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I read a prediction that if the global fertility rate stayed at the same rate as it was in 1995 by 2150 the population would be 256 billion people. That sounds crazy, but for my sci-fi I'm rolling with it (albeit shaving off 50 billion).

The Hegemony needs to feed these 200 billion odd citizens. One solution I'm interested in is cultured meat/"lab meat". Can cultured meat be grown in a industrial scale? And would this scale be large enough to feed 200 billion humans. (Their diets would be supplemented with vertical farming and green houses)

Note: Only 30-50% of the population can be fed by traditional farming alone.

Celestial Dragon Emperor
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    Can lab meat be grown on an industrial scale ? Well it's your story (120 years in the future !) so you're free to choose whatever answer you like. At the moment it can't. We cannot reality check the future. – StephenG - Help Ukraine Apr 29 '19 at 21:19
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    What will be the process for "lab meat" production? Have you seen the "Snowpiercer"? – Alexander Apr 29 '19 at 21:20
  • @Alexander cultured meat I thought was grown in Petri dishes – Celestial Dragon Emperor Apr 29 '19 at 21:26
  • Using only what we already know about cloning technology, I believe you'd still need to keep a certain stock of animals to harvest for stem cells and eggs, but I'd imagine it would be more efficient if you're not paying an energy/nutrient budget for the animals motility and organs. – Nosajimiki Apr 29 '19 at 21:34
  • @JBH I used the term cultured meat. That's what I'm talking about specifically. We have made cultured meat just at the moment it doesn't have the infrastructure to be profitable. I'll edit it the percent of the population feed by traditional means. – Celestial Dragon Emperor Apr 29 '19 at 21:46
  • My question to you is why? Cultured lab meat will not have the flavor or texture of meat from a slaughtered animal. Why not use solutions that already exist, like high protein meat substitutes from wheat gluten, soy, pea protein, etc. Not that manufactured food is more energy and space efficient than just growing a lot of legumes and other nutritious foods. No, you can't feed 200B that way; I'm not sure any way will work for that. – Cyn Apr 29 '19 at 21:48
  • +1 to @JBH's comment. It wasn't visible when I was writing mine. Sometimes the best solutions to a problem already exist! – Cyn Apr 29 '19 at 21:49
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    note traditional farming is not the same as modern industrialized sustainable farming. – John Apr 29 '19 at 21:50
  • @Cyn it does not have it now there is no reason it could not have the right texture in the future. – John Apr 29 '19 at 21:51
  • @John while that's true, my point is that lab meat would not have good flavor and texture any more than processed soybeans do. You add those things through other ingredients and how you craft it. So if you are going to all that trouble anyway, why not just use high protein ingredients that already exist? But I suppose some people will just want to "eat meat" even if it's not really meat. – Cyn Apr 29 '19 at 21:58
  • @Cyn because if you do it right you will not have to add anything, the current limitations is getting lab meat to grow connective tissue, once we can do that we can literally grow steaks in sheets. – John Apr 29 '19 at 22:11
  • @Cyn they made a burger patty out of cultured meat and it tasted fine apparently. Maybe part of the industrial process adds flavoring and texture. – Celestial Dragon Emperor Apr 29 '19 at 23:03
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    I suppose. But I'd much rather have https://www.beyondmeat.com/ thank you. That being said, you still need to provide raw material for your lab meat, and that has to come from somewhere too. – Cyn Apr 29 '19 at 23:10
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    OK, I've retracted my close vote, but I'd like to point out the following: (a) "one solution I'm interested in..." is vague. Is cultured meat what you're calling "lab meat" or isn't it? You need to tell us if rice+beans = "lab meat" or not. Please be specific and definitive. I'm frankly tiring of OPs who try to skirt the "specific and answerable" rule for this site. (b) 5% of 200B = 10B, the protein for which we'll provide using traditional methods despite what the doomsayers claim. A far more realistic value would be 30%-50%. (*continued*) – JBH Apr 30 '19 at 00:15
  • It might have made more sense (and may yet make more sense) to ask the question from a total-population-less point of view. Something more along the lines of, "regardless my total population, I need to find a synthetic method of meat protein production for 200B. Can I do this using Cultured Meat?" – JBH Apr 30 '19 at 00:17
  • @JBH I'll try my best to edit it. – Celestial Dragon Emperor Apr 30 '19 at 00:17
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    Someone has to say it: Soylent Green – manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact Apr 30 '19 at 02:08
  • @manassehkatz, or less gruesome, "Chicken Little" from Pohl/Kornbluth's "Space Merchants" (which is a lot closer to what's asked in the question). –  Apr 30 '19 at 08:29
  • 2.4 child per woman, when replacement is 2.2 yields a 10% increase per generation, or a doubling in 7 generations. Even if you assumed that 2.4 was 'all profit' you have an increase of 20%/generation, for a doubling every 3.5 generations. You would be somewhere between 20 and 25 billion. – Sherwood Botsford May 01 '19 at 12:43

6 Answers6

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Ordinary meat takes a lot calories to grow. For example you have to feed a cow 9000 calories for it to gain a pound, and a pound of beef provides roughly 1100 calories.

Consuming plants directly would still be able to feed a much larger population that any kind of meat, even if you increased the efficiency of lab meat by 2x or 3x over regular meat.

The biology of this planet ultimately relies almost entirely on sunlight for energy. The less conversion steps between raw sunlight and food (sugar, fat, or protein) the less total losses there will be in the system.

Having said that, even most plants only capture a few percent of the available solar energy (corn is only 2% to 3%). Where you would gain the most in terms of feeding much larger populations would be to invent artificial photosynthesis to produce 10x or 20x more sugar per watt of sunlight than we get now.

user4574
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    This is a frame challenge, which we whole-heartedly endorse. (And I like the idea of improving photosynthesis as a viable feed-the-universe solution! Don't get me wrong, I like my BBQ, but it's a wonderfully realistic path to success.) – JBH Apr 30 '19 at 03:16
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    @JBH you should try grilled vegetables then. It's no meat, but it still tastes great. – John Dvorak Apr 30 '19 at 11:52
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    @JohnDvorak Why would you assume they haven't? I always add veggies after the first round of meat (the fat from the meat dropping down into the embers gives it that flavour that you just can't get in a frying pan.) I've also never seen a shish kebap/shashlik skewer on a grill that didn't have veggies on it. From my experience I would assume most people who ate grilled stuff also ate grilled veggies at some point. – R. Schmitz Apr 30 '19 at 13:25
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    1 pound of cow is not necessarily 1 pound of edible beef. In general, we expect each step in energy transfer to consume 90% of input energy. Your 9000/1100 calories figure isn't far off from that, but my point is that we generally only eat the flesh, and discard the other stuff, so 9000 calories in might make less than 1100 calorie of edible beef. There's also the water. Thousands of gallons to make a pound of beef. –  Apr 30 '19 at 22:12
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    Ruminants process vegetable calories at more than an order of magnitude higher than humans can. We process animal calories drastically more efficiently. The net result heavily favors meat, two stages of loss notwithstanding. The energy argument gave way to land and water use and CO_2 emissions. These are very local considerations, however, so so not support any generally applicable rubric. – The Nate Apr 30 '19 at 22:23
  • @user4574 Cows can use the energy in 87% of the plant material from grain crops - for humans it is something like 17% (I'll try to find the source). So there is an efficiency trade off there. – josh May 01 '19 at 08:56
  • Your numbers are 100% based off traditional farming (of both meat and vegetables). Lab-grown meat is a completely different matter. I’m not saying that lab-grown meat changes the balance but your numbers don’t prove that. You also mention sunlight, and a big point of industrialising meat production is that you could use alternative energy sources. – Konrad Rudolph May 01 '19 at 08:57
  • @fredsbend the water used to "grow" beef is green water (rain water either used to grow feed crops or grass) so real beef will probably have a better tap water footprint than lab-beef. I have no figures for lab-beef. It would be interesting to compare. I also wonder if there would even be enough rain water to grown enough lab-beef for 200 billion people!? https://www.nfuonline.com/sectors/livestock/livestock-news/water-use-and-beef-what-we-know/ – josh May 01 '19 at 09:08
  • @KonradRudolph It would be interesting to see weather bacteria that use chemosynthesis could be a nutrient source. And whether it could be done efficiently. The sun gives us for free 3 to 4 million watts per square acre of sunlight during the day. Its hard to compete with that compared to just growing plants. – user4574 May 02 '19 at 02:38
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    Just because a cow needs to consume 9000 calories to produce 1100 calories for us doesn't mean the 9000 calories could be transferred to humans directly. Much of a cows diet is vegetation humans cannot digest easily. – Sonvar May 02 '19 at 03:05
  • @user4574 As mentioned this is an extremely misleading view since a square acre of plants has a much lower calorie output than a “square acre” of meat. By mass, plants are a lot less efficient energy vehicles than meat or microorganism-based feed. – Konrad Rudolph May 02 '19 at 09:17
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Not really.

Lab meat only replaces meat, which is only a small fraction of the global diet, and you still need to farm something to feed the lab meat, so there are few gains. That said someday it could easily become less wasteful than traditional ranching, just because you are not growing the whole cow and by using plants and plant byproducts humans will not eat and even human garbage. Lab mean does not gain you much in terms of total calories however, because as I said you have to feed it something, so you are still dealing with the the massive energy loss going from producer to consumer.

You are still going to use grains for the majority of your calories, the caloric efficiency of grains as producers is hard to beat. Really the globe could feed that population without much problem, the issue would be we would have to convert a much larger portion of the worlds surface into farmland, and start using water intelligently which is going to mean a lot of government oversigt. Aqua culture may be a bigger help than vat meat, since it is literally creating farmable surface, although this will likely only make up for having to farm fuels.

That said 100years is a long time technologically by then we may engineered photosynthetic meat cells, if you have that meat is only a little more costly in terms of energy than vegetables, at which point meat would have a similar efficiency as turnips or avocado. That would certainly lower the load on global agriculture but it will still never replace grains in terms of caloric efficiency.

John
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    "a lot of government oversight" - won't that by definition make it a lot less efficient? – Glen Yates Apr 29 '19 at 22:59
  • “You are still going to use grains for the majority of your calories.” Unlikely, given the existence of aquaculture vertical farming techniques. – nick012000 Apr 29 '19 at 23:56
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    you have to feed it something Yes, but who says that that can't be easy to produce chemical compounds? –  Apr 30 '19 at 07:42
  • @JanDoggen lab meat still needs more-or-less the same nutrients that animal meat does in order to grow; the only gain is that it's more space-efficient and you don't have to provide for the other needs of a living animal. – DaveMongoose Apr 30 '19 at 09:09
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    @GlenYates The government oversight point was in relation to the use of limited water resources. Oversight of a resource doesn't say anything about the efficiency of the use of that resource, it's just about prioritisation and conservation. – Simon Hibbs Apr 30 '19 at 09:50
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    @DaveMongoose yes but you dont need to waste nutrients growing anything that is not meat, i.e. no organs, maybe no bones – jk. Apr 30 '19 at 10:04
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    @JanDoggen biology, vat grown cells still need the same things as normal cow cells, sugar,protein, fats, nucleic acids. producing those chemically is way less efficient than growing them. – John Apr 30 '19 at 10:11
  • @SimonHibbs Why would water resources be limited? This planet has a lot of water. The only issue is how much energy it takes to make, for instance, sea water be usable. – Monty Harder Apr 30 '19 at 17:32
  • @MontyHarder Planet used to have a lot of petrol, too. – Monica Apologists Get Out Apr 30 '19 at 20:00
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    @jk And don't forget the gains in not needing to upkeep those organs either (don't need calories wasted on beating a heart, breathing, eating, etc). – Delioth Apr 30 '19 at 20:33
  • @Delioth you still use a lot of that energy, vat meat still needs nutrients in an accessible form oxygen ect. you are just supplying that mechanically/artificially, they still take energy. – John Apr 30 '19 at 21:48
  • @MontyHarder the single largest use of water in the world is agriculture, there are plenty of places on the planet that could be farmland if they had access to water. The US is already hitting water shortages for instance. desalinating water costs energy which has to come from somewhere, it also requires a nearby ocean.. increasing production by several hundred fold will start hitting hard limits on water availability. – John Apr 30 '19 at 21:51
  • @John As I said, the real issue is energy. It's either the energy to desalinate water and pump it to the meat factories, or if the meat factories can operate on the sea, the energy to move the meat from the factories to the people. – Monty Harder May 01 '19 at 16:35
  • @Adonalsium Petrol can be burned, but water isn't really consumed by agriculture in the long run. When people eat the food they break the water out of it again. – Monty Harder May 01 '19 at 16:37
  • @MontyHarder however the water usually came from a aquifer and is returned to rivers or the sea, aquifers often do not recharge as fast as they are drained. note in 100 years petrol will have to come from farms. I agree energy loss is the major factor which may not be clear in my answer. – John May 01 '19 at 18:57
  • @MontyHarder also a lot of the water in plants is actually converted into sugars or lipids, not just stored in the plant tissue. – John May 02 '19 at 02:40
  • @John And when animals (including bacteria) eat those plants and consume those sugars and lipids, the water comes right back out. – Monty Harder May 02 '19 at 14:51
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Yes (and it will happen fairly soon)

With the advent of 3d printers it's possible to print meat like products from other products.

Eventually society will have algae, bacteria and yeast tanks to produce the food we need. The only problem is it's not exactly appetizing. With additional processing, it can be made into products that have the look, taste and even smell of other foods including meat.

The tanks can be supplied with the required nutrients and water extracted from processed sewerage and output food and oxygen. Since algae is so fast growing and efficient, it could also replace vegetables as well as meat.

As best, real meat and vegetables would be the choice only for the ultra rich.

Thorne
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    For the record, the last Big Mac I ate tasted a lot like it came from a 3D printer. Heaven help us if Fast Food ever gets their hands on such a device. – JBH Apr 30 '19 at 03:17
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    Sorry to say but they'll be the first to reduce costs. – Thorne Apr 30 '19 at 05:02
  • The OP is referring to lab meat, which is cells from meat animals grown in vats to produce meat, not imitation meat. It is a real beef steak without a cow. – John Apr 30 '19 at 21:54
  • So is this guy. That "3d printer" is simply one of the ways of developing the structure. – The Nate Apr 30 '19 at 22:25
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    If you can't tell from the look, smell or taste, does it matter where the original cells come from? Algae, yeast and bacteria are self contained and easy to grow unlike disembodied animal cells and really only the end product matters. – Thorne May 01 '19 at 01:01
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Heck yah. I got yer lab meat factory right here!

yeast factory

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Feed-additive-Brewer-dried-yeast-dry_60078544242.html

This robot factory grows yeast to use as a food supplement. The protein content is comparable to soybeans. You can easily enrich yeast with minerals and in fact this is widely done as the yeast makes the mineral nutrients more bioavailable.

The benefit of the yeast is you can grow them in three dimensions on any kind of land or even on boats at sea. The downside is that you need to provide the yeast with everything they need including a nitrogen source and organic carbon to make into their bodies. Soybeans can do a lot of that work on their own, out in a field, using the sun and obtaining their own carbon from the air but they grow only in one dimension and according to the season.

Willk
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Replacing meat with a better and maybe more humane substitute is a small part of the solution to feeding the world since meat calories are a small part of a typical diet.

There have been a few questions here about the greatest possible production of food per unit of land surface using various techniques.

See here: Giving Tolkien Architecture a Reality Check: Dwarvish Kingdoms1

and here: How can Dwarves produce honey underground?2

And here: How many people can you feed per square-kilometer of farmland?3

And with sufficiently advanced science food can be synthesized from chemicals, like in a Star Trek food replicator.

M. A. Golding
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They are working on doing that now lab meat (though to the scientist and their polling working on it) they say it's very important for it to look, feel, and taste like the birthed thing.

They currently take cells from a cow or whatever and grow it in the lab they say it is possible but right now it will take years to do that. Just assume you've gotten the break through required to do it either a civilian tinkering in their garage came up with it (as a hobo built himself a home made nuclear reactor for his own shanty power system not kidding). So the civilian tinker in this example figures it out small scale then talks to the government or took it to a manufacturer and solved the issue so now its possible.

Or the government threw enough money at the labs and their scientist to make that occur or Japan figured it out ect. I think its growing speed, portion sizes, and getting the population to see it as safe and natural. Bare in mind real meat would become something for the rich to consume (for prestige and health) all other classes would be given the lab meat the current plan being to just phase it out and not tell anyone as they're so close in comparison.

People could be allowed to further supplement their own lives with their own gardens indoor in their basements or housed in dried swimming pools. Or you could also allow for yard farming but that depends on how much space your society allows for people to take up. They would also outlaw personal farm homesteads so meat could not be sourced from that location it won't stop everyone but then you also have to consider what do you do with the Amish and people who for religious or personal reasons will not eat what they consider to be false meat? Will there be a black market for the real deal? And how will anyone know? One devious thing would be the government in reality controls both ends of this meat pipeline and its all fake save the approved people who get it via they're on a list or are the actual animal providers themselves.

Mio
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