FDA’s Approval Of Cell Culture Chicken: The Rise Of Fresh Meat Without The Animal?

On November 14th of this year, the FDA cleared the path for Upside Foods to sell its cell-culture-based chicken products within the US. This is the first product of its kind to be cleared for commercial sale within the Americas, with only Singapore having previously cleared a similar product for sale, back in December of 2020. This latter product comes courtesy of another California start-up called Eat Just.

Since that initial approval in Singapore, Eat Just has begun to set up a 2,800 square meter (~30,000 square feet) production facility in Singapore that is scheduled to begin producing thousands of kilograms of slaughter-free meat starting in the first quarter of 2023. This would make it the top-runner in the cultured meat industry, which to this point has seen dozens of start-ups, but precious few actual products for sale.

With CEO Josh Tetrick of Eat Just projecting price equality between their cultured meat and meat from animals by 2030, could the FDA’s approval herald the dawn of slaughter-free meat? There are obviously still hurdles, but as we’ll see, the idea is not nearly as far-fetched as one might think.

A Long History

The history behind cell cultures stretches back to the 19th century, when through experimentation it was discovered that tissues and entire organs could be kept alive, even after having been separated from the body. Subsequent research during the early 20th century increased our understanding of tissue and cell cultures, which during the 1940s and 1950s led to such medical leaps forward as growing viruses in cell cultures for the sake of producing vaccines.

The injectable polio vaccine, developed by Jonas Salk, was among the first products that was mass-produced courtesy of such cell cultures. Beyond vaccine development, the ability to not only isolate cells, but to keep them alive for extended periods of time has led to countless medical and scientific breakthroughs over the intervening decades. Some of these cell cultures as used in laboratory settings are also immortal, either because of their starting point as a (human) cancer cell, due to them being stem cells, or because of immortalization treatment. Having immortalized cell lines allows for long-term studies on a well-documented type of cell.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, such cell cultures are involved in the initial step of setting up a cultivated meat production line. In the FDA Memorandum covering the approval of Upside Food’s product the following steps are detailed:

  1. Cell isolation
  2. Establishment of cell lines
  3. Establishment of Master Cell Banks (MCB)
  4. Proliferation phase
  5. Differentiation phase
  6. Harvest of cell material

None of these steps are necessarily new or uncommon within a laboratory setting. The isolation of the initial seed cells involves extracting these from a chicken. These then have to be characterized and checked for any pathogens. The resulting cells are then immortalized using gene-therapy with telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) as needed, to establish the master cell lines. These cell lines are immortal and can thus be used for the further duration of the production line.

During the proliferation phase, some of the cells from the cell banks are introduced to a bioreactor, where the cells are encouraged to multiply in suspension culture, while bathed in all the nutrients they need, and with a constant pH and temperature being maintained. Once enough cell material has formed, they are moved to the next phase, which is where these cells will differentiate into both the muscle (myocyte) and connective (fibrocyte) tissues. Both will adhere to the bioreactor’s walls, and to each other, forming a multi-cellular tissue.

After this phase, the contents of this final bioreactor can be extracted and is essentially ready for preparation and consumption.

Growing Pains

As the saying goes, if something was easy, someone else would already have done it a long time ago. In the case of cultured meat most of the challenges lie in scaling up from a laboratory setting involving small batches of cell culture, to massive bioreactors capable of outputting thousands upon thousands kilograms of product.

Making sure that these bioreactors manage to keep the cells content as nutrients are added and waste products removed is one thing, but another is the entire supply chain surrounding the operation. At this point in time, there is no massive industry capable of delivering these nutrients on a scale required to replace a significant part of today’s meat consumption. All of these supply lines will have to grow along with this nascent cultured meat industry.

A major bottleneck and cost factor here is the growth medium, especially the growth factors that the cells require in order to multiply. Common sources for laboratories include fetal bovine serum (FBS) along with the serum from other animals. Generally slaughterhouses are the primary source of the blood from which the serum is extracted. Finding replacements for this serum and their growth factors is an ongoing topic, and one that is obviously highly relevant for cultured meat.

One alternative is made from human blood, called hPL (human platelet lysate). This is a substitute for FBS that is created from previously extracted platelets that have since expired. Since these were extracted from donated blood for transfusion purposes, hPL forms a cruelty-free alternative source. The main obstacles here are that the amount is only enough for small-scale laboratory settings, and there are issues with cost and consistency across batches.

An ideal alternative for FBS, hPL and similar would be a fully artificial, synthesized alternative, as this would alleviate any ethical and food safety concerns. Unfortunately, as also covered in a 2021 review by Chelladurai et al. in Heliyon, a clear alternative does not exist yet. This reinforces the notion that finding a serum-free replacement for cultured meat is likely to form one of the major obstacles in the near future, both in terms of its ethical image and the sense of its ultimate price tag.

Still Worth It

Even with the clear challenges in scaling up cultivated meat products, there is no denial that its potential positive impacts can be massive. In a 2017 report (PDF) by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), it is noted that agriculture is responsible for about 70% of global freshwater usage, a significant amount of which goes into feeding cattle — 15 ton of water per kilogram of meat — and other animals intended for meat production.

(Credit: FAO)

When there are approximately three chickens on this Earth for every single human (~24B chickens), with similar numbers for cattle and sheep, it’s not hard to see how the meat industry has somewhat of an impact on the environment, and correspondingly the climate. If we can over the coming decades remove the need for animals to be grown for the slaughterhouse, we stand to regain many thousands of square kilometers of pasture and farm land, with corresponding cuts in greenhouse gases.

By moving the entire meat industry into fully controlled, sterile factories, this would also essentially eliminate issues with contamination, such as salmonella in chicken meat. It’d alleviate the need for antibiotics and generally result in a safer, more predictable and consistent product, while still being the same meat. Just without the part where an animal is raised from a chick, calf or piglet before its demise in an abattoir.

Opinions Remain Divided

It should bear little repetition that not everyone agrees on the need for cultured meat, with alternatives based on plant proteins generally wheeled out as the obvious alternative to meat. Even though I’m a long-time vegetarian, the notion that not everyone will want to give up eating meat seems unavoidable. However, since the main issues with the meat industry are the aforementioned environmental impact, cultured meat would seem to be a more than acceptable solution there.

Assuming we can make cultured meat work by 2030, we may see a corresponding plunge in feed required for livestock, alleviating the pressure to produce enough food for an ever-growing human population, while still allowing those who can’t give up their meat habit to dig into a fresh chunk of genuine chicken or beef. All thanks to some scientists who tinkered with some animal tissues over a hundred years ago.

105 thoughts on “FDA’s Approval Of Cell Culture Chicken: The Rise Of Fresh Meat Without The Animal?

    1. Not me. As long as it feels and tastes about the same and doesn’t contain anything more harmful to me than the original stuff, I’ll eat it just as happily; it being lab-grown is entirely irrelevant to me at that point.

      1. Agreed 100%. It would only be a matter of time before essentially everyone was on board. Minus a select few, no one cares that their medications are chemically produced and were never growing within an actual plant. It’s not only considered normal, we’ve hit a time when half the people walking around have no idea most of these medications used to be pulled from plants.
        I’m sure it will take a while, but a time will come when half the people walking around don’t realize meat used to grow in living animals. You’ll have people eating meat directly from animals, but they’ll be no different than people making their own aspirin from their backyard willow tree. Something neat for future tick tock, but they’ll be the tiny minority seen as quirky hippies.

        1. > You’ll have people eating meat directly from animals, but they’ll be no different than people making their own aspirin from their backyard willow tree. Something neat for future tick tock, but they’ll be the tiny minority seen as quirky hippies.

          Idk man, are gardeners really that small a group of people, and are they seen as backwards or quirky?

          1. “Gardeners aren’t that small a group. There’s plenty of them around.”

            True, but that’s because growing a garden is WAY different than butchering, dressing and cutting up an animal. This is definitely a minority. Fun fact: ask someone at a “feed” store in the States if they have supplies for slaughtering a rooster. They look at you like you’re crazy. Do they know where their Chick-Fil-A comes from?

            I had to put down a rooster once (backyard chickens and it was going after my kids, plus new city ordinances against them). Will not post details but it was pretty awful and not easy in any way, even doing it the “humane” way.

            But when you think about it, everything we eat comes from eating something else that was alive. Those lettuce leaves were a seed once that also had to be nurtured and grown. I see this article as no different. We’re just mastering a new set of tools.

          2. snapcracklins:

            Lots of people butcher their own chickens, all the time. It’s what you do with the males when they approach full growth, so the rooster doesn’t kill them. Surprised this didn’t occur if you had a coup with a rooster.

            I did for the first time in a Jr. HS class. ‘Broken Boundaries’ IIRC.

            Easiest way is to grab the chicken by the head and crack it like a whip. Bonus the headless body runs around for a little while, horrifying the smug herbivores in the group.

            A quick dip in boiling water and the feathers come right out. Everybody should do it, at least once in their life. Outsourcing killing is for children/cityfolk.

            Once you’ve killed a chicken you can step up to hunting.

          1. Dunno, it appears the idea is up for discussion. So long as the product is labeled so one can make a choice, this isn’t inevitable, but at minimum an interesting idea.

            Saying trivial things like ‘prog brain’ just reveals a boring inner nature. Humanity continues onwards and upwards in spite of lackluster ilk making such boring comments.

      2. Lol… That’s a lot of assumptions there. And we won’t know if it’s grossly harmful for decades. We are accumulating a lot of things in our biosystems that make asbestos look like a walk in the park. and at an alarming accelerating rate. I mean you can’t even look at photos of average crowds of people a few decades ago without seeing it. I’m sure eating more hyper-processed lab-grown chemistry experiments is the solution. It always is

        1. You can be rather certain something that you can’t distinguish in a lab from the ‘real’ thing is as safe as the ‘real’ thing. And in this case being from a lab environment its far less likely to get diseases and environmental toxins building up in it than a real animal, so arguably at least it will be safer.

          I’d also love to know what you think you see if crowds of people from one decade to another, other than changing dress sense, hair styles and the like… Photo’s of office workers from the earliest days of office/bank work look rather similar to today’s sedentary workers, and the same is seemingly true of the more hard manual labor types to me too. Perhaps these days there is a greater tendency to being overweight and/or underweight by significant amounts, and I’d expect a slightly wider racial and gender diversity in the more modern images… But nothing that screams the world is ending just in these group photo.

          1. “You can be rather certain something that you can’t distinguish in a lab from the ‘real’ thing is as safe as the ‘real’ thing.”

            This sounds exactly like something someone would say before acquiring a prion disease.

          2. > This sounds exactly like something someone would say before acquiring a prion disease.

            Which you can just as easily, likely rather more easily, get from the ‘real’ thing. Anything so novel as lab grown meant is going to be treated rather cautiously for ages, where your food chain, well it wasn’t that long ago the Horse-meat scandal happened… Folks stop paying so much attention to something that is now every day normal, doesn’t mean its foolproof safe. Nothing new there.

            Though do note I’m not yet convinced the tech is actually ready to do any good for the world. But if in the lab it is identical to the real stuff… (which it very way may not really be yet either)

          3. >Which you can just as easily, likely rather more easily, get from the ‘real’ thing.

            The real thing would die of the same prion disease, most likely, so you can spot when cows start to go mad. Cell cultures, not so sensitive, so you have to wait for people to go mad and then track it back to the corrupted cell culture.

          4. >The real thing would die of the same prion disease,

            Eventually, so very eventually you are very likely not to notice every time. Where for now at least ‘lab meats’ are so new and novel they will be studied more fully so the presence of the problem in low levels will be spotted. Once/if lab meats become the norm then maybe its going to slip through more easily, as folks relax and the safety checks ramp down – nothing is certain to catch it all.

        2. Um, where do you see assumptions? I said “as long as”, ie. “if” — I made no assumption, whatsoever, as to which way things will go.

          Besides which, you complain about me making assumptions, when your own comment makes several ones. That’s hypocrisy.

      3. Technically it could possibly be made to be less harmful? When you eat a natural or organic banana, you are getting a small amount of radioactive potassium. Which isn’t exactly a good element to be consuming.

        Not sure a lab grown chicken would be entirely free of radioactive elements but the idea of chickens crapping all over everything and a few other items such as injections to the chickens would be addressed.

        There is a reason some countries typically clean their chicken eggs before sale and lets just say it isn’t dust. Also far fewer male chicken deaths on top of things as well since male chickens have “little value” since they don’t lay eggs so they are literally disposed of. It’s almost out of a sci-fi movie.

        Conceptually this has a lot of merit and potential both economic and practicality wise. Just need to see how it is being done in detail though.

        1. No, you will not get that. Natural potassium contains about 0,01% of K40. To remove this, a process similar to nuclear fuel enrichment would be necessary, even more difficult because you want to remove a trace amount of “contamination”. Nobody would do this energy intensive process as we are perfectly adapted to natural potassium.

    1. During my student years in Koszalin University of Technology I lived in dorm and accidentally ate cockroach when making a pasta. Once I realized it’s not actually bad I started collecting and eating them like normal food. My room mate was creeped and asked to be moved to different room but money saved on food is money I could spend on building better sumo and linefollower robots so I could take part in “Roboxy” and “Trójmiejski Turniej Robotów” competitions in mid 2010s.

      1. cockroaches are a delicacy in many parts of the world. Raw, grilled, with salted caramel, they are eaten from the jungle of Laos to Surinam and probably many other places i don´t know.
        Food is food.

        1. I’ve had chocolate covered grasshopper from France. It was like a dark nestles crunch bar. No flavor but dark chocolate, but a nice crunch.

          Emu on the other hand, tastes disgusting.

  1. Since they are able to create stem cells from chicken’s muscular cells, can’t they use chicken to extract the serum?

    If one chicken is able to provide the serum quantity to 2 to 5 “lab chicken”, just like an animal with missing blood will refill its level faster ? That would probably already reduce the number of chicken by a good factor.

    Or, they need to make lab serum from chicken stem cells like done here: https://hackaday.com/2022/11/15/the-blood-factory-new-research-may-open-the-door-to-artificial-blood/

      1. What’s cultured in tofu? It’s coagulated soy milk. It’s essentially bean cheese, except cow cheese usually does contain bacterial cultures, while tofu just uses a coagulant.

        1. It’s more like “processed”. You grind up soybeans to make soymilk, then coagulate it to make “soy cheese”.

          Tempeh uses soybeans, and culture is added to make the end product.

          Seitan, you take flour and wash out the starch and bran. That leaves the protein, the gluten.Then flavor it. It always surprised me that for some, the gluten is the dangerous part.

          The first two are really old processes. I don’t know when seitan was invented.

          1. Thee daw! The term almond milk dates back to at least the 14th century in English.
            To not call it milk is culinary negationism, it’s probably older than most of the current form of the words I used here

          2. Yawn. You’ve made a couple of interesting points here and there in these comments. You and Mr. ‘prog brain’ don’t seem to be particularly imaginative though, see parent comment. Just another boring naysayer. Good luck!

    1. You would be surprised to see how many microscopic little critters are living in your vegetables, grains, etc.

      Everyone is eating the animals in their vegetables, and everyone is torturing the poor little things to death by cooking their vegetables. Get over it.

      1. Take away all ideas of technology putting humans at the same food seeking capabilities as every other animal on earth with no experiences with tool making or fire…. Humans are not focused or natural vegans. We are innate fruit eaters as our primary source of calories, water, and many other nutrients. We are set up to seek some of natures softer fibered and sweeter greens and veggies to fill in the gaps where fruits leave off and perhaps a selection of raw nuts and seeds for extra proteins and fatty acids.

    2. When the shit hit’s the fan and cannibalism becomes the norm, we will all prefer to eat vegans.

      Carnivores at least have the decency to kill our food before eating it. Apples are eaten alive.

      Grass starts screaming in the ultrasonic when you start the mower.

        1. You can look up McRib ingredients.

          You don’t want to.

          Grown in a lab would be much less disgusting. Lips and assholes would be better. It’s all processed unsellable organ meat otherwise destined for low grade dog food. Like Taco Bell beef.

  2. Shades of “The Space Merchants” (1952) by Fred Pohl & Cyril Kornbluth.

    “Scum-skimming wasn’t hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.”

    1. We took all new kids to the neighborhood ‘scum skimming’.

      There was a spot on brush creek (think LA river of movie fame, since remodeled in fancy neighborhoods) that collected green algae inches thick. The trick to riding your bike through it was to get up to speed and coast through without pumping your pedals or moving your handlebars even a tiny bit.

      The new kids didn’t know that trick, that’s why they went ‘scum skidding’ when they followed us. Good times.
      They’d go home looking like ‘Swamp Thing’. Cops/Plaza patrol would watch the fun, were on to it, but apparently approved.

  3. There is a small loud minority who embrace and champion things like this. Over time, using various excuses, they will attempt to coerce the rest of us into adopting this as well. A big problem with the modern human diet is the almost exclusive consumption of processed foods. This is just processed foods taken to the extreme. No, thanks.

      1. If the texture is no good, maybe they just need to affix it to some kind of armature or skeleton, and stimulate it with electrical impulses to give it proper muscle tone?

        Heck, you could encase it in skin, mount a microcontroller in it and make it actually walk around. No need for complicated internal organs, just a tank for nutrient mix.

        Artificial cyborg animals for meat. You could even re-use the skeleton across multiple meat harvests.

        Or .. no reason the skeleton has to be animal shaped. Could make them human shaped. Anthropomorphic cyborg animals with chicken-flesh muscles.

        Or .. why not GMO things so that the whole things just grow themselves? Not like real animals, just bags of meat that can grow in tanks.

        This is what I meant by creeps me out. Not whether it would make a decent food product, but the wider ramifications of being able to manufacture flesh.

    1. It’s not really about diet, it’s more about the ecological and ethical dumpster fire that is the way we farm animals at industrial scale.

      We’ll put the ethical argument aside, because it’s an ethical argument. The ecological impact of the farming industry is horrendous. Greenhouse gasses, the land use, the air, water, and land pollution. A staggering amount of our grain and water is fed to livestock, and animals are *very bad* at converting food into meat. It’s vastly less efficient than if we were to eat the grain directly.

      This is about finding a process to produce food which is vastly more labor and resource efficient than farming animals. We could feed more people with less land and raw resources. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t “”real meat””, it’s *food* and the assumption is it will be much cheaper than livestock, and can be produced basically anywhere.

      Look, farming animals is objectively a terrible way to produce a lot of food for a lot of people. It’s expensive, it’s difficult, it pollutes, the animals get sick, on and on. Everyone wants to be able to produce more food at lower cost.

      Nobody cares at all about what you personally eat. You are utterly insignificant as one mouth out of 8 billion. Eat the synthetic meat or don’t, there will probably always be livestock to eat if you really want. Nobody is trying to trick you into drinking Chemicals, because you really just don’t matter. There are hungry people who need food, and my bet is a majority don’t really care whether it used to walk around, so long as it fills their belly.

      Nobody cares about your sensibilities, there’s hungry people, and they need food.

      1. >animals are *very bad* at converting food into meat.

        But chicken are not really that bad. Feed conversion ratio about 1.6:1

        It takes about the same energy and water to process soy into tofu, and lots of other meat alternatives are actually worse. People just account for the raw protein content in plant matter and forget that people can’t eat it like that.

        1. Royndup-ready GM soy is grown on literally millions of acres in Argentina (and elsewhere.) If you’re using soy as a counter example, stop and think about the herbicides, land clearing and food miles involved. Getting chicken cells from the factory in the next town may well turn out to have a lower environmental impact than tofu.

          Of course, much of that GM soy is also fed to cattle… Which is stupid an inefgicient any way you look at it!

      2. Thats completely irrelevant. What when we have syntetic meat? How many more we can feet than? 20 instead of 8 billion? And then? The population will grow more and then we need the next big syntetic thing to eat? When you really want to safe the planet you need to stop the growth of population. Thats the only sustainable way.

  4. I should make this easier for me to copy & paste:
    “The problem with lab/factory-grown meat is capitalism, meaning that instead of making quality meat from quality ingredients, it will be more profitable to make questionable meat from cheap ingredients, and profit will always be king.”

    1. “Quality meat from quality ingredients” is so expensive that only rich people can afford it.

      Go ahead, find a quality delicatessen thats still in business, ask for a Reuben sandwich and be prepared to empty your wallet.

    1. If we correct our diets to what human tongues alone recognize in the raw as it’s innately designed seeks and thrives upon the need for organ transplants will all but disappear. We dig our own graves with our forks, fire, and substances to camouflage things we want to be our food but biochemically and structurally are not.

  5. Even if they do produce it, it won’t have identical taste or texture. You’re looking at a replacement for hot dogs and chicken nuggets…not actual Chicken thighs or legs.

    Just culturing the cells isn’t enough, how do you cause them to bind and contract to become muscle tissue?

    And is anyone else a little put off by letting a foreign nation manufacture our food? Why fire a shot when you can slowly introduce what will change your once customer into a sickly creature that can be eliminated with little effort?

    1. The article explained briefly how the different cell lines would bind and grow together. It’s not a far step from there to a chicken McNugget, which would be an instant choice for McDonalds and other large food producers; that is once the price is competitive with bird meat.

      McDonald’s buys a crazy amount of food, about 10% of all chickens end up in their restaurants. They have laid down humane treatment mandates to their farmers requiring fewer chickens per cage, no de-beaking, etc. They’d do anything to jump on a non-animal source. (Anything short of spending extra money.)

    2. That’s the objective of those who own most of the resources we depend upon! They own big ag, big Pharma, medical schools, hospitals, so called food processing plants, fast food chain stocks, geriatric facilities, morgues, and even cemeteries! How do you think they’ve come so geometrically rich and influential?

  6. You do not need “meat” and it is more efficient to produce foods from other types of cells that are also less likely to become a host for pathogens that could harm you, including prions.

    1. That’s the most brilliant idea yet! I’d like to be the fly on the wall watching them trying to figure out what all nutrients and other factors actually must be provided and in what sequences and delivery methods to produce the equivalent of any given human! Talk about making life way more complicated than it needs to be!

  7. As long as it’s got the same calorie and protein density as chicken, and no more saturated fat, I think it’s great. My picture of an ideal meat is something that comes in 2x2x1 cm rectangular prisms you can just throw in a curry or stir fry, or at least that comes in a nice block like tofu does, rather than the annoying irregularly shaped stuff with random looking admixtures of gristle you get at the grocery store.

  8. This could be a perfectly safe and healthy way to consume meat in the future. Or maybe not and it won’t know for years until millions could be poisoned. For every wonderful new discover that has improved all of our lives, there are hundreds of failures. Many of these failures were once touted as safe. Remember Cigarettes’, Leaded fuel, Thalidomide, Agent Orange, Baby food, your local water supply and the Covid 19 vaccines.

  9. I wish the singporians best with this, but I’m not going to lie and pretend I don’t expect this to hit the news in the long term with various ‘oops’ news items and I think I’ll sit this one out and rather go the vegetarian route than pretend I have confidence in this stuff.

    I just have one demand: put it in law to have them put it on the packaging when used in products.

  10. How long til I can get cultured koala meat? Or dog meat? Or cultured rump meat from my favorite porn star trying to extend her career a few more years. The future’s gonna be real interesting!

  11. No one seems to be asking what the environmental impact of the meat-growing industry will have.

    What are the byproducts?
    What is the waste?
    How do we get rid of it?
    How much power/space/heat/e-waste/plastic/minerals does it consume/produce?

    I might be totally fine.
    But it might make things even worse.
    The only way to know is to study it.

  12. I guess that depends on what you mean by “need”.
    I have a condition that makes it difficult to absorb B12, even though I’m younger.
    As many as 40% of people over 60 also start to develop problems absorbing it.
    Eating more B12 source is enough to manage some people’s conditions, or offset the start of more intense therapy.
    When that isn’t enough, you are stuck with monthly injections, or “direct absorption” from daily supplementation of 1000x the daily value.

    There are no entirely vegan (food) sources of properly bioavailable B12.
    Eggs are the primary (food) source of B12 for vegetarians.
    Red meat has 10-100x more B12 than eggs.

    So, while it is technically true that humans don’t NEED to eat meat, you have to know the consequences of not doing so, and counteract them.

    If consumption of vat-meat pushes the requirement for monthly injections out by 10-15 years, that is a good thing. It won’t help me, since I’ve progressed past the point that food can supply my needs, but it would still help BILLIONS of others.

  13. No, you will not get that. Natural potassium contains about 0,01% of K40. To remove this, a process similar to nuclear fuel enrichment would be necessary, even more difficult because you want to remove a trace amount of “contamination”. Nobody would do this energy intensive process as we are perfectly adapted to natural potassium.

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