AJamesStout

Andrew here (New Harvest fellow and PhD student at Tufts). Great question! I think this is tricky, and is something to definitely set expectations for. When I find myself talking about cultured meat to people who are new to the topic, I often say something along the lines of "it's the idea of using cells grown in a lab to make meat products that we usually get from animals. In the short term, this may be like using animal cells as ingredients to improve plant-based meat, and in the long term it might look like meat products that are 100% made from cultured cells." I've recently become more and more attracted to the framing of "cells as ingredients," since I think it handles that question pretty nicely and is also strikes me as a compelling way to explain it.

Andrew here - thanks for the kind words!! If I had to guess, I would say that a product gets approval in the US within 2-3 years, since by my understanding those agencies are really interested in the field. For sale at restaurants? Probably a similar time frame (as soon as a company gets regulatory approval, they will likely partner with some restuarant and sell their product at a financial loss to get feedback, garner interest, and for marketing). For sale not at a loss at restaurants and retailers? That's where I get much less confident and usually dodge the question by saying 2-100 years. The truth is we (I) just don't have any sort of good look under the hood of these companies, and don't have a clear sense of where their tech is. I think per u/sorif's earlier question, the first products will be a hybrid plant-based cell-based product (e.g., adding 5% fat cells to a plant-based burger to improve the mouthfeel and flavor) rather than a fully cell-based meat. By doing that, you've in one stroke decreased your cost of production by a ton. Whether it gets you to a price that does well in an actual food market? I'm not sure. So I'll bring it all home and say 2-100 years.
For the last question: it'd be interesting to try some sort of animal that lives in relatively extreme conditions (ie super high pressures or extreme temperatures) and see what that does to the food. I think some arctic marine animals (e.g., seals) have crazy high myoglobin (or maybe it's hemoglobin?) content in their muscles, which makes the meat very dark red. Could be interesting to see what other oddities nature has made to muscle in extreme environments! Some bottom-of-the-sea-type fish could taste pretty interesting I'd guess.

I think it's really likely (almost certain) that the first products introduced will be a mixture of plant-based materials and cells. For instance, the chicken that is currently sold in singapore is a hybrid of plant proteins and chicken cells. This has lots of benefits from a production standpoint:

• cost (way less $$ if you use less cells, which are the $$$$$ part)
• Texture (we're good at processing plant proteins into meat-like texture (as we do in plant burgers)
• Structure (the plant proteins can act as a scaffold that mimics extracellular proteins in the body - for instance, this paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-020-0046-5) refers to their textured-soy-protein scaffolds as a mimic of the perymisium - the part of muscle that is sort of a honeycomb-like protein lattuce within which muscle cells arrange themselves. I think it's a reasonable way to think of it.

Andrew here! Thanks for the questions:

• We made one! You can check it out here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.28.446057v1.full all protein components are recombinantly made in yeast, bacteria, or plants. No animal-derived components. Still LOTS of work to go (re: cost, supply chain, efficacy, etc.) but hopefully a useful start.
• I think this paper is super elegant on the topic: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-020-0046-5 it uses a common meat alternative as a scaffold, therefore making the scaffold an asset to the product rather than a hurdle to clear.
• Some better answers to this question have been posted already, so I'll just reference those for you to check out!

And soon cream cheese from Perfect Day through a different brand! https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2021/09/30/The-Urgent-Company-and-Perfect-Day-unveil-second-animal-free-dairy-brand-Modern-Kitchen-cream-cheese