Lab-grown salmon hits the menu

Characterizing meat alternatives as "ultra processed" has been a propaganda coup for the meat industry, allowing for an equivocation between categorically different nutritional profiles of products like Twinkies and Pringles on the one hand, and meat alternative products which have absolutely nothing to do with refined starches, sugars, or trans fats on the other and which in fact have better cardiovascular outcomes, cancer outcomes and environmental impacts than the meats they are replacing.

They're both ultra processed in the same way that a jellyfish and a California Redwood are both carbon based life forms.

The words "good" and "very bad" indicate that the world is less important to that person than themselves. I'd be okay with a bit of personal harm if it helps against climate change.

Ultra-processed food does not have an agreed-upon definition, and is the new "junk food" with the pretense of being more scientific. Is bread and pizza ultra-processed food? Studies do not agree on their definitions, sometimes including ingredient lists, sometimes not, sometimes it is required that the product is made in small shops with love and not in large factories. The mechanism of how ultra-processed food are supposed to cause harm remains undefined.

Lab grown meat isn't necessarily ultra processed (in the sense that it should be automatically assumed to be unhealthy, of course there's a lot of processing involved). At least, I don't know enough about it to jump to that conclusion.

Beyond Meat and Impossible burgers definitely are ultra processed though.

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It's not exactly the same, but given that much of it is for coloring, I feel the comparison should be drawn that basically all farmed salmon in the US is specifically fed food containing astaxanthin(A plant based ingredient, believe it or not) to give it a more pleasing coloring.

It took a lot of digging to find which plant based ingredients, but they include color and flavor:

https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...

This is also the part that bothers me the most. I don’t think it’s gross but I wish we had a full hunk of meat you could get in a lab. I’d try it. The products with plant based ingredients are less interesting to me.

The large majority of the final product is salmon cells so I think it counts. I don't see how this is too different from fish paste products like imitation crab or chikuwa.

If it tastes good and reduces harm to salmon, I'm in.

I don't really care if it's called salmon or not, but why is that gross?

Why is it any more gross than, for example, meatloaf?

Look more closely. Here's their actual ingredients list (from https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...):

> In addition to water and cell-cultivated salmon, our saku contains fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae, soy (an allergen), potato starch, konjac (a root vegetable), beta-carotene and lycopene (natural colors), carrageenan (an extract from red seaweed), and natural flavors.

Think about why each of these things are in there:

• Fats — because the parts [tissues] of the salmon that we eat, have not just muscle cells contained in them [the part that tastes + mouthfeels + cooks like salmon], but also fat cells (adipocytes), to contribute the taste + mouthfeel + cooking properties of "fatty tissue" [which is how we expect salmon to be] vs "lean tissue". And sure, the people creating this thing could have another tank growing "salmon-derived adipocytes", with some hormone bath to trick those adipocytes into absorbing and metabolizing nutrients from the environment to grow heavy with fat... but why bother? (That actually sounds dangerous, in fact — you might end up eating big doses of fish hormones trapped in the fat.) At the micro level, a little sphere of fat is a little sphere of fat; you can use a salmon adipocyte, some other kind of adipocyte, or even just a skin of sodium alginate, and the taste and texture of the result will be identical, as long as the fat inside the bag has identical properties (glyceride chain length, mostly).

• Natural colors and flavors — weirdly enough, because salmon grown on its own wouldn't look or taste fully like salmon. The look and flavor of salmon comes not just from what the salmon itself produces via the action of its cells/proteins/DNA, but also from "impurities" — things the salmon eats, that end up depositing into the salmon's tissues over time. Like how eating shrimp makes flamingos pink. Salmon without those things is white, and missing some of the sweetness we associate with salmon. (You can even notice this in salmon meat from different conditions; wild-caught salmon usually gets more of these nutrient sources than farmed salmon, so wild-caught salmon is often a much deeper reddish-pink color than the orange of farmed salmon.)

• Starch, maybe carrageenan (and the implicit ingredient, water) — together, a simulacrum of (slightly-viscous) salmon blood. Using water alone wouldn't work; it's too thin, it'd just run out of the muscle tissue like a water from a sponge, desiccating the tissue over a span of minutes. You need some thickener to prevent that. (I suppose you could make salmon blood plasma + platelets. Might be more nutritious if you did. Not sure how you'd get it into the tissue reliably, without any kind of circulatory system in there. And it probably doesn't make much of a difference to taste or texture even if you did. But this might still be a v2.0 goal of theirs.)

• Soy and konjac (and also maybe carrageenan here) — a simulacrum of connective tissue, i.e. collagen. This is likely the matrix holding the cells in place. There's no such thing as "cells stacked directly on other cells" that actually stays together; there needs to be some non-cellular tissue matrix that the cells slot into. (Compare/contrast: "meat glue." Is a chicken nugget chicken?)

Why not actual collagen as a matrix, or maybe, say, gelatin? Why not ground-up shrimp as a colorant instead of beta carotene + lycopene? Why vegetable oils instead of animal fats? In all these cases, probably because their goal with these ingredients seems to be to only build this salmon out of plants + cells, rather than any animal byproducts. An unstated premise here seems to be that they want to design the process such that no matter how far it gets scaled up, there's no point at which it would be more economical to switch one of the ingredient sources from "make it in a bioreactor" to "get it from an animal byproduct sources", and at even further scale, "drive animal slaughter to get said byproduct as the product."

AFAICT, this is almost the closest thing you will ever be able to get to something you can call "salmon" — or maybe more specifically, "animal-harm-free salmon" — that can be created solely in a lab.

(To get any closer, you'd need to get pretty mad-science-y. You could, in theory, genetically engineer a... tree, or what-have-you, that would metabolically synthesize the salmon blood plasma, the salmon connective tissue, the salmon-prey-species tissue trace impurities, etc.; and also act as a host to a commensal salmon cell population; eventually putting all that together inside a fruit or something. Pluck and peel the fruit, and inside — salmon muscle matrix tissue, fully cellularized, with solutes. [Though probably with the tree's vascularization, rather than salmon vascularization.] We're probably 50 years from understanding genetic engineering well enough to do that; and even then, it'd probably be operationally impractical, due to salmon muscle tissue rotting at any temperature a tree would grow at. But that product would technically be "closer to salmon", I guess.)

Similar to sushi-grade salmon?

in a good way or a bad way?

The lack of an immune system is not a health and safety risk, it's a business risk. An infected batch won't get served to humans it will just die/fail and need to be thrown out. Fighting infection is one of the reasons that lab-grown meats are so expensive. I have seen reasonably convincing technical analyses which claim that it would require pretty massive technological innovations (that are not anywhere on the horizon so far) to make any lab-grown meats economically viable. That's very likely the reason for the fact that (as pointed out in another comment), this is not pure salmon, it's salmon mixed with vegetable product. That was almost definitely a cost-saving measure.

My personal guess is that the first actually economically viable lab-grown meats will be of endangered/extinct animals that the extremely wealthy will be willing to pay the exorbitant costs that it takes to create them for the novelty factor.

Can you explain why this situation is any different than regular meat? I.e. Fish immune systems don’t stop parasites from being present in the meat, flash freezing is what kills the parasites.

Don't worry, if you catch any disease you can use any antibiotic that still works after spraying farmed salmon willy-nilly for years.

Their advertising of it being like a sushi cut then makes this possibly dangerous marketing then, no?

You're describing the sterilization process that's necessary for cheese production, it's crazy intense, but it's also a known quantity that we've been successfully doing for years and years and years. Listeria is no joke. I wouldn't worry about this any more than you worry about our other food you find at the grocery store.

What? The requirements for this are nothing like what is required for sterilization of a Mars rover. NASA's goal is to not have a single iota of foreign organic material on rovers, which is obviously not even close to what is required here. The only thing you need to worry about with this stuff is whether there are any dangerous bacterium in it (e.g. salmonella), which can be readily monitored and avoided without herculean effort. And unlike real salmon, parasites and viruses won't have much opportunity to gain a foothold.

It's certainly not marketed as though it's going to be cooked,

> Our saku is sushi-grade and is perfect for dishes like sushi, crudo, and ceviche

https://www.wildtypefoods.com/our-salmon

Animal welfare can be solved with regulations and CO2 contributions is debatable.

I’m not sure about the cost savings either, at least right now it doesn’t seem feasible.

Innovation is fun but I think the best way to tackle all your points is to keep the pressure on legislation.

Maybe someday, but for now, it's very expensive, and that suggests that it's also using lots of environmental resources.

> CO2, food safety

I'm not 100% sure either of those has been proven out.

I could see CO2, but it sort of depends on how much power the bioreactor and sterilization consumes and how much methane is release. Granted, it'd be easier to capture those and easier to place these reactors in or near a grocery store, for example, for immediate delivery.

Food safety is almost certainly going to be a bigger problem. The big problem with bioreactors is they are cultivating the ideal substance for very nasty bacteria/fungus/etc to flourish in. Bioreactors do not have immune systems. That means keeping things absolutely sterile is of the utmost importance. I'm sure when the initial products are produced safety will be pristine. However, what happens when the CEOs of these companies decide to cut back? Heck, what happens when the new guy forgets to do a sterilization cycle or runs it short?

A major issue is these will be regulated by the FDA which has a history of doing a poor job of keeping food safe. I'd feel better if it were under the jurisdiction of the USDA.

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Their first additive after water and salmon cells is canola derived so any environmental or food safety claims should factor that in.

Canola is often sprayed with neonicotinoids and the oil processed with solvents like hexane.

I'd personally prefer to get my omega acids from real salmon.

I would think that much more people would share the same beliefs. Why would I want to eat lab grown salmon?

I’d rather eat non-lab grown salmon once a month or once a quarter than eating that f—— aberration.

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It's not about beliefs. It's about slippery slopes.

As we've seen with incandescent light bulbs and plastic straws, "free market" is only temporary, until the "bad" thing simply gets banned.

They're just pre-emptively banning artificial meat, to prevent real meat from being banned!