The kit likely is optimized for human muscle cells and might not perform as well with other human cells or muscle cells from another species or even not at all. The other question is where would you find livable cells from a cow or whatever that you wanted to cultivate. I doubt that your refrigerated steak has viable cells.

[–] tobogganablaze@lemmus.org 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I don't think the requiernments for mammalian muscles cells are that different from each other. It might be optimized for a specific animal, but I'm pretty sure it will still work in general or it would only take very small adjustments to make it work for a different mammal.

The other question is where would you find livable cells from a cow or whatever that you wanted to cultivate

Yeah, you'd need a live or very recently deceased cow. But it should be easy enough to obtain some samples before or during regular slaughter. And once this method is viable and widespread enough there will probably "biopsy cows" that just get pricked for cell samples all day.

[–] volvoxvsmarla@lemm.ee 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

But it should be easy enough to obtain some samples before or during regular slaughter.

It's a DIY kit for layers to play around at home. I don't know where I would obtain samples before or during regular slaughter for my 49,99€ kit from Amazon tbh

[–] tobogganablaze@lemmus.org 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ask a local farm or butchers shop for example.

But yeah, it's probalby more of a toy and I doubt that growning your own steak at home will catch on. You need industrial scale meat cultivation if you want to compete with the current convinence and price of meat.

[–] volvoxvsmarla@lemm.ee 2 points 3 months ago

Ok that makes sense. I live very urbanized and unfortunately without books and talks my kid would probably grow up thinking meat grows in plastic packaging, so a local farm or butcher is rather out of reach. I'm probably also approaching this more from a laboratory perspective than necessary.

I also hope lab grown meat catches on, but we need a) a really good cell line to not always have to take fresh cell samples from living animals and b) a sustainable and plant based alternative to FCS. I think scaling it up wouldn't even be such a huge problem eventually. What I am much more surprised by is that so many people have an ick with lab grown meat. How is this grosser than eating a dead animal or insects?