About 10 years ago I became more aware that reducing my consumption of meat was good for the world. This was good for Beyond Meat’s prospects.
About 5 years ago I became more aware that reducing my consumption of ultra processed food was good for me. This was very bad for Beyond Meat’s prospects.
david_draco · 2h ago
The words "good" and "very bad" indicate that the world is less important to that person than themselves. I'd be okay with a bit of personal harm if it helps against climate change.
Ultra-processed food does not have an agreed-upon definition, and is the new "junk food" with the pretense of being more scientific. Is bread and pizza ultra-processed food? Studies do not agree on their definitions, sometimes including ingredient lists, sometimes not, sometimes it is required that the product is made in small shops with love and not in large factories. The mechanism of how ultra-processed food are supposed to cause harm remains undefined.
baby · 3m ago
Ultra processed food is food you wouldn't be able to make at home from whole ingredients. It's easy to make bread and pizza.
abdullahkhalids · 47m ago
> Ultra-processed food does not have an agreed-upon definition
The United Nations Food and Agriculture authority have designed the NOVA classification of food[1, 2], which includes ultra-processed food as a category.
I was extremely dismayed when that supermarket simulator game that got popular on Twitch called 'pizza' something along the line of 'frozen dessert pie'...
At least the way it tends to get made in the US, a sugary pastry that's stuffed full of sugar, carbs, fats and cheese? Ok yeah, my favorite foods are _all_ terrible for me and I can't eat them anymore. This makes me very sad.
dfxm12 · 1h ago
If one is truly worried about both, they don't have to eat beyond meat though. They can eat rice and beans. Eating rice and beans instead of both conventional and beyond meat is bad for beyond meat, too, I guess.
esperent · 2h ago
Lab grown meat isn't necessarily ultra processed (in the sense that it should be automatically assumed to be unhealthy, of course there's a lot of processing involved). At least, I don't know enough about it to jump to that conclusion.
Beyond Meat and Impossible burgers definitely are ultra processed though.
glenstein · 1h ago
Characterizing meat alternatives as "ultra processed" has been a propaganda coup for the meat industry, allowing for an equivocation between categorically different nutritional profiles of products like Twinkies and Pringles on the one hand, and meat alternative products which have absolutely nothing to do with refined starches, sugars, or trans fats on the other and which in fact have better cardiovascular outcomes, cancer outcomes and environmental impacts than the meats they are replacing.
They're both ultra processed in the same way that a jellyfish and a California Redwood are both carbon based life forms.
buu700 · 1h ago
Well it's not like they're "ultra-processed" because they're meat alternatives. I get most of my protein from Meati (mycelium), eggs, tofu, cheese, and whey/plant/collagen protein powders, none of which I would characterize as ultra-processed[1]. I'm just not sure how you could justify calling plant-based meats non-ultra-processed under any useful definition of the term.
Although I'd also add that UPF avoidance is more of a useful heuristic than an inherently reliable indicator of something's healthfulness. It's not like it's physically impossible to use complex industrial processes to create a product with high-quality nutrition that aligns with a given consumer's desired macros.
I don't personally believe that plant-based meats as we know them are as healthy as meat, but that doesn't mean they couldn't theoretically be, and it doesn't mean lab-grown meat can't be (although I'll let other people be the guinea pigs on immortalized cells and check back in next century).
Edit: 1: Except the powders. Turns out that they're on the low end of "ultra-processed" based on the Nova classification system, whereas Beyond/Impossible Meat is more firmly in that category. See comment below.
glenstein · 48m ago
>I'm just not sure how you could justify calling plant-based meats non-ultra-processed under any useful definition of the term.
It's not a question of whether or not they fit that definition, it's that the definition itself is so expansive that it allows equivocation between food products that are meaningfully different in their ingredients, health outcomes and environmental outcomes.
buu700 · 12m ago
Agreed. UPF-ness is a useful and now-trendy heuristic to determine whether and how to more qualitatively analyze the health properties of a given food, but it's not the final answer. Sugar isn't a UPF (it's in Nova group 2), but I think most people would choose to eat a plant-based burger before a bowl of sugar.
RandallBrown · 52m ago
Interestingly I would describe "tofu, cheese, and whey/plant/collagen protein powders" as ultra-processed foods simply because they use take a lot of processing to make.
baby · 1m ago
You can easily make tofu at home
buu700 · 28m ago
It looks like the protein powders were a bad example — I'd understood that they were comparable to flour, which GPT had at one point corroborated, but Grok is giving me more detailed and better referenced information which contradicts that. The powders are definitely UPF under the Nova classification system[1], which I would argue (per my "heuristic" reasoning) invites justified skepticism and need for long-term studies, but doesn't inherently make them unhealthy. The system is based more on the number of steps and/or ingredients involved in preparation than a deep qualitative analysis of what those steps are.
That being said, the same system would categorize Meati, tofu, and cheese as merely processed (Nova group 3), not ultra-processed (group 4), at least according to Grok (which provided detailed reasoning that sounded credible). For comparison, Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat were deemed to be firmly in group 4.
>I'm just not sure how you could justify calling plant-based meats non-ultra-processed under any useful definition of the term.
The most pressing question here: is tofu ultra-processed? It's a protein isolate prepared by a solution-precipitation process. If you replace the tofu salts (calcium sulfate and similar) with ethanol (an anti-solvent for proteins) you get protein powder. This is not the most efficient way make protein powder, but the point is that on the one hand you have a traditional centuries-old process, and on the other you have what seems to be a sine qua non of ultraprocessed food, and the difference is... ethanol.
Beyond Meat, which contains... dietary fiber... is part of a particular subset of highly processed foods that are trying to be healthy. If you see "chicory root extract" on a food's ingredients label, it's probably in this club. This is a telltale sign of spiking the dietary fiber content. (Beyond Meat does not contain chicory; its fiber is from peas.)
Most ultra-processed foods are not trying to be healthy. They are designed to be addictive. It's a little bit like the old kerfuffle over "weapons-grade" encryption being restricted for export. The technology can be useful for military purposes, but encryption is not a weapon per se.
The critical diversion is not from meat to processed foods, but from the practice of deliberately engineering addictive foods to the techniques that facilitate it. The food product companies would like you to look anywhere other than their intentions, because they can always change the how and what in pursuit of them. They will always be happy to ostentatiously move away from the old way of making a bag of chips you can't put down, to the new way of making a bag of chips you can't put down. The root of the problem is the incentive structure.
energy123 · 44m ago
I wish people could see through labels and categories, but it seems they can't. It's so lazy to stamp X with label Y and expect the reader to think differently about X because of your decision to apply the category Y.
abdullahkhalids · 52m ago
> meat alternative products ... have better cardiovascular outcomes, cancer outcomes
Beyond meat type meat alternative products have simply not been around enough, and not consumed by enough people to enable any sort of studies that show they are better. It takes many years, sometimes decades of tracking tens of thousands of people through their lifetimes to establish any reasonable certainty that something is better than the other.
glenstein · 41m ago
On the contrary, there are already trials pointing in the direction of better outcomes for meat alternatives. I don't have the energy at the moment to Google them up but you can find them if you try.
Moreover the ingredients in meat alternatives are known quantities and they lack the specific compounds like heme iron, nitrosamines, and saturated animal fats that are mechanistically linked to cancer and heart disease in red and processed meat.
ajross · 1h ago
This seems likely true, but at the same time the actual science has been (1) pretty conclusive on the "processed foods are bad" top-line result yet (2) really, really bad at isolating exactly why that top-line result holds. Yes, high glycemic index foods and trans fats are bad, and high sodium is bad for at least some at-risk people. But they aren't bad enough to explain the processing result. So waving away Beyond/Impossible as safe because they don't have the stuff you list is potentially premature.
Frankly I think the bigger reason these don't seem to be working out is that they aren't having the actual impact desired. The price isn't coming down. And if the price remains at higher-than-meat levels the ecological impact (which is what I personally care more about) is probably not where it needs to be either.
I mean, let's be blunt: all this dithering about health effects and environmental externalities isn't actually going to change anything. Make a burger for the price of a bean dip, however, and the market will beat your door down even if they claim not to care about the hippy nonsense.
glenstein · 1h ago
> So waving away Beyond/Impossible as safe
As I said, they measurably improve health outcomes relative to the meats they're replacing in important areas.
My understanding of the studies on UPF health outcomes is that their data is drawn overwhelmingly from traditional categories like junk food and processed starch and sugar. Which is all the more reason to avoid the equivocation between the two categories, lest someone get the mistaken impression that the Twinkie data is about the burgers.
dragonwriter · 1h ago
> As I said, they measurably improve health outcomes relative to the meats they're replacing
They imitate meats, but is there any evidence that, in practice, they replace them? In menus, and I suspect in actual human eating behavior, they seem to replace earlier vegetarian options like old-school TVP, not meat.
erikerikson · 43m ago
We have eaten impossible burgers as a replacement of beef burgers we would have otherwise eaten on burger night. Some of us even prefer the flavor but the prices are sometimes higher than beef and that reduced our consumption (at that moment we were tighter). If they were substantially less expensive we would have had to financially rationalize beef, beyond the health and environmental rationalizations.
dyauspitr · 1h ago
Meat alternatives are stupid. Soy bean chemically mangled until it tastes like meat is an abomination. Either have real lab grown meat or change your perspective and eat like the South and East asians do, making vegetarian meals incredibly delicious.
whycome · 1h ago
Chemically mangled?
I’m all for all tastes and textures.
Cheese production may be the definition of “chemically mangled milk” but I’m all for it.
Orochikaku · 1h ago
Could you elaborate on why you feel as though it’s an abomination? I don’t quite see the hang ups about it.
> "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.
morleytj · 1h ago
It's not exactly the same, but given that much of it is for coloring, I feel the comparison should be drawn that basically all farmed salmon in the US is specifically fed food containing astaxanthin to give it a more pleasing coloring, the same as the purpose of the beta-carotene added here.
conradev · 5h ago
It took a lot of digging to find which plant based ingredients, but they include color and flavor:
Thank you for the link. Canola and sunflower oils, soy, and "natural flavors". Definitely skipping this one.
I wish they'd just sell the fish cells, alone. Would love to try that.
tptacek · 2h ago
Canola, sunflower, and soy are some of the most widely consumed foods on the planet; presumably far exceeding consumption of salmon.
themafia · 2h ago
This wasn't always the case.
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.
tptacek · 2h ago
This is an extremely studied question.
rayiner · 1h ago
I tried to get my parents to switch from canola—universally used in India and Bangladesh these days—to time-tested mustard oil, and they were like “mhmm.” :-/
tptacek · 1h ago
That's ironic, because rapeseed and mustard seed oils are about as closely related as any two food oils can be.
rayiner · 32m ago
Other than the genetic engineering and solvent-based extraction of canola oil. But yes, that was my parents reaction as well. Regardless, it’s just butter, ghee, and sometimes olive or avocado oil at my house. Because food and cleanliness taboos are sub-scientific.
themafia · 1h ago
Then it's results would be easy to summarize. Yet, I'm finding no such simple summary, nor good agreement between studies. It's not like this is a multi billion dollar a year industry so that's a very confusing outcome. /s
glenstein · 1h ago
Farm salmon is artificially colored, and the feedstock they're raised on includes the same oils.
Smoked and canned salmon are often packaged with similar oils and flavor additives.
Slevin11 · 1h ago
This is a very silly take. If you consume any animal foods raised in the US, you are consuming canola / rapeseed meal, soybeans (90% of soy grown in the us is used to create animal feed), and sunflower seed / meal already. You are consuming it in a condensed secondary form (one tropic level up). It seems exceptionally backwards to be worried about eating any of these foods when the animals you eat are essentially just condensed versions of these ingredients where any downside effects would have accumulated heavily.
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.
pton_xd · 23m ago
> Also canola oil is now considered on par or healthier than olive oil.
Seed oils are now considered more healthy than olive oil? I get the ideological hatred of everything the current administration stands for, but... this take is a bit insane.
whycome · 1h ago
Many “beef burgers” have filler included like soy and wheat.
jazzyjackson · 3h ago
I wonder if roe would be feasible
tyleo · 5h ago
This is also the part that bothers me the most. I don’t think it’s gross but I wish we had a full hunk of meat you could get in a lab. I’d try it. The products with plant based ingredients are less interesting to me.
jazzyjackson · 3h ago
To grow a hunk of meat without spoilage you need an immune system that basically just requires the rest of the animal
lumost · 3h ago
Wouldn’t that happen in plant based approaches as well? Or be mitigated by growing in exceptionally sterile environments?
This is starting to sound like a process which will require untold quantities of anti biotics and preservatives.
glenstein · 1h ago
My understanding is it actually reduces the use of antibiotics, and this benefit is one of the main things people point to as a selling point.
colechristensen · 2h ago
No you wouldn't. Plenty of things are grown in labs or even on industrial levels which don't need immune systems. Maintaining a sterile environment is a challenge but not that hard.
jazzyjackson · 1h ago
Then why are the only lab grown meat products ground / reconstituted ? I'm only going off a interview with a startup CEO that pivoted to lab grown egg white because of the aforementioned challenge. You can keep sterile petri dishes, but if you try to reach even a chicken nugget sized piece of solid muscle, you aren't going to keep it free of contaminants.
Hnrobert42 · 23m ago
I thought the ground/reconstituted part was because they couldn't form long chain proteins. Or at least they could not simulate the structure of muscle tissue over long stretches. That is, they could make ground beef, but they couldn't make steak.
teaearlgraycold · 3h ago
They don't say much, but my guess is the plant ingredients are there to give the white stripes. The cells are probably just a homogeneous pink mass without it.
idiotsecant · 2h ago
'homogenous pink mass' really was their best album
GloriousKoji · 5h ago
The large majority of the final product is salmon cells so I think it counts. I don't see how this is too different from fish paste products like imitation crab or chikuwa.
mapt · 4h ago
Surimi is not mostly fish, it is mostly soy, wheat, various starches. Fish (blended Alaskan pollock usually) is a minority of material in most packagings.
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.
wakawaka28 · 4h ago
It needs to be clearly distinguished somehow from natural product, just like other "alternative" products.
burkaman · 3h ago
I don't really care if it's called salmon or not, but why is that gross?
OsrsNeedsf2P · 3h ago
It's gross because it's so misleading
glenstein · 1h ago
Just so I'm following, you used gross in the food context but not to mean anything about a sensory or culinary experience (which would be the dominant connotation brought to mind by most people who read it), you meant it as kind of an ethical objection?
Also it's the mostly same ingredients that farmed salmon is already packaged with.
tptacek · 2h ago
The entire pitch for this product is that it's lab-grown salmon. Who are they misleading?
whycome · 1h ago
It’s lab-grown salmon…
I was not expecting salmon to be actually raised — that’s just farmed.
Cell cultures to create solids was everything I’d expected. The term “plant based ingredients” is kinda dumb though.
aperrien · 2h ago
If it tastes good and reduces harm to salmon, I'm in.
oceanplexian · 25m ago
Not allowing something to exist is a really strange way of conceptualizing reduction of harm.
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.
fayten · 9m ago
Unless you are actively managing your own herd or actively hunting I don’t see how you are connecting to nature at the grocery store.
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.
pparanoidd · 1h ago
You don't stop to think about health in your food at all?
kamaal · 1h ago
>>This should not legally be allowed to be marketed as salmon
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.
lovich · 1h ago
I’m all for regulations on truthful marketing, but you made a big leap to
>clearly harmful foods
idiotsecant · 2h ago
Why is it any more gross than, for example, meatloaf?
colechristensen · 2h ago
All of the things in meat loaf are recognizably food.
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.
i_love_retros · 1h ago
How is eating eggs not gross? It's a chickens egg...
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!
colechristensen · 1h ago
In general I do not find eating animals or animal products offputting. I am an animal, I eat animals. The disconnect from nature caused by your entire diet being boxed and shrinkwrapped gives a person strange perspectives on biological reality.
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.
glenstein · 1h ago
>Meat
Isn't that the ingredient in lab grown salmon? Also things you're calling "much less recognizable" are basically varieties of vegetable oil.
Klonoar · 5h ago
If the cells came from salmon, and it's made to look like salmon, I don't particularly see why we can't call it salmon.
mapt · 4h ago
Could we call it "Fermented salmon tumor"?
teaearlgraycold · 3h ago
"Fermented Salmon" sounds funny and relatively accurate to me. Why do you call it a tumor? Are the cells cancerous?
trhaynes · 2h ago
tumor (noun) An abnormal growth of tissue resulting from uncontrolled, progressive multiplication of cells and serving no physiological function; a neoplasm
mapt · 2h ago
Multicellular life naturally exists in a well-ordered matrix according to a rough plan, not a blob in a petri dish, and when it deviates too much from that plan we have various pejorative words for it and feel various health consequences as a result of disordered growths.
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
Sn0wCoder · 2h ago
'benign tumor' maybe some Salmon Lipomas with crackers and cheese.
Teever · 5h ago
Because consumers have a reasonable expectation that the foods that they buy and eat are called the words that they've come to expect them to be called and not some sort of laboratory grown facsimile.
Klonoar · 2h ago
We have had re-use of words in food for ages now and it's not a particularly big problem.
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.
mvdtnz · 5h ago
If I make a fish potato cake in the shape of a snapper can I call it "snapper"?
Klonoar · 5h ago
Sure. I'm comfortable either reading the description on a menu or the packaging it presumably comes in to determine what I'm actually getting.
maximus_01 · 5h ago
I think that example wasn't the best as it's probably so obvious it isn't salmon it wouldn't fool anyone. But would you be comfortable if someone sold Hoki or Puffer Fish as Salmon? And then only in the fine print said it was actually Hoki that tasted like salmon or whatever. What if someone sold actual fish but called it Tofu, and only disclosed in the description that it was fish that tasted like Tofu?
That is a world I don't want to live in.
zukzuk · 4h ago
Almost every sushi restaurant in North America sells “crab” that contains 0% crab. Very few people seem to make a fuss about this.
maximus_01 · 4h ago
I must admit I didn't know that. Do you think that is widely known amongst people who eat them? But yes, either way, I find that disturbing.
Klonoar · 3h ago
You already live in that world and don't seem to know it.
maximus_01 · 1h ago
It does seem so.
To be fair I live in Australia which does seem to have much stricter labelling requirements than the US.
rvba · 2h ago
"I can't believe it's not butter" product
rectang · 2h ago
Or as my brother and I called it, "Ick-bihn-buh" — enunciating the "ICBINB" acronym.
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"?
goda90 · 5h ago
So why not just call it "vegetable and lab grown salmon cells"?
jamiek88 · 5h ago
If you use the quotation marks on the menu then yes! ‘Fish’ and ‘chips’ hahah.
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?
Klonoar · 3h ago
Sure, I think that's fine and helpful when places do that - and in fact not dystopian. These things are about explaining what taste/texture/etc a dish is trying to convey.
leoqa · 3h ago
Wait until you hear about Gummy Bears.
bigyabai · 5h ago
If you make a cheesy cracker and call it a Goldfish, nobody gets too upset.
pstuart · 5h ago
"cultivated" is a reasonable label for these things. So "cultivated salmon" is a concise and accurate description of what is being served.
Klonoar · 45m ago
Fully agreed.
dkiebd · 4h ago
Cultivated seems misleading since it sounds like it’s a real fish from a fish farm.
unsnap_biceps · 4h ago
And it's listed as cultivated on the menus of the restaurants they list on their site.
> 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 grown on its own wouldn't look or taste fully like salmon. The look and flavor of salmon comes 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. Like how eating shrimp makes flamingos pink. Salmon without those things is white, and missing some of the sweetness we associate with salmon. (You can even notice this in salmon meat from different conditions; wild-caught salmon usually gets more of these nutrient sources than farmed salmon, so wild-caught salmon is often a much deeper reddish-pink color than the orange of farmed salmon.)
• Starch, maybe carrageenan (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, desiccating 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. Not sure how you'd get it into the tissue reliably, without any kind of circulatory system in there. And it probably doesn't make much of a difference to taste or texture even if you did. But this might still be a v2.0 goal of theirs.)
• Soy and konjac (and also maybe carrageenan here) — 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" that actually stays together; there needs to be some non-cellular tissue matrix that the cells slot into. (Compare/contrast: "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 carotene + 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 get any closer, you'd need to get pretty mad-science-y. 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, and inside — salmon muscle matrix tissue, fully cellularized, with solutes. [Though probably with the tree's vascularization, rather than salmon vascularization.] 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. But that product would technically be "closer to salmon", I guess.)
bowmessage · 4h ago
> 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?
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.
derefr · 4h ago
I don't know about that.
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.
lukevp · 4h ago
The cost of the processes for these alternative meats astronomically outweighs the cost of ingredients, especially the cell culturing. It is unlikely that any of these companies are even making profit at this point. This is a long play to get the public to buy into this alternative food source, and only then will the scaling be enough to reasonably profit from any of this. There’s a baseline cost that they have to hit (farm raised salmon) and it’s incredibly cheap. Swapping out ingredients won’t make it cost competitive. Scaling up bioreactors might.
dekhn · 5h ago
"Engineered salmon product"?
wakawaka28 · 4h ago
"Phish" lol
mvdtnz · 5h ago
"It's true that our salmon represents innovative science, but first and foremost, it's just really good fish".
It's certainly not fish.
lelandfe · 2h ago
It is especially not just fish.
tjr · 1h ago
Almost, but not entirely, unlike fish.
alexose · 5h ago
Hey, I just went to Kann to try it. It was very… smooth
arjvik · 4h ago
Similar to sushi-grade salmon?
alexose · 2h ago
It's a little hard to describe. Flavor-wise, I thought it was great. Very clean, savory taste with no fishiness. The texture wasn't right, though. Too smooth and consistent, I guess due to the lack of connective tissue. Still incredibly impressive and exciting technology.
Also, the dish itself was really cool. Kann served it as sashimi, along with a bunch of small pickled things and a hunk of smoked watermelon.
unsnap_biceps · 4h ago
in a good way or a bad way?
themgt · 5h ago
We’ve worked hard to ensure that cultivated salmon cells are the first ingredient in our salmon saku (after water). After we harvest our cells, we integrate them with plant components to create the desired texture and flavor of a traditional salmon fillet.
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.
Hmm. They also compare their place to a microbrewery but I can't find any photos of the actual production process, generally a point of pride for a microbrewery. It sounds less like "lab grown meat" than literally "lab grown cells" + other stuff to mimic aspects of meat texture/flavor/color.
They've taken what was a pristine harbour untouched by humans and turned it into a sewer for salmon effluent. There is a prehistoric fish, the maugean skate, that is likely to go extinct if the salmon farming continues.
janalsncm · 5h ago
Lab grown meat solves a ton of issues: animal welfare, environment (both CO2 and clearing land for agriculture), food safety, and potentially cost too. It can’t come fast enough.
swat535 · 1h ago
Animal welfare can be solved with regulations and CO2 contributions is debatable.
I’m not sure about the cost savings either, at least right now it doesn’t seem feasible.
Innovation is fun but I think the best way to tackle all your points is to keep the pressure on legislation.
Intralexical · 1h ago
IDK. Some might say that the "eat" in "meat" is incompatible with welfare.
skybrian · 5h ago
Maybe someday, but for now, it's very expensive, and that suggests that it's also using lots of environmental resources.
__turbobrew__ · 1h ago
All of those things are solved by eating legumes as well. I would rather eat protein rich vegetarian food over lab grown meat. I still eat meat but maybe only once a week, I really enjoy discovering what other cultures have created for meat free meals. Hell, hundreds of millions of Indians are vegetarians, and I would much rather cook and eat Indian food over eating some abomination of nature which only exists due to human’s destructive diet tendencies and lack of discipline.
I also refuse to eat beyond meat either as those meat substitute products are very processed and far from their natural state.
cogman10 · 4h ago
> CO2, food safety
I'm not 100% sure either of those has been proven out.
I could see CO2, but it sort of depends on how much power the bioreactor and sterilization consumes and how much methane is release. Granted, it'd be easier to capture those and easier to place these reactors in or near a grocery store, for example, for immediate delivery.
Food safety is almost certainly going to be a bigger problem. The big problem with bioreactors is they are cultivating the ideal substance for very nasty bacteria/fungus/etc to flourish in. Bioreactors do not have immune systems. That means keeping things absolutely sterile is of the utmost importance. I'm sure when the initial products are produced safety will be pristine. However, what happens when the CEOs of these companies decide to cut back? Heck, what happens when the new guy forgets to do a sterilization cycle or runs it short?
A major issue is these will be regulated by the FDA which has a history of doing a poor job of keeping food safe. I'd feel better if it were under the jurisdiction of the USDA.
unsnap_biceps · 4h ago
Looking beyond just eating the output, encouraging research into bioreactors and effective sterilization is a great path towards lab grown organs for humans. Imagine a world where getting a heart transplant isn't a lottery anymore. This is a worthy path for research imho.
mapt · 4h ago
Imagine a world where you have to take whatever "heart" a pioneering lab can produce for under $100. Are you gonna be in the first group of recipients to risk it, knowing that these labs are largely unregulated startups?
I can cherish the research path and value the intended endpoint, but knowing what I know of agribusiness, early approval to market seems a mite reckless. Particularly in 2025. Particularly with "sushi-grade fish".
We produce millions of tons of affordable meat from industrial production of animals THAT HAVE immune systems, swimming in antibiotics, that the FDA tells you to cook thoroughly because it's definitely full of salmonella. We chop it up using child labor on production lines that would make you a vegetarian if you saw them.
janalsncm · 4h ago
Unfortunately the alternative for not using a lab grown heart in that scenario would be death, not a human heart. So I’m guessing many people will take it.
janalsncm · 3h ago
You bring up a good point, a future steak factory will be a lot more centralized than the distributed system of farms we have today. So an outbreak in one would significantly disrupt the market, at a minimum, and in the worst case cause a mass outbreak. The flip side is that a factory has a higher ceiling for cleanliness and disease surveillance. I would be wary of foreign lab grown meat for this reason.
throwaway422432 · 4h ago
Their first additive after water and salmon cells is canola derived so any environmental or food safety claims should factor that in.
Canola is often sprayed with neonicotinoids and the oil processed with solvents like hexane.
I'd personally prefer to get my omega acids from real salmon.
schuyler2d · 3h ago
Just balance that as well with what chemicals and elements show up in farmed salmon and wild salmon (heavy metals, micro plastics, PBDEs,...)
Not saying one's better, just that all our food sources have higher and lower quality steps before market.
spamjavalin · 24m ago
Good - humans need to stop killing things, stop burning things to make money.
mapt · 5h ago
> To make their product, the food company’s scientists collect living cells from Pacific salmon and grow them in cell cultivators that mimic the inside of a wild fish—controlling factors like temperature, pH and nutrients, per their website. After harvesting them, the team incorporates plant-based ingredients to make the hunk of cells taste, feel and look like salmon fillets.
So... Like a wild fish, but with NO IMMUNE SYSTEM WHATSOEVER, which requires your sterilization protocols to be effectively perfect.
NASA has tried and failed to get their sterilization protocols to perfection levels for Mars landers, and consistently failed despite using basically zero organic materials.
We're going to cook this stuff, yes, sure (aren't we?)... but the squick is rational. And the problem gets inherently worse at larger scale production.
MostlyStable · 5h ago
The lack of an immune system is not a health and safety risk, it's a business risk. An infected batch won't get served to humans it will just die/fail and need to be thrown out. Fighting infection is one of the reasons that lab-grown meats are so expensive. I have seen reasonably convincing technical analyses which claim that it would require pretty massive technological innovations (that are not anywhere on the horizon so far) to make any lab-grown meats economically viable. That's very likely the reason for the fact that (as pointed out in another comment), this is not pure salmon, it's salmon mixed with vegetable product. That was almost definitely a cost-saving measure.
My personal guess is that the first actually economically viable lab-grown meats will be of endangered/extinct animals that the extremely wealthy will be willing to pay the exorbitant costs that it takes to create them for the novelty factor.
"Produced without inspection" and "processing deviations" account for a lot of recalls.
mapt · 4h ago
There are very likely degrees of infection which are not obviously spoiled, but which have health consequences if consumed. The locus at which the antibiotic/etc protocols are mostly but not entirely effective.
If they're actively pushing into the market, that means they're selling _something_ at maybe $30-$100/kg. Would you trust that something, knowing what you know of animal tissue bioreactors? Would you trust a restaurant serving thousands of meals of that something?
Can you explain why this situation is any different than regular meat? I.e. Fish immune systems don’t stop parasites from being present in the meat, flash freezing is what kills the parasites.
goda90 · 5h ago
This obviously varies by animal, but some meats are safe to eat raw or undercooked if the animal was healthy because the meat doesn't have lots of pathogens inside it. Flash freezing won't kill bacteria or viruses that the immune system of an animal might.
mapt · 5h ago
Parasitic worms are huge, complex multicellular animals that co-evolved to sometimes survive the immune system response to their presence; Freezing kills them because they are huge and the scale of ice crystals severs important body parts. Living bacteria, living fungi, spores from these, viruses, and importantly heat-resistant toxins produced by these, are what I'm worried about.
One of modern humanity's oldest activities is fermenting carbohydrates in large bioreactors into alcohol, yogurt, and pickles, but there are a lot of things that turned out not to work in that history.
When we try to fabricate, say, monoclonal antibodies using large cultures of multicellular tissues for pharmaceutical work, the price ends up coming out to millions of dollars a kilogram.
I am implicitly skeptical of the protocols of a protein tissue culture that has to be produced at the ~$30/kg price level.
Could you eat it and not die? I'm sure!
But could you feed people with a billion meals worth of batches and have nobody die? I'm less sure! My understanding is that tissue culture failures are frequently the bane of a biologist's research program.
LeifCarrotson · 4h ago
Fish immune systems sole reason for being is to stop parasites from being present in the meat while the fish is alive. They're literally swimming through a soup of arthropods, plankton, algae, bacteria, and viruses that would love nothing more to turn their meat into more of themselves. There's always a bigger fish that is trying to eat them, yes, but the smaller critters want to eat as well!
Freezing doesn't kill the parasites, it slows the clock that started ticking when the fish was killed. It's not pasteurization, like what's done to canned tuna. It just slows the clock when you refrigerate or freeze the fish, but does not reset it to zero. And of course, if you're eating fresh fish that was healthy when it was killed, there's no need for an intermediate freezing or pasteurizing step.
This situation is different because the "clock" starts when the cell cultures are removed from the donor salmon. The whole blob/tank/plate/catalyzing surface (I'm not sure what the design is, I wish they had more documentation) on which the product grows for the whole time that the product is growing is vulnerable to a single bacterium that would grow out of control, like an immunocompromised human might be killed by an ordinary illness that most people would shrug off in 24 hours.
dekhn · 4h ago
Freezing (properly) is widely considered (by scientific establishment) to kill most parasites, not just slow them down.
mapt · 4h ago
When biologists talk about parasites, they're talking about numerous organisms from multiple kingdoms in one of the widest ecological niches.
Don't worry, if you catch any disease you can use any antibiotic that still works after spraying farmed salmon willy-nilly for years.
mapt · 4h ago
Antibiotics only work on live bacteria, and only sometimes. "Any disease" is a much broader category.
zzzoom · 3h ago
Any disease you'd catch from lab-grown meat...
throwaway889900 · 5h ago
Their advertising of it being like a sushi cut then makes this possibly dangerous marketing then, no?
margalabargala · 5h ago
No, not really, because the parent comment is freaking out about a problem that doesn't exist.
It's not going to be possible to grow a thing that looks like a piece of salmon but is secretly riddled with viruses and bacteria.
Either the lab gets their sterile technique right and they wind up with something that looks like salmon, or they get it wrong and you wind up with bacteria slop. Things that look like salmon can only become so if no bacteria and viruses are present.
dekhn · 4h ago
In the real world I don't think you'll find salmon that don't have bacteria and viruses (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43345-x shows both "good" and "bad" bacteria and certainly many salmon are infected with a range of viruses (not sure if there are any "good" viral infections, but some are not fatal).
A fair point, but wouldn't it only become unrecognizable at levels that mean you're effectively eating pus instead of salmon? My understanding is that the effective innoculation needed to give botulism to a human baby (who has an immune system, just less of one than we do) is <100 spores, which is picograms.
There's just such a gulf between the prices at which this is feasible for food use, and the prices at which existing large bioreactors can culture animal tissue.
If we can't even get plant slop ("algal biodiesel") culture consistent and cheap enough to burn in an engine, or get plant slop ("tilapia feedstock algae") cheap enough to industrialize to outcompete chickens... I don't know that I'm comfortable eating bioreactor meat that can only survive in the FDA danger zone.
XorNot · 2h ago
Living animals with immune systems are the only types of organisms which can effectively host pathogens such that they can be communicated. Even your example belies the problem: pus is produced by the immune system destroying bacteria, it isn't a bacterial colony itself.
In an a bioreactor where no immune system exists, there can't be a latent infection: there's no immune system! If it can infect and destroy what's growing, then it'll infect and destroy all of it. It isn't going to look like tuna meat after that.
Intralexical · 1h ago
Isn't it possible for the pathogen to be limited by accumulation of its own waste products or depletion of specific nutrients before it destroys the whole sample, or for the meat to be harvested before the pathogen has finished propagating?
fastball · 5h ago
What? The requirements for this are nothing like what is required for sterilization of a Mars rover. NASA's goal is to not have a single iota of foreign organic material on rovers, which is obviously not even close to what is required here. The only thing you need to worry about with this stuff is whether there are any dangerous bacterium in it (e.g. salmonella), which can be readily monitored and avoided without herculean effort. And unlike real salmon, parasites and viruses won't have much opportunity to gain a foothold.
Spivak · 2h ago
You're describing the sterilization process that's necessary for cheese production, it's crazy intense, but it's also a known quantity that we've been successfully doing for years and years and years. Listeria is no joke. I wouldn't worry about this any more than you worry about our other food you find at the grocery store.
mvdtnz · 5h ago
It's certainly not marketed as though it's going to be cooked,
> Our saku is sushi-grade and is perfect for dishes like sushi, crudo, and ceviche
Because from a quick search this isn't what people refer to when they think of lab-grown meat/fish. This is some mix of stuff that includes some amount of material that is lab-grown. It won't behave like you expect Salmon to.
exabrial · 5h ago
I'm already picky with processed food. This takes the cake on the highest form of processed available.
Hard no from me, not even once.
mr90210 · 3h ago
I would think that much more people would share the same beliefs. Why would I want to eat lab grown salmon?
I’d rather eat non-lab grown salmon once a month or once a quarter than eating that f—— aberration.
presentation · 59m ago
Because some people eat salmon more than once a month, care about the environment or animal welfare, and don't think that processed foods are inherently disgusting.
alberth · 5h ago
There’s a whole industry for cell-cultivated meat since the FDA approved it a few years ago.
> A handful of states, including Florida and Alabama, have banned or are considering bans on the creation and sale of the alternative protein.
Ouch. Red states are pro-deregulation, until laissez-faire innovation offends their beliefs.
henry2023 · 5h ago
[flagged]
hx8 · 3h ago
Sometimes politicians beat the drum about free markets when they want to privatize currently public services. Sometimes politicians beat the drum about free markets when they want to modify regulations to favor their favorite businesses. It's always treated as some fantastical force that will magically provide efficient solutions.
Sometimes the most efficient solution is to collaborate in the way only a government can organize. Sometimes regulations do more good than harm. If someone cannot articulate exactly why their proposal is a good idea and instead relies on repeating myths then be wary.
user3939382 · 2h ago
Free market presupposes no regulatory capture which I’m pretty sure is inevitable under any framework
tomp · 5h ago
It's not about beliefs. It's about slippery slopes.
As we've seen with incandescent light bulbs and plastic straws, "free market" is only temporary, until the "bad" thing simply gets banned.
They're just pre-emptively banning artificial meat, to prevent real meat from being banned!
MostlyStable · 5h ago
If that's the goal, why not pass a law saying that real meat products are not allowed to be banned?
VladVladikoff · 2h ago
Until a law says that they can be banned? Seems like a typical pointless virtue signalling waste of time. What’s the point to pass a law that is already the law?
trenchpilgrim · 2h ago
That's a common thing in the US - a state level law restricting the laws a county or city can create.
trenchpilgrim · 5h ago
That makes as much sense as banning cars to protect the railroads
delecti · 5h ago
Is this meant to be a straw man or a steel man of that position?
The idea of preemptively banning something so it can't become better than the status quo seems ludicrous.
tomp · 4h ago
Plastic straws are better, as are incandescent light bulbs.
The proof is in the pudding / free market. If the alternatives (paper straws, LED bulbs) were better, people would voluntarily buy them! (cf: mobile phones vs. stationary phones, almost noone has the latter these days, because the former are just - better!) Instead, they're banned because they're better.
Loocid · 1h ago
>The proof is in the pudding / free market.
Dumping toxic waste into a river would also lower costs for consumers vs disposing of it correctly, but there are regulations to prevent that. Complete unobstructed free market capitalism is not sustainable, there needs to be a balance.
tyleo · 3h ago
That seems like bs to me. Normal people aren’t really buying much straws and I don’t know anyone still preferring the incandescent bulbs except maybe in some Christmas varieties.
edit: I looked into it and incandescent bulbs aren’t normally preferred but there’s a small following. Even the following admits LED bulbs have a lot of benefits. It seems they just don’t like all the colors.
cosmic_cheese · 3h ago
Incandescent bulbs produce pleasant light, but there are LED bulbs that have high CRI’s that the discerning consumer can opt to buy. The best thing to do here in my opinion is to encourage improvement of LED bulb tech by buying the nicer ones instead of cheaping out on low CRI bulbs.
trenchpilgrim · 2h ago
Interestingly, there's a company that makes LED Christmas lights that look like incandescent lights. They've gotten quite popular- they have to be bought by preordering in summer to guarantee a set by the holidays.
LED bulbs are about 10x the price and don’t last any longer. That’s what I don’t like. I’d buy them if the cost the same or close, or lasted substantially longer.
p_j_w · 3h ago
>LED bulbs are about 10x the price and don’t last any longer.
Every bit of research I've ever seen shows LEDs DO last substantially longer. 5-50x longer, depending on which kinda light you'd like to compare to [1]. They're also much cheaper over the long run when you factor in the cost of electricity.
When was the last time you actually priced them out?
When they first came up they were pricy but unless you're talking about fancy smart-bulbs with Wifi and color changing, they are not 10x the price. And they empirically last 5-20+ times longer.
So even before you consider that a huge portion of the energy put into incandescence is lost to heat (thereby making it cost MUCH more in electricity), they are still roughly the same price after accounting for lifespan.
acdha · 3h ago
Citation needed on both points. The LED bulbs I'm using right now were less than double the price when I bought my house 15 years ago and while every incandescent and CFL bulb in the house has failed and been replaced since then, the LED bulbs I bought are still going strong and have paid for themselves many times over with 90% reduction in electricity usage.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
Don't need a citation, as it's my personal experience. I'm not going to do a market research project for fskcing light bulbs. I buy them at Target, or wherever. They maybe last a year, like incandescents. Occasionally they last much less, like a week. And when they die, they are e-waste (at least better than CFLs, which are straight up hazmat waste). An incandescent bulb is a bit of glass and metal.
I used to find incandescent bulbs 4 for a dollar on sale. An LED bulb is typically at least a couple of bucks, that's why I say 10x the price.
I will grant they use less electricity, but my electric bill hasn't noticably changed. The amount of electricity I use for lights in my home isn't even noise in my monthly budget. But what is annoying is having to get out a stepladder once a month to change a bulb, when the huge selling point on these bulbs is that they were worth the price because they would last 10x as long.
tmeasday · 58m ago
Wow, something weird is going on in your house. I literally never change my light bulbs, I was just thinking about this the other day when I was looking at my extra bulbs and considering where to store them. It occurred to me it's been literally years since I changed a bulb, whereas in the old days it used to be a regular occurrence.
Also it's not hard to work out how much electricity you are saving. If you are worried about a couple of bucks, it won't take much usage of a 80W bulb to blow through that.
rectang · 2h ago
Anecdotally, the LED bulbs I've bought from Ace Hardware (BR30 for 65 watt recessed kitchen lighting, and A19 for 75 watt classic bulbs) have consistently failed on order-of-months timescales similar to incandescents. Same with some Feit A19s from a few years back. But they cost more than incandescents!
Apparently the market tolerates this garbage even though LEDs are supposed to be a superior technology and last longer (and some I've bought years ago have, I just don't remember the brand and it was in another house). Perhaps Ace is practicing planned obsolescence and taking advantage of their customers' expectations that "light bulbs get replaced"?
tmeasday · 57m ago
Yeah, weird (see reply to sibling). I have Philips Hue bulbs and I literally haven't replaced any of the ones I put in like 3-4 years ago.
BurningFrog · 2h ago
"We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Ultra-processed food does not have an agreed-upon definition, and is the new "junk food" with the pretense of being more scientific. Is bread and pizza ultra-processed food? Studies do not agree on their definitions, sometimes including ingredient lists, sometimes not, sometimes it is required that the product is made in small shops with love and not in large factories. The mechanism of how ultra-processed food are supposed to cause harm remains undefined.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture authority have designed the NOVA classification of food[1, 2], which includes ultra-processed food as a category.
[1] https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/527...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
At least the way it tends to get made in the US, a sugary pastry that's stuffed full of sugar, carbs, fats and cheese? Ok yeah, my favorite foods are _all_ terrible for me and I can't eat them anymore. This makes me very sad.
Beyond Meat and Impossible burgers definitely are ultra processed though.
They're both ultra processed in the same way that a jellyfish and a California Redwood are both carbon based life forms.
Although I'd also add that UPF avoidance is more of a useful heuristic than an inherently reliable indicator of something's healthfulness. It's not like it's physically impossible to use complex industrial processes to create a product with high-quality nutrition that aligns with a given consumer's desired macros.
I don't personally believe that plant-based meats as we know them are as healthy as meat, but that doesn't mean they couldn't theoretically be, and it doesn't mean lab-grown meat can't be (although I'll let other people be the guinea pigs on immortalized cells and check back in next century).
Edit: 1: Except the powders. Turns out that they're on the low end of "ultra-processed" based on the Nova classification system, whereas Beyond/Impossible Meat is more firmly in that category. See comment below.
It's not a question of whether or not they fit that definition, it's that the definition itself is so expansive that it allows equivocation between food products that are meaningfully different in their ingredients, health outcomes and environmental outcomes.
That being said, the same system would categorize Meati, tofu, and cheese as merely processed (Nova group 3), not ultra-processed (group 4), at least according to Grok (which provided detailed reasoning that sounded credible). For comparison, Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat were deemed to be firmly in group 4.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
The most pressing question here: is tofu ultra-processed? It's a protein isolate prepared by a solution-precipitation process. If you replace the tofu salts (calcium sulfate and similar) with ethanol (an anti-solvent for proteins) you get protein powder. This is not the most efficient way make protein powder, but the point is that on the one hand you have a traditional centuries-old process, and on the other you have what seems to be a sine qua non of ultraprocessed food, and the difference is... ethanol.
Beyond Meat, which contains... dietary fiber... is part of a particular subset of highly processed foods that are trying to be healthy. If you see "chicory root extract" on a food's ingredients label, it's probably in this club. This is a telltale sign of spiking the dietary fiber content. (Beyond Meat does not contain chicory; its fiber is from peas.)
Most ultra-processed foods are not trying to be healthy. They are designed to be addictive. It's a little bit like the old kerfuffle over "weapons-grade" encryption being restricted for export. The technology can be useful for military purposes, but encryption is not a weapon per se.
The critical diversion is not from meat to processed foods, but from the practice of deliberately engineering addictive foods to the techniques that facilitate it. The food product companies would like you to look anywhere other than their intentions, because they can always change the how and what in pursuit of them. They will always be happy to ostentatiously move away from the old way of making a bag of chips you can't put down, to the new way of making a bag of chips you can't put down. The root of the problem is the incentive structure.
Beyond meat type meat alternative products have simply not been around enough, and not consumed by enough people to enable any sort of studies that show they are better. It takes many years, sometimes decades of tracking tens of thousands of people through their lifetimes to establish any reasonable certainty that something is better than the other.
Moreover the ingredients in meat alternatives are known quantities and they lack the specific compounds like heme iron, nitrosamines, and saturated animal fats that are mechanistically linked to cancer and heart disease in red and processed meat.
Frankly I think the bigger reason these don't seem to be working out is that they aren't having the actual impact desired. The price isn't coming down. And if the price remains at higher-than-meat levels the ecological impact (which is what I personally care more about) is probably not where it needs to be either.
I mean, let's be blunt: all this dithering about health effects and environmental externalities isn't actually going to change anything. Make a burger for the price of a bean dip, however, and the market will beat your door down even if they claim not to care about the hippy nonsense.
As I said, they measurably improve health outcomes relative to the meats they're replacing in important areas.
My understanding of the studies on UPF health outcomes is that their data is drawn overwhelmingly from traditional categories like junk food and processed starch and sugar. Which is all the more reason to avoid the equivocation between the two categories, lest someone get the mistaken impression that the Twinkie data is about the burgers.
They imitate meats, but is there any evidence that, in practice, they replace them? In menus, and I suspect in actual human eating behavior, they seem to replace earlier vegetarian options like old-school TVP, not meat.
I’m all for all tastes and textures.
Cheese production may be the definition of “chemically mangled milk” but I’m all for it.
> "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.
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.
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.
Seed oils are now considered more healthy than olive oil? I get the ideological hatred of everything the current administration stands for, but... this take is a bit insane.
This is starting to sound like a process which will require untold quantities of anti biotics and preservatives.
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.
Also it's the mostly same ingredients that farmed salmon is already packaged with.
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.
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
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.
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.
Isn't that the ingredient in lab grown salmon? Also things you're calling "much less recognizable" are basically varieties of vegetable oil.
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
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.
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?
> 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 grown on its own wouldn't look or taste fully like salmon. The look and flavor of salmon comes 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. Like how eating shrimp makes flamingos pink. Salmon without those things is white, and missing some of the sweetness we associate with salmon. (You can even notice this in salmon meat from different conditions; wild-caught salmon usually gets more of these nutrient sources than farmed salmon, so wild-caught salmon is often a much deeper reddish-pink color than the orange of farmed salmon.)
• Starch, maybe carrageenan (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, desiccating 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. Not sure how you'd get it into the tissue reliably, without any kind of circulatory system in there. And it probably doesn't make much of a difference to taste or texture even if you did. But this might still be a v2.0 goal of theirs.)
• Soy and konjac (and also maybe carrageenan here) — 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" that actually stays together; there needs to be some non-cellular tissue matrix that the cells slot into. (Compare/contrast: "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 carotene + 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 get any closer, you'd need to get pretty mad-science-y. 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, and inside — salmon muscle matrix tissue, fully cellularized, with solutes. [Though probably with the tree's vascularization, rather than salmon vascularization.] 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. But that product would technically be "closer to salmon", I guess.)
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.
It's certainly not fish.
Also, the dish itself was really cool. Kann served it as sashimi, along with a bunch of small pickled things and a hunk of smoked watermelon.
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.
Hmm. They also compare their place to a microbrewery but I can't find any photos of the actual production process, generally a point of pride for a microbrewery. It sounds less like "lab grown meat" than literally "lab grown cells" + other stuff to mimic aspects of meat texture/flavor/color.
https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...
https://goodfish.org.au/species/atlantic-salmon-tassal/
They've taken what was a pristine harbour untouched by humans and turned it into a sewer for salmon effluent. There is a prehistoric fish, the maugean skate, that is likely to go extinct if the salmon farming continues.
I’m not sure about the cost savings either, at least right now it doesn’t seem feasible.
Innovation is fun but I think the best way to tackle all your points is to keep the pressure on legislation.
I'm not 100% sure either of those has been proven out.
I could see CO2, but it sort of depends on how much power the bioreactor and sterilization consumes and how much methane is release. Granted, it'd be easier to capture those and easier to place these reactors in or near a grocery store, for example, for immediate delivery.
Food safety is almost certainly going to be a bigger problem. The big problem with bioreactors is they are cultivating the ideal substance for very nasty bacteria/fungus/etc to flourish in. Bioreactors do not have immune systems. That means keeping things absolutely sterile is of the utmost importance. I'm sure when the initial products are produced safety will be pristine. However, what happens when the CEOs of these companies decide to cut back? Heck, what happens when the new guy forgets to do a sterilization cycle or runs it short?
A major issue is these will be regulated by the FDA which has a history of doing a poor job of keeping food safe. I'd feel better if it were under the jurisdiction of the USDA.
I can cherish the research path and value the intended endpoint, but knowing what I know of agribusiness, early approval to market seems a mite reckless. Particularly in 2025. Particularly with "sushi-grade fish".
We produce millions of tons of affordable meat from industrial production of animals THAT HAVE immune systems, swimming in antibiotics, that the FDA tells you to cook thoroughly because it's definitely full of salmonella. We chop it up using child labor on production lines that would make you a vegetarian if you saw them.
Canola is often sprayed with neonicotinoids and the oil processed with solvents like hexane.
I'd personally prefer to get my omega acids from real salmon.
Not saying one's better, just that all our food sources have higher and lower quality steps before market.
So... Like a wild fish, but with NO IMMUNE SYSTEM WHATSOEVER, which requires your sterilization protocols to be effectively perfect.
NASA has tried and failed to get their sterilization protocols to perfection levels for Mars landers, and consistently failed despite using basically zero organic materials.
We're going to cook this stuff, yes, sure (aren't we?)... but the squick is rational. And the problem gets inherently worse at larger scale production.
My personal guess is that the first actually economically viable lab-grown meats will be of endangered/extinct animals that the extremely wealthy will be willing to pay the exorbitant costs that it takes to create them for the novelty factor.
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/recalls-public-health-...
"Produced without inspection" and "processing deviations" account for a lot of recalls.
If they're actively pushing into the market, that means they're selling _something_ at maybe $30-$100/kg. Would you trust that something, knowing what you know of animal tissue bioreactors? Would you trust a restaurant serving thousands of meals of that something?
Relevant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZGPjvFkLzUW
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One of modern humanity's oldest activities is fermenting carbohydrates in large bioreactors into alcohol, yogurt, and pickles, but there are a lot of things that turned out not to work in that history.
When we try to fabricate, say, monoclonal antibodies using large cultures of multicellular tissues for pharmaceutical work, the price ends up coming out to millions of dollars a kilogram.
I am implicitly skeptical of the protocols of a protein tissue culture that has to be produced at the ~$30/kg price level.
Could you eat it and not die? I'm sure!
But could you feed people with a billion meals worth of batches and have nobody die? I'm less sure! My understanding is that tissue culture failures are frequently the bane of a biologist's research program.
Freezing doesn't kill the parasites, it slows the clock that started ticking when the fish was killed. It's not pasteurization, like what's done to canned tuna. It just slows the clock when you refrigerate or freeze the fish, but does not reset it to zero. And of course, if you're eating fresh fish that was healthy when it was killed, there's no need for an intermediate freezing or pasteurizing step.
This situation is different because the "clock" starts when the cell cultures are removed from the donor salmon. The whole blob/tank/plate/catalyzing surface (I'm not sure what the design is, I wish they had more documentation) on which the product grows for the whole time that the product is growing is vulnerable to a single bacterium that would grow out of control, like an immunocompromised human might be killed by an ordinary illness that most people would shrug off in 24 hours.
When the FDA talks about freezing killing parasites in fish, they're talking specifically about anisakis worms - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisakis
It's not going to be possible to grow a thing that looks like a piece of salmon but is secretly riddled with viruses and bacteria.
Either the lab gets their sterile technique right and they wind up with something that looks like salmon, or they get it wrong and you wind up with bacteria slop. Things that look like salmon can only become so if no bacteria and viruses are present.
Don't forget that salmon and most other deep sea fish are immediately frozen when caught, which not only helps preserve flavor, but eliminates parasites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_and_parasites_in_salm...)
There's just such a gulf between the prices at which this is feasible for food use, and the prices at which existing large bioreactors can culture animal tissue.
If we can't even get plant slop ("algal biodiesel") culture consistent and cheap enough to burn in an engine, or get plant slop ("tilapia feedstock algae") cheap enough to industrialize to outcompete chickens... I don't know that I'm comfortable eating bioreactor meat that can only survive in the FDA danger zone.
In an a bioreactor where no immune system exists, there can't be a latent infection: there's no immune system! If it can infect and destroy what's growing, then it'll infect and destroy all of it. It isn't going to look like tuna meat after that.
> Our saku is sushi-grade and is perfect for dishes like sushi, crudo, and ceviche
https://www.wildtypefoods.com/our-salmon
Hard no from me, not even once.
I’d rather eat non-lab grown salmon once a month or once a quarter than eating that f—— aberration.
Salmon is just one example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat
Ouch. Red states are pro-deregulation, until laissez-faire innovation offends their beliefs.
Sometimes the most efficient solution is to collaborate in the way only a government can organize. Sometimes regulations do more good than harm. If someone cannot articulate exactly why their proposal is a good idea and instead relies on repeating myths then be wary.
As we've seen with incandescent light bulbs and plastic straws, "free market" is only temporary, until the "bad" thing simply gets banned.
They're just pre-emptively banning artificial meat, to prevent real meat from being banned!
The idea of preemptively banning something so it can't become better than the status quo seems ludicrous.
The proof is in the pudding / free market. If the alternatives (paper straws, LED bulbs) were better, people would voluntarily buy them! (cf: mobile phones vs. stationary phones, almost noone has the latter these days, because the former are just - better!) Instead, they're banned because they're better.
Dumping toxic waste into a river would also lower costs for consumers vs disposing of it correctly, but there are regulations to prevent that. Complete unobstructed free market capitalism is not sustainable, there needs to be a balance.
edit: I looked into it and incandescent bulbs aren’t normally preferred but there’s a small following. Even the following admits LED bulbs have a lot of benefits. It seems they just don’t like all the colors.
https://www.seasonsreflection.com/vintaglo
Every bit of research I've ever seen shows LEDs DO last substantially longer. 5-50x longer, depending on which kinda light you'd like to compare to [1]. They're also much cheaper over the long run when you factor in the cost of electricity.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...
When they first came up they were pricy but unless you're talking about fancy smart-bulbs with Wifi and color changing, they are not 10x the price. And they empirically last 5-20+ times longer.
So even before you consider that a huge portion of the energy put into incandescence is lost to heat (thereby making it cost MUCH more in electricity), they are still roughly the same price after accounting for lifespan.
I used to find incandescent bulbs 4 for a dollar on sale. An LED bulb is typically at least a couple of bucks, that's why I say 10x the price.
I will grant they use less electricity, but my electric bill hasn't noticably changed. The amount of electricity I use for lights in my home isn't even noise in my monthly budget. But what is annoying is having to get out a stepladder once a month to change a bulb, when the huge selling point on these bulbs is that they were worth the price because they would last 10x as long.
Also it's not hard to work out how much electricity you are saving. If you are worried about a couple of bucks, it won't take much usage of a 80W bulb to blow through that.
Apparently the market tolerates this garbage even though LEDs are supposed to be a superior technology and last longer (and some I've bought years ago have, I just don't remember the brand and it was in another house). Perhaps Ace is practicing planned obsolescence and taking advantage of their customers' expectations that "light bulbs get replaced"?