[margalabargala]

No, not really, because the parent comment is freaking out about a problem that doesn't exist.

It's not going to be possible to grow a thing that looks like a piece of salmon but is secretly riddled with viruses and bacteria.

Either the lab gets their sterile technique right and they wind up with something that looks like salmon, or they get it wrong and you wind up with bacteria slop. Things that look like salmon can only become so if no bacteria and viruses are present.

[dekhn]

In the real world I don't think you'll find salmon that don't have bacteria and viruses (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43345-x shows both "good" and "bad" bacteria and certainly many salmon are infected with a range of viruses (not sure if there are any "good" viral infections, but some are not fatal).

Don't forget that salmon and most other deep sea fish are immediately frozen when caught, which not only helps preserve flavor, but eliminates parasites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_and_parasites_in_salm...)

[mapt]

A fair point, but wouldn't it only become unrecognizable at levels that mean you're effectively eating pus instead of salmon? My understanding is that the effective innoculation needed to give botulism to a human baby (who has an immune system, just less of one than we do) is <100 spores, which is picograms.

There's just such a gulf between the prices at which this is feasible for food use, and the prices at which existing large bioreactors can culture animal tissue.

If we can't even get plant slop ("algal biodiesel") culture consistent and cheap enough to burn in an engine, or get plant slop ("tilapia feedstock algae") cheap enough to industrialize to outcompete chickens... I don't know that I'm comfortable eating bioreactor meat that can only survive in the FDA danger zone.

[XorNot]

Living animals with immune systems are the only types of organisms which can effectively host pathogens such that they can be communicated. Even your example belies the problem: pus is produced by the immune system destroying bacteria, it isn't a bacterial colony itself.

In an a bioreactor where no immune system exists, there can't be a latent infection: there's no immune system! If it can infect and destroy what's growing, then it'll infect and destroy all of it. It isn't going to look like tuna meat after that.

[Intralexical]

Isn't it possible for the pathogen to be limited by accumulation of its own waste products or depletion of specific nutrients before it destroys the whole sample, or for the meat to be harvested before the pathogen has finished propagating?