This month we talk about cellular agriculture, extrusion, and cheesecake.
We also discuss cultured beef, food waste, and subtractive printing.
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Transcript
Cultured meat—sometimes called lab-grown meat or cultivated meat or meatless-meat, among other monickers—is a type of meat-product produced using what's called cellular agriculture.
In essence, this means that rather than being grown on an animal, as is typically the case with meat, we grow it elsewhere: generally in some kind of scaffolding, in a lab or manufacturing hub; that scaffolding giving it shape and texture, and allowing the process of tissue engineering to help cells produce something resplendent of traditional meat.
And to be clear: this is meat. This isn't like almond milk being called milk, but being a different sort of product altogether, mostly just filling many of the same roles and purposes of milk.
Cultured beef is grown from cow cells, and then coaxed into growing into beef, just like a cow's body would normally spur it into doing the same. It's just done in some kind of synthetic container, rather than on a cow.
The purported benefits of this are many, though quite a few of the most celebrated maybe-benefits haven't manifested yet, because the scale of output for this type of product is currently minuscule.
Cows, for instance, especially those grown for meat-making purposes, are many times more greenhouse gas emitting than other protein sources (other meats are also quite emitting, and dairy cows as well, but beef cattle are several times as bad as the next-worst options), and this new, synthetic method of producing beef, once it's up and running and has been refined to the point where it has the same blend of muscle to fat to other sorts of tissue as the natural, in-demand stuff, could dramatically reduce those emissions—potentially to near-zero, in part because you don't need to raise burpy cows to produce the meat, and in part because you can control a lot of the environment more intentionally when you're doing this sort of thing in a manufacturing hub, rather than a farm or ranch.
Such a process, because of its very different practical nature, would also use substantially less clean water, would use almost no land, which cattle today use a lot of, and wouldn't require we raise a bunch of animals just to be killed for their meat, which matters to some people more than others, but absolutely represents a potential benefit here.
The technologies that allow for this type of meat production have been in the works since the mid-20th century, and the in vitro production of muscle fibers was first accomplished in 1971; though the pathologist behind that effort produced a cultured guinea-pig aorta, not beef, so presumably there wasn't much meat market potential for this stuff in those early days.
In 1991, the first patent for producing meat suitable for human consumption via tissue engineering was acquired, and the main differentiator between this and what came before was that the patentor envisioned producing a blended product, wherein muscle and fat would be grown together, as is the case in natural, animal-grown meat; without the right blend, the meat, though still meat, doesn't taste right to most people.
In the early-2000s, NASA started looking into this technology, thinking it might be prudent to allow astronauts to grow their own meat products in space, rather than trying to ship such things up with them, which can be astronomically expensive; they produced cultivated goldfish and turkey meat, and a few years later, in 2003, a pair of artist/researchers produced a small portion of cultivate frog meat, which they prepared and ate as a sort of artistic performance.
There were many, smaller efforts in subsequent years, to bring some kind of cultured meat product to market, but it wasn't until 2013 that the first beef patty produced in this fashion was created in the Netherlands.
The patty cost more than $300,000 and required two years to make, and it was cooked on live television by a celebrity chef, then eaten by food critics and researchers.
The dream for many people operating in this space is to scale-up so that they're able to produce not just convincing meat, but consistently perfect meat, with precisely the right blend of muscle and fat in each portion, with the absolute ideal nutritional profile, and in huge volumes at an ever-decreasing cost.
The theory is that, as with other products, you should be able to make each new beef patty, or whatever else you make using this technology, cheaper and cheaper, because of the economies of scale: make more of it, and each unit costs a little bit less.
So not only should future beef patties manufactured in vitro, rather than on a cow, be more perfect than any beef patty before them, in terms of taste and texture and nutrition, they should also cost less and less over time, eventually becoming so cheap that the traditional way of doing things, which is expensive monetarily and environmentally, that way of making beef would go out of business. It shouldn't be able to compete.
This field really took off in the mid-20-teens, when a slew of new companies started up and received new rounds of funding, and by 2020 at least three of those companies took things to the next level, building pilot plants for larger-scale production of their products. Around the same time, about 60 other companies entered the market, hoping to do the same in the near-future.
Headed into 2023, even though a company called Eat Just was able to get approval to sell its cultivated chicken in Singapore two years previous, and was on its way to getting the same approval in the US, many of these companies had either gone under or dramatically reduced their near-future projections—in part because of the complexities that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic, partly due to the 2022-and-onward VC funding pullback and overall economic concerns, and in part because they've realized just how tricky it can be to scale up a process of this kind, in terms of speed and in terms of expense.
What I'd like to talk about today is another futuristic food-production technology that may have immense potential, even to the point of shaping global food production at some point in the future, but which may also, in the short-term, be hindered by technology, economics, and other unfortunate practical realities.
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3-D printing, these days more commonly called additive manufacturing in industrial settings, has been around in a theoretical way since the mid-20th century.
The idea, as posited in contemporary fiction, was to "draw" in three-dimensional space using a sort of pen that would deposit liquified plastic into the right point in an X, Y, Z cubical space, and that drawing in space would be achieved by using a movable arm tracked with a camera, and it would know what to put where by following a blueprint.
Other variations of this concept involved using a loosely defined "molecular spray," which would presumably deposit the proper molecules into the right place by using a sort of 3D scaffolding, rather than blobs of liquified plastic.
In 1971, a patent was awarded for the production of a sort of 3D inkjet printer for metal objects, which would allow for the production and breakdown of printed, 3D objects.
The idea was to allow for rapid-prototyping, which means being able to sketch out an idea for a device, print a tangible version of it, then melt it down and try another version based on what you learned from that real-life model you were able to produce.
Actual functional models of this type of device were manufactured in the early 1980s, including one device, the XYZ plotter, that didn't do too terribly well, though to be fair it was also underfunded by the Japanese company within which it was built, and another that used the layering of powdered metal, zapped with a laser, to harden each new layer in place, building a finished component up from the surface of the printer over time.
The technologies and patents that would ultimately shape the modern 3D printing industry were introduced and filed in the mid-1980s, including the development of 3D file formats, suitable for blueprinting objects that would then be makable by these devices, and the strategies used by many devices to produce stuff effectively in the first place—slicing solid objects into layers, infilling, and an approach to plastic extrusion that has become the go-to for most modern, consumer-grade 3D printers, in particular.
Reliable, pro-grade, metal-working applications for these technologies came of age in the 1990s, and began to compete, in limited ways, with existing metal-shaping options, most of which are today called subtractive methods, because they start with a lump of material and then drill or stamp or carve or otherwise shape them, like a sculpture, which contrasts with additive methods, which usually involve depositing layers of metallic powder, hardening that powder into metal, and doing that over and over, building up layer after layer until you have a finished component.
The introduction of solid polymers, plastics, basically, into this process made it more valuable for some use-cases, though it also nudged it further into the rapid-protyping space, as plastics would be less resilient than metals for finished applications, and the main value then became the capacity to produce a solid, usable artifact which would then allow engineers and inventors to try out something they're working on, rather than simply imagining it, or spending gobs of time and money trying to produce a version using traditional, more expensive and time-consuming subtractive methods.
Some of those earlier 3D printing-related patents expired in the early 2000s, which led to a wave of newly founded companies in this space in the wake of the 2008 global banking collapse.
A bunch of new money was on the table, basically, and a slew of interesting new tech companies were looking for cash infusions, so this confluence of opportunities and resources led to the fairly rapid deployment of 3D printing tech into manufacturing spaces, globally, and within a decade this tech found its way into the aerospace, clean energy, electronics, and space launch industries, among many others.
We also saw, especially between 2010 and 2020, the deployment of increasingly cheap and powerful at-home 3D printers, which allowed folks to use free software like Blender to produce 3D blueprints, or download 3D blueprints from the internet, and print interesting and useful things at home, ranging from vases to tabletop gaming miniatures to components for IKEA furniture to fully functioning robot hands.
As of the day I'm recording this, it's possible to buy a fairly high-end, at-home 3D printer that fits on a desk and can print reasonably sized objects at fairly high resolutions for just over $2000. You can get a much higher-end printer, capable of producing healthcare-grade equipment, for dental offices and such, for just under $30k, and you can get a cheap, bare-bones model for between $100 and $300.
This industry, though flourishing in the sense that all those options are now commonly available and the technologies behind them have been somewhat commodified, has not yet become the be-all, end-all technology for production purposes.
And that's not because it's not useful—in some spaces, it's fundamental to operations, like with the aforementioned rapid prototyping space, where it seldom makes sense to use anything else, these days—but rather because the intended use-cases have turned out to be more finite and niche than anticipated: there are only so many people who need to print 3D objects of the kind these machines can currently make on a regular basis.
So this field has splayed out significantly, and is still expanding, expected to triple in value by 2026, to something like $44.5 billion, but even at that point you'd be unlikely, lacking some significant change in the technology or utility of these things, to find a 3D printer in every office and home around the world.
One potential avenue for further expansion of this extrusion-type of 3D printing is in home-building, and there are already neighborhoods being produced, experimentally, using what amounts to a large-scale 3D printer that deposits a specially formulated concrete instead of plastic, creating the shell of a home—only the wires and pipes and windows needing to be installed after printing is completed—in record time, and with some interesting strength and resiliency benefits.
There's also at least one company making 3D-printed rocket parts, and though they haven't yet made it to orbit, they have successfully launched a 3D-printed rocket, which could give them an edge over competitors, and maybe spark a new cost-saving direction in this already rapidly evolving space.
But another, currently less-used, but potentially even more expansion-worthy utility for this collection of approaches and devices, is found in the even more-nascent world of 3D-printed food.
There was an article in Axios, recently, entitled "A new dimension for food security," in which the potential benefits of manufacturing food, rather than producing it in the traditional fashion are laid out.
One of the top rationales for exploring the possibility of 3D printing food is that it could help us deal with increasingly pressing threats to our global food supply, while also helping us account for climate-related shifts that are making some regions persistently food-insecure, and also allowing us to recalibrate what we eat to serve our specific dietary, allergic, or taste-related needs.
Before we get into that, though, let's talk for a moment about what 3D printing food would even mean.
In the short-term, additive food printing is not all that different from printing with metal powder or plastic.
You have an arm with an extruder on it, and that arm moves around, tracing out the lines from a 3D blueprint, allowing you to lay down materials in the desired shape.
Historically, looking back at the early 2000s, this has meant laying down easy-to-extrude substances, like chocolate or cheese or cookie dough into interesting shapes, like houses or logos.
Sugar sculptures and pasta have also been popular use-cases for this technology, up till this point, though there have been more niche applications, as well, like a case-study in which 3D printing was used to produced easy-to-chew food for elderly people who have trouble chewing and swallowing more conventional options.
One recent project at Columbia University had mechanical engineering students building 3D printers capable of producing multi-ingredient foods, including a 3D-printed cheesecake.
This cheesecake consisted of peanut butter, Nutella, strawberry jam, banana puree, cherry drizzle, frosting, and a graham cracker paste.
The finished result looks like a slice of cheesecake, but has the telltale signs of consumer-grade 3D printing: the little rings and ripples left by the depositing of layer after layer of material, build up from the ground, that eventually becomes the cake.
The students discovered that the final cake was good—they even used little lasers built into the printer to cook the ingredients, in situ—and it was more complex than most food produced in this way up till this point, but there's a lot of work left to do in terms of coming up with the optimal level of structural and non-structural ingredients, and this example was really just a more complex application of what's come before: edible stuff extruded in layers to make a desired shape.
The ultimate goal, for many people and business entities and governments exploring this sub-industry, is to refine the technology to the point where small food components, even down to the size of individual molecules, can be deposited in the way extruded graham cracker paste is currently extruded, allowing for the creation of exact flavors and nutritional profiles in any shape, with any texture.
This would theoretically allow you to use your printer to produce pretty much any food you might want, given some very basic raw materials, and might even allow you to break down leftovers or expired food, into those raw components for later use.
This could theoretically do away with the concept of food waste entirely, as it would mean we could essentially produce any food we might want when we want it, in the portion size we want; so no more stockpiling, no more bulk production, just the exact thing we want, when we want it, and some boxes filled with the culinary equivalent of printer ink that will be arranged just so, to get the results we want on the other end.
That's a very sci-fi outcome at this point, and though we don't have any reason to believe it's impossible, the intermediary steps between where we are now and that Star Trek-like replicator future are potentially massive and it could be generations before we make something like that happen, if indeed we can eventually make it so.
We may be getting a preview of how some aspects of this might function, or not, looking at the evolution of the cultured meat space, as mentioned in the intro.
This would be a different thing, as cultured meat generally uses a scaffolding and then grows meat from specially stimulated cells, so it's more like cellular farming than molecular architecture.
In theory, though, converting non-scaled agriculture and food-production into large-scale manufacturing in this way, similar to how we make smartphones or screws, would dramatically reduce the cost of producing a fundamental necessity that in many places around the world is scarce or non-nutritious, the relevant supply chains prone to disruption and security issues, the people on the business end of those supply chains suffering medical issues and famines as a consequence of what's available or not available, in what quantities, qualities, and at what cost.
If further developed, this technology could cut out those intermediary steps and dramatically reduce the impact of those existing problems—introducing new ones in the process, almost certainly, but allowing us to mass-produce food printer ink components, on huge scales, and then making sure the hardware to use those materials are available and usable in as many places around the world as possible—replicators for all.
For the next several decades, minimum, though, we'll likely see interesting experiments and tests, primarily limited to the macro-scale world of stacking extrudable foodstuffs into interesting new shapes and combinations, alongside more meat-related efforts involving different growth stimuli, muscle and fat blends, and probably business models, too.
We'll also have plenty of time to think through the implications, pro and con, of changing-up our global food system in this way, which is something we should be doing regardless as the impacts of climate change begin to make agriculture as traditionally practiced more fragile and less reliable, and climate migration begins to nudge large populations away from existing supply chains, upending everything anyway, though in a less techno-optimistic, and more potentially dystopian, if we don't work hard to rearrange things better than they were, anyway, fashion.
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Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_food_printing
https://www.rtds-group.com/portfolio-item/performance/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/12/3d-printing-the-new-technology-comes-into-its-own?ref=thediff.co
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/relativity-space-has-a-successful-failure-with-the-debut-of-terran-1/
https://www.axios.com/2023/03/24/food-security-3d-printing
https://www.engineering.columbia.edu/news/honey-the-3d-print-i-mean-dessert-is-ready
https://www.fooddive.com/news/eat-just-cultivated-cell-based-meat-fda-approval-good-meat/645600/
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/22/cultivated-meat-good-meat-fda/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat
