The argument in the comment above is that lab grown salmon cells should not be allowed to be marketed as salmon because they have had components such as beta-carotene added for coloring.

In light of the fact that similar compounds are added to the majority of farmed salmon for similar reasons, the comparison shows that the objection is likely a fallacious appeal to nature, purporting that something is good because it is "natural" or "normal" rather than presenting any objective evidence to argue their point.

Farm salmon is artificially colored, and the feedstock they're raised on includes the same oils.

Smoked and canned salmon are often packaged with similar oils and flavor additives.

Canola, sunflower, and soy are some of the most widely consumed foods on the planet; presumably far exceeding consumption of salmon.

> I wish they'd just sell the fish cells, alone. Would love to try that.

They already sell those at the seafood aisle.

This is a very silly take. If you consume any animal foods raised in the US, you are consuming canola / rapeseed meal, soybeans (90% of soy grown in the us is used to create animal feed), and sunflower seed / meal already. You are consuming it in a condensed secondary form (one tropic level up). It seems exceptionally backwards to be worried about eating any of these foods when the animals you eat are essentially just condensed versions of these ingredients where any downside effects would have accumulated heavily.

Also canola oil is now considered on par or healthier than olive oil. Soybeans are one of the worlds few complete plant protein sources with a high quality protein and widely consumed all over the world to both animals and humans to much beneficial effect. Sunflower oil is the least healthy thing here, but still considered quite healthy without excessive heating.

I wonder if roe would be feasible

Wouldn’t that happen in plant based approaches as well? Or be mitigated by growing in exceptionally sterile environments?

This is starting to sound like a process which will require untold quantities of anti biotics and preservatives.

No you wouldn't. Plenty of things are grown in labs or even on industrial levels which don't need immune systems. Maintaining a sterile environment is a challenge but not that hard.

Not really, if you clean your bioreactors well.

'homogenous pink mass' really was their best album

I had foolishly given them the benefit of the doubt and after poking around their entire damn website site and I now hate them. I couldn't find a nutrition label but buried in text was information I need.

"4-5 grams of protein per 100 gram serving" "fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae"

Real Coho Salmon is about 20% protein and 7% fat so we're looking at less than 20% of the important parts being salmon. I retract my previous comment. It's not Salmon.

I believe the FDA defines a minimum of 40% of a meat product to be made of that meat to be labeled as that meat (eg. beef hotdogs needs to be made of 40% beef) and I'm not sure if this qualifies as that.

As a benchmark, the tuna used in a Subway tuna sandwich is 100% tuna, the beef in Taco Bell beef tacos is 88% beef, and the chicken in McDonald's Chicken McNuggets is 100% chicken but make up 45% of the nugget.

Thank you for the point about “ingredient stuffing”. I had never considered this method of deceiving consumers and will be on the lookout for it.

Why doesn’t the FDA require explicit percentages be listed..?

Clear as body milk and salad with meat in it?

Unless you are actively managing your own herd or actively hunting I don’t see how you are connecting to nature at the grocery store.

People don’t care as long as it tastes good. The current methods we have for farming meat do not scale and we need to work on alternatives. Meat is tasty and people want to eat it.

Innovation will continue in the lab grown meat sector and when it eventually scales it will over take traditional methods. Current factory farming is anything but natural and there is plenty of harm being done.

Would you respect being eaten as part of the circle of life? What about your family?

Where is the line drawn?

Explain to me the difference between disrespect and being cattle-bolted through the skull.

When the fish is yanked out of the factory farm and suffocated in air or chilled and frozen alive do you think they experience this respect we're talking about? If so, where?

Does the operator say thanks to each fish before their brutal, agonizing, often prolonged for market death?

'respect' is about the most stupid thing I can think to bring up when referencing loss of life in animals.

It's a meta human concept that means nothing other than the mans approval of method -- it means nothing with regard to the animal or the suffering.

Depends on the context, not necessarily weird. If the choice was between “world A” where sentient beings were perpetually bred into existence to be perpetually tortured until they died and “world B” where the breeding stopped and the beings became extinct, it would be insane to favour world A over B.

Farming them into existence creates moral responsibility, and killing then annihilates the remaining value of a life for which you were morally responsible.

The "connection" you're advocating appears to be a more a romanticized free association (along the lines of "we are all stardust") than a specific conceptual argument accountable to the interests of the animals being harmed.

> I'm perfectly fine eating something that was alive, so long as it was treated with respect and was killed humanely. Doing so connects you, a living being, to other living beings that are part of the circle of life, which live and die the same way you and I will.

Would you say the same thing about killing other humans for food? If not, why not?

> killed humanely

What does this mean?

Not sure about fish but mammals produced for meat are usually killed before adult age. Is that "killed humanely"?

Just so I'm following, you used gross in the food context but not to mean anything about a sensory or culinary experience (which would be the dominant connotation brought to mind by most people who read it), you meant it as kind of an ethical objection?

Also it's the mostly same ingredients that farmed salmon is already packaged with.

The entire pitch for this product is that it's lab-grown salmon. Who are they misleading?

It’s lab-grown salmon… I was not expecting salmon to be actually raised — that’s just farmed. Cell cultures to create solids was everything I’d expected. The term “plant based ingredients” is kinda dumb though.

What do you mean by “part of the circle of life”? I’m not sure why that would be a compelling reason to be ok with something either way?

For most of human history eating meat riddled with maggots was part of the circle of life, is it weird to be grossed out by eating meat riddled with maggots?

If you don't think parasite ridden flesh is gross then your meter needs recalibrating.

Even ancient man avoided parasites when possible. Parasites can kill you, regardless of how natural they are.

Dog shit and nightshade are part of the circle of life too, but they seem to be avoided by most.

Something being good because it's 'part of the circle of life', whatever that means, is as blind and irrational as 'all upf is bad by virtue of being defined as upf.'

Life isn't as simple as black and white.

How is eating eggs not gross? It's a chickens egg...

And milk from a cows udder, how is that not gross?

You know there's puss and blood in cows milk because they all have raw infected udders from being milked non stop by a machine?

Enjoy your meatloaf!

>Meat

Isn't that the ingredient in lab grown salmon? Also things you're calling "much less recognizable" are basically varieties of vegetable oil.

"Fermented Salmon" sounds funny and relatively accurate to me. Why do you call it a tumor? Are the cells cancerous?

Sure. I'm comfortable either reading the description on a menu or the packaging it presumably comes in to determine what I'm actually getting.

If you use the quotation marks on the menu then yes! ‘Fish’ and ‘chips’ hahah.

It’s kinda like how they’ve started calling chocolate type products that have never seen a cocoa bean ‘chocolatey’.

Do we accept we are in a dystopia yet?

If you make a cheesy cracker and call it a Goldfish, nobody gets too upset.

Wait until you hear about Gummy Bears.

We have had re-use of words in food for ages now and it's not a particularly big problem.

If a consumer has an expectation that what they're eating and drinking are specific things, they would be well served by learning to read the label(s). Nobody is serving these things outside of niche restaurant experiences and calling them the exact same thing as their OG counterparts.

Fully agreed.

Cultivated seems misleading since it sounds like it’s a real fish from a fish farm.

And it's listed as cultivated on the menus of the restaurants they list on their site.

Do you buy breakfast "cereals" or do you buy blended, colorized reformed wheat and other grains paste, fortified with vitamins and minerals?

Almost, but not entirely, unlike fish.

Reluctant upvote.

These would essentially be animals in a persistent vegetative state, so they would be a lot like humans in that same state — needing to be individually hooked up to a bunch of machines to keep them alive. Parenteral nutrition and all that.

While that type of infrastructure is certainly possible, there's no clear way to scale it like there is for cellular culturing.

And the result might be pretty disappointing even if you did it. Picture a human who spent their whole life in a coma in a hospital bed — they'd have zero muscle mass, fragile bones, etc.

However, you might be able to get around this by hooking the animal's body up to a synthetic brainstem that sends computer-controlled impulses down the spine – such that you've got e.g. a bunch of brainless salmon strapped in place in a flow tank, whose bodies are constantly being told to breathe, swim forward, open their mouths to capture food when food is released into the tank, etc.

I think that, besides the scalability challenges, the reason this approach isn't more looked into as an avenue of research, is that the ethics of cellular-cultured meat are really clear (there is nothing experiencing pain there; there aren't even nerve cells to sense or relay pain), while the ethics of brainless whole-animal cultivation are... non-obvious, to say the least.

I don't know about that.

Buying some filtered animal-derived blood plasma on the open market and letting the tissue grow/soak in it, would likely be a lot cheaper than precision mixing+dispersing of thickeners + reverse-pressure-gradient tissue impregnation of those thickeners. Food-grade blood plasma is the lowest-demand animal byproduct there is — it's what gets rejected out of even blood-sausage manufacture.

Same with collagen vs., specifically, carrageenan — collagen's cheap in bulk and works great for getting animal cells to stick to it; carrageenan's expensive, finicky to work with, and there are concerns about the carcinogenic effects of its long-term consumption. Many food-product manufacturers have moved away from previous formulations containing carrageenan; companies are only sticking with carrageenan at this point if there's nothing else that works within their constraints. Judging by other carrageenan-containing products, those constraints are probably something like "plant-derived; solid at room temperature; melts in your mouth; decent compressive strength, yet tears easily under tension."

And vegetable oils would be cheaper than animal fats... but vegetable oils with the same set of health guarantees as salmon (i.e. "omega-3 rich" vegetable oils) are not. And their product does claim to have the same health benefits as real salmon; so presumably they are aiming for that omega-3:omega-6 ratio target, since it's usually the headline "health benefit" of eating salmon. Which means they're probably buying, continuously-measuring, and mixing different oils to hit that ratio — similar to what orange-juice processors do to create a homogeneous juice.

The cost of the processes for these alternative meats astronomically outweighs the cost of ingredients, especially the cell culturing. It is unlikely that any of these companies are even making profit at this point. This is a long play to get the public to buy into this alternative food source, and only then will the scaling be enough to reasonably profit from any of this. There’s a baseline cost that they have to hit (farm raised salmon) and it’s incredibly cheap. Swapping out ingredients won’t make it cost competitive. Scaling up bioreactors might.

Nah, that's a mushroom-based product.

I hear.