The First CRISPR Gene-Edited Meat is Coming (fastcompany.com) 54
"Most companies are trying to create lab-grown meat with little to no genetic engineering, which despite shifts in attitude is still frowned on," writes Fast Company. And other companies "think that modifications like this will complicate getting regulatory approval," especially in Europe, which considers CRISPR to be a form of genetic modfication.
But then there's the cultivated meat startup SciFi Foods (formerly Artemys Foods). Fast Company reports that its CEO/cofounder Joshua March became "obsessed" with cultivated meat "after reading about it in The Player of Games, a 1988 science fiction novel by Iain M. Banks that is beloved by techies." For a while, March sat on the sidelines running other startups. "I didn't think I had to do anything," he says, "that it would happen on its own." But years ticked by, and there was little advancement in what was then usually referred to as lab-grown meat. "I honestly became pretty disenchanted with the companies in the space and all the arm waving about how the costs would be solved." If he wanted it to be a real thing in the world, he'd have to do something. He'd have to play the game.
Unlike virtually every other startup in the space — and according to the Good Food Institute, there are 152 cultivated meat companies as of the end of 2022, operating in 29 countries — March and SciFi are using CRISPR (the technology that makes gene editing as easy as using a 3D printer) to hasten its advances. To Kasia Gora, SciFi's CTO, it's merely an engineering challenge. "We take a synthetic biology approach to figuring out how to make scalable beef cell lines," she tells me. The key is engineering cycles that enable rapid prototyping. The best cell lines will go on to create the next round of modifications....
SciFi is betting that the only way to economically scale cultivated meat is with CRISPR, and that by making iterative tweaks they can create dependable cell lines with rich, meat-y flavor. "We have an eventual target of $1 per burger at commercial scale," March says. Once harvested, beef cells will be formulated into a blended burger that is mostly like the plant-based burgers you may already know — soy protein and coconut oil. SciFi's secret sauce is adding a small percentage of SciFi cells (5% to 20%, according to March) to reward our taste buds with the beef-y notes we may think are missing from competitors like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.
But then there's the cultivated meat startup SciFi Foods (formerly Artemys Foods). Fast Company reports that its CEO/cofounder Joshua March became "obsessed" with cultivated meat "after reading about it in The Player of Games, a 1988 science fiction novel by Iain M. Banks that is beloved by techies." For a while, March sat on the sidelines running other startups. "I didn't think I had to do anything," he says, "that it would happen on its own." But years ticked by, and there was little advancement in what was then usually referred to as lab-grown meat. "I honestly became pretty disenchanted with the companies in the space and all the arm waving about how the costs would be solved." If he wanted it to be a real thing in the world, he'd have to do something. He'd have to play the game.
Unlike virtually every other startup in the space — and according to the Good Food Institute, there are 152 cultivated meat companies as of the end of 2022, operating in 29 countries — March and SciFi are using CRISPR (the technology that makes gene editing as easy as using a 3D printer) to hasten its advances. To Kasia Gora, SciFi's CTO, it's merely an engineering challenge. "We take a synthetic biology approach to figuring out how to make scalable beef cell lines," she tells me. The key is engineering cycles that enable rapid prototyping. The best cell lines will go on to create the next round of modifications....
SciFi is betting that the only way to economically scale cultivated meat is with CRISPR, and that by making iterative tweaks they can create dependable cell lines with rich, meat-y flavor. "We have an eventual target of $1 per burger at commercial scale," March says. Once harvested, beef cells will be formulated into a blended burger that is mostly like the plant-based burgers you may already know — soy protein and coconut oil. SciFi's secret sauce is adding a small percentage of SciFi cells (5% to 20%, according to March) to reward our taste buds with the beef-y notes we may think are missing from competitors like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.
and with last words they lost the meat eaters (Score:1)
so after talking about beef cells they really only want to slightly taint a highly processed veggie crap patty with the beef. no thanks, junk food!
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so after talking about beef cells they really only want to slightly taint a highly processed veggie crap patty with the beef. no thanks, junk food!
Yes, but the real question is does it fry up crispr?
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so after talking about beef cells they really only want to slightly taint a highly processed veggie crap patty with the beef. no thanks, junk food!
Yah, what is the point? I like a veggie burger every so often, but people really need to limit the phytoestrogen load that you get with them. Just a little bit of beef in them will piss off the vegans, but do little else.
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For most vegans, the argument is they don't want to kill animals (unborn babies: ok. unfertilized chicken egg: not ok). I don't know who in that community would and wouldn't consider eating processed lab grown cells with no animal death involved remain vegan.
There are a number of different rationales. I knowsome that say that they won't eat animal products because the animal didn't give consent (think of eating honey or milk)
So it's like did the animal give consent to have some cells harvested to take part in the synthetic meat process?
Note - to me this seems whacky and way overthinking things if the bees didn't give consent to use their honey - their food - do we have the right to use the other comestibles that other insects eat?
Sounds crazy, but check
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Like with anything you can make the entire movement out to be nuts by looking at the most extreme adherents to it, veganism just happens to have a very loud contigent of the craziest which includes PETA who are basically trolls at this point. What they get wrong is there is no way you are ever going to shame people into such lifestyle changes, nor is this something that can just be done on an individual level. Eat meat or don't based on what your needs and opinions are but don't think it's changing the wo
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veggie burgers taste like ass and have processed crap in them.
If a beef cell based thing had the muscle and fat marbling right you could have $200 a pound Japanese kobe beef for $2 and no resource intensive farming. That's the dream.
Until then a line of hundreds of steer are going to die for my existence like the daily thousands of psychers consumed by the Emperor in Warhammer 40K.
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veggie burgers taste like ass and have processed crap in them.
I'll defer to your experience of what ass tastes like.
Anyhow, read the whole post.
Here's the issue. I've had a couple of Veggie burgers that aren't good, and I've had some that are indeed tasty. The ones that sucked were overly spiced. That is an issue with a lot of vegans, trying to make up for lack of flavor by too damn much spice. That ruins the flavor profile.
But it's just like eating vegetables at meals.One of the better meat subs is made from wheat gluten - the protein component of meat. Unfot
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My point is I'd welcome tasty real meat that was synthetically grown if it was cheap. The amount of pollution and energy consumption by argriculture would plummet. But I don't want a salted processed veggie chem pattie.
"tastes like ass" is an expression, sorry it gave you wood thinking about analingus.
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My point is I'd welcome tasty real meat that was synthetically grown if it was cheap.
I'm hoping they get it right. I'll be one of the main issues is getting some fat into the meat.
The amount of pollution and energy consumption by argriculture would plummet. But I don't want a salted processed veggie chem pattie.
"tastes like ass" is an expression, sorry it gave you wood thinking about analingus.
Oh yeah, I knew.
But rest assured, you got me back - I was taking my first sip of coffee in the morning while reading this, and snorted about half of it out from laughing.
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Hamburgers aren't the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
All of the meat substitute/cultured meat companies focus on hamburgers. Hamburgers are not the problem: ground beef is essentially a waste product. Beef is far more valuable as whole cuts than ground beef.
Unless and until we are able to cultivate or simulate whole muscle tissue, not just in taste but also texture and probably visual quality as well, the impact on cattle ranching for meat will be practically negligible.
Would probably make more of an impact working on genetically modified yeast to produce dairy milk. Roughly 10% of beef in the US is culled dairy cows, so an alternative source of cow milk could put a pretty big dent in that.
=Smidge=
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Oftentimes I'm not even sure these companies know who they're marketing to. Vegetarians / vegans? Most of them don't want their patties to become more meatlike. Meat eaters? Most of them don't want something synthetic, and for those willing to give it a shot, most of their standards will be unmeetably high, if not impossible (to the point that even something that passed a double-blind test would still be rejected in the marketplace because of the mere perception that it's inferior).
Their market "people who
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You are assuming just US beef consumers. Mock meats are popular enough in Asia. Regardless of demographic, the market is large enough to accommodate a new product, even if it hits a fraction of several demographics. Once the product is around for a while, it won't be seen as "synthetic". Hell, US packaged ultra-processed carbohydrate products that constitute a bulk of food supply, are way more "synthetic" than this. People consume them without a thought. It's all about marketing. The beef industry will lobb
Re:Hamburgers aren't the problem. (Score:4, Interesting)
Oftentimes I'm not even sure these companies know who they're marketing to. Vegetarians / vegans? Most of them don't want their patties to become more meatlike. Meat eaters? Most of them don't want something synthetic, and for those willing to give it a shot, most of their standards will be unmeetably high
Vegetarians object to slaughter for meat, so I'm thinking that a good percentage of them will probably find cultured meat a viable substitute. For meat eaters, acceptability will depend on taste and price in comparison to the slaughtered meat they are used to. Vegans - no way, because veganism is a system of religious dietary law, like kashrut or halal.
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Their market "people who want to eat meat, but don't really want to eat meat". And I'm not sure that's as big of a market as they seem to think it is, for all these different companies with all these different products.
I expect their real market is "people with enough money to buy out my company and make me rich before they realize the potential customer base for my product is unsustainably small".
Re:Hamburgers aren't the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hamburgers are not the problem
45% of all beef produced is ground into hamburger. So it's a big part of the problem.
Growing hamburger in a vat is way easier than growing a t-bone steak.
People eat hamburgers with mustard, ketchup, and other condiments, so are less fussy about the taste.
Would probably make more of an impact working on genetically modified yeast to produce dairy milk.
Researchers are working on it [phys.org]. The taste is good. The hard part is lowering the cost.
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> 45% of all beef produced is ground into hamburger. So it's a big part of the problem.
Only because it can't be sold as whole cut. Ground beef wholesales right now for between $1 and $3.60 per pound depending on grade and fat content. A whole side of beef - without any cost from additional butchering or processing that something like ground beef has - is over $4.60/lb. The value of the meat is in the cuts; the whole muscle slabs of meat.
Ground beef is a waste product, made from the scraps and trimmings l
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ground beef is essentially a waste product. Beef is far more valuable as whole cuts than ground beef.
There's just no way it's gone up to $5/lb (which it has) if they're not turning meat which could be steaks (if not the nicest cuts) into burger due to demand.
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There's one way that doesn't require grinding up steaks to make cheaper burger; corporate greed.
Tyson foods (and many other food corporations) made record profits during the height of inflation, but they made a point of only talking about supply chain and labor demand issues. The reality is that over half of the increase in prices that we've seen in the USA are due to companies increasing their profit margins.
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There's a lot of price gouging... ere excuse me, "supply chain issues" that jack up prices. This is why I try to reference wholesale prices [beefitswha...dinner.com], to try and keep the number of middlemen (and therefore profit margins) to a minimum.
Nobody is taking pricey cuts of meat and grinding it up, at least not to any significant degree. Much like chicken nuggets ground beef is mostly trimmings and "recovered" meat that they can't sell as-is.
Sure you might be paying $5/lb for ground beef at the supermarket but you're also pa
Re:Hamburgers aren't the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
All of the meat substitute/cultured meat companies focus on hamburgers. Hamburgers are not the problem: ground beef is essentially a waste product. Beef is far more valuable as whole cuts than ground beef.
The first cultured meat to hit the market will look like ground meat, because it has no structure. Steaks and ribs will require scaffolding.and the growth of whole muscles. No problem, because the market for ground meat is a huge one; if cultured meat is accepted as a product, it will have to conquer the ground meat market first.
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The scaffolding required to produce actual muscles will also be useful for treating people with damage or perhaps diseased muscles.
Re:Hamburgers aren't the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
They're focused on burgers because they're everywhere and since they're made of ground meat instead of whole muscle tissue they are much easier to mimic the texture of. This is the same reason that sausage substitutes are the next most common meat substitute you see out and about after burgers.
In fact, brands like Field Roast have been making faux sausages with incredibly meaty textures for longer than Impossible Burger has even existed. The funniest part of their products is their faux sausages have a texture much more similar to freshly made raw pork sausages you might buy at a proper meat department or shop as opposed to the already cooked packaged ones most are familiar with nowadays whose texture are more like hotdogs.
Texture is absolutely key to creating a meat substitute people will actually accept and so far while I have had sausage and burger substitutes that have had great texture I've never seen a substitute for whole beef meat that was going to even come close to winning over anyone who has any recent memory (last couple decades) of eating meat.
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I would second that, there's a lot of just straight up vegan sausages (not even faux meat) i've had that are just really good since sausage is all about heavy seasoning anyways. Thing is they have been a niche product so the cost per/lb is usually more and they are not as available than meat but if it get's to price parity or lower I would buy them a whole lot more.
You're right that the texture is different but for some thing like that yes it's different but it's still good. Meat sausages by themselves ca
Agreed! (Score:2)
Agree on this 100%.
I stopped eating meat 3 years back.
The plant based hamburgers are totally fine. They are no match for beef burgers at the high end of the market, but are totally on-par with fast food burgers.
Once you add all the other parts that make up a burger - the bun, pickles, relish etc. - vegan burgers just work.
The sausages aren't too bad, there's an issue with the cooked texture sometimes - again, they are not a match for high end pork/beef sausage, but more likened to the cheaper end of the mar
Ground beef is NOT waste meat! (Score:2)
I don't know why people keep saying that or where it started, but ground beef is not waste meat.
Ground beef is made from somewhat less used and tougher cuts of meat like round, chuck, and sirloin, cuts that aren't the best for steaks or regular roasts, but are perfectly suited and come out incredibly tender and juicy and delicious when used in slowly cooked dishes like stews and pot roasts.
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> I don't know why people keep saying that or where it started, but ground beef is not waste meat.
If the meat had sufficient value to be sold as whole cuts, they would sell it as whole cuts. But it doesn't have that value, so they grind it up along with meat and fat from all other arts of the animal. That's the definition of "waste."
Ground beef is the particle board of the meat packing industry. Are you seriously going to suggest that trees are farmed solely for the purpose of grinding them into coarse d
Just two words... (Score:2)
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That remains to be seen. Successes in this industry tend to be rare.
Lab-grown gene-edited meat (Score:2)
Remember prions? (Score:2)
Before the discovery of prions, no one believe that a protein could be responsible for disease. Yet, it is responsible for one of the worst diseases imaginable.
Now I'm not saying this product has prions. But I am saying that we have no idea what long term effects this could have. And we know from history (margarine, for example) that food replacements initially touted as better than their natural counterparts have in cases actually been worse for you than the foods they replaced. And we also know tha
We've switched... (Score:2)
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It seems every week another report of contaminated ground beef resulting in recalls and warnings emerges. The industry is failing to maintain a standard that is slipping further into decline. So, we've switched to plant-based, namely the Impossible "beef". I'm the primary cook in the household, and I've tried many of the various offerings from Beyond and others. But, to us, the Impossible is the closest to ground beef in looks and taste. It cooks just like ground beef, whether on the grill as a burger, or in recipes. And now, the cost is comparable, as well. I've not bought animal ground beef in a year and we don't miss it. For a pot-luck meal at husband's work, I made a Cottage Pie with Impossible. Everyone there raved about it and wanted the recipe. I think quite a few were convinced by that to give Impossible a try in their own recipes.
Make sure to pay attention to the phytoestrogen load you are picking up.
We eat veggie burgers in my household, but only a few times a month
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I have to agree with you 100%. I have a hand operated grinder that's a lot older than me. It works fine for this purpose. A buddy of mine, though, has a state-of-the-art electric grinder I've come to love. My girlfriend and I get together with him to make sausages and grind our own beef the way you do. Maybe three or four times a year I'll get store-bought ground beef for one reason or another, but ours is so much better.
I've tried beef substitutes, too. They're not bad, but our product is better, and
Wow! You can really taste the Human in it! (Score:2)
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But, let us bring back extinct animals and see what they taste like.
Like who would not want to try a brontosaurus steak?
(Okay, vegans, vegetarians, etc... no need to be picky.)
So many problems with this (Score:2)
Next: they're still going to just mix it in with a bunch of over-processed soy garbage and other over-processed stuff? When everyone talks about how 'highly processed' foods are horrible for your health?
Meanwhile the vegan nutjobs will still try to guilt-trip everyone into avoiding it because they "didn't get the cows' consent to use it's DNA" and
What a weird business stratagy (Score:2)
No thank you! (Score:1)
Foolish. (Score:2)
especially in Europe, which considers CRISPR to be a form of genetic modfication.
This is sad how foolish some laws/regulations are. Everything that is not a clone was a genetic modification. Even the Mendelian genetics is... Genetic modification.
The real problem are things like roundup, use of hormones and antibiotics, etc. Yet, direct genetic modification has been targeted, mostly because America was the leader in it.
I can't wait (Score:2)
As somebody who enjoys eating meat, but who is more and more burdened but what we as a species must do in order for most of us to be able to eat meat, I can't wait for the day in which I will be able to eat lab-grown meat.
I understand our position in the food pyramid: we are omnivores, which implies that meat is part of what we eat. However, my conscience is having more and more problems accepting what is currently done in order for people like me to be able to enjoy meat.
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