Lab meat ain't happening

This great longform piece explains why commercial lab meat, cultured meat, whatever term you use, is NOT coming to your dinner plate at an affordable price by 2030 and probably by 2050.

I had long been somewhat skeptical of energy costs. Related to that, I've been skeptical of environmental benefits, especially climate change ones, assuming the electricity for this wouldn't all be renewable by any means. 

This story doesn't focus on that.

Instead, it looks at the processing sterility issue, which was No. 2 on my skepticism list.

To explain? To grow lab meat, you've got to have a clean room. As in, not just generically clean, but something on the approximately level of cleanness as a computer chip manufacturing clean room.

Just one problem. Computer chips are light and small.

Sides of beef are not.

Joe Fassler's take is that this not only is VERY likely not "scalable" to the size needed for economies of scale to cause major price drops, but that it pretty much may not be that scalable period.

All it takes is one scare of hamburgers being contaminated with lab e coli, even though this happens all the time in the regular hamburger sales world, to sink it, right?

As for the economies of scale issue, look at how much more "fake meat" costs than the real thing, and also note how it's limited still to just burgers and sausage at this time.

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So, the "Impossible Burger" and siblings?

No, not so much.

First, for various reasons, they're still a lot more pricey than meat, though not so much to be not at all in the commercial ballpark.

Second, it's LESS HEALTHY. Yes, you read that right. Impossible itself has as much saturated fat as beef and much more sodium. That offsets the advantage of no cholesterol. Plus, it IS a processed food, and per that link, at least as of two years ago, and contra the PR fellating of Genetic Literacy Project, not all ingredients had been independently tested.

Third, and also per that piece, the energy inputs for faked meat, while not nearly as high as lab meat, could well be higher than for actual beef, and certainly higher than, for say, grass-fed beef.

The real answer?

Per that old commercial: "Eat less beef."

You don't have to be a vegetarian. But, if everybody in the US cut their beef and pork eating by one half, poultry by one third, and fish stayed even so as not to overfish, that would be a huge change right there, and one a lot less pricey than faked meat, let alone lab meat.

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Update, Oct. 21: The LA Times tries to pretend lab meat is just around the corner, or just around the corner by 2030. Core Brown needs to read what I read.