Thursday, December 03, 2020

Dubious about lab grown chicken

The Guardian has a headline:

No-kill, lab-grown meat to go on sale for first time 

but when you read the details, it sounds more like PR spin than anything else:

The cells for Eat Just’s product are grown in a 1,200-litre bioreactor and then combined with plant-based ingredients. Initial availability would be limited, the company said, and the bites would be sold in a restaurant in Singapore. The product would be significantly more expensive than conventional chicken until production was scaled up, but Eat Just said it would ultimately be cheaper.

The cells used to start the process came from a cell bank and did not require the slaughter of a chicken because cells can be taken from biopsies of live animals. The nutrients supplied to the growing cells were all from plants.

The growth medium for the Singapore production line includes foetal bovine serum, which is extracted from foetal blood, but this is largely removed before consumption. A plant-based serum would be used in the next production line, the company said, but was not available when the Singapore approval process began two years ago.

What I would like to know is:

*  how many chicken cells per piece?

*  how much could they be contributing to the taste?  [Perhaps need a blind test between a bit of their chicken made with plant filler alone, compared to a piece with the chicken cells thrown in.]

*  sounds like they certainly can't be contributing to texture. 

* is using "plant medium" to grow cells really been proved as viable?

I remain deeply skeptical about the benefits (both for the individual consumer and on the bigger question of whether it will ever reduce the number of animals raised and eaten) of this whole idea.  

I would like science journalists to show more skepticism on the matter - they seem too ready to just repeat PR releases.

3 comments:

GMB said...

Don't go near this rubbish. We just have to be much nicer to our chickens. And some farmers are very good to their chickens but its rare.. The chickens have to be integrated fully into a wider ecology. The greater tragedy is not the murder of the chicken. The worse tragedy is not giving that chicken a healthy happy life.

The real slaughter is necessitated by this monoculture and laboratory combination. To grow a single crop in a single field is a violation of all laws of nature and by its very nature requires constant killing and poisoning. Monoculture is the great crime against nature. Not killing animals. Although it is true we have to do this latter thing a lot better than we are doing.

Part of being nicer to animals is having a different set of living arrangements, which emphasise built up small towns surrounded by permaculture farms, and avoiding these large kill centres. Large industrial animal kill centres are a horrifying thing in my view. My Dad taking a chook and suddenly chopping its head off when I was about five years old. To me thats not such a big deal. But loading all the yearlings onto a truck and taking them all to the meatworks to be killed ..... We have got to care a bit more about the horror of this.

GMB said...

Its not a serious logistical model this lab chicken either. Because the laboratory is always going to be a high maintenance arrangement that requires all these logistical problems with inputs going back and forth from the farm to the lab. It makes no sense. Whereas the chicken, properly used as part of a wider ecology, becomes one part in an enterprise where the sum of it all is greater than the parts. I'm struggling to find the usual phrased.

So for example if you have the chickens following behind the flerd ... at 3-5 days delay, and the trainee is covering the cowshit with grain, then the chickens will come in, eat all the maggots, eat the grain, spread out the manure, eat animal protein, green stuff, and get a lot of sun every day, and their eggs will thereby contain huge amounts of vitamin D and K2 in the yolks. Then if you have a particularly sad piece of ground you drag the chook shelter over it and they will leave the phosphate that the sad piece of ground will become the most fertile piece of ground.

The lab and monoculture debacle offers nothing of this. There is just this simplistic and wrong energy paradigm that they are working off. Its unbelievable the crudeness of the thinking here. In this thinking you have only net primary production. So that any animal involvement means lost joules. So we humans have to eat the first thing that grows out of the ground, according to this ignorance of nature. Fucking unbelievable that people who think they are educated fall for such crude thinking.

The Greatest Australian; Bill Mollison, struggled against this net primary production based stupidity all his life.

GMB said...

Thanks Steve. Least I get some small part of my message out. Maybe thats part of why we are being treated like animals now. We didn't have the right to be treated like humans because we didn't have the conscience to treat animals right.

But if you are blocking me maybe Sinclair has an obligation, AS A NEW IMMIGRANT, to let more of my messages through. He is a new immigrant blocking me. Thats kind of perverse. Then one time when questioned about it he said I could comment here (meaning here on your blog). Well now though I'm nearly always right (I was wrong to be a neocon) ... I can't comment here often either.

Sinclair is testing my patience with his intransigence and bloody mindedness. And I perceive racism here also. If Sinclair is putting the gargoyle community ahead of normal Australians thats a big issue for me. Big fucking issue. I am holding off giving him a hard time because of what I perceive to be some good and courageous works.

But he's taking too long to come around.