Environment

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New Lab-Grown Meat Breakthrough Beats Traditional Beef by a Mile With 90% Less Land Use, 80% Less Water, and Dramatically Lower Emissions (www.barchart.com)

submitted 1 week ago by remington@beehaw.org to c/environment@beehaw.org

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[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 3 points 1 week ago

First off, this article is about the growth scaffold, and the entire breakthrough was achieved by not using an animal-based one:

Recent research has yielded a promising advance in cultivated meat production that could materially improve scalability and cost-efficiency. Scientists at University College London have developed a method to convert yeast left over from brewing into edible scaffold material on which animal cells can grow, offering a potential alternative to expensive synthetic or plant-derived scaffolds and helping address one of the biggest bottlenecks in cultivated meat manufacturing.

Secondly, there are a bunch of plant-based, FBS-alternative cell feeds ('nutrients and growth factors') on the market, and pretty much every lab-grown meat company out there is either already using them or moving as much of their production to them as possible, for a number of reasons.

The world is never going to stop eating meat, but the sooner we move to cultured meats instead of slaughtered farm animals, the sooner we significantly lower the amount of animal suffering and environmental impact.