During the pandemic, plant-based meat consumption and media coverage exploded. Now, a host of trend pieces decry its demise. That shift is no organic accident.
I’m hating how lemmy.ml is losing my context parent, but I think I posted a video to you prior.
The problem with lab grown meat is that the process is inherently VERY complex and touchy. They like to compare it to making beer or wine, but it’s an exacting process. IF we could figure out lab grown meat, that advance would likely involve a far bigger advance in nuclear medicine, changing the world of medication to a “this is YOUR cure for cancer, created for pennies based upon your DNA” type of utopia.
Maybe there’s someone close to this who can suggest to me what I’m missing there, but the obstacles for lab grown meat are simply those same golden obstacles we’ve had to far more important problems, that we’ve thrown far more money at.
From the video, the biggest pain point for the next 20 years is this. You cannot scale the process. The bigger your bioreactor, the lower the efficiency. “Scale” involves building hundreds or thousands of resource-expensive bioreactors, filling them all with chemicals, and running the bioreaction over a long period of time, in highly a sensitive lab environment. Unfortunately, it feels like this is a “down to go up”. While possible, it seems as likely to be a success as some sort of New coal tech wiping Solar out and being the real solution for dirty power. If you put THAT kind of money into the already well-understood meat industries that already have some good best practices (that aren’t necessarily followed like they should be), you’ll end up with agriculture that’s good for the environment AND billions of dollars to spare to use on some other green initiative.
Of course, the real issue is that the countries whose people care the most aren’t the problem at all. The US is a great example. Our meat industry is an insignificant part of the problem, at <2% of the GHG emissions. The US meat industry is actually statistically INCREDIBLY effective… but the meat industry in other countries, not so much.
I’m hating how lemmy.ml is losing my context parent, but I think I posted a video to you prior.
The problem with lab grown meat is that the process is inherently VERY complex and touchy. They like to compare it to making beer or wine, but it’s an exacting process. IF we could figure out lab grown meat, that advance would likely involve a far bigger advance in nuclear medicine, changing the world of medication to a “this is YOUR cure for cancer, created for pennies based upon your DNA” type of utopia.
Maybe there’s someone close to this who can suggest to me what I’m missing there, but the obstacles for lab grown meat are simply those same golden obstacles we’ve had to far more important problems, that we’ve thrown far more money at.
From the video, the biggest pain point for the next 20 years is this. You cannot scale the process. The bigger your bioreactor, the lower the efficiency. “Scale” involves building hundreds or thousands of resource-expensive bioreactors, filling them all with chemicals, and running the bioreaction over a long period of time, in highly a sensitive lab environment. Unfortunately, it feels like this is a “down to go up”. While possible, it seems as likely to be a success as some sort of New coal tech wiping Solar out and being the real solution for dirty power. If you put THAT kind of money into the already well-understood meat industries that already have some good best practices (that aren’t necessarily followed like they should be), you’ll end up with agriculture that’s good for the environment AND billions of dollars to spare to use on some other green initiative.
Of course, the real issue is that the countries whose people care the most aren’t the problem at all. The US is a great example. Our meat industry is an insignificant part of the problem, at <2% of the GHG emissions. The US meat industry is actually statistically INCREDIBLY effective… but the meat industry in other countries, not so much.