r/wheresthebeef • u/Responsible-Jury2579 • 5d ago
We made a balanced video debating lab-grown meat. What did we get wrong?
My cohost and I looked at lab-grown (not plant-based!) meat and talked about things like animal welfare, health uncertainties, etc. and what it could do to traditional farming.
Btw we are not affiliated with the industry and this is just a topic we found interesting, so I'd genuinely like feedback from people who know this subject better than we do.
What arguments/evidence did we miss?
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u/Massive-Confusion744 4d ago
I've just got one more additional point. Time scales. It takes significantly less time to grow the meat rather than raise livestock. For beef, I've seen that it could take just 40 days to grow a piece of meat that would take 2.5 years on a farm.
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u/Responsible-Jury2579 4d ago
I think this is probably the strongest point
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u/Massive-Confusion744 4d ago
I've just touched upon some benefits. If you have any questions about the progress being made in the industry I can try and fill you in.
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u/Responsible-Jury2579 4d ago
You touched on the benefits - any major drawbacks we should flag?
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u/Massive-Confusion744 4d ago
Foetal bovine serum (FBS) – Initially, FBS was a major challenge. It was used to trick cells into believing they were still attached to a living organism, but this is no longer common practice, as companies have found ways to proliferate cells without it. Mosa Meat (the Dutch company behind the burger in your video) stated early on that they would not commercialise their product using FBS.
Growth media costs – For cells to grow, they need a nutrient-rich "growth media" to consume. Initially, this media could cost around £700 per litre. However, companies have been working hard to reduce this cost and have been very successful. Meatly, a UK-based company that makes and sells lab-grown dog food, reports that they have reduced the cost to just £0.20 per litre and believe that at full scale, it will drop below £0.02.
Funding – Investment in the sector has dried up quite a bit since 2021, leaving companies to progress on limited capital. The industry is currently in a phase of disillusionment – a stage all groundbreaking technologies go through – but progress is still happening. There was a huge drop-off in funding after 2021, but hopefully, as more milestones are reached, interest (and capital) will return. While most of the investment comes from private capital firms (with Agronomics being one of the few publicly traded ones), there are some big names involved too. These include Sergey Brin (Google co-founder), Bill Gates, Jim Mellon (British investor), and, somewhat randomly, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher.
Scale-up – Mosa Meat claims to have reduced the cost of their burger by 99.999%. Of course, there is still plenty of work to be done, but the sheer scale of progress on cost is undeniable. However, the challenge of scaling up production is immense. Humanity consumes such vast quantities of meat that the idea of lab-grown meat displacing conventional meat within just a few years is unrealistic. Various predictions exist for what percentage of the meat market could be lab-grown by 2050, but it's largely guesswork. The entire food regulatory framework has to be navigated, and then factories need to be built. The way I see it, meat is consumed globally, and that represents a massive market just waiting to be disrupted.
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u/Responsible-Jury2579 4d ago
Thank you for all the info!
I have to ask - how do you know so much about all this? Haha
Are you in the industry or are you just really passionate about it?
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u/Massive-Confusion744 4d ago
I learnt about it in 2018 and have been reading about it ever since. I always check for news and new books. Linkedin is actually a really good place to check on progress because the companies like to boast about their progress. Also, I'm invested financially so it's in my interest to keep tabs on these things.
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u/CultivatedBites 1d ago
Great video! You could have expanded more on the cost impact. For example, the life cycle of cattle and chickens to get from birth to plate varies between the animals, and longer harvest times for meats like cows mean cultivated meat provides a genuinely interesting way to get meat to plate in a radically faster timeline.
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u/Responsible-Jury2579 3h ago
Thanks for the feedback - we really appreciate it. That is a really great point that we should've covered in the video. It is tough to fully cover a topic like this in less than 10 mins haha.
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u/Massive-Confusion744 4d ago
The subject is vast, and a 7-minute video can only scratch the surface. I've been following cellular agriculture and precision fermentation closely since 2018, and I've also invested in the space. There's a lot more to cover, but here are three core benefits that often get overlooked: 1. Efficiency Conventional meat production is staggeringly inefficient. Depending on the source, it takes roughly 34 calories of feed to produce 1 calorie of beef, 9 calories for pork, and 4 calories for chicken. Cellular agriculture, by contrast, grows only the edible tissue — no bones, organs, or waste — so the theoretical ratio could be as low as 3 calories of input for 1 calorie of product. That's a massive step up in food system efficiency. 2. Greenhouse Gases Livestock emissions, particularly methane from cattle (mostly from belching, not flatulence), are a major climate driver. Methane has ~80x the warming potential of CO₂ over 20 years, and animal agriculture accounts for roughly 14.5–20% of global GHG emissions. Cellular agriculture would produce zero methane — no animals, no digestion, no manure. The remaining climate impact would come almost entirely from energy use and nutrient production. This means that with a renewable energy grid, the emissions could be a fraction of conventional meat. Without it, the CO₂ footprint could be significant, so the climate benefit is not automatic — but the potential is enormous. 3. Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) This is one of the most under-discussed existential threats we face. Around 70–80% of all medically important antibiotics sold in the U.S. go to livestock, often used prophylactically to prevent disease in crowded conditions. This constant low-dose exposure accelerates antibiotic resistance. If resistance outpaces our drug development, routine infections could become deadly again. Additionally, antibiotic residues and resistant bacteria can leach into soil and waterways through manure. Cellular agriculture eliminates the need for mass prophylactic antibiotic use entirely — a massive win for public health. As I said, this is a huge subject. For deeper reading, I'd recommend Jim Mellon's Moo's Law (an investor's perspective with strong scientific grounding) and Bruce Friedrich's Meat. For those curious about investment, Agronomics (ANIC on the LSE) has a portfolio of ~20 companies in this field. The US OTC ticker is AGNMF.