[cheese_please]

I don't know about WildType specifically, but it's not necessarily true that a salmon would need to die at any point in the process. Cells from a simple muscle biopsy could be cultured for this purpose, and a single biopsy may have the potential to produce a great deal of cells depending on the culture conditions. Or they may have developed an immortalized salmon cell line from an initial biopsy that they can proliferate indefinitely (though this leads to questions about genetic drift after a certain number of population doublings; I'm sure they would have a bunch of frozen vials to restart from early passage numbers every few batches though).

[UglyToad]

Plus as a lapsed-vegetarian I'm excited for lab grown meats even if there's an animal killed at some point in the process. It's impossible to choose a food without at least some harm. How many fish are killed by fertilizer runoff or damming for irrigation or whatever else is needed for all forms of agriculture?

I'm going to assume a non-zero amount. So my view is the aim with all ethics-based dietary choices with the motivation of avoiding harm to animals is basically to optimize for least animals killed per calorie per 'sentience' unit or whatever.

All food choices are inherently non-zero in animal suffering and I don't think it's reasonable to hold lab grown meat to any higher standard.

[hutzlibu]

"All food choices are inherently non-zero in animal suffering and I don't think it's reasonable to hold lab grown meat to any higher standard. "

I know. I am not even a vegetarian. (I just have a big problem with the industrial food machine)

But if something is advertised as totally ethical, then yes, it should hold to a higher standard.

[dehrmann]

I think you're both right. There are reasonable enough ways to get cell samples without killing the fish, but they're so short on details I assume they're hiding something. For all I know, it's a no-kill fish version of Theranos that just serves store-bough salmon from the back.