Cultured meat is all bullshit marketing until supermarkets at least sell simple tofu for less than chicken. It's just mashed-up beans, loads of water and a teaspoon of rock powder!
The Chinese supermarkets can do it, but in normal supermarkets, everything meat-free is positioned as a luxury rich-people thing. Organic this, handmade that, marinated the other. Hovering at £6 or £8 a kilo. Meanwhile the shelves next to it are groaning under endless kilos of chicken from £2.50 (1kg of legs at Tesco, was £2.15 until recently).
My tin-foil hat theory here is that they don't want to knock the bottom out of the meat-free market because they're hoping to replace cheap meat with expensive synthetic meat and not let on that it's a false dichotomy.
don't forget that most meat is also subsidized on many levels[1]. Cost would probably be the same or more compared to the normal supermarket price without these subsidies[2].
Absolutely, but even then it doesn't really explain why no mainstream supermarket can figure out how to offer a non-premium tofu product, products that literally exist already in the country, other than "they just don't want to".
To invoke soy's pricing in the Western world (let alone the UK) and not also acknowledge that it contains phytoestrogens is disingenuous because this affects the pricing of it due to volume sold. Aside from tofu causing me intolerable heartburn, I also wouldn't eat it because of the phytoestrogens.
Quorn vegetarian mince is cheap, no hormones, antibiotics or fat. Real low-fat meat mince is £1 more per kg than Quorn mince. No soy either, it's mycoprotein.
Do we need cultured meat when Quorn is satisfactory for most people who don't eat meat for whatever reason?
I'm not "against" anything, but I only drink water in 2023. Furthermore, beer has a far higher amount than coffee. FWIW, it's only some herbal teas that contain phytoestrogens.
A more compelling "gotcha" would have been invoking something like broccoli, which is higher again, and actually higher than natto (fermented soybeans) per 100g.
> this affects the pricing of it due to volume sold.
And yet the Chinese supermarket 1km from Tesco can sell it at £2.40/kg, and at Tesco it starts at over £6. It's clearly possible.
As for Quorn, I used to eat tons of that as I had a vegetarian parent. It's "OK", but if we're doing anecdata, it does cause digestive problems for many people. As I'm not vegetarian, I don't feel the need to use meat replacements. If I'm eating something else it's because I want to.
As far as I can tell, non-exclusive consumption of tofu is unlikely to be a major issue in terms of health effects of phytoestrogens (at least compared to what I would say are my top health risks: sedentary job, then probably occasional cured meats and overall salt intake).
> Do we need cultured meat when Quorn is satisfactory for most people who don't eat meat for whatever reason?
Exactly my original point with a substitution of a different protein source.
Not sure I would want to eat chicken that costs only £2.50 a kilo.
But again, if one ate chicken once a month, one could afford the real thing, and if most of us did the same, there would enough to go around without having to resort to industrial meat production.
90% of the Tesco chicken is that same meat. The packs with the skinned breasts cost (much) more than bone-in, skin-on legs, but they come from the same chickens.
There's a tiny (like half a chiller's worth, relative to nearly a whole aisle) amount of "nice" chicken, which is where I would intuitively expect a chicken's cost to be: about £10-15 a bird.
And this's exactly my point. People won't eat something like tofu if it costs 3 times what chicken can cost them, unless they actually want to eat tofu specifically (which I do, but I also baulk at the supermarket price, since I can get it for under half the price in a Chinese supermarket and in a bigger pack).
Which is then a vicious cycle because people won't buy it to try, and won't learn how to cook it (which can take a little experimentation if you didn't grow up with it) because why would they?
Well, in the same way that you can say "what's so hard about cooking chicken, I just fry it, seems to work just fine", then sure. But that's not what people do with chicken: they have learned how they like to cook it: curried, roasted, stewed, etc, etc. Just ask pretty much any grandmother for her roast chicken technique and it'll be a whole system!
Just whacking tofu solo into a pan and making it hot doesn't produce a result that I'd expect most people to go "yes, wow, you know, this is worth 3 times the cost of the chicken legs".
For a start, if you buy the Western supermarket stuff, it's often very spongy and you need to remove the water if you want to pan fry it. The Chinese supermarket stuff is much more homogeneous (you can make it spongy by freezing it if you want). So now you need to figure out that if you want it to go crispy, you need to press it. And maybe a cornflour dredge to make a nicer crust.
Frying directly also doesn't really work trivially with anything except extra-firm, it just turns into a scrambled mess (ok, so this one is cultural, in Chinese cooking you're generally supposed to maintain the shape). You can steam softer tofu, but then you still need to figure out how you like the sauce. You must also find a steamer big enough to fit the plate: attempting to extract tofu not on a plate from a steamer to a plate is a valuable and emotional learning experience on its own.
In general, tofu doesn't act the same way as meat: meat provides flavour to the dish, tofu absorbs flavours from the dish (and even this varies hugely between types). So if you just do a straight swap, even disregarding the mechanical differences, you will not get a very exciting result. So now you also need to adapt what you cook to fit tofu--this is often hard and you will fail if you're expecting to be able to make a roast tofu block taste like granny's roast chicken--or find new dishes that you like which use tofu.
Not to mention that for some dishes you may well need new ingredients that, as "world foods", are expensive or unavailable in normal supermarkets.
This all takes time, effort and not a little tofu to figure out. In the same way that my grandmother took a lot of chickens to hit on her signature!
Tofu is just an example. The same, broadly, goes for the other similar "alternatives" (in the Western-meat-avoider sense, they're just "food" to some): tempeh, seitan, paneer, gluten, whatever. Even fairly conventional "Western" things like halloumi and beans aren't simple drop-in replacements!
I'm saddened none of the comments here acknowledge that alternative sources of protein lead to the demise of the industrial exploitation of animals, who suffer immensely.
I support all efforts to find alternatives. The article states:
>the environmental impact of near-term ACBM (animal cell-based meat) production is likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production if a highly refined growth medium is utilized for ACBM production.
A future of affordable cultured meat is absolutely possible, humans are good enough at problem solving and environmental impact and price will go down.
Without invoking PETA, consider animal welfare before dismissing laboratory/engineered proteins as unnecessary.
Everyone who knows anything at all about agriculture knew this already. Pasture raised meat is one of the best environmental resources there is, and the largest climate threat we face by far is a direct result of the reduction of pasture raising animals. Soil is life and we have absolutely destroyed it.
Well said. I work with farmers in encouraging natural and organic farming and also in supporting sustainable practices. It would be impossible to do this viably without livestock and planned grazing.
this does not gel well with the idea of having luxuries constantly - a thing that has been more and more prevalent as time gone by. People expect it now, and not being able to eat meat is a sign of poverty (when it isn't really for a long time in history).
Those vegetarians doing just fine have usually to be much more careful about what they eat than meat-eaters, so this tells me that meat is not just an unnecessary luxury. While in the west we eat much more meat that necessary, I don't think that stopping consuming it is the right course of action.
There are alternatives to meat, like bugs, but that is not what vegetarians do or preach.
If your first alternative to meat is bugs then I’m sorry but you need to readjust your idea of what an alternative is. Until I see Bill Gates do as he preaches and chow down on a plate of live insects, me and 6 billion other people won’t even consider it.
What I will consider is something like mianjin, which is the gluten from wheat. Cheap, sustainable, protein-rich, and easily flavored to whatever food you want. Plus the leftover starches can be used to replicate other animal products like cheeses and bacon, albeit while being completely empty calories.
I don't know why you'd think they'd be live. I don't eat live chickens, fish or cows. Some people eat live oysters, I guess.
I have actually eaten insects on more than one occasion (some kind of fried cricket, I think). They weren't especially tasty, but they also weren't bad. Just a fairly unexciting snack taste-wise. I'd say "high" game or strong cheese is far, far more of an acquired taste than they were.
Crustaceans are not insects, but insects basically derive from arthropod proto-crustaceans: fundamentally a prawn and a cricket are each roughly the same distance, phylogenetically speaking, from a cow (actually they have 6 legs, not 10, and most are air-breathers, so they're closer in some ways!). Indeed, they can both trigger shellfish allergies. Maybe we're just more used to "weird sea things" being food than "weird land things".
Putting aside the obvious aversion to insect morphologies, if they're being processed into some kind of protein meal, I don't really find that any more objectionable than mechanically-recovered meat slurry, which is a major component of lots of food. Which, to be fair, I do already, generally, avoid.
I was not advocating eating bugs in place of meat (I don't like the idea either). I was saying that if for some reason we had to forfait meat, I think it would be easier for the average person to have a proper diet if it included bugs than a vegan one.
That said, I agree with you, those that advocate such a change are the last ones willing to do it (let's guess when meat will disappear from EU Parliament canteen).
Look no further than you country's dietary recommendations.
They all say something along the lines "eat mostly legumes, whole grains, leafy green vegetables and other vegetables". It probably even tells you to cut down on beef and pork. Sweden's national food agency even has advice directed at vegans saying mostly the same things as it tells meaties, but adds "try to eat an iron source with all food (beans, nuts), supplement with b12 and use enriched milk replacements".
> "eat mostly legumes, whole grains, leafy green vegetables and other vegetables". It probably even tells you to cut down on beef and pork.
Yes, as I wrote we tend to eat too much meat in the west. But cutting down on meat consumption and eating mostly vegetables doesn't mean avoiding eating meat at all.
The thing is, information on how to do it in a safe and healthy way is available, sometimes even from your national food agency.
The problem is, I think, that people do not follow the guidelines of the food agencies anyway. If you follow the guidelines but on a vegan diet, making sure to supplement b12, you won't have to do any planning. A healthy dietary pattern looks the same if you don't eat meat. People most often just have to make sure they get enough calories.
People say that, but when the Academy of nutritionist and dietetics and various government agencies says it is possible to live a healthy life on a plant based diet you know it is baloney.
It consists mostly of the things people have been telling us to eat for ages. Whole grains. Legumes. Leafy greens. Vegetables. Some vegetable oil like rapeseed or olive oil.
Supplement with b12 and drink fortified milk alternatives you will be just fine. If you are a woman and have problems with iron absorbation you should probably take an iron supplement as well.
Online it seems to be a controversy, but among people who actually study nutrition there is pretty broad agreement that a vegan diet can be fine.
The first recommendations published in Sweden were published in the 60s. They have changed very little on a macro level.
Before that people are traditional food, which usually was quite healthy if you had at least some economic means (otherwise it was a lot of rye, fish and potatoes in Sweden).
With the economic growth after the war people started deviating from healthy dietary patterns, which is why nutrition recommendations start popping up from the late 50s.
Who are we supposed to trust with nutrition if not the people that actually work with understanding the science? I do know that the USDA have quite a lot of industry influence, but that is not the case everywhere.
Most dietary recommendations look like the Mediterranean diet, which we know have very good health outcomes, with local adaptions. For a good reason.
Keep in mind that many people have ethical issues with killing animals for food. They can certainly switch to eating plants, but many won't. "fake meat" is the bridge they need to align their actions with their morals.
The Chinese supermarkets can do it, but in normal supermarkets, everything meat-free is positioned as a luxury rich-people thing. Organic this, handmade that, marinated the other. Hovering at £6 or £8 a kilo. Meanwhile the shelves next to it are groaning under endless kilos of chicken from £2.50 (1kg of legs at Tesco, was £2.15 until recently).
My tin-foil hat theory here is that they don't want to knock the bottom out of the meat-free market because they're hoping to replace cheap meat with expensive synthetic meat and not let on that it's a false dichotomy.