Lab-Grown Meat Approved for Sale in US

[ZoomBubba]

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Last week the U.S. Department of Agriculture granted its first-ever approval of cell-cultured meat produced by two companies, GOOD Meat and UPSIDE Foods. Both grow small amounts of chicken cells into slabs of meat—no slaughter required. It was the final regulatory thumbs-up that the California-based companies needed in order to sell and serve their products in the U.S.

The approval comes less than a year after the Food and Drug Administration declared the companies’ products safe to eat, and it represents a major milestone for the burgeoning cultured meat industry. But it doesn’t mean lab-grown steaks will be hitting supermarket shelves tomorrow. For now, both companies have been given the go-ahead to sell strictly chicken products at a select handful of restaurants. They’ll need additional approval to market cell-cultivated beef, pork or seafood.

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The overall production process is relatively simple, says Vítor Santo, GOOD Meat’s cell agriculture director. “The biggest challenge right now is definitely building the manufacturing capacity,” he says. UPSIDE Foods’ COO, Amy Chen, concurs. “Industrial farming has had a head start,” she says. But now that both companies have USDA and FDA approval, they can start to build up the infrastructure to cultivate enough meat to ship products across the U.S.

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When the products do hit supermarket shelves, Chen says, “they will actually bear the stamp and seal that you expect on a piece of meat”: a little round tag certifying USDA inspection. The labels will also include the prefix “cell-cultured” to distinguish the meat from conventional barnyard fare. And they will lack an official “vegetarian” stamp of approval. The Vegetarian Society’s standpoint is that lab-grown meat doesn’t qualify as vegetarian or vegan because it contains cells originally sampled from an animal. The organization, however, will consider creating a new label to certify it as “cruelty-free” or “slaughter-free,” McIlwain says.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lab-grown-meat-approved-for-sale-what-you-need-to-know/

[katt_goddess]

Lab-grown meats is people. <.< >.>

I'm laughing at it now but you know someone is going to either try to culture from human cells just to see the results or accidentally culture through contamination, decide that's the tastiest stuff they've ever grown and behold, Soylent Green.

[ZoomBubba]

It'd be hard to do it through contamination because it would require a fetus. I think on the most part, the stigma of wanting to eat people will keep there from being a serious push for human meat. I'm sure there'd be a regulation put in place way before hand to prevent it, with the full support of the cultured meat companies because they don't want that stink attached to them.

[Jman]

I've been following this for a while, because well, farming takes up a ton of space, and despite what hardcore preservationists insist, no one is fucking eating crickets as their main source of protein.  The question now is the kinds (fat to meat ratio, especially in cuts of beef) and of course, price parity.  It's meat, not plants disguised as meat, not bugs shaped into meat, meat.  So you get that messaging out, and you can do a lot if you reach price parity, especially since it is cruelty free and presumably requires a lot less land and water.

[viperxmns]

I guess this tech would be good for making things like burgers, cold cuts, hot dogs, that sort of stuff. Lab made steak would be harder to science I imagine

[katt_goddess]

4 minutes ago, ZoomBubba said:

It'd be hard to do it through contamination because it would require a fetus. I think on the most part, the stigma of wanting to eat people will keep there from being a serious push for human meat. I'm sure there'd be a regulation put in place way before hand to prevent it, with the full support of the cultured meat companies because they don't want that stink attached to them.

For accidental, I was thinking someone having like a cut on their hand and potentially getting a drop of human blood in the chicken cells. 

I'm not saying it would be easy-easy or obvious, just that the possibility is there. Every job has a joker in it. 

[ZoomBubba]

5 minutes ago, Jman said:

I've been following this for a while, because well, farming takes up a ton of space, and despite what hardcore preservationists insist, no one is fucking eating crickets as their main source of protein.  The question now is the kinds (fat to meat ratio, especially in cuts of beef) and of course, price parity.  It's meat, not plants disguised as meat, not bugs shaped into meat, meat.  So you get that messaging out, and you can do a lot if you reach price parity, especially since it is cruelty free and presumably requires a lot less land and water.

I think we're probably still at least decade away from it being upscaled to a point where we can find it in the hot dog aisle at Walmart, but I'm pretty sure we'll get there within 20. The biggest obstacle aside from upscaling production is the various meat lobbies who are already coming out in full force against it. But, really, I think it would be a benefit for many farmers since they'd probably switch from breeding a lot of cows to focusing on breeding quality meat with fewer cows. Plus, the environmental impact, particularly on land usage and water pollution, would win out the debate in the end.

I'd love to see most of that land used for animal agriculture be rewilded and human free, allowing wildlife to expand again. I don't have any love for western ranchers or southern chicken growers, the latter managing to stink up whole neighborhoods because they're given free reign to throw up their shit factories.

[ZoomBubba]

29 minutes ago, viperxmns said:

I guess this tech would be good for making things like burgers, cold cuts, hot dogs, that sort of stuff. Lab made steak would be harder to science I imagine

That's already something that's being worked on:

 

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But companies such as Atelier Meats, devoted to growing cell-cultured meat, are up for the challenge—and they are already working on processes for cultivating custom-made meats. “There would be multiple trays in the bioreactor versus just one of ground beef. Each tray would have an individual scaffold, which is the framework around which the meat would grow,” explains co-founder Rahim Rajwani. “For example, if a national retailer, like Costco, said, ‘We want a particular steak that is shaped just like our regular eight-ounce steak. We want it to be 40-percent protein and 60-percent fat with 30-percent of that entire steak being marbled.’ We could literally create that exact steak, even down to the size.”

It comes from this interesting article about being able to customize the meat that's grown: https://modernfarmer.com/2022/02/custom-cell-grown-meat/

[viperxmns]

now I'm imagining bioreactor meat zombies coming to kill us all

[Gemini]

If I buy this and it makes me grow a third eye after eating it, I'm suing.

[ghostrek]

i dont like that idea

[ZoomBubba]

9 minutes ago, ghostrek said:

i dont like that idea

Well, you should follow that up with "because ...."

Anyway, it's in the same vein as that food replicator technology on Star Trek. Are you saying you don't want food replicators?

[ghostrek]

3 minutes ago, ZoomBubba said:

Well, you should follow that up with "because ...."

Anyway, it's in the same vein as that food replicator technology on Star Trek. Are you saying you don't want food replicators?

i work at a  butchershop

[ZoomBubba]

1 hour ago, Gemini said:

If I buy this and it makes me grow a third eye after eating it, I'm suing.

You're probably more apt to catch a food borne illness or parasite from the meat you buy at the store than you would something produced in a lab that's just replicating the animal cells.

[ZoomBubba]

Just now, ZoomBubba said:

You're probably more apt to catch a food borne illness or parasite from the meat you buy at the store than you would something produced in a lab that's just replicating the animal cells.

I've seen your photo. Now I'm picturing you with a meat cleaver and covered in blood.

Seriously, we're talking about a couple of decades. Do you see yourself butchering or being replaced by a machine that can do most of that butchering for you?

[Gemini]

29 minutes ago, ZoomBubba said:

You're probably more apt to catch a food borne illness or parasite from the meat you buy at the store than you would something produced in a lab that's just replicating the animal cells.

*shrugs* Okay.

[ZoomBubba]

9 minutes ago, Gemini said:

*shrugs* Okay.

Edited July 5, 2023 by ZoomBubba

[tsar4]

I had seen food in school cafeterias that make me think they've had lab grown meat for decades.

Edited July 5, 2023 by tsar4
Sp

[Gemini]

1 hour ago, ZoomBubba said:

[Raptorpat]

Where is the meat lobby on this? I'd figure they'd try to shut this down faster than the dairy lobby is fighting against alternative milks.

[ZoomBubba]

12 hours ago, Raptorpat said:

Where is the meat lobby on this? I'd figure they'd try to shut this down faster than the dairy lobby is fighting against alternative milks.

They've been lobbying pretty hard, particularly during the Trump years. It's been pretty similar to their battle with plant-based meat alternatives.

Here's a couple of links about it:

https://thespoon.tech/traditional-meat-producers-lobby-trump-over-cultured-meat/

https://newrepublic.com/article/171709/inside-battle-big-ag-lab-grown-meat

[André Toulon]

On 7/4/2023 at 9:31 PM, tsar4 said:

I had seen food in school cafeterias that make me think they've had lab grown meat for decades.

They have