Recently tried an Impossible burger and nuggets and thought that if nobody told me it wasn’t meat, I’d have thought the patty was made out of a weird kind of meat, rather than make a connection with the taste and texture of plants. Honestly, I might not complain if that was the only kind of “meat” I could have for the rest of my life.
Well, maybe I’d miss bacon.
I’ve yet to find the opportunity to try lab-grown meat, but I for sure would like to try it out and don’t see much wrong with it as long as it’s sustainable, reasonably priced, and doesn’t have anything you wouldn’t expect in a normal piece of meat.
Also, with imitation and lab-grown options, I’d no longer have to deal with the disgust factor of handling raw meat (esp. the juices) or biting into gristle. I’ll happily devour a hot dog, but something about an unexpected bit of cartilage gives me a lingering sense of revulsion.
Lab meat seems like a great idea for those who know nothing about tissue culture. lab-grown meat production traditionally relies on animal serum, particularly fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is a nutrient-rich liquid extracted from the blood of slaughtered cow fetuses to stimulate cell growth. It’s all bullshit.
Some companies are trying to find alternatives, but nothing else is working and all this tech will produce meat only smug Hollywood celebrities can afford.
There are other options and substitutes, known as chemically defined media(CDM), because ultimately FBS is just a chemical slurry that can be replicated via any other ingredients like Gatorade.
The reason FBS is used extensively is because of the long history of it’s use and when trying to do something new limiting variables is critical. It’s an issue of there needing to be a new standard, but that one XKCD mentality is preventing it.
The two major drawback of FBS is that, ironically, it’s a biological product and the composition can vary wildly between batches, and that it’s stupidily expensive at ~$1500 USD per liter. You will not be purchasing a lab grown burger made with FBS unless you have thousands of dollars to spend per burger.
However, without oversight, certification programs and forced transparency it can be expected that these companies are going to cut corners, but it’s going to be via other low cost animal product additives like gelatin, eggs, chitin etc.