Lab meat is $1.8 trillion dollar bullshit
Just because you can do something amazing doesn't mean you can do it cheap.
Lab-grown meat isn’t a scam, it’s not a lie, but it is likely to be a heaping mound of bullshit. When someone lies, they intentionally share something they know to be untrue. Bullshit, however, can simply be the result of someone not entirely knowing what they’re talking about; they think they have more or less enough solid information to extrapolate from but haven’t taken the time to fully investigate the big picture. This isn’t to say these people don’t have the ability to see the big picture at all. Actually, if you’re looking for a place that has plenty of really smart people, a lab-grown meat company is a good place to start.
You might be thinking: Where do you get off saying Lab meat is bullshit? We have it now. Eat Just’s lab-grown chicken nuggets are literally for sale in Singapore.
However, CEO of Eat Just, Josh Tetrick, admits that a single nugget costs $50 to produce. Nuggets aren’t entirely chicken either - they’ve got plenty of breading and vegetable oil. If we rely on Kyla Scanlon’s back-of-the-napkin calculations on the average amount of actual meat in a chicken nugget, we get about 6.4g of chicken meat in a McDonald’s nugget. Let’s be extra generous and assume each Eat Just nugget has 10g of lab chicken in it. That means on a kilogram basis, 1 kilogram of chicken meat costs $5000 (or $2272 a pound). By comparison, the wholesale price of trimmed chicken meat in the US is $3.11 a pound.(S)
Also let me point out at first that they are not producing chicken breast. What comes out of their labs and bioreactors is something called “cell-slurry” - a watery mash. Which, of course, is why they sell chicken nuggets rather than chicken parmesan.
So, yes. Lab-grown “meat” exists now, but thanks to Dr. David Humbird’s extensive analysis of the technical challenges of scaling lab meat and Joe Fassler’s in-depth reporting on Humbird’s assertions as well as many other experts, it’s finally being accepted that lab meat will likely never achieve what its proponents claim it will. Namely, it won’t significantly reduce the environmental burden of animal foods, nor will it significantly reduce the amount of animal suffering that needs to take place in the world to sustain humans. For that to happen, people would need to eat enough lab-grown meat that the amount of actual meat eaten is significantly reduced. That’s a lot of lab meat. We’re talking billions of pounds a year.
R. Vergeer, P. Sinke and I. Odegard of CE Delft published in 2021 an extra optimistic assessment of the viability of scaling up lab-grown meat. They envisioned in that report a glorious state-of-the-art $450 million meat growing facility capable of producing 22 million pounds of cultured meat a year. Of course no facility on this scale has ever been built. It would contain 130 bioreactors with a 10,000 liter capacity and 4,300 bioreactors with a 2,000 liter capacity.
22 million pounds of lab meat a year sounds amazing, but it is fantastically small when you consider that 100 billion pounds of meat are produced in the U.S. every year. Joe Fassler points out that this high-tec $450 million facility would take over a whopping .022% of the U.S. meat market. To make lab meat even 10% of the world’s meat supply would require at least 4000 facilities like GFI envisions, costing a minimum of $1.8 trillion. By the way, that’s just the price for the facility. By the way, each facility is expected to have 200 staff with an average salary of $100,000 meaning employee costs of these 4000 facilities would be $80 billion dollars every year. They also project maintenance costs to be about 5% of the base equipment costs so you can add another $37.3 billion per year. This of course isn’t near the full yearly operating costs.
The US sustainable food start-up Eat Just has struck a deal to build massive bioreactors with the goal of producing tens of millions of pounds of lab-grown meat a year.
The technological and biological barriers to replicating meat at scale are so high that lab-grown meat will likely never be sold at a price anywhere close to conventional meat’s. The best case scenario is that lab-grown meat will be a premium product that a very small number of upper-class people will buy sometimes, and it won’t be as nutritious or even as tasty as real meat. It’s like saying electric airplanes will save the world but the reality ends up being that only the rich can afford to use them so 99.5% of conventional airplanes are still up in the air.
The pharmaceutical industry is a reasonable example of the kind of bioreactor technology that is needed for lab grown meat. Pharma uses bioreactors to get cells to create all kinds of biologically active compounds for them. Lab meat companies get cells to produce… more cells for us to eat. But if we’re going to be making “meat” at scale with bioreactors, we would need 11-22x the entire pharmaceutical industry’s current bioreactor capacity just to replace 0.5% of global meat demand.
Let’s take a look at why Moore’s law isn’t coming to the rescue…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Joseph Everett’s Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.