Dutch firm Meatable can turn pig stem cells into sausages 60 times faster than farmers can rear pigs.

Good news for pigs. I'll be delighted to see factory farming disappear and be replaced by tech like this.

Technically kosher because there's no cloven hooves?

Sausage seems like the perfect entry point for this technology. People don't really care what goes in them as long as it tastes good. It's also a lot more forgiving from a texture perspective. It would even be feasible to expand to more exotic sausages like pheasant or alligator.

I'm skeptical. It's been really picking hard to get those things to grow in a vat. This would be a huge breakthrough, and popsci has a way of leaving out critical, fatal details.

Sustainable sources of real meat without killing animals are very welcome! Good luck to them because killing things to eat meat is the worst.

My hope is that these alternative meat industries also factor in job creation opportunities for people who are working in conventional meat production right now—if there’s populist pressure towards moving for more lucrative and safer jobs in lab-manufactured meats, that would be help reduce pressure from farm industry lobbyists, I think.

But the above is a secondary goal (and maybe the responsibility of another party), and shouldn’t distract from the primary goal of researching methods to create sustainable, cruelty-free lab-manufactured meats!

This sounds like good news but what I don't want is one big corporation replacing hundreds/thousands of worldwide farmers and having total control over the cost of selling this to consumers.

I've been waiting for that for so long. Just hope governments and people give it a fair chance instead of jumping rashly negative conclusions just because it is lab grown. So is beer, and cheese, and most other things we consume.

OK, but how does it taste?

Sausage is smart since you can get away with a lot of textural sins, and it's already expected to be packed with sodium.

Follow-up questions will also include price.

I like the idea, and I hope it scales to be significantly cheaper than murder sausage

give me vegan-friendly bacon and I'm in. Sausage is easy.

Fantastic. I can't wait to have cruelty free meat products

I'm not exactly what you would call concerned about meat as a food source. I'm fine with it. But anything that can break the need for industrial farming is a damn good thing imo.

I'm eager for a good product to come to market so I can at least try it. So far, there hasn't been one that's available that's priced well enough to be a viable choice, nor that matches expectations of taste. Textures have gotten good though.

But I think a sausage format is a great place for cultured meats to break into because there's a wide range of ingredients with different flavors already. We're used to sausages being fairly varied in taste and texture, so adding a new type is less of a "new food" barrier. Tbh though, it's gotta be better than veggie sausages, those are pretty meh at best.

Ok can it be translated to meat on the table with costs and impact being less than actual pig slaughtering? I wouldn't even mind the taste being a little different

Still won't stop the "alpha male" types from hating it because they base their entire personality around doing what they think wi make other people mad.

Cool. Maybe, soon, they can turn me into a sausage?

Wait until pig cancer cells turn into sausages 90 times faster

Ok but how long does it take to get the stemcells

Does this mean no more plastic fed to pigs?

So when can we realistically expect this to be a thing?

If they used human stem cells, cannibalism? Maybe. Tasty? Probably.

This stuff was basically ready to go minus scaling up two decades ago. They were still working on adding marbling and texture into steaks that could fool you in a blind test, but amazed it’s taken this long to get to sausages.

Uhh. That's meaningless? What's the energy/resource usage comparison.

Rednecks on Facebook are already getting butthurt about this like this and asking lab grown meat to be banned

They're going on about stuff like cancer or whatever

I'm not exactly sure, but I think we can combine pork growing vats and AI to create a new species.

okay, but what's the resource consumption like? that's the major issue with meat farming - it takes all the resources necessary to grow food for the animals, and also all the resources necessary to keep and grow the animals themselves. If you need more meat in the same timeframe you can always just raise more pigs.

I see the sustainability argument, but it doesn't address my main concern, which is that it sounds yucky. Still, I'll eat lab sausage before I eat cockroach patties so 🤷

Let me guess, the stem cells are harvested from pigs?

Price? With the economy, it'll be cheaper to wait for the pigs to reach our local market instead

ah would you look at that, no mention of quantity.

It's 60 times faster, there should be the volume of an entire pig's worth in like 2 weeks.

Pigs eat pigs