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Biotech

Singapore Becomes First Country To Approve Lab-Grown Meat (cnn.com) 78

Singapore has granted San Francisco start-up Eat Just Inc. regulatory approval to sell its laboratory-grown chicken in the city-state -- the world's first government to allow the sale of cultured meat. CNN reports: The product, created from cultured chicken cells, has been approved as an ingredient in chicken bites following Singapore Food Agency (SFA) approval, Eat Just said Tuesday. Initially, the chicken bites will debut in a Singapore restaurant, with plans for wider expansion into dining and retail establishments in the country, Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just told CNN Business. The product will be priced at parity with premium chicken, he added.

The cultured meat is created in a bioreactor -- an apparatus in which a biological reaction or change takes place -- Eat Just said. It has a high protein content and is a rich source of minerals, according to the company, which plans to sell the product under the GOOD Meat brand. For now, with manufacturing hubs in Singapore and Northern California, the company only has approval to sell the meat in Singapore, but it hopes to expand sales of cultured meat -- including cultured beef -- into the US and Western Europe, Tetrick said.

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Singapore Becomes First Country To Approve Lab-Grown Meat

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  • by spiritplumber ( 1944222 ) on Thursday December 03, 2020 @02:24AM (#60788712) Homepage
    I guess it's time to dust off that old joke... Seriously though, cruelty-free meat sounds great.
    • You're not taking into account opportunity cost [wikipedia.org]. You need to compare against the most likely alternative, not some nonexistent zero base state (where no animals are killed).

      For all the criticisms of the food animal industry, domesticated animals usually live long, healthy lives protected from disease and predation. At slaughter, they are killed swiftly in a painless manner. If you get rid of domesticated food animals, the most likely thing to happen is that the grazing land they currently occupy will
      • For whatever reason, most - nearly all - people don't care about animals inflicting harm on other animals. Maybe it's because they personally don't see themselves as agents in the suffering or something else.
      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Thursday December 03, 2020 @04:57AM (#60788944)

        domesticated animals usually live long, healthy lives

        Chickens are slaughtered at six weeks.
        Pigs are butchered at six months.
        Cattle are killed for beef at about 30 months.

        • 6 months for pigs feels like the high end. Around here, 2.5-3 months for a "luau-style" pig, and 4-5 months for butchering. Unless you're lucky enough to become a sow and grow old watching watch your litters become slaughtered.

          Any pork after 6 months old is too tough for Americans not to complain.
        • by Subm ( 79417 )

          Chickens are slaughtered at six weeks.
          Pigs are butchered at six months.
          Cattle are killed for beef at about 30 months.

          You're being generous talking about the females. The males are killed right away.

          All those people talking about "soy boys" implying soy leads to more estrogen, if they eat meat, they're getting a lot more estrogen from all those female animals and their milk.

      • by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Thursday December 03, 2020 @05:20AM (#60788998)
        Those are free-range chickens. The majority of US, and I imagine Singapore chickens are shitting on each other in a tiny cage all their lives.
      • by Misagon ( 1135 )

        Domestic food animals greatly outnumber wild animals.
        https://xkcd.com/1338/ [xkcd.com]

        Of course, most farm animals are slaughtered as soon as they have reached slaughter-weight - because that makes economic sense. Only females that produce offspring and milk or eggs get to live longer - and only as long as they can produce.
        This means that the total death rate of domestic animals greatly outweigh the death rate of wild animals.

        While livestock have been bred to be docile, they can often understand in advance that they a

      • or cities? It's decent land, and we put a lot of water on it. You can't grow that much grass w/o it.

        Also feel free to look up the conditions of a modern factory farm. I'm not a PETA fan by any means (I'm vegetarian because I don't like meat) but their lives are pretty terrible. Chickens especially. There's a reason why the mega corps that run them have gotten laws passed to make reporting on the conditions a crime (they were struck down by the courts).

        And then there's a few truly horrifying specialt
        • by ghoul ( 157158 )
          Star Trek killed people all the time. Transporters are basically killing machines - you are killed at point of departure, a new you replicated and imparted with your memories.
      • It really depends on what you consider suffering.

        Yes, if we imagine a cow grazing on a vast open ranch. Living a good life. Doing cow things. Grazing. Establishing dominance. Mating... or whatever cows like to do. Then at the end of their life, they are painlessly kill off. That doesn't sound too bad.

        If however, they are confined in small spaces, forced fed to make them fat. Denied the change to live a natural cow social life (establishing dominance, mating...)... then are painlessly killed off like an asse

        • For example if you lock up people to save them from a virus you improve their health statistics but suicides go up.
      • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        For all the criticisms of the food animal industry, domesticated animals usually live long, healthy lives protected from disease and predation

        Sheer fantasy. You seem to be implying that domesticated farm animals don't lead pitiful hellish lives in cramped conditions often very diseased unless they are stuffed full of drugs / antibiotics. Especially in the US but pretty much worldwide. Most humans can not claim to be animal lovers and then eat most meat products that haven't been very carefully sourced from

      • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        And:
        https://www.onegreenplanet.org... [onegreenplanet.org]

        I had to stop reading.

      • Admittedly I didn't watch the linked videos in their entirety, but the comments on the gruesome link are ace.
    • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Thursday December 03, 2020 @05:51AM (#60789034)

      All it does is push the overpopulation crisis and extinction of countelss species a but further to the future. Not prevent it in any way. Rather allow humans to slack off even longer, before facing that problem.

      At the cost of countless long-term hard to study food-borne illnesses (as if we didn't already have enough... it's basically 90% of all so-called "age-related" illnesses), and not to forget, shitty, mushy taste and texture.

      Just use a freaking condom, would ya? Don't be a dick, don't make more than one kid until we can afford to have two again.
      With 500 million humans, nobody needs meat factories, and we can treat animals well and eat them too.
      Unless you're one of them city-dwelling nutjobs who pops B12 in secret (they all do, no exception), and thinks feeding his cat or a lion no meat is not the same as torturing and killing it.

      • All it does is push the overpopulation crisis and extinction of countelss species a but further to the future. Not prevent it in any way. Rather allow humans to slack off even longer, before facing that problem.

        When advancing technology takes away a lefty bullshit problem, their reaction is to replace it with an even bullshittier "problem."

        Getting meat the natural way, hunting, depletes natural stocks for all significantly large human populations, so we replaced it with agriculture (Compare with fishing, our one remaining form of commercial hunting). Then you complained about the environmental cost of cattle farming. Advancing further to lab-grown meat is a pure win for both people and animals.

      • Just use a freaking condom, would ya? Don't be a dick, don't make more than one kid until we can afford to have two again.

        Statistically speaking, you don't need to tell us. You need to tell exotic cultures that we aren't allowed to tell things to.

  • Anyone tried this stuff? How does it taste? Is the texture even comparable to meat that came from critter?

    • Anyone tried this stuff? How does it taste? Is the texture even comparable to meat that came from critter?

      They're putting it in "nuggets", so... who gives a fuck? (shrug)

  • Or will it taste like puree baby food meat.

    • Worse:
      Puree baby food unless you want artificial texuring/coloring/flavoring/... that'll make you even more ill than the pure stuff, 10-20 years down the line, when it is far enough removed that the industry can argue the health problems are unrelated. (The sugar industry did that for decades, but is now starting to lose. The processed protein industry still does.)

  • by dcw3 ( 649211 ) on Thursday December 03, 2020 @05:25AM (#60789010) Journal

    Soylent Green (the movie) was set in NY in 2022, but surely the "food" had been developed years earlier :P

    • by ghoul ( 157158 )
      When people complain "Where are my flying cars and Mars colonies - Science Fiction has lied to me, I think thank god they lied about Soylent Green"
  • Structural differences result in very different effects on the body and very different health properties.

    This is to meat what a stack of sheet metal and stock metal is to a car. "But it's made of the same molecules." doesn't make it any faster on the street.

    • Huh? Different health properties like what? Your body needs esential amino acids, carbs, and some minerals. It doesn't care about "structural differences". Full synthetic is the way to go. We have to stop killing and exploiting animals for food, it's unnecessary.

      • See... this is what I mean.

        People talking, who have never even heard of secondary and tertiary protein structure. Or gut microbiome, for that matter.

        And other clueless peeple moderating him up and me as "troll"... clearly not knowing what that word actually even means, or not even caring.

        Thanks for a nice examble for why democracy aka mob rule is a bad idea. (Aaand I'm moderated flamebait by people who cannot think beyond "Must hate democracy. Must be enemy. Kill him!" --.--)

        How did you get here from the 60

    • Structural differences result in very different effects on the body and very different health properties.

      Huh? The very first thing your body does with proteins is break them down into amino acids. "Structure" be damned.

    • In its current form, lab-grown meat is nothing but the meat you eat, so it's all formed as ground meat or nuggets. Adding structure will eventually make it look like chops, steaks, and rib racks. No difference to the part you eat, though.

    • It's close enough for junk food.
    • "Structural differences result in very different effects on the body and very different health properties."

      As others said, why would structural differences have different effects on the body and different health properties ? It's still the same matter. Why do you think we chew our food? You're basically complaining about texture, which is just another way of saying "I don't want this".

  • For every man

  • by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:56AM (#60789176) Journal

    Chicken.

    Why not lamb or something delicious? Hell, why not veal, a "problematic" meat, which cries out for a solution? As this is new growth it should pass through this phase before becoming more beefy or muttony.

  • If this thing becomes common then it will be impossible to order a chicken dish because everybody will be trying to mix in a fake chicken meat to earn an extra buck. In some places, synthetic eggs are being passed for real.

  • Selling lab grown meat isn't illegal in the US as everything not outlawed is legal by default. I'm sure this is true of many other places.

  • Not only is this, "cruelty free," meat, but it will not have the occasional bones or gristle of other meats, nor the excess salt/iron/etc. found in plant-based alternatives. I wonder when this will reach us in the US... I'd like to try a bite.
    • by ghoul ( 157158 )
      "Cruelty to animals free". I am sure lots of post docs and grad students were made to work 20 hr days to develop this so not totally "Cruelty dree"
  • It worked out pretty well. Except that the cows keep knocking over the test tube racks.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I guess that this restaurant [vegnews.com] does not count.

    • by ghoul ( 157158 )
      Its a test kitchen. Israel hasnt certified lab meat for general consumption.
      • by alexo ( 9335 )

        Its a test kitchen. Israel hasnt certified lab meat for general consumption.

        If members of the general public can get a labburger by reserving a table, how is it not general consumption?
        Being a "test kitchen" in this case seems more like a question of scale than certification.

        • by ghoul ( 157158 )
          Members of the general public have received COVID vaccines since September. But you and me cant go to our doctor and get one. Because the members of general public are getting it as part of a trial. Thats why its called a trial.
          • by alexo ( 9335 )

            Members of the general public have received COVID vaccines since September. But you and me cant go to our doctor and get one. Because the members of general public are getting it as part of a trial. Thats why its called a trial.

            You and I can reserve a table at that restaurant (subject to COVID restrictions and travel arrangements).

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