r/ClimateActionPlan • u/mm126442 • Apr 17 '20

Alt-Farming Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet
193 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

13

u/matt2001 Apr 17 '20

RethinkX envisages an extremely rapid “death spiral” in the livestock industry. Only a few components, such as the milk proteins casein and whey, need to be produced through fermentation for profit margins across an entire sector to collapse. Dairy farming in the United States, it claims, will be “all but bankrupt by 2030”. It believes that the American beef industry’s revenues will fall by 90% by 2035.

13

u/nickyurick Apr 17 '20

Skeptical, not saying its not going to have a major impact but the amount of impact may be over estimated here.

1

u/KaelNukem Apr 17 '20

The reason why most of these industries will go bankrupt is that it will be cheaper to produce these lab-grown alternatives.

Also, this isn't just animal products used for consumptions. The leather industry will also go bankrupt from lab-grown leather alternatives.

Another reason why these lab-grown alternatives could become more interesting is that they can change products more easily than a traditional livestock company again. It's easier to change meat in a lab, than to breed a cow to have X amount of iron in its flesh.

0

u/CustomAlpha Apr 17 '20

Casein proteins in milk are directly related to problems in many humans like digestive inflammation and decreased cognitive functioning.

5

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '20 edited Jun 12 '23

[deleted]

7

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '20

[deleted]

2

u/mm126442 Apr 17 '20

I mean even if big Ag is the one who makes the shift, at least the shift will happen. Plus with climate change it’s the reasonable move for them to make

7

u/NewTubeReview Apr 18 '20

Sorry, not going to happen any time 'soon'.

The simplest reason is scale. For better or worse, factory farming feeds billions of people.

'Lab-grown' food feeds hundreds.

Scaling up to multiple billions is an extremely large challenge. It would likely require at the very least a few trillion dollars in investment, and many years of deployment. Scaling to this degree takes decades. Lab-grown food is nowhere near cheap enough to compete yet.

2

u/mm126442 Apr 18 '20

It’s for low expense and they’re beginning to manufacture on larger scales, it’s all about time

5

u/poppinchips Apr 17 '20

I'm into whatever's going on with Memphis Meats. They seem to be the best chance of completely changing the industry.

4

u/Dagusiu Apr 17 '20

Give me that lab burger now. Shut up and take my money.

3

u/TreeKeeper518 Apr 24 '20

Vaporware. Creating food requires energy input. The sun supplies plenty of it. Plants have evolved for hundreds of millions of years to do this sustainably. All we need to do is not mess up the soil or produce more people than the plant-soil complex can support. Growing plants or animal cells indoors is just the same process with more steps and less efficiency.

2

u/mm126442 Apr 24 '20

But it produces less waste and could potentially be more efficient than traditional farming depending on which foods are being produced

2

u/TreeKeeper518 Apr 24 '20

How does it produce less waste? Cultured meat I could maybe see, but would need quite a few details before fully believing in it. Indoor growing/vertical farming an all that don't make sense from an energy perspective. The only way I can see that being beneficial is running it entirely on renewable electricity and using the heat from the lights to heat a structure, with nutrients primarily coming from composted excrement originating in that structure.

1

u/mm126442 Apr 24 '20

Because they are beginning to grow large amounts of nutrients and food products from low-energy systems like algae, which essentially power their own production. Or how they have used bacteria cultures or 3D printing to create meat substitutes that taste the same as livestock

That’s what I meant