Lab-grown meat is proving to be a grotesque misadventure Story by Andrew Orlowski

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Once again a really bad idea meets really stupid money and the rest is history.  On the face of it, this was folly top to bottom but had the market muscle to be forced into the global market.  Whoever funded this is now wearing it and looking for a government bailout.

Every square foot of soil on earth needs a cow to stimulate it and improve its production.  Mankind id wed to animal husbandry and a massive supply of meat.

Our proper population limit will be determined our animal husbandry because those animals off set soil mining.

Lab-grown meat is proving to be a grotesque misadventure

Story by Andrew Orlowski

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/smallbusiness/ar-AA1semlV

Lab-grown meat involves extracting cells derived from animal fetuses - Liudmila Chernetska/iStockphoto

Your tasty, wholesome steak is safe for now: the lab-grown meat revolution looks like it’s over.

“It’s going to go down as one of the biggest failures in food history. Business schools will be presenting lessons on lab-grown meat,” says Julian Mellentin, a food consultant whose company has advised alternative protein companies – and told them not to do it.

But in what may be the most shameless pivot that a startup sector has ever made, it now wants you and me, the taxpayers, to bail them out of their folly. And guess what: the Government is sympathetic.

Since the first lab-grown burger was demonstrated more than a decade ago, billions of pounds have been thrown at the technology. It involves extracting cells derived from animal fetuses and cultivating the cells in sterile bioreactors, a process that takes a lot of energy and expense. The resulting slurry is then stretched and shaped to resemble animal tissue, although the backers – who include Bill Gates and Richard Branson – understandably prefer the euphemism “cultivated meat”.

We were told that this innovation would transform how we eat and farm – but this month, leading industry figures admitted the game was all but up. Which is where you come in.

It's not currently sold in the US Pennsylvania lawmaker proposed

“There’s a valley of death we’re not going to cross as an industry without a massive infusion of public investment,” admitted an executive at one cultivated meat company, Mosa Meat, the website AgFunderNews reported. The chief executive of Impossible Foods, which only creates plant-based ersatz meat products, acknowledged that the political mood has changed for everyone. Food security and competitiveness are now back on the agenda, he said. The alternative proteins bubble has burst.

In reality, it never stood a chance. The economics were always stacked against meat bioreactors. The process requires pharmaceutical industry-level lab conditions, very expensive nutrients – which amount to about two thirds of the cost – specialised labour and long timescales. Optimistically, producers would be doing well to hit $63 (£48) per kilo wholesale as a break-even price, one study found. That made the output not remotely competitive with premium meat products.

SCiFi Foods, backed by the band Coldplay and Andreessen Horowitz, closed down this year. Israel’s Aleph Farms has laid off 30pc of its staff. Upside Foods cancelled its plans for its first production bioreactor.

But the real reason is not so much economics as it is lack of demand, expressed in the form of public disgust. Our attitudes to food have been shaped by psychology, culture, family and tradition. Only weirdos are impressed by cells from a bioreactor.

“Even the test marketing has stopped, because nobody wanted the product – it’s just too weird. People are very reluctant to put a technology into their bodies,” thinks Mr Mellentin.

“The only markets that it can aim for now are as a high-end product – almost as a novelty – on the coasts of the United States, and possibly Singapore and London.”

One by one the justifications for lab-grown meat have fallen away. The claim that the process reduced CO2 emissions over conventional livestock farming has been comprehensively demolished: one estimate is that it increases emissions by between four times and 25 times as much as reared meat. The animal, of course, can perform its own exercise by itself, for free, while the nutrients it requires are either free or cheap. It also enhances the land on which it grazes.

The argument that lab-grown meat is more humane is rather stronger – the fetus from which the cells are extracted is going to die anyway. But the answer to that is not a new Frankenfood: but more humane farming.

Conspiracy theorists have clumped together alternative proteins, such as insects as ingredients and bioreactor cells, as part of a darker plot to attack conventional farming. The meme “I will not eat the bugs” is popular. Activists have called for taxes on conventional meat products. But it doesn’t require a sinister masterplan to see that our farmers and our food chains are undervalued and under assault from an aggressive administrative state.

In fact, no conspiracy is required to explain this giant folly: just a lot of naivety and poor judgement. During the decade-era of low interest rates, far too much money was chasing too few good ideas. Wild experiments were being advanced and funded by high net worth individuals, including Bill Gates and Richard Branson. The consultant class obsequiously told them it was a fantastic idea. And the social science departments at universities then jumped into action.

There is now a bewildering array of academic papers on bioreactor meat, ranging from how to nudge the public into accepting fake meat, to novel methods and nutrients (food technology). Meanwhile Generation Z is returning to real meat again, on health grounds.

But perhaps someone should break the news to ministers. Last week the Government gave itself a pat on the back after singling out lab-grown meat as it launched its Regulatory Innovation Office, one of a dozen new quangos. It was “game changing tech”, apparently.

Taxpayers may be sympathetic to helping out strategic industries that keep our nation safe, such as the production of high-quality steel for our reactors and submarines. But I doubt they will want to rescue Silicon Valley’s VC class from one its most grotesque misadventures.