I, personally, have grown muscle tissue in a laboratory environment, so I know what it takes to actually grow muscle tissue. What I’m not familiar with is what the lab-grown meat industry practices are, but I just looked into it briefly.

There are 2 companies currently with approval to sell a lab-grown meat product in the US: Upside Foods and Good Meat.

Both sell chicken. Upside Food’s process is outlined in their FDA submission. They specifically state: “several media protein components (e.g., bovine serum albumin, growth factors) are required for sustaining cell viability and growth during the culture process” i.e., they rely on albumin from cattle like I suspected.

Unfortunately, since the “creation of chicken cells” is FDA regulated, but “production of chicken meat” is USDA regulated, that document doesn’t actually go into detail on how the cells are turned into the final product. This Wired article, however, says that they are basically just laying out sheets of the cells, and then manually stacking them to give some structure, which is not a scalable solution. Also, it seems like they are somewhat falling apart as a company not that they are running out of VC money. It looks like they are also trying to pivot into producing some sort of primarily plant based sausage with a little chicken cells thrown in. I’m assuming that’s a last gasp to produce something profitable.

Good Meats, on the other hand, I can’t find as much information on. The equivalent FDA document is on the other side of a link that seems broken. According to what they publish on their site, they are essentially vat growing cells, straining them off, and then extruding them into a shape.

In both cases, I don’t think it’s accurate to call the product “meat” since the cells will not have the structure of muscle cells (long strands), and there isn’t any tissue organization or adhesion to an extracellular matrix. It’s more of a pate even though they called a fillet.

The ecological footprint of both of the companies is greater than just conventional chicken production. I know this because both websites try really carefully to make it seem like they are better, but they can’t say that they are.

Upside foods phrases all of their claims as “what if we could do x, y, and z?” Rather than saying that they can do it. Good Meats similarly has an FAQ of “is it better than conventional?” and their response is “we believe it will be”.

A little while after we happen to contaminate said planet with extremophiles accidentally brought aboard our probe/lander

Like Einstein adding the cosmological constant to his equations because he initially couldn’t conceive of the universe expanding, and the equations wouldn’t work otherwise.

In addition to selective breeding like others have mentioned, supply chain logistics have gotten much more advanced over the years. You can get many fruits right at the peak of ripeness year round due to sourcing and better storage methodologies.

Science has also gotten better at giving plants what they need to grow successfully, so almost all agricultural products are much larger than they would have been 50 years ago. If you take an apple tree from an orchard, and stick it in a random person’s back yard and neglect it, it will have way smaller fruit. Irrigation, fertilization, etc, allow things to grow bigger, but the parts needed for the actual reproduction don’t really grow much, so that extra energy just ends up producing fruit that’s more “watered down”.

In a grain, for example, theres 3 parts: germ, bran, and endosperm. The germ is the little start of the seedlings, and it contains protein, minerals, and fats. The bran is the other coating that has fiber, protein, and minerals. The endosperm is mostly just carbs. In modern grain, the endosperm takes up a much larger percentage of the grain than in older varieties (and non-fertilized/irrigated/weeded/pest controlled fields)

And poison ivy more powerful

I’m very much not up-to-date on the lab grown meat industry (so take this with a grain of salt), but I have done cell culture.

There’s a reason most scifi with food grown in vats references bacteria, yeast, and algae. Single celled organisms have to be relatively self sufficient. You can grow more yeast/bacteria by feeding plain sugar to it. There are other nutrients eventually needed, but they can be given in simple forms (e.g., oxygen, inorganic salts, etc.) that you can isolate or create through simple chemistry alone.

Vertebrate cells are part of a highly complex system where they require sugars/salts/etc, but also growth factors, antibodies, and a whole host of other proteins, fats, steroids, etc. Some of those can be created in a lab with chemistry or special bacteria/yeast, but for the most part, scientists use fetal bovine serum. It’s a byproduct of slaughtering pregnant cattle, and it contains a lot of those things that are just too hard to create otherwise.

Cells also need to be given the right niche do grow and differentiate into the target cell type, so muscle needs to exercise, arteries need pulsatile fluid flow, nerves need electrical signals, etc. Without an immune system, everything needs to be done in a sterile environment.

All of that adds up to an ecological footprint that’s extremely difficult to reduce below the natural product.

I can’t stand the amount of times my phone tries to force apostrophes into places that don’t need them. So many plurals that should just end in " s " become " 's ". “Were” also gets changed to “we’re” despite it not making any sense in context.

Also, separate issue, but it seems like autocorrect can almost never comprehend the possibility that I hit the wrong button for the first letter of a word.

Agreed. Sometimes, a sentence that ends with a preposition sounds weird. Oftentimes, a sentence that has been completely rearranged to not end in a preposition sounds weird.

Not only is it fine, but it’s the most common (and i would say most correct) way to write scientific papers.

The tone of scientific papers is usually supposed to focus on the science, not the scientist, so you have “reagent A was mixed with reagent B”, not “I mixed reagent A and reagent B”.

An added bonus is that it prevents having to assign credit to each and every step of a procedure, which would be distracting. E.G., “Alice added 200 ml water to the flask while Bob weighed out 5 g of sodium hydroxide and added it to the flask”.

Most people in America have health insurance through their employer. This was originally designed to be a perk of jobs back in the day, but now it unfortunately links healthcare to employment. If you are retirement age, you can get Medicare, which is government sponsored healthcare that still works through the private system, so there are no “government doctors” or anything like that for that population. Similarly, for disabled folks, or those poor enough (which can be hard to prove), they can get Medicaid.

If you lose your job, there’s a system to pay to extend your employer’s insurance policy until your next job’s plan kicks in, but it’s expensive cause your old job is no longer paying a big percentage of it, so a lot of people gamble on not needing insurance if for example, they end one job in May and know they have a new job starting in September.

With insurance, there are some government mandated policies. For example (and don’t quote me on this cause I don’t know the exact policies), things determined to be “preventative” have no out of pocket cost, so you won’t generally pay for a regular yearly checkup, vaccines, etc. There are often options for insurance types to pick from depending on if you anticipate needing lots of care (e.g., a healthy young person probably won’t, but if you are trying to have a baby, you know there are a lot of costs associated).

My employer pays for my insurance. If I were to get cancer, I would probably end up paying for a couple thousand dollars of appointments, scans, etc (called the deductible). Then I’d reach a point where my insurance covers most of the cost, and I kick in 20% (called the coinsurance level). Eventually, if my costs hit a certain limit (the out of pocket limit), insurance covers everything. I think it’s like $8k or something like that for me. That’s the most I could ever have to pay in a year.

People get screwed over by a few things. First is that while I could put together $8k if I had to, many people still have trouble with that. The second is people falling through the cracks of the labyrinthine system, and they end up without insurance while in between jobs or whatever. The third thing is that insurance decides what is necessary, so if you live in the middle of nowhere, and your child gets a specific type of cancer, you might not want to settle for whatever the “standard of care” is at your local hospital, you might want to fly across the country to go to the best hospital for that cancer, and your insurance isn’t going to cover that cost.

And it is incredibly important to note that the insurance companies don’t play fair. When your doctor tells the insurance company that you need a certain procedure, they have an automated system send out a “no”. Your doctor then has to spend time to appeal the decision. Eventually, you might get the care you need paid for, but by engaging in these practices, they are hoping you will either 1: pay yourself, or 2: die.

Also, a final note that I think is important is that cancer, and many chronic illnesses, makes people desperate, and willing to try anything. There is a huge ecosystem (and it probably exists in your country, too), of people selling alternative (i.e., fake) medicine to cure them. Yeah, it’s possible to wind up with a $50k bill for real medicine, but you also have people paying large sums to feed bleach to their autistic kids and then trying to pay for it with go fund me.

Agreed. Jobs don’t go to the applicant with the highest GPA (or the most “skilled”), they go to whoever had an internship at their dad’s friend’s company (or friend’s dad’s company, etc.) each summer and got grades that were “good enough”. If you can get something like that, even if it’s not exactly in your area of interest, you don’t need to be too concerned about grades.

On the other hand, if you don’t have those connections, you need to be smart.

There are people who are able to get decent enough grades and get jobs on charisma alone, but they are a nightmare to work with cause you’ll always be picking up their slack (even if they are perfectly nice people that you enjoy being around).

I tend to disagree with people on the “numbers game” thing. The barriers to submitting a million resumes to a million jobs have never been lower, so people in charge of hiring are inundated with applications from people who’s skillsets and stated interests make it clear that they have not even read the job posting. It makes it so that people who are fitting for the job are like a needle in a haystack. It also doesn’t help that the people reviewing applications are not often the people who you’d be working with, and they don’t necessarily know all the right things to be looking for; they just have a list of magic words that they are filtering for. You might have a synonym of the right word on your resume, and they’d never notice it.

These days, knowing someone is especially the key in my experience. It doesn’t even have to be someone you know well enough that they’d give you an actual “recommendation”. You are probably better off sending your resume to 10 people who already have the job you want than submitting 100 actual applications.

It’s not the best resume in the giant stack who gets interviewed, it’s someone’s niece’s college roommate’s former coworker’s step-cousin.

I feel like it’s only a matter of time before those get banned, so i kinda want to get one, even though I dont really need one.

So I don’t resent paying taxes but I do resent how much when roughly 1/5th of that goes to defense contractors

Don’t forget to also resent how much money sneakily goes to defense contractors (or other megacorps) by way of every other government office. It depends on the agency, but the majority of the federal workforce is not US government employees, it’s contractors, so taxpayer funds go to an army of middlemen before trickling down to the people doing the work. Taxpayers end up overpaying for labor, and the laborers make less money and with less job security than if that tax money just went directly to the worker.

healthcare, bicycle lanes, cheap and very good trains/metro/ferries/buses everywhere

Danish healthcare is cheaper than US healthcare, and bicycles/public transit are also cheaper than the car centric US transportation infrastructure. If the US adopted socialized healthcare and sane transit, we’d pay less taxes not more.

P.S. Does anyone know where I could get some metric-only measuring cups?

The key is to never use measuring cups, stick to the scale for everything. Using recipes made with mass is the best way to do it, but if you are trying to adapt a volume based recipe, look at the serving size on the food package; it should be given in volume and mass. For example my king arthur brand 00 pizza flour serving size is 1/4 cup (30 g).

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/snppah/what_are_florida_ounces/

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever measured vanilla, it goes right in the bowl, lol. Small quantities are often easier by volume, though, for sure.

Diameter of pots is big, too. You get way more evaporation with a wider pot.

Ounces suck because they are used as a weight and a volume, and I can’t ever be sure which one a particular recipe is using.