Meat Grown in Israeli Bioreactors May Be Coming to American Diners (yahoo.com) 90
"An Israeli startup wants to replace chicken coops, barns and slaughterhouses with bioreactors to churn out cell-based meat for American diners," reports Bloomberg:
Future Meat Technologies Ltd. is in talks with U.S. regulators to start offering its products in restaurants by the end of next year. The company has just opened what it calls the world's first industrial cellular meat facility, which will be able to produce 500 kilograms (1,102 pounds) a day. "From the get-go, our main focus was around scaling up and reducing cost in order to have a commercially viable product," Chief Executive Officer Rom Kshuk said in an interview... Since the first prototypes, startups have cut costs by 99% and if consumers take to these products, the market could reach $25 billion by 2030, McKinsey & Co. said in a report last week. But to compete with conventional meat, costs need to be slashed even further.
Future Meat Technologies, which has raised $43 million from investors including Tyson Foods Inc., Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. and S2G Ventures LLC, claims the lowest price for cultured chicken breast. It's managed to cut the cost to $4 per 100 grams, a fraction of the original price, and plans to cut it by half again by the end of 2022, Kshuk said. The company's facility, located in the Israeli city of Rehovot, can produce cultured chicken, pork, and lamb, with the production of beef coming soon. Still, it's small compared with some conventional farm factories, some of which slaughter thousands of animals per day. The Good Food Institute said cultured meat production will need to reach millions of tons a year to progress from the demonstration to the industrial stage.
Future Meat will be able to "scale out" production lines and replicate the facility elsewhere, Kshuk said. It plans to target the U.S. market — which has some of the biggest meat consumption rates in the world — before expanding to Europe and China... "We are aiming to reduce the cost more, more and more," the CEO said. "The story here is not to have a premium product. This is really about finding an alternative way to produce meat."
Slashdot reader Beeftopia tipped us off to the story. The company claims in a press release that their platform "enables fast production cycles, about 20-times faster than traditional animal agriculture." "After demonstrating that cultured meat can reach cost parity faster than the market anticipated, this production facility is the real game-changer," says Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientific officer of Future Meat Technologies. "This facility demonstrates our proprietary media rejuvenation technology in scale, allowing us to reach production densities 10-times higher than the industrial standard. Our goal is to make cultured meat affordable for everyone, while ensuring we produce delicious food that is both healthy and sustainable, helping to secure the future of coming generations."
The facility further supports Future Meat Technologies' larger efforts to create a more sustainable future. The company's cruelty-free production process is expected to generate 80% less greenhouse emissions and use 99% less land and 96% less freshwater than traditional meat production.
Future Meat Technologies, which has raised $43 million from investors including Tyson Foods Inc., Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. and S2G Ventures LLC, claims the lowest price for cultured chicken breast. It's managed to cut the cost to $4 per 100 grams, a fraction of the original price, and plans to cut it by half again by the end of 2022, Kshuk said. The company's facility, located in the Israeli city of Rehovot, can produce cultured chicken, pork, and lamb, with the production of beef coming soon. Still, it's small compared with some conventional farm factories, some of which slaughter thousands of animals per day. The Good Food Institute said cultured meat production will need to reach millions of tons a year to progress from the demonstration to the industrial stage.
Future Meat will be able to "scale out" production lines and replicate the facility elsewhere, Kshuk said. It plans to target the U.S. market — which has some of the biggest meat consumption rates in the world — before expanding to Europe and China... "We are aiming to reduce the cost more, more and more," the CEO said. "The story here is not to have a premium product. This is really about finding an alternative way to produce meat."
Slashdot reader Beeftopia tipped us off to the story. The company claims in a press release that their platform "enables fast production cycles, about 20-times faster than traditional animal agriculture." "After demonstrating that cultured meat can reach cost parity faster than the market anticipated, this production facility is the real game-changer," says Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientific officer of Future Meat Technologies. "This facility demonstrates our proprietary media rejuvenation technology in scale, allowing us to reach production densities 10-times higher than the industrial standard. Our goal is to make cultured meat affordable for everyone, while ensuring we produce delicious food that is both healthy and sustainable, helping to secure the future of coming generations."
The facility further supports Future Meat Technologies' larger efforts to create a more sustainable future. The company's cruelty-free production process is expected to generate 80% less greenhouse emissions and use 99% less land and 96% less freshwater than traditional meat production.
have to ask... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Maybe they can make healthy bacon!
Uncured bacon made from pastured/free range hogs is healthy.
Re:have to ask... (Score:5, Interesting)
Generally speaking, the people in Israel who work at biotech companies are not the same people who have issues with bacon.
I once saw that some rabbi wrote an opinion piece that artificially grown pig meat might actually be kosher though, because the actual rules, like what kind of hooves the animal has, don't apply in this situation.
But then these are the same people who won't eat chicken with dairy because of the whole '...in its mother's milk' thing, so I wouldn't count on that opinion being the canonical one.
Re:have to ask... (Score:4, Insightful)
Where can I get this chicken milk and how delicious is it?
Re: have to ask... (Score:1)
Pick a statement. Any statement. So long as it has a subject, object, and a verb, or maybe even one or two out of three, there will be a group of people who go overboard with it in ways you can't imagine.
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Where can I get this chicken milk and how delicious is it?
You wouldn't want it; it's milk that tastes like chicken.
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Those people you mentioned at the end, are they aware that chickens are not mammals, and so none of them produce milk?
And that rabbi that you mentioned earlier, was he aware that the cell lines used to produce this meat originally did come from an animal that would have had (or did have, depending on age) hooves and all the rest? Stretching one animal to produce that much food has a very feeding-the-multitude vibe to it!
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Over-safe in certain respects, seeing how far it can be stretched in others.
Where the rules come from (Score:5, Insightful)
In Israel there are scientists and people who believe in science. In fact, most of the average people there are sick of the Orthodox Jews since the Orthodox are a bunch of radical clowns who make life shitty for anyone they interact with, including themselves. But that is the same as how shitty life is dealing with Fundamentalist Christians, Islamic Fundamentalists, Hindu Fundamentalists, Sikh Extremists, etc.
Well spoken. (Score:3)
Humans are not exclusively rational beings. We are also emotional beings. The emotional parts of our brain are older and more deeply integrated into our cognitive processes than the logical parts of our brains. It means that emotions can have the effect of overriding logic, and making absurdities seem entirely reasonable to a person.
And it can happen to any of us, even those of us who have studied the scientific method, inculcated critical thinking, and consider ourselves beyond such weaknesses. Hopeful
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There's different kinds of religious people, and people can be raised to be orthodox without being raised to be an asshole. Some people argue endlessly about what being orthodox actually means, and Jews are literally known for arguing about their religion to an extent which far outstrips most others.
why not mix meat and dairy ? (Score:3)
Ok, but what is the deal with not mixing meat and dairy ? I didn't understand the GP's statement '...in its mother's milk', and searching on the internet just shows fanatics repeatedly analyzing in different ways what "scriptures" say about this.
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Nah man, Jesus said you can eat anything you want because if you shit it out it doesn't become part of you so it can't possibly be bad. So when god said don't eat certain things, those were jokes.
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Of course there are different views in Christianity regarding Old Testament Law, but many will state that salvation comes from grace, not from observance of rules. It's the basis for Protestantism after all.
A pastor I have more respect for than most once said: I'm not saying you won't go to heaven if you eat pork - but if you do maybe you'll get there earlier.
Apart from trichynosis I believe there may be other health issues with pork, that now get disregarded because pork hygiene is considered a solved pr
Could be safer too (Score:2)
Mass-production chickens are so bacteria-soaked that the disassembly lines have been spraying more and more chlorine on them to compensate. I probably couldn't find the article again, but the chlorine concentrations are so high they killed a government meat inspector.
A culture factory can be better controlled than a facility that has live animals pooping in it.
Looking forward to this. I'd pay more.
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Looking forward to this. I'd pay more.
How much more? TFS says $4 per 100g, which is over $20 a pound.
At that price, I'd try it, but wouldn't buy it regularly.
They aren't just competing with "real" chicken, but also with plant-based fake chicken which is not bad.
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Yeah, at $18/lb I'm not sure what exactly they expect their market to be - that's probably 2-3x the cost of organic, free-range, antibiotic-free chicken at my expensive local natural food store, and 5-10x the cost of "good brand" chicken at the normal grocery store.
Even if they can pull the cost down to half that... it's still ridiculously expensive. Especially since it's probably primarily suitable as a ground- or chopped-meat alternative for patties, nuggets, etc. Which I suspect draw primarily from che
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so they plan on the US first and I expect it will fail spectacularly unless they can get the cost to around $6/lb. At 18, we are talking crazy money, and even at half the price, 9, still pretty steep. The article does no
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Inflated prices look extremely suspect. So Israel controlled Epstein who extorted Gates who bought up a lot of farm land that he could shut down production to force paying for extremely expensive and extremely profitable fake meat, eat it or go hungry and pay top dollar. SMELLS REALLY BAD
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Here on Planet Earth, $4 per 100 grams works out to $18.14 per pound, not "over $20". According to TFS, it will be half that by the end of next year, and they plan on reducing the cost "more, more, more, and more". The current average price of boneless chicken breasts is around $3.40. Depending on how big a factor "more, more, more, and more" turns out to be, they might have a shot at being competitive.
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> How much more? TFS says $4 per 100g, which is over $20 a pound.
> At that price, I'd try it, but wouldn't buy it regularly.
They'll have to find a niche market like Wagyu A5 which is already $5.29/100g.
If they're able to cut it in half like they say Wagyu farming could be eliminated... assuming it's treated as a commodity and not a fashion brand.
Re: Could be safer too (Score:3)
Depends on the country. In Europe, bleaching chicken is illegal. The farmers have to look after the hens.
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Remember, if you're going on a trip to the US, bring your own food.
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Been there, done that, JFK customs were courteous but unfortunately rather firm about me having to part ways with my precious food.
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Processed (Score:2)
The products of Future Meat Technologies represents the ultimate in ultra-processed foods. Real
meat -- including chicken -- is natural. Cultured chicken breast is definitely not.
Re:Processed (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's better, I'm all for it.
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War and peace post. (Score:2)
Such words do mean something; that the person using them is trying to make you concerned but has no specific information for you. This is often, but not always, a manipulative way of speaking.
You see your buddy step into a puddle. It is leaking from a chemical barrel labeled "acetic acid". You do not know what that is, but it has scary looking labels. All the plants near it are dead. It is not wrong in that case to simply yell "I think that is toxic!"
There are legitimate concerns about say, processing. A l
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A cow "processed" the feed it ate considerably before it became the final product. I don't see any resemblance to the original ingredient at all.
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I can't help but notice that you made no mention of taste, or texture. Soylent Green may be the way for the overpopulated world to survive, but it won't help if people don't eat it.
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Cyanide is organic, being eaten by lions natural (Score:2)
> Real meat -- including chicken -- is natural.
Assembly lines with animals living in cages small enough that they can't even turn around isn't exactly natural, but whatever.
Some things that ARE natural include cyanide, hemlock, malaria, and being eaten by lions.
Things that are not natural include driving in cars, wearing clothes, and the internet.
Enjoy your natural. Try playing dead when the lion naturally tries to eat you. It might work.
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I imagine that cooking with heat would be considered unnatural for some of these definitions.
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Chicken may be natural but it is also highly processed. It starts out as an egg and through several stages of processing becomes a full size chicken. That chicken is then further processed to remove unwanted parts (namely feathers and most internal organs).
Future Meat "chicken breast" is grown from cell cultures so in that regard it really isn't all that different from regular chicken.
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There's nothing natural about modern chickens, selectively bred so harshly they can barely walk and would never survive in the wild, pumped full of anti-biotics, the meat soaked in bleach.
Religious loophole + just-in-time meat production (Score:3)
I can also see this for future space missions. Perhaps a bioreactor can take up less space or provide more nutrition than a ton of preserved food?
Finally, this may be a means of bringing really fresh preservative-free meat to those willing to pay more. You can get meat from your local bioreactor instead of having it shipped from far away.
You definitely don't want to be anywhere near a slaughterhouse. They emit horrific smells, nightmarish sounds, and pollute the nearby environment intensely between the concentrated biowaste and the chemicals needed to keep the fecal/entrail bacteria at bay. However, I bet one of these could someday be setup in an old factory and greatly reduce the time between production and consumption. I am sure this is far off, just interesting possibilities and potential.
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From TFS:
It plans to target the U.S. market
So, not really an issue. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I want to eat something that the chef won't eat themselves.
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From TFS:
It plans to target the U.S. market
So, not really an issue. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I want to eat something that the chef won't eat themselves.
First of all, we probably have more kosher Jews than anywhere but Israel. Plus, I don't think it's a coincidence that it was invented in one of the most advanced nations where food restrictions are extremely common and deeply ingrained in the culture....not to mention they're embedded in the middle of a ton of halal eaters, many with deep pockets, who surely must want a porkchop on occasion.
I know many orthodox Jews and have heard the conversation about if it's kosher if the pork was created in the Star
Energy use? (Score:1)
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Well not just "hurt animals" but hurt environment as well. Remember a good portion of the US west is going through a drought so the cost of meat is going to go up. This will also lessen the demand for water as well as the space taken up by traditional means.
How does it taste? (Score:2)
The real question here is how does the stuff taste? If it tastes like meat then that's great. However, if it tastes like meat slime, that's not going to sell so well.
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The real question here is how does the stuff taste? If it tastes like meat then that's great. However, if it tastes like meat slime, that's not going to sell so well.
Thinking of the TV show Better Off Ted [wikipedia.org], episode Heroes [fandom.com] (S1:E2) and the employee taste-testing their new lab-grown meat [youtube.com] ...
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I remember that episode, even before the clip, I remember it's "tastes like despair." You need to exercise that meat! (but so expensive!)
Prion diseases in 3...2...1... (Score:1)
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Don't confuse canola oil with rapeseed oil. Scientists and plant breeders created Canola precisely because rapeseed oil contains erucic acid which when consumed in large quantities is harmful. They bred rapeseed varieties to have low erucic acid content, and the resulting brassica varieties were called "Canola" as a trade name, and now it's a generic name for this sub-species of brassica. In Europe they still consume some rapeseed oil, but in north America there is virtually none. Of course none of this
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Don't confuse canola oil and margarine. Canola oil is a clear yellowish liquid. Margarine is vegetable oil, often canola, that is hydrogenated so you can spread it with a knife.
Do the math, $4 /100g is $18 a pound for chicken (Score:1)
Cue several new illnesses, discovered decades late (Score:1)
Because it just isn:t the whole thing. Like every time before, where we claimed it was "everything the body needs" or "the same thing".
You will see weird gelatinous consistencies, severe water loss on heating, more prorous structures, quicker rotting, blander taste, unnatural proteins and most of all, unnatural compositions. Like a severe lack of certain important micronutrients, or other things that only appear in real muscle after actual use in a live animal.
All of that would still be OK ... if it was jus
Target the U.S. market? (Score:3)
You mean instead of Jewish space lasers we're gonna have to deal with radioactive bioengineered fake meat?
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Questionable practice (Score:2)
Shipping the "meat" around half the world kinda seems to defeat the idea of it being more ecological to eat than real meat.
Which it won't be anyway. The idea that eating cows is a bad idea will be laughable in fifty years. It's an ideological fluke.
But hey, no point in fighting windmills. Zeitgeist is hard to beat. Ask 1930s Germans.
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It's basically a pilot plant. Shipping will be negligable right now in scheme of things. If it expands, i would expect to see factories arise nearer the point of consumption. Why wouldn't any company with a perishable product do that? Especially when production should be relatively easy to automate?
Kentucky Fried Bioreactor (Score:2)
I can see it clearly.
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Cultured chicken, pork, and lamb (Score:2)
To be successfully in certain US states they'll also have to include roadkill.
I read that as "chum" not "churn" (Score:2)
Let that image sink in for you.
Caveat (Score:3)
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But you're not interested in actual information are you? You're judging something entirely by your perceived idea of when you most recently saw a Slashdot post saying something came to market. That much is evident from comparing it to a pandemic.
You put no effort into understanding why a vaccine was able to be produced quickly and that the only risk of the "rushed" process was entirely economic given that we followed every safety protocol during the pandemic that we have for any other drug approved by the F
Re: Caveat (Score:2)
'Bioreactor' sounds kool (Score:2)
I want a little solar piezoelectric speaker on the package, so my chicken squawks when I open it.
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Israel = Tleilax (Score:2)
Is this synthmeat Kosher (Score:1)
Just NO ! (Score:1)
Not a food for vegetarians like me (Score:2)
I have come across a number of plant-based meat substitutes, and generally, I am not that keen on them. When I went into the office every day, I used to get lunch from the local working men's cafe. They did a wide range of vegetarian foods, as well as the usual sausages, bacon, burgers, etc. One day, I had a veggie burger, and I was convinced the cafe had made a mistake, and given me a meat burger. So I took it back. The cafe owner assured me there was no mistake, and showed me the packet the veggie burger
Finally.. (Score:1)