Cultured & Alternative Foods News and Discussions

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

Reinventing the eel: first lab-grown eel meat revealed

Mon 22 Jan 2024 09.15 GMT

The first lab-grown freshwater eel meat has been produced, potentially solving a diner’s dilemma. Rampant overfishing has caused eel populations to plummet and prices to soar, but the cultivated eel could provide the delicacy guilt-free.

The eel meat was produced by Forsea Foods in Israel from embryonic cells of a freshwater eel. The company collaborated with a Japanese chef to create unagi kabayaki, marinated grilled eel over rice, and unagi nigiri, a type of sushi.

The company aims to scale up its operation and have the cultivated eel on sale in about two years. Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, last year backed the development of a cultivated meat industry. The restaurant price in Japan is about $250 a kilogram, and Forsea Foods expects the price of the cultivated eel to match that of the wild-caught eel.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... t-revealed



Credit: Anatoly Michaello

[weatheriscool]

Cultivated meat production costs could fall significantly: Bovine muscle engineered to produce their own growth signals
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-cultivate ... antly.html
by Tufts University

Cellular agriculture—the production of meat from cells grown in bioreactors rather than harvested from farm animals—is taking leaps in technology that are making it a more viable option for the food industry. One such leap has now been made at the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA), led by David Kaplan, Stern Family Professor of Engineering, in which researchers have created bovine (beef) muscle cells that produce their own growth factors, a step that can significantly cut costs of production.

[Time_Traveller]

Yes, it is cricket: Italy gives go-ahead to insect flour for human use

Wed 31 Jan 2024 17.16 GMT



A company that produces flour made from crickets has become the first in Italy to be given the green light to sell food made from insects for human consumption, defying Italian food purists and even a government attempt to curb its use.

Josè Francesco Cianni, the chief executive of Nutrinsect, said: “a new page in the history of food has been opened” now that his nutrient-packed flour can be incorporated into an array of food items.

“This is very big news for us,” said Cianni, whose main motive for the business initiative was to provide an alternative, sustainable protein source.

Since 2020, millions of crickets have been raised at the company’s plant in Montecassiano, a town in the central Marche region, where they are heat-treated before being frozen and ground into powder.

Until now, the company has been permitted to sell the flour only for use in pet food.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/ ... onsumption

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Scientists grow beef cells in rice to make new protein-rich space food
By Michael Irving
February 14, 2024

In a move that will make some stomachs growl and others turn, Korean scientists have taken muscle and fat stem cells from cows and transplanted them into grains of rice. The end result is a new, high-protein food that should be cheap, environmentally friendly, and useful for famines, military or space travel.

Our current farming practices aren’t particularly sustainable, and with billions more people on the way, the environmental impact is only projected to grow. As such, the future of food might look very different to what we’re used to, whether that’s growing meat in labs, eating insects for protein, or stoking microbes to produce nutritious powders.

Now, scientists in Korea have created a new kind of food that could form a future staple – a beef-rice hybrid. The principle is similar to growing meat cells in the lab, except this time they did so inside the pores of rice grains. The structure provided a stable scaffold for the animal cells, while certain molecules in rice helped them flourish.

https://newatlas.com/science/beef-cells ... rich-food/

[wjfox]

The Leading Lab-Grown-Meat Company Just Paused a Major Expansion

Feb 14, 2024 4:26 PM

In September 2023, Upside Foods announced its plans to open a large cultivated-meat plant in Glenview, Illinois. The 187,000-square-foot plant was slated to have an initial capacity of millions of pounds of bioreactor-brewed meat per year, which would make it one of the largest planned factories in the nascent cultivated-meat industry. The company nicknamed the facility Rubicon, signifying “a point of no return” for cultivated-meat production.

WIRED can reveal that Upside’s plans to build Rubicon have been put on hold, and the company will instead focus on doubling its investment in its established facility in Emeryville, California, before it continues work in Glenview. In an email seen by WIRED, Upside CEO Uma Valeti told employees that expanding operations at its Emeryville facility would cost “substantially less” than building the first phase of Rubicon and that the company had been streamlining the way it operates and stopping noncritical work.

[...]

The Illinois factory was supposed to be a major step toward the commercialization of cultivated meat, with a potential capacity of more than 30 million pounds per year. As part of its commitment to the project, Upside had said it planned to invest more than $140 million in the Midwest region and create 75 new jobs associated with the factory. In April 2022 Upside closed a $400 million Series C funding round, the largest in the industry to date, which brought the company to a self-claimed valuation of more than $1 billion.

But since 2022 there has been a pronounced downturn in the amount of new venture capital money flowing toward the cultivated-meat industry. According to preliminary data from food-tech venture capital firm Agfunder, total investment in the space dropped by 78 percent from 2022 to 2023, from $807 million to $177 million.

https://www.wired.com/story/upside-food ... rown-meat/

[caltrek]

Scientists grow beef cells in rice to make new protein-rich space food

But since 2022 there has been a pronounced downturn in the amount of new venture capital money flowing toward the cultivated-meat industry.

The thing is that efforts at making high protein foods available to the general public may not be either welcome or desirable. I have already posted the citation below in the Future of Food, Agriculture, and Aquaculture thread. Still, since it is so relevant to this discussion, I am also posting it here:


Eating Too Much Protein is Bad for Your Arteries
February 19, 2024

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) PITTSBURGH, Feb. 19, 2024 – University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers discovered a molecular mechanism by which excessive dietary protein could increase atherosclerosis risk. The findings were published in Nature Metabolism today.

The study, which combined small human trials with experiments in mice and cells in a Petri dish, showed that consuming over 22% of dietary calories from protein can lead to increased activation of immune cells that play a role in atherosclerotic plaque formation, driving the disease risk. Furthermore, the scientists showed that one amino acid – leucine – seems to have a disproportionate role in driving the pathological pathways linked to atherosclerosis, or stiff, hardened arteries.

“Our study shows that dialing up your protein intake in pursuit of better metabolic health is not a panacea. You could be doing real damage to your arteries,” said senior and co-corresponding author Babak Razani, M.D., Ph.D., professor of cardiology at Pitt. “Our hope is that this research starts a conversation about ways of modifying diets in a precise manner that can influence body function at a molecular level and dampen disease risks.”

According to a survey of an average American diet over the last decade, Americans generally consume a lot of protein, mostly from animal sources. Further, nearly a quarter of the population receives over 22% of all daily calories from protein alone.

That trend is likely driven by the popular idea that dietary protein is essential to healthy living, says Razani. But his and other groups have shown that overreliance on protein may not be such a good thing for long-term health.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1034427

caltrek's comments: As more and more such studies come to this sort of conclusion, demand for protein rich rice and protein rich cultivated meat may evaporate. Hence, why continue to invest in their development?

[raklian]

caltrek's comments: As more and more such studies come to this sort of conclusion, demand for protein rich rice and protein rich cultivated meat may evaporate. Hence, why continue to invest in their development?

There is always going to be demand for protein sources as they're an essential macronutrient. Once cultured meat becomes cheaper than conventional meat, it's not hard to imagine we'll invest more in technologies that will make cultured meat production more efficient. Additionally, with sufficiently advanced technology, we may alter the composition of protein to render it relatively harmless to our longevity.

[caltrek]

caltrek's comments: As more and more such studies come to this sort of conclusion, demand for protein rich rice and protein rich cultivated meat may evaporate. Hence, why continue to invest in their development?

There is always going to be demand for protein sources as they're an essential macronutrient...

Yes, but the point is that demand can and perhaps should be met by reliance on existing plant-based sources. Beans tend to be particularly high in protein, but other foods such as mushrooms, eggplant, avocados, etc. also contain protein.