[anlum]

If you think lab-grown meat is anything other than a massive accelerrant to the problem of antibiotic resistance, you've got another thing coming.

A bioreactor is basically just an animal with a severely curtailed feature set - limited homeostasis, no sense organs, cognition, locomotion, etc.

Crucially, a bioreactor has no immune system. It's a soup of muscle cells with basically no defense against external pathogens. Sterile technique will only get you so far, especially at scale. Lab-grown meat pretty much constitutionally requires constant antibiotic input. It's the price you pay for stripping the concept of animal as meat machine down to its most basic essence.

[sieste]

Interesting point. But you also have to consider there are no faeces which contribute to infection risk in live animals and increase need for antibiotics. And we know a lot about keeping dead meat from going bad, see slaughterhouses and supermarkets. Can lab meat be grown under less favourable conditions for bacteria, eg cooling or oxygen poor?

[dartos]

Kind of.

Lab meat may be in a sterile environment, but it’s vulnerable to a lot more too. (As OP was saying)

Like an operating theatre is cleaner than a slaughterhouse, but that’s because the bar for what would cause contamination is that much lower.

[dutchclutch808]

A consumermarket labgrown meat was tested in the Netherlands for over three decades, as they wanted to be absolutely sure that the genepool used was varied enough to maintain the quality of the meat, and that no unforeseen mutations would suddenly pop up, messing up meatproduction or worse, more. I don't believe the antibiotic resistance was too much of an issue over that period.

Too bad they pulled the plug on the product in the end, due to production costs making and market assessment it would still be too expensive to be sold as a viable alternate meat-option. But as far as I know, it's over three decades of growing meat in a lab, good and safe enough for human consumption.

[dartos]

It’s one of the main challenges of growing meat like that too.

[bmer]

*[CITATIONS NEEDED]*

1) Bioreactors have available many options other than antibiotics for controlling bacterial growth.

2) A bioreactor is not "basically just an animal with a severely curtailed feature set". A bioreactor is not even "basically an organ with a severely curtailed feature set".

3) What precisely do you mean by "sterile techniques will only get you so far, especially at scale"?

There are actual issues with lab-grown meat. In a nutshell: nutritional quality, and the high degree of post-processing likely needed in order to make them palatable in terms of texture and taste.

TL;DR when someone reasons by analogy, doubt everything they say.

[JR1427]

I also find it interesting that people don't seem to think too hard about where lab grown meat is heading.

You could imagine that the culture mechanisms will get more and more sophisticated, building up some of the systems seen in animals from scratch.

I have (partly jokingly) thought about the idea that rather than redesign animals from the ground up, why not just engineer out the qualities that we (think) we don't want in livestock animals.

It wouldn't be hard to selectively breed brain-dead carcasses that require life-support machines to grow. And then we can harvest the meat from brain-dead animals. Yum.

Sounds appealing, doesn't it?...

[rogual]

Maybe we could even go full Hitchhiker's Guide and design an animal that wants to be eaten.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HLy27bK-wU

[dartos]

I think it’s more likely that we just grow cells into basically a large living meatball.

Why go through the effort to grow skin, eyes, and bones when all we want is a wad of meat

[JR1427]

A large living meatball wont be able to stay alive.

It would need a circulatory system, to get oxygen in to it, and waste products out.

As others have pointed out, it would also be very prone to infection, without a protective outer later (skin), and specialised cells that will destroy pathogens (immune system).

I could go on and on!

There is a reason why giant meatballs didn't evolve.

[PhasmaFelis]

More appealing than typical factory farms, yes.

[okokwhatever]

Your answer is SO well informed and focused out of the hype that I just can say thanks.

[bmer]

Except it's also very wrong. So, it just happened to make you feel good, and therefore it felt well-informed?