Cell-cultured meat industry veteran (and dropout) here. If Singaporean companies are able to make a viable business out of cell-cultured meat, that would be fantastic, and a boon to the world. Some skepticism is warranted, though. It's very difficult to do this at scale, and that's regardless of unit price. Cultivating the meat that sells at a mass-market price is the real challenge and one I wouldn't bet on anytime soon, not even by 2030. The technical challenges are too many to list here, some of which are not public knowledge. Besides, the once-touted environmental advantages have turned out to be marginal at best.
One way this business might make sense would be to sell boutique cell-cultured "specialty" meats, like scallops, veal, and wooly mammoth (yes, it's been seriously considered). They're not nearly as price-sensitive, and the scale is smaller. Here's hoping we can ease the burden on endangered populations and mitigate the inherent cruelty of some of those industries with cell-cultured alternatives.
Surprisingly France and the UK are high up there, despite being geographically distant industrialized countries (e.g., not primarily based on agriculture). I wonder if this is because this is showing dollar value imports and these places export high cost food products? ... is it just champagne from France?
1) It's a small island, but it's also a major trading port. Which means its whole economy is already geared towards importing food from neighboring countries.
2) On the other hand: no domestic industry to disrupt! No domestic farming groups lobbying against meat substitutes, which may push research/distribution furhter along.
They're also big on future-proofing and environmental awareness in general as they have a very long term stable government that looks 10-100 years ahead.
At what point does the high-effort labmeat become more economical for Singapore than importing meat? I suspect this is the nontrivial bit of the equation, massive quantities of imports are already inbound every single day.
There may be some aspect of geopolitical independence here as well, if they're dependent on imports for luxury foods (like meat) then they're more exposed to higher prices and external supply issues (which might be health related, scarcity, or some kind of politically caused scarcity).
I must respectfully disagree. Geopolitical independence is fundamentally less of a concern for luxury goods. You not being able to get a fancy steak is not a national security threat.
Meat is actually a "superfood" that gives you both energy and the building blocks your body needs to keep working. We don't need it in developped countries but in times of trouble when importations might be impossible, meat is not going to be a luxury.
In the Sinosphere food of Chinese origin can be viewed with suspicion due to the known environmental degradation of Chinese farmland, as well as the many food adulteration scandals.
Malaysia makes a lot of sense; there is a lot of cuisine overlap, it is right next door, and Singapore actually started its modern life by getting kicked out of Malaysia. (That whole saga is interesting; as far as I know Singapore may be the rare example of a country unwillingly becoming independent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_in_Malaysia)
Given we are talking about meat I thought your linked plot looked weird (Australia was way too small). Then I realised that you have to select 'Animal' rather than 'Food Products' to see just meat imports, with the expected suspects being there (Aus, NZ, Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia).
I'd pay some pretty silly amounts of money to eat reasonably accurate replicas of otherwise unobtainable meats. I doubt I'm the only one. I feel like East Asia alone could easily fuel such an industry.
A few years back I saw a great article that listed out some fairly reasonable criticisms of Cell-cultured meats. Wasn't one of those "but think of the farmers!" type things. More a list of the hurdles to over come.
The one thing it raised was that cultured meats do not have any sort of immune system. Thus if they are not produced in, what amounts to, TSMC level sterile environments there is the potential of entire batches being rendered useless as bacteria have a feast. There was also a lot of issue with scale, things I am sure you are aware of.
For specialty meats, yeah it makes sense.
But for pure scale I am a bit more hopeful on things like Precision Fermentation of yeasts as being a much more viable meat alternative. Turns out things like Quorn were way ahead of there time in that sense.
This is exactly right. I saw enormous batches turn to bacterial sludge on a regular basis, which is exactly what you’d expect even in very clean environments. The fundamental problem is that bacteria are specifically evolved to infiltrate and infect; and, they multiply orders of magnitude faster than vertebrate muscle cells.
> The technical challenges are too many to list here, some of which are not public knowledge
I'd love to know the major ones, or whatever you can share.
I'm much more optimistic about lab grown meat than most people. In fact I would love to invest in some lab grown meat companies. The more I know the better.
Idk. I would love to taste real mammoth. But with the lab grown “mammoth” i feel there is just too many knobs they can tweak, and without a reference who knows how authentic it would be. Basically the company making it would be strongly incentivised to squeeze some strange yet acceptable flavour profile. You don’t want everyone to think it tastes too much like a cow, because how do you justify the price point then. But you also don’t want it to taste so gamey or weird that people refuse it. Both would be financial ruin for the company. So instead of getting how a real mammoth tasted you would get some taste balanced to feel exotic yet acceptable.
I bet the taste would depend more on the tastes of the team making it than the actual flavour profile of a mamoth.
You would win that bet. I can tell you that chicken meat coming out of a bioreactor tastes nothing like chicken meat from a chicken - and in fact it’s revolting. There are several additional steps needed in order to make it palatable.
The way I was thinking about it is that how meat tastes depends very much on the excretion system of the animal removing waste products from the tissues. And those functions (the lymphatic system, the circulation, the kidneys, the bowels, the lungs) are not present in the lab grown meat tissue. We are obviously providing those functions artificially but I wouldn't be surprised if these artificial attempts are "worse" than the real deal at their job. After all the real chickens spent millions of years co-evolving these support functions with their tissues.
Plus what the tissue is fed! Some say they can taste if the cow was fed corn vs grass. Whatever the lab grown meat is fed must be even bigger difference from the original.
> There are several additional steps needed in order to make it palatable.
Makes sense. I wasn't even thinking about those, just the growing conditions. But of corse! And I bet while these were developed there was a ton of "prepare, taste, spit it out in disgust, adjust" cycles. With extant animals in theory at least you can do it scientifically by having blind taste tests comparing the real meat with the lab grown one. With mammoth, or anything else extinct, we would be guessing and making things up even more.
From that point of view, you could just have your flavor scientists whip up some MSG and garlic and make "Mammoth In A Biskit," zero actual mammoth required.
To think no one in history has ever tasted mammoth burger—milled flour bread buns wouldn't have coexisted with Neolithic mammoth hunters, that was an expensive specialization of the agriculture era.
(Or perhaps Neolithic people would pity us and our culinary traditions—the bland, meaningless ennui of takeout fast-food. The true enjoyment of mammoth steak, we shall never know, is what it tastes when you've chased it down yourself for three days on foot).
Maybe this is more of a philosophical question, but to me “lab-grown mammoth muscular tissue” is not “mammoth meat” if it hasn’t lived a mammoth’s life. I doubt it would taste the same as the real deal. Of course it’s as close is we’re going to get, most likely.
Lab grown human flesh would remove the health risks around cannibalism but I assume the taboo would remain. Otherwise I'm imagining tasting menus of an extreme variety of creatures extinct, endangered or just previously hard to fit into the supply chain.
I’m now imagining the lab grown meat companies driving exotic animals to extinction so that they could corner the market on their meat and drive the prices up.
i was reading an interview once & the researcher, if i ain't mistaken, was excited more about the new possibilities of vegetal cultures than animal; do we have any movement towards that already or it's still stuck @ "not enough market"?
Definitely there are some exciting advances in vegetal protein, as well as fungal protein. It’s still difficult, but (in my opinion) the difficulty there is the inertia of consumer tastes, and the food distribution business. They’re not trying to fight things like thermodynamics and cellular biology, which are far more formidable opponents.
Two examples of non-meat protein advances: fungal-derived cheeses, and protein extracted from duckweed.
Singapore is a follower. Whatever they're in to happened elsewhere 2 years before.
More broadly, it's not really about cell-cultured meat. It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever which can be ingratiated in to the food supply chain anywhere. The huge success in culturally normalizing the consumption of 'beef balls' and similar '<highly processed, derivative, nominal protein identity> balls' in markets like Thailand to my critical eye largely stem from the beef ball factories of Shantou in Guangdong. Make no mistake: those people are making bank selling total bunk for real bucks.
Poverty will be the driver.
Economically, it's hard to pass up plants. They've literally evolved over millions of years to produce the goods using almost nothing in resource terms. Somehow the world just needs to learn to love Indian food and stop expecting protein and lipid dense meals.
You're not wrong about the economics. Access to large amounts of high-quality protein (regardless of whether it's plant or animal derived) is increasingly going to divide the rich and poor. We can easily grow enough crops to provide everyone with enough calories (distribution problems aside), but people can't maximize performance and healthspan eating mostly grains and starches.
Sure but most people aren't in to resistance training. They're in to high fructose corn syrup, processed foods, and sedentary lifestyles. I wondered which product generates higher returns: protein powders or statins? Actually according to Google the former is USD$28B and the latter is only USD$20B at the moment. I'd expect the latter to grow and the former to shrink.
The corn syrup thing is a US-only thing, isn't it?
The rest of the world seems to use sugar from beets/sugar cane/coconuts?
Correct me if I'm wrong, I base the above statements on a rant by an American coworker about how the corn lobby managed to somehow force American food producers to exclusively use relatively high calory corn syrup as a sweetener as opposed to much lower calory sweeteners.
The short version is it's because of steep subsidies on corn as a crop. We have tons of the shit, and artificially cheap at that. It goes into foods as itself, foods as corn syrup, corn flour, and a substantial amount is converted to ethanol for fuel.
Corn syrup is kind of a bogeyman in some circles because it contains a slightly higher fraction of fructose than sugar produced from beets or sugar cane. There might be a little something to that as fructose is metabolized through a different pathway than glucose and there is some correlation at the country level between consumption and diabetes rates. But with sugar it's really more the quantity that matters rather than the composition.
Were you attempting to post a different link? That study points a pretty strong negative correlation with corn syrup.
...Diabetes prevalence was 20% higher in countries with higher availability of HFCS compared to countries with low availability, and these differences were retained or strengthened after adjusting for country-level estimates of body mass index (BMI), population and gross domestic product (adjusted diabetes prevalence=8.0 vs. 6.7%, p=0.03; fasting plasma glucose=5.34 vs. 5.22 mmol/L, p=0.03) despite similarities in obesity and total sugar and calorie availability. These results suggest that countries with higher availability of HFCS have a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes independent of obesity.
Not just statins but diet drugs like wegovy. I suspect that people's addiction to corn syrup will be solved medically, not with willpower or lifestyle changes.
I fear that people will eat less corn syrup but only because they're eating less overall. I'd love to see people put the money they save into higher quality food, but history suggests otherwise.
The corn syrup based foods are cheap, tasty, and really easy to eat. It's too bad they have no nutrients besides calories.
> Singapore is a follower. Whatever they're in to happened elsewhere 2 years before.
> [...]
> It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever
Personally I follow fermentation based (bacteria based) proteins with interest, potentially they can have an even smaller footprint than plant based protein.
Like Solein ( https://solarfoods.com/solein/ ), which has now been accepted as safe for human consumption in one country: Singapore.
potentially they can have an even smaller footprint than plant based protein.
Maybe one day - the potential of fungi is amazing. It's a whole world that is fundamental to ecology and comparatively poorly understood or mapped. However, I remain skeptical at present once you factor in one or both of the lab costs (steel vats, process control, power consumption, thermal systems, and lab employees) and the raw inputs (fermentation doesn't happen on thin air).
By the time you've grown the raw input, why not just grow a food crop?
I feel virtue-signalling regulatory moves are meaningless. Case in point: many markets are totally unregulated, by your logic they're ahead of the curve. I don't disagree.
I don’t think so. A soy plant has tons of evolutionary baggage tied to its protein synthesis. It has to reproduce, out compete other life for resources, be hardy enough to survive both pests and pesticides, and it evolved in a resource constrained environment.
For life generating protein is a byproduct of other goals. It seems possible that we can do better.
It's a bacterium in this case, not a fungus. It can metabolize hydrogen and use CO2 to build the proteins. They electrolyze water using solar power to create the hydrogen, so it sort of does happen on thin air, but of course some minerals need to be added as well. The product is basically a powder consisting of dried bacteria.
Which is why water desalination tech is one of their major exports. They mastered the technology out of survival need (Malaysia constantly threatening to cut off water supply) and are exporting it now.
By your standards, most of the world outside the US does not innovate, which makes sense since if they did, the tech would be bought up by a US company anyways
No, not really. There are some unique facets to Singaporean culture that heavily discourage innovation. This isn't the case for most of the rest of the world.
One way this business might make sense would be to sell boutique cell-cultured "specialty" meats, like scallops, veal, and wooly mammoth (yes, it's been seriously considered). They're not nearly as price-sensitive, and the scale is smaller. Here's hoping we can ease the burden on endangered populations and mitigate the inherent cruelty of some of those industries with cell-cultured alternatives.