Too expensive pleasure: the production of artificial meat violated spendings on it

The production of farmed meat, which is so much hoped for by advocates of green energy and animal rights activists around the world, has rather dubious prospects so far, the journalists of the online analytical publication The Counter write in a detailed material exploring this problem.

Novye Izvestia has repeatedly published news from the "front" of the production of artificial meat, and, as a rule, very optimistic. It seemed that just about, and this problem will be solved, and then mankind will no longer have to deal with the daily mass murder of animals, and in addition, this will significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere produced by millions of cows, sheep, chickens and other animals whose meat people eat.

It turned out that “installations for culturing cells in bioreactors are very resource-intensive. This fact allows critics to argue that if these plants were running on fossil fuels, their environmental impact could be even worse than traditional meat production. The analysis of the situation showed that the cultivation of meat can have more serious consequences for the climate than the production of chicken and pork, which uses conventional energy ... "

The journalists of the publication found out that all startups producing ersatz "meat" are deceiving in their calculations that very soon they will reduce its cost from the current $ 10 thousand per pound to $ 2.5. No one even theoretically came close to the price of this ersatz at $ 1000 per kilogram, despite the fact that they are constantly shifting the dates. And at the same time, all startups regularly continue to receive subsidies from governments or venture capitalists.

The publication notes that if today we begin to accelerate the development of meat production from a bioreactor, then by 2030 it will already be possible to launch the first factory. Its construction will cost $ 450 million, and it will produce only ... 10 thousand tons of meat per year.

For its operation, it will be necessary to supply 600 bioreactor boilers, as well as to organize there sterile conditions with the highest degree of protection, as in the production of the most complex and purest bio and pharmaceutical preparations, or microchips.

At the same time, at the JBS plant in Colorado alone, 5 thousand heads of cattle are slaughtered every day, and the same 10 thousand tons of meat (natural) are produced per week.

In order for artificial meat to occupy 10% of the market in America alone, 4,000 such giga factories with bioreactors need to be built, which will cost $ 1.8 trillion.

Experts believe that there are two ways out of this situation, and both of them do not mean the production of meat in bioreactors on cell cultures. The first way out is meat from peas (soybeans), vegetarian ersatz (already produced now). This will mean the forcible reduction of beef cattle without any replacement for the sake of the "green agenda", that is, such a movement towards "conscious vegetarianism" expected by the "greens". The maximum concession that it is proposed to make in this case is to leave poultry farming, as not too energy-intensive production: 1 calorie of chicken consumes 8-10 calories of feed, while a pig and a cow - 25, as well as aquaculture. For example, farms for growing shellfish (mussels) - the cheapest animal protein.

The second way out: the production of protein from insects ...