So... Like a wild fish, but with NO IMMUNE SYSTEM WHATSOEVER, which requires your sterilization protocols to be effectively perfect.
NASA has tried and failed to get their sterilization protocols to perfection levels for Mars landers, and consistently failed despite using basically zero organic materials.
We're going to cook this stuff, yes, sure (aren't we?)... but the squick is rational. And the problem gets inherently worse at larger scale production.
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.
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.
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...)
> Our saku is sushi-grade and is perfect for dishes like sushi, crudo, and ceviche
One of modern humanity's oldest activities is fermenting carbohydrates in large bioreactors into alcohol, yogurt, and pickles, but there are a lot of things that turned out not to work in that history.
When we try to fabricate, say, monoclonal antibodies using large cultures of multicellular tissues for pharmaceutical work, the price ends up coming out to millions of dollars a kilogram.
I am implicitly skeptical of the protocols of a protein tissue culture that has to be produced at the ~$30/kg price level.
Could you eat it and not die? I'm sure!
But could you feed people with a billion meals worth of batches and have nobody die? I'm less sure! My understanding is that tissue culture failures are frequently the bane of a biologist's research program.
Freezing doesn't kill the parasites, it slows the clock that started ticking when the fish was killed. It's not pasteurization, like what's done to canned tuna. It just slows the clock when you refrigerate or freeze the fish, but does not reset it to zero. And of course, if you're eating fresh fish that was healthy when it was killed, there's no need for an intermediate freezing or pasteurizing step.
This situation is different because the "clock" starts when the cell cultures are removed from the donor salmon. The whole blob/tank/plate/catalyzing surface (I'm not sure what the design is, I wish they had more documentation) on which the product grows for the whole time that the product is growing is vulnerable to a single bacterium that would grow out of control, like an immunocompromised human might be killed by an ordinary illness that most people would shrug off in 24 hours.
When the FDA talks about freezing killing parasites in fish, they're talking specifically about anisakis worms - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisakis
My personal guess is that the first actually economically viable lab-grown meats will be of endangered/extinct animals that the extremely wealthy will be willing to pay the exorbitant costs that it takes to create them for the novelty factor.
If they're actively pushing into the market, that means they're selling _something_ at maybe $30-$100/kg. Would you trust that something, knowing what you know of animal tissue bioreactors? Would you trust a restaurant serving thousands of meals of that something?
Relevant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZGPjvFkLzUW
> "We harvest the cells from our tanks and integrate them with a few plant-based ingredients..."
Gross. This should not legally be allowed to be marketed as salmon, at all.
It's certainly not fish.
That is a world I don't want to live in.
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?
https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...
I wish they'd just sell the fish cells, alone. Would love to try that.
This came as a shock to me. The macronutrients don't lie, though. Fish is protein and a little fat, carb content is fractions of a gram, and these labels are telling me that there's more carbohydrate than protein.
The ingredient labels that the FDA allows, do find a way to lie. If you read a ten-ingredient label that says "Ingredients: Beef, wheat flour, corn flour, oats, textured vegetable protein, canola oil, vegetable oil, xanthan gum, carageenan, salt", and tell people that this is the highest-percentage ingredient to the lowest-percentage ingredient ordering, most people will assume it's >75% beef, but all the label is saying numerically is that it's >10% beef; If every other ingredient was in the 9.0 to 9.9% range then the beef input would be around sixth of the material. Add more ingredients and this can be manipulated even more.
I also don't think this is comparable. Blended Alaskan pollock had an immune system before it hit the cold chain.
> In addition to water and cell-cultivated salmon, our saku contains fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae, soy (an allergen), potato starch, konjac (a root vegetable), beta-carotene and lycopene (natural colors), carrageenan (an extract from red seaweed), and natural flavors.
Think about why each of these things are in there:
• Fats — because the parts [tissues] of the salmon that we eat, have not just muscle cells contained in them [the part that tastes + mouthfeels + cooks like salmon], but also fat cells (adipocytes), to contribute the taste + mouthfeel + cooking properties of "fatty tissue" [which is how we expect salmon to be] vs "lean tissue". And sure, the people creating this thing could have another tank growing "salmon-derived adipocytes", with some hormone bath to trick those adipocytes into absorbing and metabolizing nutrients from the environment to grow heavy with fat... but why bother? (That actually sounds dangerous, in fact — you might end up eating big doses of fish hormones trapped in the fat.) At the micro level, a little sphere of fat is a little sphere of fat; you can use a salmon adipocyte, some other kind of adipocyte, or even just a skin of sodium alginate, and the taste and texture of the result will be identical, as long as the fat inside the bag has identical properties (glyceride chain length, mostly).
• Natural colors and flavors — weirdly enough, because salmon grown on its own wouldn't look or taste fully like salmon. The look and flavor of salmon comes not just from what the salmon itself produces via the action of its cells/proteins/DNA, but also from "impurities" — things the salmon eats, that end up depositing into the salmon's tissues over time. Like how eating shrimp makes flamingos pink. Salmon without those things is white, and missing some of the sweetness we associate with salmon. (You can even notice this in salmon meat from different conditions; wild-caught salmon usually gets more of these nutrient sources than farmed salmon, so wild-caught salmon is often a much deeper reddish-pink color than the orange of farmed salmon.)
• Starch, maybe carrageenan (and the implicit ingredient, water) — together, a simulacrum of (slightly-viscous) salmon blood. Using water alone wouldn't work; it's too thin, it'd just run out of the muscle tissue like a water from a sponge, desiccating the tissue over a span of minutes. You need some thickener to prevent that. (I suppose you could make salmon blood plasma + platelets. Might be more nutritious if you did. Not sure how you'd get it into the tissue reliably, without any kind of circulatory system in there. And it probably doesn't make much of a difference to taste or texture even if you did. But this might still be a v2.0 goal of theirs.)
• Soy and konjac (and also maybe carrageenan here) — a simulacrum of connective tissue, i.e. collagen. This is likely the matrix holding the cells in place. There's no such thing as "cells stacked directly on other cells" that actually stays together; there needs to be some non-cellular tissue matrix that the cells slot into. (Compare/contrast: "meat glue." Is a chicken nugget chicken?)
Why not actual collagen as a matrix, or maybe, say, gelatin? Why not ground-up shrimp as a colorant instead of beta carotene + lycopene? Why vegetable oils instead of animal fats? In all these cases, probably because their goal with these ingredients seems to be to only build this salmon out of plants + cells, rather than any animal byproducts. An unstated premise here seems to be that they want to design the process such that no matter how far it gets scaled up, there's no point at which it would be more economical to switch one of the ingredient sources from "make it in a bioreactor" to "get it from an animal byproduct sources", and at even further scale, "drive animal slaughter to get said byproduct as the product."
AFAICT, this is almost the closest thing you will ever be able to get to something you can call "salmon" — or maybe more specifically, "animal-harm-free salmon" — that can be created solely in a lab.
(To get any closer, you'd need to get pretty mad-science-y. You could, in theory, genetically engineer a... tree, or what-have-you, that would metabolically synthesize the salmon blood plasma, the salmon connective tissue, the salmon-prey-species tissue trace impurities, etc.; and also act as a host to a commensal salmon cell population; eventually putting all that together inside a fruit or something. Pluck and peel the fruit, and inside — salmon muscle matrix tissue, fully cellularized, with solutes. [Though probably with the tree's vascularization, rather than salmon vascularization.] We're probably 50 years from understanding genetic engineering well enough to do that; and even then, it'd probably be operationally impractical, due to salmon muscle tissue rotting at any temperature a tree would grow at. But that product would technically be "closer to salmon", I guess.)
Simple answer: they're cutting corners -- increasing shelf life, decreasing production costs, and overall increasing profits, like many of the big food corporations operating today.
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.
In addition to water and cell-cultivated salmon, our saku contains fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae, soy (an allergen), potato starch, konjac (a root vegetable), beta-carotene and lycopene (natural colors), carrageenan (an extract from red seaweed), and natural flavors.
Hmm. They also compare their place to a microbrewery but I can't find any photos of the actual production process, generally a point of pride for a microbrewery. It sounds less like "lab grown meat" than literally "lab grown cells" + other stuff to mimic aspects of meat texture/flavor/color.
https://www.wildtypefoods.com/faqs/why-are-there-other-ingre...
I'm not 100% sure either of those has been proven out.
I could see CO2, but it sort of depends on how much power the bioreactor and sterilization consumes and how much methane is release. Granted, it'd be easier to capture those and easier to place these reactors in or near a grocery store, for example, for immediate delivery.
Food safety is almost certainly going to be a bigger problem. The big problem with bioreactors is they are cultivating the ideal substance for very nasty bacteria/fungus/etc to flourish in. Bioreactors do not have immune systems. That means keeping things absolutely sterile is of the utmost importance. I'm sure when the initial products are produced safety will be pristine. However, what happens when the CEOs of these companies decide to cut back? Heck, what happens when the new guy forgets to do a sterilization cycle or runs it short?
A major issue is these will be regulated by the FDA which has a history of doing a poor job of keeping food safe. I'd feel better if it were under the jurisdiction of the USDA.
I can cherish the research path and value the intended endpoint, but knowing what I know of agribusiness, early approval to market seems a mite reckless. Particularly in 2025. Particularly with "sushi-grade fish".
We produce millions of tons of affordable meat from industrial production of animals THAT HAVE immune systems, swimming in antibiotics, that the FDA tells you to cook thoroughly because it's definitely full of salmonella. We chop it up using child labor on production lines that would make you a vegetarian if you saw them.
Canola is often sprayed with neonicotinoids and the oil processed with solvents like hexane.
I'd personally prefer to get my omega acids from real salmon.
Hard no from me, not even once.
Salmon is just one example.
arjvik•1h ago
Ouch. Red states are pro-deregulation, until laissez-faire innovation offends their beliefs.
bowmessage•1h ago
sunshinesnacks•1h ago
https://alabamareflector.com/2025/08/02/capped-alabama-coal-...
https://alabamarivers.org/coal-ash/
henry2023•1h ago
That’s all it takes for them to dismiss any argument.
bowmessage•50m ago
tomp•1h ago
As we've seen with incandescent light bulbs and plastic straws, "free market" is only temporary, until the "bad" thing simply gets banned.
They're just pre-emptively banning artificial meat, to prevent real meat from being banned!
MostlyStable•1h ago
delecti•1h ago
The idea of preemptively banning something so it can't become better than the status quo seems ludicrous.
tomp•12m ago
The proof is in the pudding / free market. If the alternatives (paper straws, LED bulbs) were better, people would voluntarily buy them! (cf: mobile phones vs. stationary phones, almost noone has the latter these days, because the former are just - better!) Instead, they're banned because they're better.
trenchpilgrim•1h ago
henry2023•1h ago