Review: Cultivated Salmon
Is lab-grown meat good yet?
I crave meat all the time. Which is a bummer, since most meat is factory farmed, and factory farms are really brutal. My “solution” is to “offset” my meat consumption: I pay $100 a month to hopefully kinda-sorta cancel out the moral fallout of my diet.
The dream is meat that grows like plants, in reactors.
I would pay double - nay, triple - for cultivated meat: no animal suffering, no guilt, no problem. So I’ve been wanting to try it for years. And today, I got the chance. Wildtype does indeed grow real salmon cells in conditions similar to the inside of a fish, then mixes them with “plant-based ingredients” to make the final product.
There are some red flags. One, you can only buy this cultivated salmon at four restaurants in the US. The one near me, where I went tonight with three fellow bloggers, only served it as part of an omakase, along with more conventional fish. And two, the whole “plant-based ingredients” thing, suggesting that pure meat is unviable. Which is the rub, with cultivated meat. We theoretically, kinda-sorta “have the technology” and that’s very cool. But we can only make teeny tiny amounts, and at too high a cost to sell in normal markets.
Whatever. At least I got to try the stuff. It looked like this.
And it tasted like soy.
Sorry. I’m more bummed than you. But it tasted like fake meat, seitan or tofu or something. It’s possible it has some other advantages; fake meat products tend to make me queasy, and maybe this sits a little better. But it’s still not as tasty as an Impossible or Beyond Burger, much less actual sashimi.
I am maximally biased in favor here. I really want cultivated meat to be good. I’m optimistic about technology in general, and I desperately want a cheat code to let me eat meat without subsidizing animal torture. If I could have liked it, I would have liked it. I let it sit in my mouth for a while, waiting to see if I would pick up the telltale salmon taste that I love so dearly. I dipped some in soy sauce, in case that was the missing piece. But no. It just wasn’t very good.
Do I Still Believe?
Growing meat in a vat is hard. There are political headwinds and numerous technical challenges, including a very high risk of contamination, since meat outside an organism is basically the most attractive possible medium for harmful bacteria. No immune system! Not even any skin! And you can’t feed antibiotics to a vaguely pulsing slab. So you’d better have an industrial-grade clean lab, with zero contamination, while managing a supply chain of rare ingredients for which there’s currently little demand. And unless you somehow scale this bespoke operation to billions of times its current viable scale (and solve tricky marketing problems), it will barely even put a dent in factory farm revenues.
And yet, yes, I do believe. There are few things more powerful than small groups of morally motivated nerds. The challenges seem insurmountable today, and my first taste of cultivated meat did not please me, but something is better than nothing. Layer by layer, from a tiny seed, the solution may yet grow.
Tesla pulled off a really clever thing with the original Roadster: it was expensive and had crap range, but it was a rocket. They found the one niche where their technology was compelling in spite of all its deficits.
I’m not sure what the equivalent is for lab-grown meat: it’s expensive and doesn’t taste good, but (fill in the blank). Not causing animal suffering doesn’t seem compelling enough unless you can do it at scale.
I really enjoy eating meat too (especially salmon!), so am very disappointed to hear that lab-grown salmon doesn't taste anything like the real thing.
In terms of the political headwinds - I've heard that Middle Eastern countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been making significant investments in cultivated meat for food-security purposes, and to try and diversify their economies away from oil. Perhaps this is an area where the politics in those countries are more conducive to this type of innovation than in the US. (Though I understand there have been headwinds there, too.)