19 thoughts on “Lab-Grown Meat”

  1. I could see using lab-grown ground beef as taco filling or something, but by the time there are acceptable lab grown steaks, your meat-faber will be able to output a live cow.

    1. Why build a whole cow that you need to feed and kill and which you’ll only eat part of, if you can just print the steaks and milk?

      How many green fields do you think we’ll have on the Moon for our Moon cows?

      1. I think we can be confident a faber that can print a live cow will also be able to print a cow habitat. Right after it prints out that slave-girl I mentioned. Let’s keep our priorities straight. Also livestock is self-preserving to a degree (I better leave it at that; may ability to become vulgar is second to none). There also may be religious issues here. Is a printed steak kosher or is it treif?

  2. If they cannot grow artificial meat without FBS it is very unlikely that their efforts will be completed with a commercial product, due to the cost (serum is sold at around $ 1,200 /L) and because the “meat” produced would not be free from animal slaughter.

    It could be good for space people because transporting FBS is easier than a herd of cow. It could be good for Earth people if cheap enough cause it makes the most out of one cow. But this movement to stop eating meat or farming cattle is insane.

    Remember a year or so ago, when a famous vegan chef told the public he had been looking into the benefits that our hoofed friends provide the environment and that it made sense to eat their meat? People freaked but when people rationally examine the situation, the benefits are undeniable both to humans and to the environment.

  3. Cattle convert inedible grass into tasty, tasty meat and if not fed grain produce it with a healthy ratio of omega3 to omega6, which I suspect would be difficult to ensure in vat beef.

    With all the life support and micronutrient issues for vat meat, the quality and cost will remain abysmal for a long time to come.

    1. This was another Arthur C. Clarke prophesy that worked out just as well as his myriad other prognostications. About the only thing he got right was geostationary orbit, though even then it was to be dominated by Chinese Communists broadcasting porn to the West.

  4. For an initial lunar or Martian habitat, I think that algae-fed fish and egg-laying chickens would be the easiest forms of meat to be grown. It has been suggested that small pigs would also work. Their smell means that they would need their own separate habitats though. When considering the living volumes, the quantity of grains, or the shipping costs needed I’m not so sure that beef would be on the initial menu. Substitutes such as lab-grown beef or soy-based analogues might make more sense.

    1. Some of the thinking about this stuff is derived from what turned out to be fact-free nutrional theory (like the infamous Food Pyramid). Wild cattle didn’t graze on world-wide “amber waves of grain,” and the only reason most Americans think grass-fed beef taste like pee is because we’ve been raised eating wheat- and corn-fed beef. When designing a diet for early space colonists (and assuming you don’t have magic food-fabers) it’s always wise to start out by remembering humans can survive indefinitely on baseline pemmican, which is a 50/50 mixture of animal protein and animal fat. The Hurons added berries to improve the flavor, not the nutritional content. The reason you can live on pemmican is because animals store vitamins in their fat. Lean “field meat” like rabbit is only 7% fat, and you will starve to death on it.

        1. I don’t think so either, but I’ve heard that complaint from any number of people over the years. Mainly, I think it’s a little too lean, and at least should be grain finished.

          When I hear that complaint from people, I usually just ask (as guilessly as possoble) how they know that taste, and then ejoy the silly excuse making. I, on the other hand, have spent much of my life in the company of suddenly-sneezing women and babies being changed. I was also a sewer worker in the long ago, where I became familiar with Murphy’s Special Law of Consquences: “If something horrid can possibly wind up in your mouth, it will.”

      1. Assuming BFR, how expensive would it be per year to just ship each person 2 years’ worth of pemmican, jerky, and freeze-dried meat each alignment? At what point of local development does it actually become cost-effective to grow such “necessary luxuries” (i.e., expensive to produce but required for morale and health) locally, as opposed to shipping them in?

        In short, is this really a first-gen issue for a colony? Is it even a third-gen issue? The further back you can push the requirement to replace imports with local production, the longer you have for people to tinker with the technology, and maybe come up with an alternative.

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