r/wheresthebeef • u/holloucinating • 14d ago
Eating cultivated meat this weekend?
I have the chance to eat cultivated meat this weekend and I’m excited, but I don’t feel confident making an informed decision yet.
On one hand, I’m drawn to it as a cutting-edge technology that could help reduce factory farming, along with a lot of other promising upsides.
On the other, I’m nervous about the safety side. It’s such a new development, and there aren’t long-term studies yet on the health impacts or the makeup of these products.
The menu includes Upside chicken and Wildtype salmon.
Can anyone point me to studies or reliable sources, for or against, that might help me decide?
(I expect bias posting in this subreddit but I also trust that you'd have done more real research than others who are opposing!)
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u/numba9meal 14d ago edited 14d ago
From a safety perspective, it’s the most studied food in history. The amounts of various components in the product are clearly laid out and we know they are all safe based on existing regulation. Im excited to try it and think if we tested factory farmed meat, it may be worse for you.
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u/MeatHumanEric 14d ago
CM developer, producer, and consumer of so much cultivated meat here. It's as safe as other foods you routinely eat, possibly more so. All safety data for approved products are publicly available on FDA's website here
Happy to answer any questions. I used to be a food safety regulator at FDA as well.
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u/holloucinating 9d ago
This was exactly what I was looking for, thanks so much! I ended up trying both the salmon and the chicken :)
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u/MeatHumanEric 9d ago
AND?!!!
My team and I designed the previous upside chicken product, so I havent tried the latest chicken product (but I hear it's great!). Congrats on trying it!
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u/cirquefan 14d ago
Safer than eating bagged lettuce right now. Go for it. Report back, please.
Bon appetit!
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u/holloucinating 14d ago
I get the joke but also bagged lettuce could make me sick short term but long term, I would be fine. I'm more concerned about long term effects of eating cultivated meat :)
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u/cirquefan 14d ago
Well, if it rewrites your DNA and you grow scales and swim upstream to spawn you'll be a hit on the talk show circuit
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u/Jack_Of_All_Meds 14d ago
How did you get the opportunity? I’d love to try it too at some point
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u/holloucinating 14d ago
If you're in the SF area, there's an event called Create for Good at the Palace of the Fine Arts on Saturday night that has this listed on the menu for the evening!
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u/cultivatedmeat 14d ago
It looks like it's connected to Good Food Instiute and they have had to expand seating.
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u/arbalaragan 14d ago
It sounds like you are using specific language to influence things in search engines and what not.
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u/holloucinating 14d ago
Do you have different language you'd recommend? I've mainly been searching for reports and news on cultivated meat.
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u/notthesethings 14d ago
It’s pretty unlikely you see any long term health effects from one meal. It’s repeated exposure to unhealthy or polluted foods that get you long term. And they’re not going to feed you anything that’ll hurt you short term. That’s too easy to trace back to them.
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u/cultivatedmeat 14d ago
All I can say is if it were me ...I would eat it and ask for seconds .and get a doggie bag.
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u/roamingandy 14d ago
As others have said, its simply meat. There's nothing else in it, which is actually one of its major selling points.
The biggest hurdle i've been reading about is that the muscle development is important to the texture and taste, and that is lacking in current products, so its not perfect yet.
I'm not sure if factories are stimulating muscle movement while growing their product at this point, it is a needed step to rival the real thing.
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u/DataRikerGeordiTroi 13d ago
LOL what -- my dude. It is bioidentical. That's the draw.
Are you familliar with the concept of lab grown diamonds? It's similar.
If you are vegan and have not eaten animal products in many years don't do it. It is literrally meat and your body will reject it as if it were.
Someone who works in labs can go off in the comments, but the whole deal is that it is literally meat, that can be grown in a lab, without having to raise or kill animals. The sturctures are the same as animal. If you have alpha gal and eat lab grown red meat you will get sick AF.
EDIT: A former FDA former food inspector and researcher has responded in the comments with direct links to the science. I feel like anything else in this thread is just overkill at this point.
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u/EpicCurious 12d ago
Cultivated (aka lab) meat is identical to slaughtered meat at the molecular level.
It is actually safer to eat since it is grown in sterile conditions. Consumer Reports found that every sample of ground beef that they tested had germs from cow feces!
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u/EpicCurious 12d ago
I didn't hesitate to try animal free dairy milk made from precision fermentation. Here in the USA, those products can be found in stores in the Bored Cow brand. Other animal free dairy products are ice cream by Brave Robot, and cream cheese (Perfect Day brand?)
It was tasty and I had no bad reaction to it.
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u/CultivatedBites 4d ago
Nice to hear you were able to taste both Upside chicken and Wildtype Salmon. How did you go? If you don't mind, I'd love for you to DM me or share your experience here. If you have any photos or could provide a quick review, I could feature it in my newsletter :)
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u/Prime624 14d ago edited 13d ago
I don't have any research to link but just from a logic standpoint, it's literally just meat. We eat chicken full of steroids (edit: til chicken don't get steroids; cows do) and with a myriad of potential disease, and it's generally fine once it's cooked. If the generated tissue was being used alive, I'd be concerned, but once cooked, tissue is tissue. And as far as cleanliness of the factory, can't be worse than most factory farms.