[HN Gopher] Dairy Made from Grass in a Fermentor
___________________________________________________________________
Dairy Made from Grass in a Fermentor
Author : vincent_s
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-02-23 12:20 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thosevegancowboys.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thosevegancowboys.com)
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| The promise of this headline is amazing. Sadly, the linked page
| appears to be a X-prize / Latitude prize type competition to find
| a way of doing it, rather than an actual product.
| vincentdm wrote:
| No they are a genuine lab with scientists; but I agree that the
| homepage is misleading.
| ctack wrote:
| But they still don't seem to have anything.
| kabdib wrote:
| A science fiction story about synthetic milk, rather funny and
| one of my favorites:
|
| https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v62n06_1959-02_EXcite...
| Semiapies wrote:
| This story was my first thought when I saw the headline.
| tasogare wrote:
| That probably won't work, and it will no be allowed to be
| marketed as milk in France (thanks to the _loi relative a la
| transparence de l 'information sur les produits agricoles et
| alimentaires_). I hope EU and other countries have similar laws
| to protect their consumers.
| gmuslera wrote:
| They are focusing on the wrong end of the problem. Why try to
| produce cow milk/cheese? If they want a make food, they should
| start trying to make human milk, or Matrix's Tasty Wheat. Once
| you can turn grass or some easy to grow vegetable into everything
| our body needs you can add flavoring/texture later.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| I would think cows eat more than one type of grass. I went to Mt.
| Mount Rainier and saw a mountain meadow for the first time, and
| was blown away how pretty and diverse it was in grasses.
|
| So do Swiss cows in the Alps make the best milk?
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| It makes for a great marketing opportunity, yes.
| war1025 wrote:
| My mom grew up on a dairy farm and said you could always tell
| when the cows got into the wild onions. Diversity is good, but
| flavors do come through in the milk, so there are some things
| that you want to avoid.
| DFHippie wrote:
| That's an event in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles": a cow at a
| dairy has eaten some wild garlic and the entire batch of milk
| is ruined. Everyone has to go out and walk the fields in a
| line to root out any garlic they come across.
|
| Full disclosure: I never finished the book (my attention
| wandered elsewhere), but I did get as far as this scene.
|
| ETA: Around this part of the book the words "hagrid" and
| "dumbledore" appear, suggesting J.K. Rowling was reading this
| around when she named the characters in Harry Potter.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| It's pretty darn good milk, but there are many more differences
| besides feed:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24816367
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23474129
|
| (I do note that the various cheese producers enforce
| restrictions on what their dairy suppliers feed, so I'm pretty
| sure that meadow biome is tastable even in processed form)
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I grew up around dairy farmers in the Midwest. Anecdotally,
| yes - different grasses/plants cause changes in milk
| production/flavor. However, most is homogenized anyway so the
| differences don't really matter unless it's a specialty
| product.
| pstuart wrote:
| An older effort for a somewhat similar goal:
| https://www.realvegancheese.org/
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| It will take a lot more than a single fungus to do the trick.
| Lactation and digestion in cows involve completely differently
| pathways. I am not sure why they insist on fungus, perhaps they
| are referring to genetically engineered yeast? Milk is primarily
| suspended fat in water. What is possible is to use a
| bacteria/microbe to convert plant matter to fat first and then
| use traditional industrial machinery to disperse it into water.
| However, you still need to find a way to remove the fiber that
| remains. Perhaps using a squeezer to extract the fats. All these
| will not truly replace real dairy, the result will be more akin
| to almond milk. Also, 2.5 million is absolutely peanuts. You need
| at least a magnitude higher funding unless you plan to outsource
| everything to India.
|
| If you want an exact replica of the cow mammalian milk production
| process that is molecule-to-molecule compatible then you need at
| least two dozen tissue engineers. This is slightly beyond what a
| "fungus" to do.
| Wheaties466 wrote:
| I think they might be referring to yeast. I know thats how
| Impossible "cracked the code" to making heme.
|
| seems to be a very ambitious project but im hopeful!
|
| This makes me want to do more research into how Perfect Day
| makes their Lab dairy.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| > Milk is primarily suspended fat in water.
|
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100+g+cow%27s+milk says
| it's primarily carbohydrates (7g/100g), protein (4g), and a bit
| of fat (2g) suspended in water. Also, the website is somewhat
| confusing, but poking around a bit it looks like they are
| targeting the production of protein (casein specifically), not
| fat. You may be attacking a strawman here...
|
| > You need at least a magnitude higher funding unless you plan
| to outsource everything to India.
|
| ... as well as a large fraction of the world's population, for
| no discernible reason.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Casein plays an important role in the meltiness of cheese[1]
| so it makes sense they'd want to replicate it (lots of
| almost-but-not-quite-vegan cheese alternatives like Trader
| Joe's almond cheese have ~1% casein in them for this reason).
|
| 1: https://www.finecooking.com/article/the-science-of-
| melting-c...
| abeppu wrote:
| This sounds cool, but ... it's a little mystifying to me why food
| is the area where people are willing to work the hardest to
| recreate traditional products developed in a period where reality
| was just very different. I've never heard of anyone working to
| produce a vegan wool sweater with plant derived components to
| recreate a fair isle sweater, or a vegan cordovan leather shoe
| that lasts decades. Why do we put so much energy into trying to
| recreate exactly the experience of traditional animal based food
| products?
|
| I think most of us can be nostalgic for foods that didn't exist
| until the latter half of the 20th century. Pioneering chefs and
| restaurants create amazing experiences from flavors and textures
| that are new, unfamiliar, and surprising (maybe a point of
| comparison would be the fermentation experimentation that Noma
| got so much media for). So it's not that we can't really love new
| foods.
|
| If this energy and innovative spirit was directed differently, I
| wonder what new things we might be enjoying which are very
| different from traditional concepts but in many ways better, and
| which the next generation will consider foundational?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> recreate traditional products developed in a period where
| reality was just very different.
|
| Ever see a house with the Tesla solar roofing shingles? There
| is a line of thought that for customers to accept a new product
| it must be as externally similar as possible to a preexisting
| one, even if doing so means degrading the performance or
| practicality of that product.
| sojsurf wrote:
| It's easy to forget that old designs are not necessarily bad
| designs. The "original" shingles are wooden shingles, clay
| half-pipes, and slate shingles. These have some good things
| going for them:
|
| - Modular design makes transportation, storage and
| installation simple.
|
| - Modular design makes it easy to replace just a small
| section.
|
| - Simple design means it's easy to understand edge cases and
| failure modes.
|
| - Simple, standardized shapes make it easy to replace parts
| even if the original manufacturer is out of business.
|
| I can replace a shingle on a 100-year-old roof, no questions
| asked. What will people do when one or two of their custom
| Tesla roof shingles fail in 20 years? 30 years?
|
| Newer (or fancier) is not always better.
| cobbzilla wrote:
| iirc they have a life warranty, that kind of addresses your
| concern.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| Cheese tastes good.
| iamwpj wrote:
| To piggy back this I get really annoyed when trying to meal
| plan using vegan/vegetarian ideas and they're operating on the
| standard expectation of meat & potatoes, but replacing it with
| a "meaty" vegetable.
|
| I don't want to replace the meat, I want a meal without meat.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > Pioneering chefs and restaurants create amazing experiences
| from flavors and textures
|
| We already have vegetarian/vegan restaurants that are beyond
| "beef burger but not beef". There's not really much to pinoeer
| here except just "bring them to near you"?
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| To me one of the more compelling reasons to develop substitutes
| that closely resemble animal-produced originals (chemically,
| not just superficially) is the staggeringly huge number of
| recipes that depend on animal products.
|
| There are substitutes that work as a technicality right now,
| but it's usually trivial to tell the difference between a
| recipe using original ingredients vs. a recipe that's been
| "veganized" (most often, the result is more crumbly, less rich,
| has wrong texture, etc).
|
| Innovation in vegan food is a good thing that should be
| encouraged but it needn't come at the cost of large chunks of
| cultural heritage in the form of food. Vegan substitutes that
| are close analogues of animal-produced originals lets us have
| the best of both worlds.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > I've never heard of anyone working to produce a vegan wool
| sweater with plant derived components to recreate a fair isle
| sweater, or a vegan cordovan leather shoe that lasts decades
|
| I mean, it's a while ago now, but nylon, rayon etc were very
| much sold as synthetic silk back in the day. And synthetic wood
| flooring and furniture products are extremely common (in the
| flooring case in particular, great effort is gone to to gloss
| over the fact that they even _are_ synthetic). People largely
| want things that are similar to things they're used to.
|
| And it's possibly relevant that both of the things you mention
| are luxury products that most consumers would not have
| experience of anyway. Milk is not. If everyone wore extremely
| expensive shoes that lasted decades, there might be more of a
| demand for synthetic ones, but in practice that's not even a
| product where many people wanted the original.
|
| There's also a market for novel stuff, of course, but it's
| generally a smaller market. And, like, vegan food that is not
| emulating animal-based food certainly _exists_; it's just a
| harder sell for the average person (at least in the west; your
| milage may vary elsewhere). Though it's rarely entirely novel;
| just adaptations of existing food that isn't meat-based and can
| have any animal ingredients swapped out easily (a lot of Indian
| food works well here; often contains dairy products in its
| traditional form, but they can be swapped out quite easily).
| codr7 wrote:
| Cotton in German, Baumwolle, literally means tree-wool.
|
| That said, I agree, especially concerning food.
|
| Recreating meat dishes doesn't make much sense to me, it's
| not as if there's a lack of options on the vegetable side.
|
| That said, I do miss cheese sometimes, it's very tricky to
| replace.
| abeppu wrote:
| > There's also a market for novel stuff, of course, but it's
| generally a smaller market.
|
| See, that's the part I don't agree with; it's just that when
| the market gets big, we stop seeing them as novelties. Cheese
| puffs, instant ramen, pringles, chex -- in the last century
| multiple generations of novel mass produced manufactured food
| was invented in part around techniques that were newly
| available.
|
| > People largely want things that are similar to things
| they're used to.
|
| And yet new things, which are similar but also markedly
| distinct can be hugely appealing (e.g. cronuts). Foreign
| goods can become popular when introduced to a new market, and
| eventually become unremarkable and ubiquitous (I can buy
| multiple kinds of premade kimchi at my local chain
| supermarket).
|
| If you're in a position to food-science vegan cheese-adjacent
| products, why not pursue directions that mix and match
| familiar and unfamiliar aspects to create something the old-
| school dairy can't?
|
| - the flavor of cashew cheese and nutritional yeast, but the
| texture of salmon roe that pops in your mouth.
|
| - a salty + umami product that starts with a crisp texture
| like parmesan tuiles, but melts when warmed. Sprinkle thin
| flakes over hot dishes.
|
| - the salty funky hit of blue cheese in a fibrous chewy form
| like beef jerky. The nose hit is extended as you try to pull
| off a chunk with your teeth.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> This sounds cool, but ... it 's a little mystifying to me
| why food is the area where people are willing to work the
| hardest to recreate traditional products developed in a period
| where reality was just very different._
|
| Two reasons, broadly speaking:
|
| First, you get to co-opt existing preferences, instead of
| trying to displace them by establishing new ones.
|
| Second, to some extent, existing animal-based products are
| best-in-class due to decades, centuries, or even millennia of
| survivorship bias. Some of those may represent a local maxima,
| but discovering that often requires some out-of-the-box
| thinking, such as Herman Miller's Pellicle as first
| demonstrated via the Aeron chair, which IMO is superior in
| practically every respect than traditional chair upholstering
| methods and materials, no matter how high-end, but absolutely
| isn't a one-to-one replacement for them.
| tw04 wrote:
| >Why do we put so much energy into trying to recreate exactly
| the experience of traditional animal based food products?
|
| Because until we stop using animals for food, those other
| things are kind of pointless? Who cares if you can buy vegan
| shoes that last decades, what's the end game? The cows are
| still going to be slaughtered for food, it'll just be one more
| thing that gets wasted instead of used.
|
| >Pioneering chefs and restaurants create amazing experiences
| from flavors and textures that are new, unfamiliar, and
| surprising (maybe a point of comparison would be the
| fermentation experimentation that Noma got so much media for).
| So it's not that we can't really love new foods.
|
| I think the number of "completely new and unfamiliar" foods
| created in the last 100 years can be measured on one hand. Sure
| people have taken known ingredients and mixed them in new ways,
| but that doesn't change the fact the underlying _thing_ that we
| like is still there. Humans have had thousands of years to
| perfect food, why do you think someone in a lab working for a
| couple years is going to be able to upend that?
|
| >If this energy and innovative spirit was directed differently,
| I wonder what new things we might be enjoying which are very
| different from traditional concepts but in many ways better,
| and which the next generation will consider foundational?
|
| You're basically describing soylent, and the results are as
| expected. To pretend that there aren't people thinking about
| new ways of fueling humans is kind of unfair - it's happening,
| it's just HARD. People like "real" food.
| GZJOHN wrote:
| This is complete nonsense right on the top of the page: "Those
| Vegan Cowboys strive for healthy products with less saturated
| fats, which are suitable for people with lactose intolerance. "
| Lactose is a sugar and has nothing to do with saturated fat. If
| they don't understand one of the most fundamental qualities of
| milk how can they ever hope to recreate it?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Looks like 'dutch english' or maybe even an automated
| translation - google translate makes the same mistake of using
| 'products xx, which can...' instead of 'products xx, that
| can...'
| [deleted]
| rsynnott wrote:
| I think you're just reading this incorrectly. It should be read
| as "thing which has quality A, and quality B" (where A is low
| saturated fat and B is no lactose), not "quality A which
| implies quality B".
| tom_mellior wrote:
| I noticed the same, but I think some benefit of a doubt needs
| to be given because the text was probably written by someone
| who is not a native speaker of English. I think the phrasing is
| off, and they meant "products with less saturated fats, _and in
| addition_ which are suitable for people with lactose
| intolerance ". As in, listing two distinct properties, not one
| property implying the other.
| sva_ wrote:
| Exactly. The 'which' probably refers to 'healthy products',
| rather than to 'saturated fats'.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-23 23:03 UTC)