a non-starter for commercial clean meat production.

[Maybo]

(3:17) Up to now the only reliable growth medium has been something called fetal bovine serum. It's harvested from unborn calves and is both ethically and economically a non-starter for commercial clean meat production.

Does 'non-starter' mean 'useless'?

 

[Piscean]

non-starter

1. an idea, plan, or person with no chance of success: 2. an idea, plan, or…

dictionary.cambridge.org

 

[Maybo]

That means using ‘fetal bovine serum’ to create meat would fail. Is that what the speaker meant?

 

[emsr2d2]

That means using ‘fetal bovine serum’ to create meat would fail. Is that what the speaker meant?

No. It doesn't say that it's a non-starter from a practical point of view. Lab-grown meat has been a thing for a few years. It's perfectly possible. It says it's commercially a non-starter purely from an ethical and an economic point of view. It's expensive to produce and it uses an animal-based product to create it, so it's unsuitable for those on a vegan/plant-based diet. Therefore, it currently doesn't make commercial sense for most companies to invest in it.

 

[SoothingDave]

The ethics are atrocious. People don't want to eat veal anymore because of the treatment of the calves. No one is going to be able to successfully market a meat product based on calf fetuses.