Posted on 12/07/2025 10:14:24 PM PST by Red Badger
Pork might be cheap, fatty, and flavorful, but pig farming isn’t without its downsides. For starters, pigs are highly social creatures — capable of displaying distinct personality traits as well as emotions like stress and fear — and considered the fifth most intelligent animal in the world, demonstrating cognizance that rivals that of a three-year-old human child. The environmental impact of factory meat production is also astounding.
Yet since the 19th century, we’ve bred, fattened, and harvested these sensitive creatures on an unprecedented scale. Now, a new startup named Mission Barns is looking for a way to change that: the company peddles in bioreactor-grown meat, which it says is a sustainable alternative to the horrific industrial meat industry.
The process works like this:
Workers first take a small sample of fatty tissue from a live animal — in Mission Barns’ case, a Yorkshire pig living in upstate New York named Dawn. Lab workers then add plant-based sugars, proteins, and vitamins to the fat culture and fatten the sample in a cultivator, mimicking the growth a pig’s body would undergo naturally.
After a two-week incubation period, the meat is then “combined” with plant protein to create a product that’s technically real meat, but without all the cruelty that defines factory meat farming. The end result can then be cooked into all manner of traditional meat stuffs, like sausages, salami, and bacon.
According to a review from Grist, the result is something like “diet meat,” tasting a “little less meaty” than the real deal. That said, the fact that Dawn the Yorkshire pig is still alive and well has to count for something — and, as the food reviewer writes, the resulting foods still “taste great.”
Grist notes that the meat grown by Mission Barns is “unstructured,” meaning it’s not trying to replicate the fatty conditions of ultra-specific cuts like loins or shanks. Instead, the alt meat is meant to stand-in for those products that use pork as a base. This freedom allows the company, and the restaurants they partner with, to play around with specific flavor profiles and growth processes, turning the bioreactor into an extension of the kitchen.
The bacon, for example, is said to have a “nice applewood smoke,” while the meatballs had an appropriately “springy” mouthfeel.
Mission Barns was approved for US operations by the Food and Drug Administration back in March, making it just the third company to receive US regulatory approval to sell lab-reared animal cells for public consumption.
At the moment, the operation is pretty small-scale — Grist notes that a pack of eight meatballs currently sells for a lofty $13.99 in Berkley, California, which is steep but still light years lower than the lab-grown meet of yesteryear, which typically cost around $300,000 per burger patty. That said, the startup is reportedly looking to scale up production and start selling its proprietary bioreactors to other food companies.
Whether Mission Barns can succeed at revolutionizing meat consumption in one of the most carnivorous countries on the planet remains to be seen, but if it means little fellas like Dawn won’t have to die in an industrial slaughterhouse to satisfy our nation’s cravings, it’ll certainly be worth the effort.
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I never sausage a thing!...........
I like to appreciate the animal who died so that I could eat their meat. I think our far-back ancestors did the same, especially since they probably had to hunt for every piece of meat they had. Raising livestock for consumption is a fairly recent development, human evolution-wise.
I am not about to give thanks for some bioreactor.
Yuk.
I smell something hitting the ground...
Winston Churchill: “Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you, but a pig will look you straight in the eye and treat you as an equal”
No thanks. Once they start mixing plant crap in, nope. Probably unfermented soy junk, in that form probably estrogen mimicking and men do not need more of that in their diets.
The problem with lab-grown meat is that you never know what they’re putting into it without your knowledge.
The simple fact IS humans are not going to be able to take livestock to space. The mass balance with chemical and nuclear fission even fusion rockets is against it.
There is no way to lift out of earth’s gravity well the mass needed to feed,water and reproduce livestock. It’s ten to one feed to whole animal with cattle, then you have to skin and gut it you lose all the bones, gut track mass ect. It’s 40% weight on the hoof to edible meat. This says nothing of the oxygen and more importantly the water requirements. Cattle need 2,000 gallons or more per finished pound of meat.
Like it or not when humans go to space they are vegans or they are eating fermented and bioreactor based proteins.
Here on earth 6 billion people live with chronic protein deficiency. Here again there is not enough land or water to have all 8 billion humans eat like Europeans or Americans the math is clear on that.
It’s when not if biotech brings mass cultured proteins to the market. Once it scaled up it will be the cheapest form of protein in the market and economics will decide. One has a choice buy a ground feedlot beef for $8 per lb or buy cultured ground beef identical in DNA to the cow it was biopsied from for $2 or less. People will chose by their wallets. Don’t want $2 biotech don’t buy it , but the price of feedlot beef will shoot up as demand drops and its supply shrinks.
Uh.....NO!!
Who in their right mind would sacrifice the taste / smell / procedure of enjoying a delicious meal from what God put before us to enjoy? Look at the physiological damage done to a human with just being in the space station more than 6 months? We are made to exist with a force so as so our muscles can be utilized. We don’t even know the planet we are on now and to contemplate zipping around in space as the next logical procedure is naive.
FrankenBacon
And we end up with an overpopulation of pigs.
I read a lot of scifi and one series solved that ‘problem’. They took fertilized eggs, embryos, of the livestock frozen in liquid nitrogen. That way they could take thousands of cattle, pigs, sheep, horses, chickens of various varieties in a very small space then gestate them in artificial wombs...........................
“Cattle need 2,000 gallons or more per finished pound of meat.”
If you don’t know that basic biological fact, what is the probability you’d be wrong on a complex subject involving land management, animal farming, demographics, economics, nutrition, cultural preferences, etc? The math is clear on that, it’s 99.87%.
“And we end up with an overpopulation of pigs.”
No idea what 2, 3, or 4 are, but I'm guessing that #6 is democrats.
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