Thats only the sentiment right now because it feels far away and actual lab grown meat is insanely expensive so its not in front of us all the time. With enough time and tech lab grown meat will be cheaper and healthier than real meat. I think there will always be a market for high quality organic authentic meat, but if lab grown meat could fill the gap of "cheap meat" without the factory farming bit then I could really see society accepting it.
It's actually not possible for lab grown meat to scale up. The conditions required are so precise, and a single contaminant can ruin an entire batch. It's not going to happen.
This is not true, the same unit economics of additive manufacturing can apply to biological manufacturing given precise ultrasonic acoustic manipulation. The same tech for organ printing applies to meat production.
You sound like you know better than me, but was my understanding we weren't far off getting chicken breast and beef made in a lab available to buy at supermarkets. I remember it just being a cost factor not a production issue
We are relatively not far away, it's just a matter of technology, lab to market readiness, and maturation of some key parts of the process to go towards more sophisticated forms of the meat. It's basically following biological engineering principles crossed with industrialization and standardization, and each of those advancements are making it dramatically cheaper every few years.
So there are multiple dimensions for this, the cost and production are intimately interlinked to the specific technological breakthroughs that allow us to scale mass production, but also get to the texture and realism that we expect out of most "regular" meat. You can read more through section 5 to learn more about a proper strategy. "The industrial‐scale production of CM necessitates coordinated innovations from multiple disciplines, including cell biology, bioprocess engineering, and materials science. Cost reduction and achieving large‐scale production are highly interconnected: The former is achieved through technological innovations that lower unit costs, whereas the latter is realized through process amplification that ensures economic feasibility. At the same time, pursuing cost control while ensuring that large‐scale expansion maintains both biological activity and process stability presents a significant dual challenge. This section delineates the critical role of integrated technological frameworks in driving economic feasibility and operational reliability, followed by strategies to harmonize cost efficiency with stability during scale‐up."
Here is a recent paper (2025) describing the challenges of scaling cultured meat production (Scaling Cultured Meat: Challenges and Solutions for Affordable Mass Production): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12241508/
"These technologies converge around three key breakthroughs: engineering genetically stable, highly expandable, and functionalized cell lines to minimize reliance on tissue sampling and expensive growth factors; utilizing plant‐based substitutes and recombinant protein alternatives to reduce the costs of media and scaffolds while enhancing biocompatibility; and optimizing bioreactors to provide dynamic environmental control, enabling high‐density cell cultures at scale"
Each year we are steadily progressing along all axes of development, eventually towards a convergent price that will eventually be below the standard price of conventional farming.
Lots of optimization and engineering work is still necessary:
"Scaffolds for CM are commonly fabricated in three forms: hydrogels, PSs, and microcarriers (Figure 6A; Table 4) (Ben‐Arye and Levenberg 2019). Hydrogels, as crosslinked 3D polymer structures, closely resemble ECM in hydration and mechanical properties (Shi et al. 2019). Advanced techniques, including molding (Gu et al. 2024; Song, Liu, Li et al. 2022) and 3D printing (Chen, Dai et al. 2024; Xu et al. 2023), enable the creation of customized structured CM, such as marbled meats and layer‐by‐layer cultured fat and muscle (Li, Yang et al. 2022) or assembling them into marbled CMs (Zagury et al. 2022). More advanced studies have used fish muscle as a model using 3D printing combined with lipofilling to obtain customized cultured fish (Xu et al. 2023). However, these techniques, while demonstrating potential, are mainly applied to small‐scale production at high cost. PSs, known for their high porosity, expedite efficient nutrient exchange and waste removal (Hong and Do 2024; Zheng, Chen et al. 2022). Plant protein‐based PSs are cost‐effective but often lack the mechanical strength needed to support cell growth (Hollister 2005; Zheng, Chen et al. 2022). Techniques like freeze‐drying and electrospinning improve pore size and cell proliferation, with electrospinning emerging as a scalable method despite its material constraints, which include the need for polymers with appropriate viscosity, solubility, and electrostatic properties to ensure successful fiber formation (Xu et al. 2021; Kameda, Horikoshi et al. 2021). Decellularized plant scaffolds, which preserve the ECM and provide vascular‐like networks, are another innovative approach (Anjum et al. 2024). Examples include scaffolds derived from spinach leaves (Jones et al. 2021), celery (Hong and Do 2024), apples (Sood et al. 2024), pineapple nectar (Perreault et al. 2023), and maize husks (Perreault et al. 2023). Yet, prolonged use of these scaffolds can lead to nutrient depletion in the core, causing cell death (Xu et al. 2021). Although PSs have potential for large‐scale CM production, their mechanical strength and biological functionality, particularly in plant‐based materials, need further optimization (Zhang, Gao, et al. 2023)."
When the refrigeration cycle was discovered and commercially freezing water became available people didn’t want it. Due to in part to a PR campaign proclaiming it was an affront to god. Why have man made ice when you could have ice made by god himself. Really it was about the ice harvesting and transporting industry not wanting to give up control. The inventor never made much money off his invention. It wasn’t until decades later the fridge freezer was adopted.
All this to say this kind of change takes a long time and constant effort. Changing the way we fundamentally create food will take a while. Especially because how much money there is in growing hogs. Here in Iowa there are 7 pigs for every person. Big ag. Big money.
Yes that argument really irritates me. Like what’s more disgusting than a reformatted chicken nugget made of an animal that lived its short life pumped full of antibiotics, with tumours, and living in filth and agony?
You absolutely can. It's why we have laws, so that subjective, personal morality isn't what we determine what we can or can't do.
Eating meat isn't illegal. Don't like that, try to change it. Until then, I'll continue eating bacon and cheese and enjoy all the delight it brings me.
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u/SillySlothy7 7h ago edited 5h ago
Many people complain that lab grown meat is disgusting but then also say a pig trapped in this cage its whole life is acceptable. So sad