I guess in the long term it should be cheaper for the same reason that vegetables are more energy efficient than meat: it takes less energy to grow just a muscle than to also grow a surrounding cow that runs around frolicking for several years.
And to provide for what a functioning immune system and digestive system and endocrine system provides in a living animal, in one convenient package that grows right alongside the meat, but instead with external infrastructure? It’s crazy what mycobacteria can do to mammalian tissue culture overnight if the wrong dust particle floats in or how many inputs it takes to get non-tumor mammalian somatic cells to divide in a reasonable period in a dish rather than their usual environment. There’s reasons that the only industrial biotech processes that use animal cells are things that make antibodies and the like that nothing else can make and are very expensive, and instead everybody else uses fungi or bacteria.
True. But time and engineering doesn’t make everything possible, and if something is possible it doesn’t always make it likely. The world does have limits both practical and theoretical, contrary to what the popular mythology of progress implicitly suggests.
Beyond Meat seems to be more healthy, tastes the same and promises to be cheaper (18x) than meat. Any they successfully did this to egg products already. I mean I don’t think that it will look like a genuine body piece—most people don’t already buy that anyway.
Not ‘cheaper’ and I pretty much fail to see how that can ever happen.
Also, most people don’t think technology will deliver eutopia. Why should it?
I guess in the long term it should be cheaper for the same reason that vegetables are more energy efficient than meat: it takes less energy to grow just a muscle than to also grow a surrounding cow that runs around frolicking for several years.
And to provide for what a functioning immune system and digestive system and endocrine system provides in a living animal, in one convenient package that grows right alongside the meat, but instead with external infrastructure? It’s crazy what mycobacteria can do to mammalian tissue culture overnight if the wrong dust particle floats in or how many inputs it takes to get non-tumor mammalian somatic cells to divide in a reasonable period in a dish rather than their usual environment. There’s reasons that the only industrial biotech processes that use animal cells are things that make antibodies and the like that nothing else can make and are very expensive, and instead everybody else uses fungi or bacteria.
I realize there are lots of practical problems. But “can ever happen” is a long time.
True. But time and engineering doesn’t make everything possible, and if something is possible it doesn’t always make it likely. The world does have limits both practical and theoretical, contrary to what the popular mythology of progress implicitly suggests.
Beyond Meat seems to be more healthy, tastes the same and promises to be cheaper (18x) than meat. Any they successfully did this to egg products already. I mean I don’t think that it will look like a genuine body piece—most people don’t already buy that anyway.