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.
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.
Reading the commonly-cited definition of "ultra processed":
Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). Group 1 [un- or minimally processed] foods are absent or represent a small proportion of the ingredients in the formulation. Processes enabling the manufacture of ultra-processed foods include industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; application of additives including those whose function is to make the final product palatable or hyperpalatable such as flavours, colourants, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers; and sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials. Processes and ingredients here are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-(h)eat or to drink), tasteful alternatives to all other Nova food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals.
I'd say that it doesn't really fit any of the usual categories. It's definitely produced by technical means using uncommon ingredients. But it's not hyper-palatable -- that is, it's not designed to make you eat large amounts of it.
So I guess it depends on how well it ends up fitting into the diet. If we end up eating it the way we eat salmon -- a few times a week, in reasonable quantities, with a similar nutritional profile -- then it's not a concern. If it ends up going into a product that you eat by the bagful, then it could be a concern for the same reason other ultra-processed foods are.
It is important to not that nuts and dark chocolate usually fit the ultra processed (or sometimes just processed) food definition. This poses real problems in studies because they are roughly a net benefit health wise so authors have the choice between excluding them from the study (which misleadingly worsens claims about processed food being bad) or keeping them in (misleadingly softening how bad they are).
> An ultra-processed food is a grouping of processed food characterized by relatively involved methods of production. There is no simple definition of UPF, but they are generally understood to be an industrial creation derived from natural food or synthesized from other organic compounds.
This disgusting salmon-flavoured soy bean paste certainly qualifies.
It is important to not that nuts and dark chocolate usually fit the ultra processed (or sometimes just processed) food definition. This poses real problems in studies because they are roughly a net benefit health wise so authors have the choice between excluding them from the study (which misleadingly worsens claims about processed food being bad) or keeping them in (misleadingly softening how bad they are).
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.
> 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 read "cancer" in between the lines of that comment. So the characterization of (potentially) that backdrop as "a bit of personal harm" feels wildly overassuming.
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.
I might be able to figure out how to grind wheat into flour for bread. Maybe I can squint hard enough to consider baking yeast to be a "whole ingredient". But cheese? I assume I can probably figure it out with the internet, but it is not at all obvious what goes into that. And the milk I would use almost certainly went through an industrial sterilization process that I know I am not equipped to so.
You can make ricotta in <1h with whole milk, vinegar and a bit of salt. And it's good on pizza!
But most "regular" cheeses like Swiss cheese also need rennet, ie. you need to slaughter a calf and scrape its stomach lining. You may want to make sure your downstairs neighbor is OK with the procedure before you start (offer them a veal dinner to make up for the noise?). Other than that, it's basically (unpasteurized) milk, salt and water. And time.
Yeast: take a sourdough baking class. You just need air, water and (organic) flour.
Your ignorance of the process or recipe of a food product doesn't affect the definition of ultra processed food. No amount of knowledge will let you make something like ultra processed foods at home with home equipment simply because it uses industrial processes and ingredients. Naturally there is a spectrum of processed-ness.
And yet, pizza regularly appears on lists of "ultra processed" foods. As do potato chips and ice cream, two foods that are also very easy to make at home from whole ingredients.
There is no consistent definition and people regularly bend over backward to put all "junk food" in this category.
Yeah, it's a good example of how useless "ultra processed" is as a heuristic when we can use a slightly better label like "junk food".
So, donuts are fine because they are only a few ingredients that you can make on your stove, and they're bad once a factory makes them? Maybe only because the factory uses "chemicals"?
No, it's the fried calorie-dense food that is easy to overeat while displacing nutrition from better food sources that is the problem.
Everyone here seems to be avoiding the point that ultra processed foods contain ingredients that home bakers would never use: preservatives, anti-caking agents, flavor enhancers, artificial colors and flavors. Ingredients that are not food and add little to no nutritional value.
Pizza made at home will not use such things. Your local pub that makes their own pizza will not either. Fast food or frozen pizza gets their ingredients from central suppliers in bulk, and they have no choice but to use such things in order for their products to survive the extended storage, processing, transportation, and similar delays that will occur on the way to the consumer.
It's a very convenient red herring to zoom in on some additives instead of zooming out to evaluate your dietary patterns.
Probably because we can use it to let ourselves off the hook for a bad diet. We can do things like roleplay that it's the seed oil in our Doritos making us fat, and that if it were butter then, idk, it would be a superfood or something?
It's the pepperoni, 15g sodium, 100g saturated fat, and 3000 calories of Costco pizza you just ate that's doing a number on your body, not the guar gum in the dough.
Or, how are you going to pick apart an ingredient list when you just ate a half-dozen home-cooked lard donuts? You're cool with laying down arterial plaque but you draw the line at ascorbic acid in the store-bought cream filling?
The "ulta processed" meme is a huge distraction. It's like listening to a fat guy talk about how he's very particular about the gum he chews because he stays away from "sugar alcohols". Yeah? What about the other 4999 calories of food you ate today?
> Everyone here seems to be avoiding the point that ultra processed foods contain ingredients that home bakers would never use: preservatives, anti-caking agents, flavor enhancers, artificial colors and flavors. Ingredients that are not food and add little to no nutritional value.
Precisely what is wrong with flavor enhancers? A common flavor enhancer is MSG, and using that in homemade dishes would not be that unusual. I frequently use it in many home preparations that could use more savory flavor.
Likewise with thickeners or emulsifiers such as cornstarch, xanthum gum, guar gum, etc: these are often used in many preparations at home. Just because something has 'no nutritional value' doesn't mean it doesn't have culinary value. By this same logic, spices have no nutritional value and are just flavors, which clearly doesn't pass the sniff test.
Sometimes. But if you look at papers, media coverage, and policy proposals you'll find that "has preservatives and stuff" is not actually a necessary nor sufficient requirement.
This is not true. I frequently use these spooky "ingredients" in home cooking. I use sodium citrate to make cheese sauces that don't coagulate. I use MSG if I need a source of glutamic umami. I've used various gums as thickeners.
These aren't some toxic compounds that machines put in our food. You can just go to a food supply store and grab them. MSG is just available pretty much everywhere.
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.
Pizza at home is my pet peeve. Lots of work working the dough, lots of waiting, super messy. Needs expensive oven and tons of electricity. All of this work to get one of the cheapest meal available.
Now compare to a steak - add salt, 5 minutes on pan, rest. Better than $50 steak at most restaurants.
I get that pizza at home is a whole hobby, yes. And if you don't want to do it, it's all of those things that you say.
1) My pizza oven runs on gas not electricity. Not that this is better environmentally. Some run on wood.
2) I'm getting better results than I can get in a local pizza place. Cheap pizza is not great pizza. Home pizza making has a learning curve, it's more of a niche thing than e.g. cooking a steak or burger.
For grandparent post, Pizza is of course not a "dessert", it's a savoury main course. Full of white flour, cheese fats, and salt. So also not health food.
> 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.
Yeah, no shit? We're not ants in a colony. I think you're pretty stupid if you're alright with harming yourself while achieving nothing. If you wanna risk your life for a cause then take direct action, eating processed slop and pretending to feel good about it is only gonna make both your world and mine shittier.
The thing is, we don’t even have good evidence that UPF is necessarily harmful. Whey protein is UPF, but is associated with positive outcomes. Mass produced wholemeal bread is UPF, but is associated with good outcomes.
I’m not convinced that the “UPF” category adds anything useful over “HFSS” at this point. Happy to be pushed off my view, but seen nothing that would do so thus far.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
I see "junk food" as a value judgement more so than a heuristic. How do you define "junk food"? Most people would agree that most things that are marketed as candy are junk food, but what else qualifies as "junk food"? Off the top of my head, I bet you could ask 10 different people about which of these qualify as "junk food" and get 10 different answers: pizza, pasta, granola bars, burgers, lettuce-wrapped burgers, Impossible burgers, steak, salad with store-bought dressing, canned chicken noodle soup, coconuts, dates, MCT oil, bacon, oatmeal, cheese, mozzarella sticks, French fries, potato chips, baked potatoes, cereal, corn, popcorn, protein powder, protein bars, smoothies, sugar-free ice cream.
"Ultra-processed" may be a little fuzzy at the boundaries, but at least it's a specific enough term that we all know and mostly agree on what we're talking about when we use the term. UPF-ness is a heuristic that can help determine whether or not a certain food is junk, but once you've categorized something as "junk food" you've already decided it's unhealthy. No one has to study or debate whether or not junk food is unhealthy.
But that's what makes it more valuable. It is honest. There's a value judgement in "ultra-processed" that is just hidden. This is how you get ostensibly serious people saying that frozen lasagna made with whole ingredients and no preservatives is still "ultra-processed" because it is shipped in plastic or that a can of baked beans made with sugar and preservatives isn't "ultra-processed" because it is part of a traditional british breakfast. If you ask 10 different people on the street what "ultra-processed" means you'll get even less consistency.
And the value judgement is the only part that has an especially meaningful connection to health. It is admittedly really difficult to do rigorous research on the health impacts of diet, but the connection between "ultra-processed-ness" and health outcomes is super messy. And even when we can get data that suggests negative health outcomes, what's the actual cause? Preservatives? Lack of fiber? Hyperpalatability? Nobody has been able to clearly articulate a cause and if we could then we could just focus on that thing rather than the "ultra-processed-ness."
Some protein powders, e.g. many of the plant protein powders, require complex processing, which is reflected in their price, which is many times greater than the price of meat (per protein content).
However there are other protein powders that are obtained using minimal processing, much less than the traditional food processing, so they cannot be considered "ultra-processed" by any definition.
For instance the protein concentrates that are extracted from milk or whey are much less processed than the traditional dairy products. (This is also reflected in their price, which is similar to that of the cheapest kinds of chicken meat, per their protein content.)
To extract the protein powder from milk or whey, only simple (in principle) processing steps are done: centrifugation to remove the fat, ultrafiltration to remove the lactose and the water and drying to remove the residual water.
This kind of processing alters the proteins of milk far less than the traditional making of cheese, which requires strong processing with enzymes and/or acid and/or heat and/or fermentation, and which causes significant changes in the structure and composition of the milk proteins.
If you call milk/whey protein concentrate as "ultra-processed", you must call any cheese as "hyper-super-ultra-processed".
It is true that making milk/whey protein powders requires machines that can be made only using modern technologies, while cheese and other dairy products were already made many millennia ago. However the simplicity of the old technologies is only apparent, because they exploited the work of dead animal bodies (rennet) or bacteria or fungi, which are much more complex than human-made machines.
In this case, i.e. for making milk/whey protein powders, modern technology has allowed the use of much less processing for extracting the useful part of milk, keeping it in its unaltered state, than the traditional technologies, so this is clearly not an example of "ultra-processing".
Similarly, extracting vegetable oils using supercritical carbon dioxide is certainly not "ultra-processing" as it allows a better preservation of the oil fraction of oily seeds or oily fruits than the traditional oil extraction methods.
So the use of modern processing methods is not the same as "ultra-processing". To the latter, one should count only processing methods that cause irreversible changes in the food, removing the control of the end users on the composition of the food that they eat, i.e. processing that mixes ingredients into the food or that alters the food through heating or other treatments.
Fruit juice concentrates are often considered "ultra-processed" in the scientific literature, media, and policy initiatives. Are they substantially more processed than whey protein?
>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.
Their intentions sort of don't matter. The food company and the grocery store are businesses, and the idea that a business should exist for anything except profit has become less fashionable. In any case, there are enough business owners/executives who believe this, and are not punished for it, that they will outcompete you if you don't.
The way to make a good profit in the food industry is to sell a lot of a product that you can sell for a good price, but have it be very cheap to manufacture. If you take really cheap input material that historically was used mostly for animal feed, like corn or oats, and can do a bunch of food science magic to it to make it very tasty and addictive, you can charge a good price and people will buy lots of it.
The problem with ultraprocessed foods is simply that the manufacturer has been given too many free parameters, and if they get enough they can find something addictive and unhealthy. Since shelf space on grocery store shelves is allocated based on sales, the shelves will be filled with addictive food. This is even true of the produce section. Fruits and vegetables are bred to increase their sugar content, reduce bitterness, etc. Luckily breeding fruit trees is more time consuming and less controllable than all of the chemistry that can happen in a potato chip factory. We will see how this holds up as genetic engineering becomes more predictable.
Anyhow the only solution we've really come up with to this social problem is to change our brains with Glucagon Like Peptides to be less susceptible to these tricks. We will see how long that is able to keep ahead of the food companies.
That's an interesting question. Based on Grok's analysis, the answer isn't that tofu is UPF, but that your particular proposed method of creating a protein powder would not be UPF. Unless you followed that process with "additional steps like centrifugation, pH adjustment, spray-drying, and stabilizers", as would typically be involved in production of commercial powders, it would remain in Nova group 3 like tofu. (Whether it would be a particularly palatable or mixable protein powder is obviously another matter entirely.)
Of course I agree with the rest of your point, which is similar to what I was saying. (I also chuckled at your choice of analogy, as a founder of an encryption startup.) I have a lot of thoughts on the incentive structure[1], which I would dramatically overhaul given the option.
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.
There are 3 kinds of processing, with very different effects. One kind is separating a product into its components. Another is mixing various ingredients. The third is applying some treatment to the product that modifies its structure, heating being the most frequent method.
I consider only mixing ingredients and applying various treatments as belonging to "ultraprocessing", because these processing methods remove the control of the end consumer about what is being eaten, as they are normally irreversible.
On the other hand, any separation method cannot have a harmful effect by itself and separation of the edible components is absolutely necessarily for human food, because we have reduced digestive systems, which are unable to extract as efficiently the nutrients from food as those of most other non-carnivorous mammals.
The only harmful effects of well-separated food ingredients, like seed flour, oils or protein powders, happen when the end consumers choose to mix them in unhealthy proportions, like when adding too much sugar or too much fat to some dish, but then they can blame only themselves for this.
With food that has passed through the other kinds of processing, nothing that the end consumers do with it can make it healthy, when it has not originally been so, which happens frequently because for its producers it is more beneficial to try to make it addictive instead of healthy.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Beyond doesn't contain heme iron, but Impossible does.
Good point. From chatgpting about this for a moment, it sounds like the heme is chemically structurally identical, but it's soy derived and (1) there isn't yet research tying it to the same health outcomes as animal heme, and (2) there may be an important difference in the environmental and chemical context and which it's delivered, as animal heme is delivered in saturated animal fats, accompanied by nitrites/nitrates (from curing) and heterocyclic amines or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (from high-heat cooking of meat).
But it could be a legit issue in terms of sharing rather than improving on a health outcomes associated with meat.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Educate yourself. This is nothing more than Richard Berman's propaganda to allow more bullshit in this country.
Big tobacco, drunk driving, union busting, questioning global warming, the list goes on and this man is likely responsible for some of the most detrimental misinformation campaigns in modern history.
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.
The argument in the comment above is that lab grown salmon cells should not be allowed to be marketed as salmon because they have had components such as beta-carotene added for coloring.
In light of the fact that similar compounds are added to the majority of farmed salmon for similar reasons, the comparison shows that the objection is likely a fallacious appeal to nature, purporting that something is good because it is "natural" or "normal" rather than presenting any objective evidence to argue their point.
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.
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.” :-/
The story is a lot more interesting than I could have imagined:
It’s particularly popular in the northern state of West Bengal in India, where it’s used in dishes such as achaars, a pickled condiment used to add an acidic spice to a wide variety of dishes.
Through careful breeding processes, the group of scientists were able to produce rapeseed plants with low levels of erucic acid. The oil, later to be named canola oil (can- for Canada, -ola which stands for “oil, low acid”) soon became a commercialized, easily marketable hit with both the public and science community alike (Fisher, 2020).
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.
I don’t think people eating butter instead of canola oil is what upsets people.
It’s people ignoring the mountain of evidence that such a switch would be a backwards step for health outcomes and claiming the opposite because they read a book by the usual rogues’ gallery of science misinterpreters (Taubes, Teicholz, Shanahan).
ant-seed oil is anti-scientific and prays on people being ignorant about the research on health outcomes and relies on emotional appeals and appeals to nature such as "the genetic engineering and solvent-based extraction of canola oil".
Who are you trying to kid? You listed sunflower seed oil alongside canola --- you're presumably just as opposed to mustard seed oil.
It would be funny if the one seed oil you're OK with is mustard seed oil, the oil closest in composition to canola, the one oil anyone has a legit gripe about (it doesn't taste very good).
Mustard oil has been used in the subcontinent since the Indus valley civilization 4,500 years ago. It’s extremely well understood. Unlike solvent extraction of oil.
You write this as if there isn't controversy about mustard oil, which is banned in the United States because it contains high levels of a likely heart toxin ("Among South Asians living in the US, ASCVD risk is four-fold higher than the local population") and limited throughout Europe. The entire point of solvent extraction is convert rapeseed oil, which would otherwise be similarly problematic (they're basically the same plant!) into something less toxic than mustard oil (that's literally why it's called "canola").
I don't care either way; let the mustard oil flow. I don't buy the mustard oil thing either. Just don't pretend that mustard oil is somehow healthier than canola. Use whichever fat tastes best to you.
Canola oil is simply a mustard-seed oil from a hybrid mustard bred for low erucic acid content. Solvent extraction is widely used, but not something that defines canola oil. Cold-pressed and expeller-pressed canola oil are also produced on a smaller scale.
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
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.
> You are consuming it in a condensed secondary form (one tropic level up).
I always find this is looked over and a double standard. You can raise an animal on a diet of anything along with medication, drugs, and supplements, and advocates will label the beef/chicken/pork product as "meat" and "natural" as if it was a single pure ingredient. But then if a non-meat alternative like a burger is mentioned, every individual ingredient used gets scrutinized, even if that ingredient is often fed to farm animals like soy or grain.
This, in my opinion, is the most important point in the thread and the clearest expression of it. For purposes of this argument, meat is conceived of essentially as a single ingredient, and the raising of the animal in artificial conditions, on hormones, fed on processed food with its associated environmental footprints are kind of sidestepped, while alternatives have to answer for every step in the chain of production.
That mapping seems correct to me, as a lot of the objections here are free-floating one-offs that presume these background assumptions more so than they are apples to apples comparisons intent on clearly comparing them in totality.
> 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.
So, basically a salmon-flavored jelly? I'm actually ok with this as long as there is no harmful substances involved. I wonder how's the texture once it's cooked or grilled.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's hard but people culture animal cells in 5000 gallon bioreactors so it's not about size. We're not really to the point of producing tissues with 3D structure and cell differentiation. That's why lab grown meat is always pink paste ground into something else.
Building lab grown tissues and not just cell lines is what's being worked on now, for any purpose not only food.
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.
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.
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.
I had foolishly given them the benefit of the doubt and after poking around their entire damn website site and I now hate them. I couldn't find a nutrition label but buried in text was information I need.
"4-5 grams of protein per 100 gram serving"
"fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae"
Real Coho Salmon is about 20% protein and 7% fat so we're looking at less than 20% of the important parts being salmon. I retract my previous comment. It's not Salmon.
I believe the FDA defines a minimum of 40% of a meat product to be made of that meat to be labeled as that meat (eg. beef hotdogs needs to be made of 40% beef) and I'm not sure if this qualifies as that.
As a benchmark, the tuna used in a Subway tuna sandwich is 100% tuna, the beef in Taco Bell beef tacos is 88% beef, and the chicken in McDonald's Chicken McNuggets is 100% chicken but make up 45% of the nugget.
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.
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.
Would you respect being eaten as part of the circle of life? What about your family?
Where is the line drawn?
Explain to me the difference between disrespect and being cattle-bolted through the skull.
When the fish is yanked out of the factory farm and suffocated in air or chilled and frozen alive do you think they experience this respect we're talking about? If so, where?
Does the operator say thanks to each fish before their brutal, agonizing, often prolonged for market death?
'respect' is about the most stupid thing I can think to bring up when referencing loss of life in animals.
It's a meta human concept that means nothing other than the mans approval of method -- it means nothing with regard to the animal or the suffering.
> Explain to me the difference between disrespect and being cattle-bolted through the skull.
I think if you could choose between that and being slowly consumed by five or six coyotes from the ass forward, you'd go for the cattle bolt. I have a ton of problems with the US meat industry (to the point where I only eat meat once a month or so unless somebody is throwing it away), but there are ranchers out there who do try to do their best for the food they raise.
One has human moral responsibility, the other doesn't.
I actually do think, if we solved all the other problems in the world and had time left over, it would be right to intervene in nature to stop the harms you described too, and that conversation is a pandora's box of its own. But I don't think the upshot of these harms in nature is that we're also allowed to engage in similar harms at any scale we choose, as long as the badness isn't as bad as what happens in nature. Mainly because that comparison sidesteps the role of unique human moral responsibility and implies an unmade argument that analogies to nature can serve the function of authorizing human-initiated moral harms.
Depends on the context, not necessarily weird. If the choice was between “world A” where sentient beings were perpetually bred into existence to be perpetually tortured until they died and “world B” where the breeding stopped and the beings became extinct, it would be insane to favour world A over B.
Farming them into existence creates moral responsibility, and killing then annihilates the remaining value of a life for which you were morally responsible.
The "connection" you're advocating appears to be a more a romanticized free association (along the lines of "we are all stardust") than a specific conceptual argument accountable to the interests of the animals being harmed.
> 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.
Would you say the same thing about killing other humans for food? If not, why not?
I'll answer for that person. If humans were naturally cannibalistic then I think they'd agree. For instance, if we were spiders it would seem pretty natural to eat each other. But the fact is that cannibalism, even among the biggest fans of CAFOs, is just not that much fun.
I'd ask the poster a similar question though. If a monkey or chimp was treated with respect and killed humanely, would they eat that?
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.
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.
What do you mean by “part of the circle of life”? I’m not sure why that would be a compelling reason to be ok with something either way?
For most of human history eating meat riddled with maggots was part of the circle of life, is it weird to be grossed out by eating meat riddled with maggots?
What’s the practical difference as far as the appeal to nature argument you’re making goes? Humans lived for thousands of years on maggot-riddled meat, same as they did on parasite-riddled salmon.
Surely if it was good enough for us to live on back then, it’s part of the circle of life and should be totally fine. Right?
If one’s no longer acceptable because we don’t do it any more, then surely if lab meat gets established then we’ll look back at that parasite-riddled salmon with the same revulsion as we do the maggots.
If you don't think parasite ridden flesh is gross then your meter needs recalibrating.
Even ancient man avoided parasites when possible. Parasites can kill you, regardless of how natural they are.
Dog shit and nightshade are part of the circle of life too, but they seem to be avoided by most.
Something being good because it's 'part of the circle of life', whatever that means, is as blind and irrational as 'all upf is bad by virtue of being defined as upf.'
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.
You think squeezing something to get the oil out is unpleasant and unnatural? I don't know what to do with that, it's nearly as absurd as saying cutting food with a knife is gross and unnatural, you should use your teeth instead.
An expeller is just a screw press. Get your terminology right if you're going to chase the latest food demonizing fad.
And yes, lots of oils are extracted by mashing up biologicals mixing it with a solvent like hexane and then evaporating off the solvent leaving a trace <1ppm behind.
I filled my gas tank today and did some spray painting without entirely appropriate ventilation. I'm sure most people regularly expose themselves to a little bit of organic solvent on a regular basis without a second thought or moralizing about it.
tumor (noun) An abnormal growth of tissue resulting from uncontrolled, progressive multiplication of cells and serving no physiological function; a neoplasm
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
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?
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"?
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.
That is not it, and throwing short inflammatory comments up and down this comment chain isn't going to do much except clutter it up.
(Almost nobody who goes in to a restaurant is fooled by "Fish" in quotation marks on the menu; it's an alarming enough call-out to make anyone aware of it)
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.
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.
It's a neat trick, wording-wise, to try and make it out like I'm doing that. It's fairly clear that I'm not doing that.
e.g, Almond _milk_ has been a thing for centuries now. Everyone knows it's not from a cow, yet we call it milk because the end product is similar enough that people get what the point is. Humanity will likely do this until the heat death of the universe. You should probably just get over it.
you mean artificially colored canola soy extrusions, with an unspecified (i.e. very small) quantity of chemically replicated salmon cells? how about counterfeit biohazard salmon?
>>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.
> 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.)
It seems to me more feasible to engineer salmon (or cows, etc) with no, or severely curtailed, brains. That would remove most ethical issues with meat-eating.
These would essentially be animals in a persistent vegetative state, so they would be a lot like humans in that same state — needing to be individually hooked up to a bunch of machines to keep them alive. Parenteral nutrition and all that.
While that type of infrastructure is certainly possible, there's no clear way to scale it like there is for cellular culturing.
And the result might be pretty disappointing even if you did it. Picture a human who spent their whole life in a coma in a hospital bed — they'd have zero muscle mass, fragile bones, etc.
However, you might be able to get around this by hooking the animal's body up to a synthetic brainstem that sends computer-controlled impulses down the spine – such that you've got e.g. a bunch of brainless salmon strapped in place in a flow tank, whose bodies are constantly being told to breathe, swim forward, open their mouths to capture food when food is released into the tank, etc.
I think that, besides the scalability challenges, the reason this approach isn't more looked into as an avenue of research, is that the ethics of cellular-cultured meat are really clear (there is nothing experiencing pain there; there aren't even nerve cells to sense or relay pain), while the ethics of brainless whole-animal cultivation are... non-obvious, to say the least.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is important to not that nuts and dark chocolate usually fit the ultra processed (or sometimes just processed) food definition. This poses real problems in studies because they are roughly a net benefit health wise so authors have the choice between excluding them from the study (which misleadingly worsens claims about processed food being bad) or keeping them in (misleadingly softening how bad they are).
I think the world would be a better place if everyone went vegan.
However, I’m not convinced that vegan activism via pointing out that many people’s behaviours are at odds with their stated ethical preferences is particularly effective.
I suspect this is because many vegan activists make the assumption that people have ethical preferences which then drive their behaviour. For many (most?) people, though, I think they act the way that feels good to them and then come up with justifications for it post-hoc, even if those justifications are illogical.
As such, I live in hope that lab-grown meat will be tasty and cheap enough that people switch across and stop consuming animal products, which will give humanity the space to look back and see the abhorrent nature of animal agriculture for what it is and ban it outright.
With any luck, we’ll view our current generation’s treatment of animals with the same confusion we feel when we consider our forebears’ tolerance of slavery.
> As such, I live in hope that lab-grown meat will be tasty and cheap enough that people switch across and stop consuming animal products, which will give humanity the space to look back and see the abhorrent nature of animal agriculture for what it is and ban it outright.
Agreed. Replicated meat is the ideal.
"I shall try some of your burned replicated bird meat!"
> I think the world would be a better place if everyone went vegan.
Strongly disagree. I absolutely hate that animals have to be killed for us to eat meat. And the industrial scale cruelty of factory farming gives me existential dread. But I have yet to see a healthy looking vegan person.
I've lived in a couple of very liberal cities with vegans, and every single one I met looked... just sick and unhealthy.
But I think we're on the same page w.r.t the best end-goal. I can't wait for cultured meats so we can stop inflicting so much cruelty on farm animals.
> But I have yet to see a healthy looking vegan person.
This anecdata is so wrong and only serves to degrade the conversation. I can only imagine you have some sort of bias that convinced you this was worth sharing.
There are a wide range of people who are vegan with various aesthetics, just as with any diet. There is also a selection bias as veganism can attract people who have health issues that they are treating with diet. Your judgement of the efficacy and impact of a lifestyle being based on some people you've met tells me your way of thinking about the world is deeply flawed and shallow.
There are plenty of replies raising the issue of empirics vs anecdotal evidence.
However to add to the anecdotal, there are many top level vegan athletes out there - Lewis Hamilton, Venus Williams to name a couple of particularly famous ones. It’s worth looking up though as it does show that it’s at least possible to be vegan and much healthier than the average person (depending on your definition of healthy I suppose).
Eh, I think there are several reasons to favour the empirics we have on the subject over anecdotal experiences, which are going to be coloured by problematic biases (toupee fallacy, etc).
When we look at the data on the subject, both in terms of shorter term RCTs looking at biomarkers and longer term observational data, vegan diets seem non-inferior to the other top-tier dietary patterns we see for lifespan and healthspan (med, lacto-ovo vegetarian etc).
That said, I’m sympathetic to the view that with currently available foods one does have to be more mindful of diet than when on an omni diet - I think that’s true. But when an omni dieter looks unhealthy we just say “that guy looks rough” and when we see a vegan who looks unhealthy we say “vegan diets make you look rough”.
> But when an omni dieter looks unhealthy we just say “that guy looks rough” and when we see a vegan who looks unhealthy we say “vegan diets make you look rough”.
many such cases. People have no idea about how much their bias influences their perception of the world and then share the output of that worldview as if it is relevant to reality
Yep, and we can even see it in others. I have little doubt that if the person I replied to was a passenger in a car, the driver got cut off by someone and they responded by making a sweeping generalisation about people of that race/gender/religion driving poorly they’d be able to identify the same bias at play.
As I say, my thesis is that these double standards/logical contradictions are intellectual tools to protect us from our cognitive dissonance. We’re not really operating from a set of logically coherent principles for the most part.
I say this without judgement or any belief that I’m not doing the same thing in a million areas in my life. Just to point out that this is why I lean more towards cultivated meat than outreach activism when it comes to veganising the world!
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.
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.
Alternative explanations (pick and chose any you like)
* High demand but limited supply
* Unable to externalize costs that wild/farmed fish doesn't pay
* R/D investments that needs to be recouped
* Small production with a lack of economy of scale
Oh it could obviously be this is a terrible product where its more important to appear environmentally friendly than to actually be so. But lets see where it is in a decade, with my current limited data it looks like a step in the right direction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure I understand this argument. The point is that there are some serious issues with the production of meat that are not (or may not be in future) issues with lab grown meat.
It's true that you could solve this by only eating legumes, but you then go on to say you don't even eat only legumes yourself, you also consume meat. So for those times where you do consume meat, lab grown meat would solve the issues that come with that.
Totally get that you may have dietary/taste preferences that preclude consumption of these meats, but that sounds different to the OP's point that they potential solve a lot of issues with our current food supply.
I consume very little meat, and when I do it is either because someone serves me meat at a meal or occasionally I will buy some meat from my local butcher which sources their meat from local free range farms.
Meat consumption is also not a binary decision, you can consume 10% of the meat you currently do and reduce the environmental side effects caused by your meat consumption by 90%. Furthermore, you can consume meat that comes from small scale local sustainable sources to further reduce your footprint.
It is the same deal with eggs, I don’t buy factory eggs, I buy them from my local farmer who has free range chickens. Sure, eggs are $8/dozen, but that is the real cost of eggs which do not preclude animal suffering and unsustainable farming practices.
My point is maybe the solution to the meat supply issues is to consume less meat, and consume meat from more sustainable sources. It is almost impossible for western society to grasp that maybe the solution to sustainability problems is to align their consumption with the rest of the world instead of turning to technology to solve all their problems. It is the same with so many other things like water management where the solution seems to be to dam more rivers and suck more acquifers dry instead of maybe not trying to grow grass and cedar trees in a desert.
Still not sure what your contention with the OP is. They said lab meat solves problems inherent to non-lab meat. This seems to be trivially true. It could also be true that consuming 10% of the meat you normally consume would also reduce the issues of meat consumption.
> It is almost impossible for western society to grasp that maybe the solution to sustainability problems is to align their consumption with the rest of the world instead of turning to technology to solve all their problems.
Not sure what persuasive power this is supposed to have. In the case of lab meat, the technological solution seems outright better than the “rest of the world” solution.
If the “rest of the world” solution is “eat less meat” then on an ethical basis, that is a worse option compared to lab meat. Sure, fewer sentient beings having their throats slit for taste pleasure is better than the status quo, but zero is even better than that.
Why would you think that? It's much more urgent to replace commonly eaten foods like beef, chicken and fish than foods that for most people are little more than a curiosity.
With that said, vegan caviar has existed for years make of algae, and it's honestly not far from the real thing.
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.
Yeah, I'm personally very bullish on processed and ultra-processed food. If we make it that far as a race, I suspect in 100 years from now we'll be eating a more processed diet and it will be more healthful than our current diet.
Mix in the benefits you mentioned and it seems like a no-brainer to me.
can you clarify your specific concerns around lab-grown salmon that you feel have not been accounted for with the regulatory review that was performed?
Referring to your "poisons the populace" comment. Do you have evidence substantiating your suggestion that lab-grown salmon will "poison" people? I'm substantially curious because as I understand it, the risk of heavy metal poisoning and parasites commonly found in wild salmon are eliminated when lab grown.
Sure, "poison" is hyperbolic, but my point is: the continued approval of extremely unhealthy food additives (synthetic petroleum coloring, oils that are extracted with petroleum solvents, etc.) is making the population extremely unhealthy. These food additives disrupt hormones and make food addictive. They also help to improve shelf life, an added benefit for only the corporation profiting. None of this helps the consumer.
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.
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?
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.
I'm not going to defend paper straws; plastic straws weren't banned because they're better or worse, they're banned because of a viral video of a sea turtle with one stuck up its nose. LED bulbs are absolutely better though. They output so much less waste heat, and they last so much longer.
> "free market" is only temporary, until the "bad" thing simply gets banned
How can the alternatives get better, if regressive municipalities preemptively ban them to prevent "slippery slopes"?
I'm not the one who started banning though. I'd be open to first unbanning plastic straws and incandescent light bulbs, then unbanning artificial meat. Let the market decide!
But I definitely want to ban them before they ban me.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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"?
Have you returned them? I have a number of Feit bulbs which are in their second decade so I don't think it's as simple as a particular vendor skimping.
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.
Okay, so your personal anecdote is interesting but that doesn't mean that all of the people who have had very different experiences are making things up, it means there's something odd about the power at your house. Have you had problems with other electronics? I had an uncle who had “bad luck” like that until he got it tested and learned that the utility was supplying very noisy power which damaged anything more complicated than an incandescent bulb or old-school electric motor.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Fish immune systems sole reason for being is to stop parasites from being present in the meat while the fish is alive.
Ah, good news for you then! Fish immune system most definitely does NOT stop parasites. Every (and I mean it, every) salmon you've ever eaten had some parts of parasites in them.
That's also why you absolutely should NOT eat fresh-caught salmon without thoroughly cooking it. Industrially-caught salmon is always frozen, and it kills parasites.
These fish grew large enough for humans to eye as food, because parasites were effectively limited by the immune system from devouring the entire fish. It's not perfectly effective, but it doesn't need to be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Recent HN comment on "Beyond Meat headed to Chapter 11 bankruptcy", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44935141#44935280
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.
Reading the commonly-cited definition of "ultra processed":
I'd say that it doesn't really fit any of the usual categories. It's definitely produced by technical means using uncommon ingredients. But it's not hyper-palatable -- that is, it's not designed to make you eat large amounts of it.So I guess it depends on how well it ends up fitting into the diet. If we end up eating it the way we eat salmon -- a few times a week, in reasonable quantities, with a similar nutritional profile -- then it's not a concern. If it ends up going into a product that you eat by the bagful, then it could be a concern for the same reason other ultra-processed foods are.
It is important to not that nuts and dark chocolate usually fit the ultra processed (or sometimes just processed) food definition. This poses real problems in studies because they are roughly a net benefit health wise so authors have the choice between excluding them from the study (which misleadingly worsens claims about processed food being bad) or keeping them in (misleadingly softening how bad they are).
Also many traditional foods like cheese would probably get classified that way if they were invented today.
nuts are ultra processed?
They fit the definition of some studies yes.
According to Wikipedia,
> An ultra-processed food is a grouping of processed food characterized by relatively involved methods of production. There is no simple definition of UPF, but they are generally understood to be an industrial creation derived from natural food or synthesized from other organic compounds.
This disgusting salmon-flavoured soy bean paste certainly qualifies.
As I said elsewhere:
It is important to not that nuts and dark chocolate usually fit the ultra processed (or sometimes just processed) food definition. This poses real problems in studies because they are roughly a net benefit health wise so authors have the choice between excluding them from the study (which misleadingly worsens claims about processed food being bad) or keeping them in (misleadingly softening how bad they are).
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.
> 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.
[1] https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/527...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
NOVA is criticized to be unscientific: https://afgc.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/UPF-Scientifi...
I read "cancer" in between the lines of that comment. So the characterization of (potentially) that backdrop as "a bit of personal harm" feels wildly overassuming.
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.
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.
I might be able to figure out how to grind wheat into flour for bread. Maybe I can squint hard enough to consider baking yeast to be a "whole ingredient". But cheese? I assume I can probably figure it out with the internet, but it is not at all obvious what goes into that. And the milk I would use almost certainly went through an industrial sterilization process that I know I am not equipped to so.
You can make ricotta in <1h with whole milk, vinegar and a bit of salt. And it's good on pizza!
But most "regular" cheeses like Swiss cheese also need rennet, ie. you need to slaughter a calf and scrape its stomach lining. You may want to make sure your downstairs neighbor is OK with the procedure before you start (offer them a veal dinner to make up for the noise?). Other than that, it's basically (unpasteurized) milk, salt and water. And time.
Yeast: take a sourdough baking class. You just need air, water and (organic) flour.
Your ignorance of the process or recipe of a food product doesn't affect the definition of ultra processed food. No amount of knowledge will let you make something like ultra processed foods at home with home equipment simply because it uses industrial processes and ingredients. Naturally there is a spectrum of processed-ness.
And yet, pizza regularly appears on lists of "ultra processed" foods. As do potato chips and ice cream, two foods that are also very easy to make at home from whole ingredients.
There is no consistent definition and people regularly bend over backward to put all "junk food" in this category.
Yeah, it's a good example of how useless "ultra processed" is as a heuristic when we can use a slightly better label like "junk food".
So, donuts are fine because they are only a few ingredients that you can make on your stove, and they're bad once a factory makes them? Maybe only because the factory uses "chemicals"?
No, it's the fried calorie-dense food that is easy to overeat while displacing nutrition from better food sources that is the problem.
Everyone here seems to be avoiding the point that ultra processed foods contain ingredients that home bakers would never use: preservatives, anti-caking agents, flavor enhancers, artificial colors and flavors. Ingredients that are not food and add little to no nutritional value.
Pizza made at home will not use such things. Your local pub that makes their own pizza will not either. Fast food or frozen pizza gets their ingredients from central suppliers in bulk, and they have no choice but to use such things in order for their products to survive the extended storage, processing, transportation, and similar delays that will occur on the way to the consumer.
It's a very convenient red herring to zoom in on some additives instead of zooming out to evaluate your dietary patterns.
Probably because we can use it to let ourselves off the hook for a bad diet. We can do things like roleplay that it's the seed oil in our Doritos making us fat, and that if it were butter then, idk, it would be a superfood or something?
It's the pepperoni, 15g sodium, 100g saturated fat, and 3000 calories of Costco pizza you just ate that's doing a number on your body, not the guar gum in the dough.
Or, how are you going to pick apart an ingredient list when you just ate a half-dozen home-cooked lard donuts? You're cool with laying down arterial plaque but you draw the line at ascorbic acid in the store-bought cream filling?
The "ulta processed" meme is a huge distraction. It's like listening to a fat guy talk about how he's very particular about the gum he chews because he stays away from "sugar alcohols". Yeah? What about the other 4999 calories of food you ate today?
> Everyone here seems to be avoiding the point that ultra processed foods contain ingredients that home bakers would never use: preservatives, anti-caking agents, flavor enhancers, artificial colors and flavors. Ingredients that are not food and add little to no nutritional value.
Precisely what is wrong with flavor enhancers? A common flavor enhancer is MSG, and using that in homemade dishes would not be that unusual. I frequently use it in many home preparations that could use more savory flavor.
Likewise with thickeners or emulsifiers such as cornstarch, xanthum gum, guar gum, etc: these are often used in many preparations at home. Just because something has 'no nutritional value' doesn't mean it doesn't have culinary value. By this same logic, spices have no nutritional value and are just flavors, which clearly doesn't pass the sniff test.
Sometimes. But if you look at papers, media coverage, and policy proposals you'll find that "has preservatives and stuff" is not actually a necessary nor sufficient requirement.
This is not true. I frequently use these spooky "ingredients" in home cooking. I use sodium citrate to make cheese sauces that don't coagulate. I use MSG if I need a source of glutamic umami. I've used various gums as thickeners.
These aren't some toxic compounds that machines put in our food. You can just go to a food supply store and grab them. MSG is just available pretty much everywhere.
You can debate semantics / definitions or make an assessment and get most of the benefit.
He is saying that the assessment is wrongly done.
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.
Why not make pizza at home?
Pizza at home is my pet peeve. Lots of work working the dough, lots of waiting, super messy. Needs expensive oven and tons of electricity. All of this work to get one of the cheapest meal available.
Now compare to a steak - add salt, 5 minutes on pan, rest. Better than $50 steak at most restaurants.
I get that pizza at home is a whole hobby, yes. And if you don't want to do it, it's all of those things that you say.
1) My pizza oven runs on gas not electricity. Not that this is better environmentally. Some run on wood.
2) I'm getting better results than I can get in a local pizza place. Cheap pizza is not great pizza. Home pizza making has a learning curve, it's more of a niche thing than e.g. cooking a steak or burger.
For grandparent post, Pizza is of course not a "dessert", it's a savoury main course. Full of white flour, cheese fats, and salt. So also not health food.
One does not need to eat these "ultra-processed" foods when reducing meat consumption.
> 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.
Yeah, no shit? We're not ants in a colony. I think you're pretty stupid if you're alright with harming yourself while achieving nothing. If you wanna risk your life for a cause then take direct action, eating processed slop and pretending to feel good about it is only gonna make both your world and mine shittier.
The thing is, we don’t even have good evidence that UPF is necessarily harmful. Whey protein is UPF, but is associated with positive outcomes. Mass produced wholemeal bread is UPF, but is associated with good outcomes.
I’m not convinced that the “UPF” category adds anything useful over “HFSS” at this point. Happy to be pushed off my view, but seen nothing that would do so thus far.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
I personally think it is less useful than just "junk food." At least that name makes it clear that it is a fuzzy heuristic.
I see "junk food" as a value judgement more so than a heuristic. How do you define "junk food"? Most people would agree that most things that are marketed as candy are junk food, but what else qualifies as "junk food"? Off the top of my head, I bet you could ask 10 different people about which of these qualify as "junk food" and get 10 different answers: pizza, pasta, granola bars, burgers, lettuce-wrapped burgers, Impossible burgers, steak, salad with store-bought dressing, canned chicken noodle soup, coconuts, dates, MCT oil, bacon, oatmeal, cheese, mozzarella sticks, French fries, potato chips, baked potatoes, cereal, corn, popcorn, protein powder, protein bars, smoothies, sugar-free ice cream.
"Ultra-processed" may be a little fuzzy at the boundaries, but at least it's a specific enough term that we all know and mostly agree on what we're talking about when we use the term. UPF-ness is a heuristic that can help determine whether or not a certain food is junk, but once you've categorized something as "junk food" you've already decided it's unhealthy. No one has to study or debate whether or not junk food is unhealthy.
But that's what makes it more valuable. It is honest. There's a value judgement in "ultra-processed" that is just hidden. This is how you get ostensibly serious people saying that frozen lasagna made with whole ingredients and no preservatives is still "ultra-processed" because it is shipped in plastic or that a can of baked beans made with sugar and preservatives isn't "ultra-processed" because it is part of a traditional british breakfast. If you ask 10 different people on the street what "ultra-processed" means you'll get even less consistency.
And the value judgement is the only part that has an especially meaningful connection to health. It is admittedly really difficult to do rigorous research on the health impacts of diet, but the connection between "ultra-processed-ness" and health outcomes is super messy. And even when we can get data that suggests negative health outcomes, what's the actual cause? Preservatives? Lack of fiber? Hyperpalatability? Nobody has been able to clearly articulate a cause and if we could then we could just focus on that thing rather than the "ultra-processed-ness."
Protein powders are an ultra-processed food.
Some protein powders, e.g. many of the plant protein powders, require complex processing, which is reflected in their price, which is many times greater than the price of meat (per protein content).
However there are other protein powders that are obtained using minimal processing, much less than the traditional food processing, so they cannot be considered "ultra-processed" by any definition.
For instance the protein concentrates that are extracted from milk or whey are much less processed than the traditional dairy products. (This is also reflected in their price, which is similar to that of the cheapest kinds of chicken meat, per their protein content.)
To extract the protein powder from milk or whey, only simple (in principle) processing steps are done: centrifugation to remove the fat, ultrafiltration to remove the lactose and the water and drying to remove the residual water.
This kind of processing alters the proteins of milk far less than the traditional making of cheese, which requires strong processing with enzymes and/or acid and/or heat and/or fermentation, and which causes significant changes in the structure and composition of the milk proteins.
If you call milk/whey protein concentrate as "ultra-processed", you must call any cheese as "hyper-super-ultra-processed".
It is true that making milk/whey protein powders requires machines that can be made only using modern technologies, while cheese and other dairy products were already made many millennia ago. However the simplicity of the old technologies is only apparent, because they exploited the work of dead animal bodies (rennet) or bacteria or fungi, which are much more complex than human-made machines.
In this case, i.e. for making milk/whey protein powders, modern technology has allowed the use of much less processing for extracting the useful part of milk, keeping it in its unaltered state, than the traditional technologies, so this is clearly not an example of "ultra-processing".
Similarly, extracting vegetable oils using supercritical carbon dioxide is certainly not "ultra-processing" as it allows a better preservation of the oil fraction of oily seeds or oily fruits than the traditional oil extraction methods.
So the use of modern processing methods is not the same as "ultra-processing". To the latter, one should count only processing methods that cause irreversible changes in the food, removing the control of the end users on the composition of the food that they eat, i.e. processing that mixes ingredients into the food or that alters the food through heating or other treatments.
Fruit juice concentrates are often considered "ultra-processed" in the scientific literature, media, and policy initiatives. Are they substantially more processed than whey protein?
The definitions are indeed fucked.
>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.
Their intentions sort of don't matter. The food company and the grocery store are businesses, and the idea that a business should exist for anything except profit has become less fashionable. In any case, there are enough business owners/executives who believe this, and are not punished for it, that they will outcompete you if you don't.
The way to make a good profit in the food industry is to sell a lot of a product that you can sell for a good price, but have it be very cheap to manufacture. If you take really cheap input material that historically was used mostly for animal feed, like corn or oats, and can do a bunch of food science magic to it to make it very tasty and addictive, you can charge a good price and people will buy lots of it.
The problem with ultraprocessed foods is simply that the manufacturer has been given too many free parameters, and if they get enough they can find something addictive and unhealthy. Since shelf space on grocery store shelves is allocated based on sales, the shelves will be filled with addictive food. This is even true of the produce section. Fruits and vegetables are bred to increase their sugar content, reduce bitterness, etc. Luckily breeding fruit trees is more time consuming and less controllable than all of the chemistry that can happen in a potato chip factory. We will see how this holds up as genetic engineering becomes more predictable.
Anyhow the only solution we've really come up with to this social problem is to change our brains with Glucagon Like Peptides to be less susceptible to these tricks. We will see how long that is able to keep ahead of the food companies.
That's an interesting question. Based on Grok's analysis, the answer isn't that tofu is UPF, but that your particular proposed method of creating a protein powder would not be UPF. Unless you followed that process with "additional steps like centrifugation, pH adjustment, spray-drying, and stabilizers", as would typically be involved in production of commercial powders, it would remain in Nova group 3 like tofu. (Whether it would be a particularly palatable or mixable protein powder is obviously another matter entirely.)
Of course I agree with the rest of your point, which is similar to what I was saying. (I also chuckled at your choice of analogy, as a founder of an encryption startup.) I have a lot of thoughts on the incentive structure[1], which I would dramatically overhaul given the option.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808168
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.
The use of the word "processing" is ambiguous.
There are 3 kinds of processing, with very different effects. One kind is separating a product into its components. Another is mixing various ingredients. The third is applying some treatment to the product that modifies its structure, heating being the most frequent method.
I consider only mixing ingredients and applying various treatments as belonging to "ultraprocessing", because these processing methods remove the control of the end consumer about what is being eaten, as they are normally irreversible.
On the other hand, any separation method cannot have a harmful effect by itself and separation of the edible components is absolutely necessarily for human food, because we have reduced digestive systems, which are unable to extract as efficiently the nutrients from food as those of most other non-carnivorous mammals.
The only harmful effects of well-separated food ingredients, like seed flour, oils or protein powders, happen when the end consumers choose to mix them in unhealthy proportions, like when adding too much sugar or too much fat to some dish, but then they can blame only themselves for this.
With food that has passed through the other kinds of processing, nothing that the end consumers do with it can make it healthy, when it has not originally been so, which happens frequently because for its producers it is more beneficial to try to make it addictive instead of healthy.
In your definition what is the difference between "ultraprocessing" and "processing"?
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.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
You can easily make tofu at home
It really is funny and sad:
"Ultra processed foods are killing us"
Meaning: stop eating sugar cereals, doritos, frappuccinos, sweet granola bars, cheesy crackers, candy, and salted, processed deli meats
Popular interpretation: stop eating vegetarian meat alternatives
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Beyond doesn't contain heme iron, but Impossible does.
Good point. From chatgpting about this for a moment, it sounds like the heme is chemically structurally identical, but it's soy derived and (1) there isn't yet research tying it to the same health outcomes as animal heme, and (2) there may be an important difference in the environmental and chemical context and which it's delivered, as animal heme is delivered in saturated animal fats, accompanied by nitrites/nitrates (from curing) and heterocyclic amines or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (from high-heat cooking of meat).
But it could be a legit issue in terms of sharing rather than improving on a health outcomes associated with meat.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Could you elaborate on why you feel as though it’s an abomination? I don’t quite see the hang ups about it.
Educate yourself. This is nothing more than Richard Berman's propaganda to allow more bullshit in this country.
Big tobacco, drunk driving, union busting, questioning global warming, the list goes on and this man is likely responsible for some of the most detrimental misinformation campaigns in modern history.
https://sentientmedia.org/big-meat-rebrand-disinformation/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Organizational_Rese...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berman_(musician)#Hiatus...
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From https://www.wildtypefoods.com/our-salmon :
> "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.
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.
How is that relevant to this discussion?
The argument in the comment above is that lab grown salmon cells should not be allowed to be marketed as salmon because they have had components such as beta-carotene added for coloring.
In light of the fact that similar compounds are added to the majority of farmed salmon for similar reasons, the comparison shows that the objection is likely a fallacious appeal to nature, purporting that something is good because it is "natural" or "normal" rather than presenting any objective evidence to argue their point.
It took a lot of digging to find which plant based ingredients, but they include color and flavor:
https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...
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.
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.
Horrible, right? I avoid those too.
I base my choices on health outcomes rather than vibes.
Canola, sunflower, and soy are some of the most widely consumed foods on the planet; presumably far exceeding consumption of salmon.
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.
If one is going to make sweeping generalisations based on cross sectional data, you have to be open to all the sweeping generalisations.
So is it also easy to wonder if there’s a connection between high canola consumption and the fact we’re living longer than ever?
This is an extremely studied question.
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.” :-/
The story is a lot more interesting than I could have imagined:
https://sites.bu.edu/gastronomyblog/2022/05/18/the-marvelous... https://www.andersonintl.com/the-controversy-surrounding-mus...Still digging for the brand
That's ironic, because rapeseed and mustard seed oils are about as closely related as any two food oils can be.
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.
Totally agree with you. I do not understand how this viewpoint upsets people.
I don’t think people eating butter instead of canola oil is what upsets people.
It’s people ignoring the mountain of evidence that such a switch would be a backwards step for health outcomes and claiming the opposite because they read a book by the usual rogues’ gallery of science misinterpreters (Taubes, Teicholz, Shanahan).
ant-seed oil is anti-scientific and prays on people being ignorant about the research on health outcomes and relies on emotional appeals and appeals to nature such as "the genetic engineering and solvent-based extraction of canola oil".
Calling the rejection of a novel highly processed food replacement like this anti-scientific is comically illogical.
Who are you trying to kid? You listed sunflower seed oil alongside canola --- you're presumably just as opposed to mustard seed oil.
It would be funny if the one seed oil you're OK with is mustard seed oil, the oil closest in composition to canola, the one oil anyone has a legit gripe about (it doesn't taste very good).
I don't know what time-tested means but mustard oil is banned in EU/US for edible uses due to high erucic acid. So you parents were right!
Seams not all mustard oil is Banned in the EU.
I've got a bottle of Uncle Roy's cold pressed extra virgin "spicy" mustard seed oil at my local Spar.
The label reads "erucic acid free", so I'm guessing they somehow remove it?
It even has the awful pun of "The healthy Oilternative".
I understand they also remove (most of?) it from Canola Oil.
Thanks for letting me know, I'll try to get my hands on it.
Mustard oil has been used in the subcontinent since the Indus valley civilization 4,500 years ago. It’s extremely well understood. Unlike solvent extraction of oil.
You write this as if there isn't controversy about mustard oil, which is banned in the United States because it contains high levels of a likely heart toxin ("Among South Asians living in the US, ASCVD risk is four-fold higher than the local population") and limited throughout Europe. The entire point of solvent extraction is convert rapeseed oil, which would otherwise be similarly problematic (they're basically the same plant!) into something less toxic than mustard oil (that's literally why it's called "canola").
I don't care either way; let the mustard oil flow. I don't buy the mustard oil thing either. Just don't pretend that mustard oil is somehow healthier than canola. Use whichever fat tastes best to you.
Canola oil is simply a mustard-seed oil from a hybrid mustard bred for low erucic acid content. Solvent extraction is widely used, but not something that defines canola oil. Cold-pressed and expeller-pressed canola oil are also produced on a smaller scale.
No, in populations which traditionally use mustard oil heart problems are common. So it's time tested to cause heart failure.
Is that true in a meaningful way? Bangladesh’s life expectancy at 65 is higher than richer countries like China, Vietnam, and Jordan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Asian_countries_by_lif...
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
> This wasn't always the case.
This is pretty vague. Similarly ~50 years ago, people were not eating as much meat as they do today.
This is the sort of “logic” that people like RFK Jr. use. What’s the evidence for the connection you’re trying to make?
Okay? Many of us don't care for that.
> I wish they'd just sell the fish cells, alone. Would love to try that.
They already sell those at the seafood aisle.
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.
> You are consuming it in a condensed secondary form (one tropic level up).
I always find this is looked over and a double standard. You can raise an animal on a diet of anything along with medication, drugs, and supplements, and advocates will label the beef/chicken/pork product as "meat" and "natural" as if it was a single pure ingredient. But then if a non-meat alternative like a burger is mentioned, every individual ingredient used gets scrutinized, even if that ingredient is often fed to farm animals like soy or grain.
This, in my opinion, is the most important point in the thread and the clearest expression of it. For purposes of this argument, meat is conceived of essentially as a single ingredient, and the raising of the animal in artificial conditions, on hormones, fed on processed food with its associated environmental footprints are kind of sidestepped, while alternatives have to answer for every step in the chain of production.
That mapping seems correct to me, as a lot of the objections here are free-floating one-offs that presume these background assumptions more so than they are apples to apples comparisons intent on clearly comparing them in totality.
Many “beef burgers” have filler included like soy and wheat.
Fallacious argument. Buy grass fed and grass finished.
I wonder if roe would be feasible
> 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.
So, basically a salmon-flavored jelly? I'm actually ok with this as long as there is no harmful substances involved. I wonder how's the texture once it's cooked or grilled.
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.
To grow a hunk of meat without spoilage you need an immune system that basically just requires the rest of the animal
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's hard but people culture animal cells in 5000 gallon bioreactors so it's not about size. We're not really to the point of producing tissues with 3D structure and cell differentiation. That's why lab grown meat is always pink paste ground into something else.
Building lab grown tissues and not just cell lines is what's being worked on now, for any purpose not only food.
Not really, if you clean your bioreactors well.
Bioreactors are not producing hunks of meat.
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.
'homogenous pink mass' really was their best album
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.
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.
I had foolishly given them the benefit of the doubt and after poking around their entire damn website site and I now hate them. I couldn't find a nutrition label but buried in text was information I need.
"4-5 grams of protein per 100 gram serving" "fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae"
Real Coho Salmon is about 20% protein and 7% fat so we're looking at less than 20% of the important parts being salmon. I retract my previous comment. It's not Salmon.
I believe the FDA defines a minimum of 40% of a meat product to be made of that meat to be labeled as that meat (eg. beef hotdogs needs to be made of 40% beef) and I'm not sure if this qualifies as that.
As a benchmark, the tuna used in a Subway tuna sandwich is 100% tuna, the beef in Taco Bell beef tacos is 88% beef, and the chicken in McDonald's Chicken McNuggets is 100% chicken but make up 45% of the nugget.
Thank you for the point about “ingredient stuffing”. I had never considered this method of deceiving consumers and will be on the lookout for it.
Why doesn’t the FDA require explicit percentages be listed..?
In other countries, they do.
In the US, the invisible hand of the market will surely push a food producer to regulate itself effectively.
It needs to be clearly distinguished somehow from natural product, just like other "alternative" products.
Clear as body milk and salad with meat in it?
If it tastes good and reduces harm to salmon, I'm in.
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.
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.
Would you respect being eaten as part of the circle of life? What about your family?
Where is the line drawn?
Explain to me the difference between disrespect and being cattle-bolted through the skull.
When the fish is yanked out of the factory farm and suffocated in air or chilled and frozen alive do you think they experience this respect we're talking about? If so, where?
Does the operator say thanks to each fish before their brutal, agonizing, often prolonged for market death?
'respect' is about the most stupid thing I can think to bring up when referencing loss of life in animals.
It's a meta human concept that means nothing other than the mans approval of method -- it means nothing with regard to the animal or the suffering.
> Explain to me the difference between disrespect and being cattle-bolted through the skull.
I think if you could choose between that and being slowly consumed by five or six coyotes from the ass forward, you'd go for the cattle bolt. I have a ton of problems with the US meat industry (to the point where I only eat meat once a month or so unless somebody is throwing it away), but there are ranchers out there who do try to do their best for the food they raise.
One has human moral responsibility, the other doesn't.
I actually do think, if we solved all the other problems in the world and had time left over, it would be right to intervene in nature to stop the harms you described too, and that conversation is a pandora's box of its own. But I don't think the upshot of these harms in nature is that we're also allowed to engage in similar harms at any scale we choose, as long as the badness isn't as bad as what happens in nature. Mainly because that comparison sidesteps the role of unique human moral responsibility and implies an unmade argument that analogies to nature can serve the function of authorizing human-initiated moral harms.
Depends on the context, not necessarily weird. If the choice was between “world A” where sentient beings were perpetually bred into existence to be perpetually tortured until they died and “world B” where the breeding stopped and the beings became extinct, it would be insane to favour world A over B.
Farming them into existence creates moral responsibility, and killing then annihilates the remaining value of a life for which you were morally responsible.
The "connection" you're advocating appears to be a more a romanticized free association (along the lines of "we are all stardust") than a specific conceptual argument accountable to the interests of the animals being harmed.
> 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.
Would you say the same thing about killing other humans for food? If not, why not?
I'll answer for that person. If humans were naturally cannibalistic then I think they'd agree. For instance, if we were spiders it would seem pretty natural to eat each other. But the fact is that cannibalism, even among the biggest fans of CAFOs, is just not that much fun.
I'd ask the poster a similar question though. If a monkey or chimp was treated with respect and killed humanely, would they eat that?
> killed humanely
What does this mean?
Not sure about fish but mammals produced for meat are usually killed before adult age. Is that "killed humanely"?
You don't stop to think about health in your food at all?
I don't really care if it's called salmon or not, but why is that gross?
It's gross because it's so misleading
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.
Which is exactly why I don’t buy farmed salmon.
The entire pitch for this product is that it's lab-grown salmon. Who are they misleading?
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.
> Gross.
Want something even grosser? Go catch a salmon and then look at how many parasites are in _every_ fish.
If you have ever eaten salmon, you've swallowed tons of parasites in all stages of their lifecycle.
I have caught many salmon.
The parasites are part of the circle of life and are in no way gross to me.
Sorry you feel that way.
What do you mean by “part of the circle of life”? I’m not sure why that would be a compelling reason to be ok with something either way?
For most of human history eating meat riddled with maggots was part of the circle of life, is it weird to be grossed out by eating meat riddled with maggots?
Spoiled meat that needs to be tossed != live fish that needs to be cooked.
What’s the practical difference as far as the appeal to nature argument you’re making goes? Humans lived for thousands of years on maggot-riddled meat, same as they did on parasite-riddled salmon.
Surely if it was good enough for us to live on back then, it’s part of the circle of life and should be totally fine. Right?
If one’s no longer acceptable because we don’t do it any more, then surely if lab meat gets established then we’ll look back at that parasite-riddled salmon with the same revulsion as we do the maggots.
If you don't think parasite ridden flesh is gross then your meter needs recalibrating.
Even ancient man avoided parasites when possible. Parasites can kill you, regardless of how natural they are.
Dog shit and nightshade are part of the circle of life too, but they seem to be avoided by most.
Something being good because it's 'part of the circle of life', whatever that means, is as blind and irrational as 'all upf is bad by virtue of being defined as upf.'
Life isn't as simple as black and white.
Why is it any more gross than, for example, meatloaf?
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.
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!
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.
Well said.
I will never understand how so many defend the expeller-propelled and solvent laden oils as somehow pleasant and natural…
You think squeezing something to get the oil out is unpleasant and unnatural? I don't know what to do with that, it's nearly as absurd as saying cutting food with a knife is gross and unnatural, you should use your teeth instead.
Have you looked up how seed oils are made? There’s very little squeezing and a lot of chemical spraying…
>expeller-propelled
An expeller is just a screw press. Get your terminology right if you're going to chase the latest food demonizing fad.
And yes, lots of oils are extracted by mashing up biologicals mixing it with a solvent like hexane and then evaporating off the solvent leaving a trace <1ppm behind.
I filled my gas tank today and did some spray painting without entirely appropriate ventilation. I'm sure most people regularly expose themselves to a little bit of organic solvent on a regular basis without a second thought or moralizing about it.
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>Meat
Isn't that the ingredient in lab grown salmon? Also things you're calling "much less recognizable" are basically varieties of vegetable oil.
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.
Could we call it "Fermented salmon tumor"?
"Fermented Salmon" sounds funny and relatively accurate to me. Why do you call it a tumor? Are the cells cancerous?
tumor (noun) An abnormal growth of tissue resulting from uncontrolled, progressive multiplication of cells and serving no physiological function; a neoplasm
'benign tumor' maybe some Salmon Lipomas with crackers and cheese.
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
If I make a fish potato cake in the shape of a snapper can I call it "snapper"?
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.
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.
Almost every sushi restaurant in North America sells “crab” that contains 0% crab. Very few people seem to make a fuss about this.
… and it must be clearly labeled as imitation crab on the menu. They cannot just call it “crab”.
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.
Very few people realize what they’re actually eating, I fear.
You already live in that world and don't seem to know it.
It does seem so.
To be fair I live in Australia which does seem to have much stricter labelling requirements than the US.
"I can't believe it's not butter" product
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"?
So why not just call it "vegetable and lab grown salmon cells"?
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?
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.
They’re trying to cut corners and swindle inattentive buyers. That’s it.
That is not it, and throwing short inflammatory comments up and down this comment chain isn't going to do much except clutter it up.
(Almost nobody who goes in to a restaurant is fooled by "Fish" in quotation marks on the menu; it's an alarming enough call-out to make anyone aware of it)
If you make a cheesy cracker and call it a Goldfish, nobody gets too upset.
Wait until you hear about Gummy Bears.
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.
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.
Why are you defending corporations who thrive on the for-profit deception of consumers?
It's a neat trick, wording-wise, to try and make it out like I'm doing that. It's fairly clear that I'm not doing that.
e.g, Almond _milk_ has been a thing for centuries now. Everyone knows it's not from a cow, yet we call it milk because the end product is similar enough that people get what the point is. Humanity will likely do this until the heat death of the universe. You should probably just get over it.
Yes, word tricks are the problem. They deceive.
That's... not even a real response to my comment.
If you're going to be this disingenuous then I'm not going to bother responding past this. shrug
"cultivated" is a reasonable label for these things. So "cultivated salmon" is a concise and accurate description of what is being served.
Fully agreed.
Cultivated seems misleading since it sounds like it’s a real fish from a fish farm.
And it's listed as cultivated on the menus of the restaurants they list on their site.
Do you have a better name than Lab-grown salmon, that describes what this product is to the average consumer?
you mean artificially colored canola soy extrusions, with an unspecified (i.e. very small) quantity of chemically replicated salmon cells? how about counterfeit biohazard salmon?
Do you buy breakfast "cereals" or do you buy blended, colorized reformed wheat and other grains paste, fortified with vitamins and minerals?
Who cares about their health and still eats cereal in 2025?
neither, for the same reasons
"It's true that our salmon represents innovative science, but first and foremost, it's just really good fish".
It's certainly not fish.
It is especially not just fish.
Almost, but not entirely, unlike fish.
It's Almost Pizza(tm)!
"Mostly fish" (in the same way that scumble is mostly apples)
Honestly what is sold as salmon shouldn't be legal. I've completely stopped buying and eating salmon.
>>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.
I’m all for regulations on truthful marketing, but you made a big leap to
>clearly harmful foods
Someone else suggested "engineered salmon product", which seems reasonable to me.
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Killing salmon is gross too...
Sometimes it’s net.
Reluctant upvote.
Look more closely. Here's their actual ingredients list (from https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...):
> 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.)
It seems to me more feasible to engineer salmon (or cows, etc) with no, or severely curtailed, brains. That would remove most ethical issues with meat-eating.
These would essentially be animals in a persistent vegetative state, so they would be a lot like humans in that same state — needing to be individually hooked up to a bunch of machines to keep them alive. Parenteral nutrition and all that.
While that type of infrastructure is certainly possible, there's no clear way to scale it like there is for cellular culturing.
And the result might be pretty disappointing even if you did it. Picture a human who spent their whole life in a coma in a hospital bed — they'd have zero muscle mass, fragile bones, etc.
However, you might be able to get around this by hooking the animal's body up to a synthetic brainstem that sends computer-controlled impulses down the spine – such that you've got e.g. a bunch of brainless salmon strapped in place in a flow tank, whose bodies are constantly being told to breathe, swim forward, open their mouths to capture food when food is released into the tank, etc.
I think that, besides the scalability challenges, the reason this approach isn't more looked into as an avenue of research, is that the ethics of cellular-cultured meat are really clear (there is nothing experiencing pain there; there aren't even nerve cells to sense or relay pain), while the ethics of brainless whole-animal cultivation are... non-obvious, to say the least.
> 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.
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.
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.
"Engineered salmon product"?
"Phish" lol
Nah, that's a mushroom-based product.
I hear.
Salmon farming is causing huge environmental damage in Tasmania.
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.
Hey, I just went to Kann to try it. It was very… smooth
Similar to sushi-grade salmon?
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.
in a good way or a bad way?
It is important to not that nuts and dark chocolate usually fit the ultra processed (or sometimes just processed) food definition. This poses real problems in studies because they are roughly a net benefit health wise so authors have the choice between excluding them from the study (which misleadingly worsens claims about processed food being bad) or keeping them in (misleadingly softening how bad they are).
I think the world would be a better place if everyone went vegan.
However, I’m not convinced that vegan activism via pointing out that many people’s behaviours are at odds with their stated ethical preferences is particularly effective.
I suspect this is because many vegan activists make the assumption that people have ethical preferences which then drive their behaviour. For many (most?) people, though, I think they act the way that feels good to them and then come up with justifications for it post-hoc, even if those justifications are illogical.
As such, I live in hope that lab-grown meat will be tasty and cheap enough that people switch across and stop consuming animal products, which will give humanity the space to look back and see the abhorrent nature of animal agriculture for what it is and ban it outright.
With any luck, we’ll view our current generation’s treatment of animals with the same confusion we feel when we consider our forebears’ tolerance of slavery.
Bring on the cultured salmon!
> As such, I live in hope that lab-grown meat will be tasty and cheap enough that people switch across and stop consuming animal products, which will give humanity the space to look back and see the abhorrent nature of animal agriculture for what it is and ban it outright.
Agreed. Replicated meat is the ideal.
"I shall try some of your burned replicated bird meat!"
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/2d56c6ef-8b4d-4d7b-926f-e6c4c47...
> I think the world would be a better place if everyone went vegan.
Strongly disagree. I absolutely hate that animals have to be killed for us to eat meat. And the industrial scale cruelty of factory farming gives me existential dread. But I have yet to see a healthy looking vegan person.
I've lived in a couple of very liberal cities with vegans, and every single one I met looked... just sick and unhealthy.
But I think we're on the same page w.r.t the best end-goal. I can't wait for cultured meats so we can stop inflicting so much cruelty on farm animals.
> But I have yet to see a healthy looking vegan person.
This anecdata is so wrong and only serves to degrade the conversation. I can only imagine you have some sort of bias that convinced you this was worth sharing.
There are a wide range of people who are vegan with various aesthetics, just as with any diet. There is also a selection bias as veganism can attract people who have health issues that they are treating with diet. Your judgement of the efficacy and impact of a lifestyle being based on some people you've met tells me your way of thinking about the world is deeply flawed and shallow.
Wow tell me how you really feel. Who am I going to believe angry people on HN or my own lying eyes?
There are plenty of replies raising the issue of empirics vs anecdotal evidence. However to add to the anecdotal, there are many top level vegan athletes out there - Lewis Hamilton, Venus Williams to name a couple of particularly famous ones. It’s worth looking up though as it does show that it’s at least possible to be vegan and much healthier than the average person (depending on your definition of healthy I suppose).
Eh, I think there are several reasons to favour the empirics we have on the subject over anecdotal experiences, which are going to be coloured by problematic biases (toupee fallacy, etc).
When we look at the data on the subject, both in terms of shorter term RCTs looking at biomarkers and longer term observational data, vegan diets seem non-inferior to the other top-tier dietary patterns we see for lifespan and healthspan (med, lacto-ovo vegetarian etc).
That said, I’m sympathetic to the view that with currently available foods one does have to be more mindful of diet than when on an omni diet - I think that’s true. But when an omni dieter looks unhealthy we just say “that guy looks rough” and when we see a vegan who looks unhealthy we say “vegan diets make you look rough”.
> But when an omni dieter looks unhealthy we just say “that guy looks rough” and when we see a vegan who looks unhealthy we say “vegan diets make you look rough”.
many such cases. People have no idea about how much their bias influences their perception of the world and then share the output of that worldview as if it is relevant to reality
Yep, and we can even see it in others. I have little doubt that if the person I replied to was a passenger in a car, the driver got cut off by someone and they responded by making a sweeping generalisation about people of that race/gender/religion driving poorly they’d be able to identify the same bias at play.
As I say, my thesis is that these double standards/logical contradictions are intellectual tools to protect us from our cognitive dissonance. We’re not really operating from a set of logically coherent principles for the most part.
I say this without judgement or any belief that I’m not doing the same thing in a million areas in my life. Just to point out that this is why I lean more towards cultivated meat than outreach activism when it comes to veganising the world!
Just out of interest, in what way do you see them as unhealthy? Mostly that the concept of health can vary wildly.
I would also say that i have seen the complete opposite to you, alas this is all anecdotal.
Salmon is next to chicken as the highest calories out: calories in for farming. They're efficient
I suspect lab grown salmon is a bad idea on those economic grounds.
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.
https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...
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.
Maybe someday, but for now, it's very expensive, and that suggests that it's also using lots of environmental resources.
Alternative explanations (pick and chose any you like)
* High demand but limited supply
* Unable to externalize costs that wild/farmed fish doesn't pay
* R/D investments that needs to be recouped
* Small production with a lack of economy of scale
Oh it could obviously be this is a terrible product where its more important to appear environmentally friendly than to actually be so. But lets see where it is in a decade, with my current limited data it looks like a step in the right direction.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure I understand this argument. The point is that there are some serious issues with the production of meat that are not (or may not be in future) issues with lab grown meat.
It's true that you could solve this by only eating legumes, but you then go on to say you don't even eat only legumes yourself, you also consume meat. So for those times where you do consume meat, lab grown meat would solve the issues that come with that.
Totally get that you may have dietary/taste preferences that preclude consumption of these meats, but that sounds different to the OP's point that they potential solve a lot of issues with our current food supply.
I consume very little meat, and when I do it is either because someone serves me meat at a meal or occasionally I will buy some meat from my local butcher which sources their meat from local free range farms.
Meat consumption is also not a binary decision, you can consume 10% of the meat you currently do and reduce the environmental side effects caused by your meat consumption by 90%. Furthermore, you can consume meat that comes from small scale local sustainable sources to further reduce your footprint.
It is the same deal with eggs, I don’t buy factory eggs, I buy them from my local farmer who has free range chickens. Sure, eggs are $8/dozen, but that is the real cost of eggs which do not preclude animal suffering and unsustainable farming practices.
My point is maybe the solution to the meat supply issues is to consume less meat, and consume meat from more sustainable sources. It is almost impossible for western society to grasp that maybe the solution to sustainability problems is to align their consumption with the rest of the world instead of turning to technology to solve all their problems. It is the same with so many other things like water management where the solution seems to be to dam more rivers and suck more acquifers dry instead of maybe not trying to grow grass and cedar trees in a desert.
Still not sure what your contention with the OP is. They said lab meat solves problems inherent to non-lab meat. This seems to be trivially true. It could also be true that consuming 10% of the meat you normally consume would also reduce the issues of meat consumption.
> It is almost impossible for western society to grasp that maybe the solution to sustainability problems is to align their consumption with the rest of the world instead of turning to technology to solve all their problems.
Not sure what persuasive power this is supposed to have. In the case of lab meat, the technological solution seems outright better than the “rest of the world” solution.
If the “rest of the world” solution is “eat less meat” then on an ethical basis, that is a worse option compared to lab meat. Sure, fewer sentient beings having their throats slit for taste pleasure is better than the status quo, but zero is even better than that.
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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.
IDK. Some might say that the "eat" in "meat" is incompatible with welfare.
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.
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.
Isn't obvious they should first offer exotic food.
I mean, 'Whale' meat or 'Caviar' or 'Foie Gras' instead of ordinary 'Salmon' would find far more market.
Why would you think that? It's much more urgent to replace commonly eaten foods like beef, chicken and fish than foods that for most people are little more than a curiosity.
With that said, vegan caviar has existed for years make of algae, and it's honestly not far from the real thing.
Agree. Foie gras also is very well replicated with vegetable ingredients.
A recently bought salmon meat tray revealed hundreds of parasites oozing off its surface.
K, no thanks,
There’s a whole industry for cell-cultivated meat since the FDA approved it a few years ago.
Salmon is just one example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat
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.
Same sentiment from me. I'd rather pay more and eat the real thing.
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.
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.
Yeah, I'm personally very bullish on processed and ultra-processed food. If we make it that far as a race, I suspect in 100 years from now we'll be eating a more processed diet and it will be more healthful than our current diet.
Mix in the benefits you mentioned and it seems like a no-brainer to me.
This seems more akin to fermentation
This is more akin to "pink slime"
Good - humans need to stop killing things, stop burning things to make money.
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> 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.
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Like from coal ash ponds that might leak heavy metals into drinking water?
https://alabamareflector.com/2025/08/02/capped-alabama-coal-...
https://alabamarivers.org/coal-ash/
“Of course Clean Coal couldn’t possibly be the reason. Your data is wrong.”
That’s all it takes for them to dismiss any argument.
Please don't lump me (GP) into "them". I think this is also of grave concern.
can you clarify your specific concerns around lab-grown salmon that you feel have not been accounted for with the regulatory review that was performed?
Referring to your "poisons the populace" comment. Do you have evidence substantiating your suggestion that lab-grown salmon will "poison" people? I'm substantially curious because as I understand it, the risk of heavy metal poisoning and parasites commonly found in wild salmon are eliminated when lab grown.
Sure, "poison" is hyperbolic, but my point is: the continued approval of extremely unhealthy food additives (synthetic petroleum coloring, oils that are extracted with petroleum solvents, etc.) is making the population extremely unhealthy. These food additives disrupt hormones and make food addictive. They also help to improve shelf life, an added benefit for only the corporation profiting. None of this helps the consumer.
Sorry didn’t meant to put you on that category. It was more a critic to the current political disclosure level going on virtually everywhere .
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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.
Free market presupposes no regulatory capture which I’m pretty sure is inevitable under any framework
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!
If that's the goal, why not pass a law saying that real meat products are not allowed to be banned?
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?
That's a common thing in the US - a state level law restricting the laws a county or city can create.
That makes as much sense as banning cars to protect the railroads
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.
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.
I'm not going to defend paper straws; plastic straws weren't banned because they're better or worse, they're banned because of a viral video of a sea turtle with one stuck up its nose. LED bulbs are absolutely better though. They output so much less waste heat, and they last so much longer.
> "free market" is only temporary, until the "bad" thing simply gets banned
How can the alternatives get better, if regressive municipalities preemptively ban them to prevent "slippery slopes"?
> preemptively ban them
I'm not the one who started banning though. I'd be open to first unbanning plastic straws and incandescent light bulbs, then unbanning artificial meat. Let the market decide!
But I definitely want to ban them before they ban me.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.seasonsreflection.com/vintaglo
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.
>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.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...
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.
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.
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"?
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.
Have you returned them? I have a number of Feit bulbs which are in their second decade so I don't think it's as simple as a particular vendor skimping.
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.
Okay, so your personal anecdote is interesting but that doesn't mean that all of the people who have had very different experiences are making things up, it means there's something odd about the power at your house. Have you had problems with other electronics? I had an uncle who had “bad luck” like that until he got it tested and learned that the utility was supplying very noisy power which damaged anything more complicated than an incandescent bulb or old-school electric motor.
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.
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>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.
"We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
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> 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.
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.
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?
Relevant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZGPjvFkLzUW
> An infected batch won't get served to humans
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/recalls-public-health-...
"Produced without inspection" and "processing deviations" account for a lot of recalls.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Freezing (properly) is widely considered (by scientific establishment) to kill most parasites, not just slow them down.
When biologists talk about parasites, they're talking about numerous organisms from multiple kingdoms in one of the widest ecological niches.
When the FDA talks about freezing killing parasites in fish, they're talking specifically about anisakis worms - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisakis
> Fish immune systems sole reason for being is to stop parasites from being present in the meat while the fish is alive.
Ah, good news for you then! Fish immune system most definitely does NOT stop parasites. Every (and I mean it, every) salmon you've ever eaten had some parts of parasites in them.
That's also why you absolutely should NOT eat fresh-caught salmon without thoroughly cooking it. Industrially-caught salmon is always frozen, and it kills parasites.
These fish grew large enough for humans to eye as food, because parasites were effectively limited by the immune system from devouring the entire fish. It's not perfectly effective, but it doesn't need to be.
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
https://www.wildtypefoods.com/our-salmon
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.
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.
Don't worry, if you catch any disease you can use any antibiotic that still works after spraying farmed salmon willy-nilly for years.
Antibiotics only work on live bacteria, and only sometimes. "Any disease" is a much broader category.
Any disease you'd catch from lab-grown meat...
Their advertising of it being like a sushi cut then makes this possibly dangerous marketing then, no?
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.
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).
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...)
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.
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.
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?
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.