointed to discover that the amounts are fairly low. Maybe it depends on the type. Lots of other reasons for us to cultivate more mushrooms though. Mycelium Running outlines a lot of cool ideas.
>56oz according to google which lists beef at 7g/ounce and mushrooms at 0.9/ounce
Edit: legumes are more practical, green peas give you 2g/oz and peanuts can be 7g/oz shelled according to google, (though they are different proteins than the beef). Mushrooms are good for texture and some like shitaki can give the umami taste, but they aren’t a nutritional meat substitute on their own.
Not mushrooms but Quorn has been making meat substitute products (some quite tasty) out of vat-grown mycelium since ‘85:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn
Quorn has for the most part been making meat substitutes out of vat-grown mycelium and eggs
I love mushrooms, and am mostly vegan, but the skeptic in me suspects it's not as economically viable (with their current processes) to make meat-like products out of just their "mycoprotein" or they'd be doing more of it.
I realize they have released a few vegan products, but I've never seen them in stores and can't see why they wouldn't be as widely available as their other products if there weren't some texture/flavor issues without the eggs.
The fully vegan products are actually pretty common here in the UK. They taste fine to me. I wonder if it's something to do with certain products needing a particular texture which is hard to get without eggs.
My local animal rights group changed their marketing 15 years ago from mainly using the term “vegan” to “plant-based” which is free from the cult-like elements of veganism, such as disapproval of anything but “100%”. The term “vegan” is back now that it has become more mainstream.
Hence, "mostly vegan". I was vegan for 6-7 years, now I'm begrudgingly consuming oysters and clams. Both have fewer neurons than a mosquito and no brain or central nervous system. I'm not certain they can't feel pain, but I was having a hard time sustaining my health within my budget on a fully plant-based diet, so until I can get back to a place where I feel like I'm getting complete nutrition on plant-based foods and supplements, I've been forcing myself to choke down some bivalves on occasion.
Some vegans including myself consider bivalves to be vegan since bivalves aren’t sentient.
Veganism as a taxonomical distinction between animals and plants/fungi doesn’t make sense because it would entail eating sentient plants which doesn’t track the underlying ethics.
There are none that we know of. But if we discovered one tomorrow or if Santa’s elves fell under the plant taxonomy, I don’t think most vegans would be onboard with farming them for food. Sentience is the variable that matters. Animals have just become a rough proxy for that variable due to the lopsided distribution of sentience.
I only skimmed it, but nothing in the article said scam? More just that they are facing enormous problems scaling production. Both at producing macroscopic quantities of chicken (vs thin chicken sheets) and how to productionize the process so it could produce the mega tons required to be a commercial product.
The way we grew them normally was in those roller bottles [2]: you have some tissue culture medium in the bottle (containing fetal calf serum, which is still required to grow mammalian cells AFAIK, another reason most of these companies can't do what they say) and other components. Then the bottles are put on their sides on a roller mechanism, in an incubator with a controlled CO2 concentration.
The cells want to grow in a one-cell-thick monolayer all over the inside of the bottle. What they won't do is to grow a double layer. This is because they have "contact inhibition" which is a major mechanism for preventing tumor-like growth: when cells are touching each other, they stop dividing.
So these guys are trying to grow tissue and what they seem to be doing instead is growing monolayers just like this on the inside of roller bottles, scraping them off, then putting them together again.
One thing that disturbed me was that they need to coat the bottles with porcine gelatin. In that case, a lot of those "chicken" cutlets are actually pork!
[1] WI-38 cells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WI-38
[2] Tissue culture in roller bottles (yes, the medium is red at least for mammalian cells): https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-hgsfepq18i/images/stencil/12...