Growing meat cells in a lab and selling them as food is illegal in the states you reference.
What Beyond does in processing plant material into something that resembles some meat products is still legal everywhere.
Growing meat cells in a lab and selling them as food is illegal in the states you reference.
What Beyond does in processing plant material into something that resembles some meat products is still legal everywhere.
Because the only information that isn’t already public is speculation (a mix of outright wrong and unknown if wrong but unprovable in court), victim and witness names, and maybe some investigative techniques. Releasing them would expose victims and witnesses to doxing, feed conspiracy theory on the speculation (including the known-wrong stuff, but to many people “being in the file” gives it some kind of aura), and let future traffickers know how Epstein was finally taken down so they can run a tighter operation and avoid getting caught.
Or you could soak it in prescription strength urea for a couple of days to get the nail to fall off. Less collateral damage that way.
OP might be talking about a procedure where a podiatrist or dermatologist kills the mis-growing edges of the nail root. The remaining root grows a narrower nail, but hopefully a straighter one. Sometimes the process doesn’t work the first time (hard to judge how much cell-kill stuff will get just the edges and not damage the middle) and has to be repeated.
The barrier here is that hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution has extremely optimized their form, and the nature of growing only the muscle cells de-optimizes the system. Animals have immune systems; lab cells have to be kept in a sterile environment, a significant cost. Animals have digestive systems and can power cell growth and all other functions from common plant materials; lab cells have to be fed pre-digested and carefully proportioned material, a significant cost. Animals have circulatory systems that efficiently perfuse oxygen and nutrients, and remove waste; lab cell containers have to be centrifuged in small containers because the forces required in large containers damage the cells. And so on.
Lab-grown cuts are sold as a luxury good now, and I expect as the price comes down from 1000x animal-grown meat to more like 10x animal-grown meat they will become more widely eaten by rich conspicuous consumers.
The real opportunity for equal-tasting, cheaper, better for the environment “meat” is development of and efficiencies gained by scaling the lines of plant-based imitations like what Impossible and it’s competitors are doing.
The cost is a big turn off for most people. At grocery stores near me, the Impossible and Beyond products are more than double the price of the meat products they are imitating. In part because livestock feed is hugely subsidized by the government.
If the plant-based meat alternatives could gain efficiency through scale and experience to lower the cost below animal meat, we would see way more people trying them and finding what dishes they work best in, which would feed back into scaled market demand. But I don’t see that kind of explosive growth potential at current price levels.