Is Lab Created Meat a Viable Answer?

In an article at The Counter, https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/?utm_source=morning_brew, they were talking about the financial viability of lab created meat.

The process, according to GFI, would begin with a 1.5-milliliter vial of production-optimized animal cells (the report doesn’t specify which livestock species). Those cells would be used to inoculate a 250-ml flask, a vessel smaller than a can of soda. The rest of the flask would be filled with a specially formulated growth medium, a nutrient-dense broth of purified water, salts, glucose, amino acids, and “growth factors”—the hormones, recombinant proteins, cytokines and other substances that regulate cell development and metabolism. In a sense, the role of this liquid is to approximate good old-fashioned blood, the fluid that delivers nutrients and hormones to cells inside a living animal’s body.

Slowly, the initial seed cells would begin to multiply. After 10 days, according to GFI, the cells graduate to their first bioreactor, a small, 50-liter model. In another 10 days, they would move to a much larger, 12,500-liter stirred batch reactor, the kind of steel vessel you might expect to see in a brewery, capable of holding the same volume as a backyard swimming pool. This gradual progression is necessary; you can’t just throw a small amount of cells into a large bioreactor and hope they’ll start dividing. Cells are “fastidious,” Hughes told me, and have strict metabolic requirements for growth, including oxygen tension. Because of this characteristic, more fluid is pumped into the reactor as cells multiply, maintaining a specific ratio of fluid to cells. Any cultured meat facility, real or imagined, will likely need to operate this way: with a graduated series of ever-larger reactors, like a sequence of Russian dolls.

So, we’re talking lots of machinery, buildings, manpower…

Doesn’t sound like a good climate saving solution, does it?

Not to mention that the whole process is kind of distasteful. At another point in the article it talked about how they could use the lowest quality grains to “feed” this “meat.”

Goes to show you, with  good marketing people will buy anything.

Man playing God never turns out well.