Synthetic Or Not Synthetic

Here are two images of technology for producing synthetically made food products. Can you guess which one is beer and which one is cell-cultured meat?

Actually, I apologise this is a trick question because neither is truly synthetic. Both brewing beer and cultivating meat involve leveraging natural biological processes (fermentation in beer production and cellular growth for cultivated meat). These processes occur in nature, with fermentation being a spontaneous activity, in which yeasts convert sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide, and cellular growth being fundamental to organism development.

The human intervention in both cases (selecting ingredients and controlling conditions for beer brewing, and providing a nutrient-rich medium for cell cultivation) aims to guide and optimise these natural processes for specific outcomes. While brewing beer has been practised for millennia, cultivating meat is a contemporary innovation, yet both fundamentally rely on understanding and harnessing biological activities. Thus, despite their distinct end products and technological complexities, both processes share a foundation in natural biological phenomena, refined and directed by human ingenuity.