[HN Gopher] CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tast...
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CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat
Author : rguiscard
Score : 287 points
Date : 2025-12-12 00:59 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.isaaa.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.isaaa.org)
| SapporoChris wrote:
| They've altered Fusarium venenatum which is currently what Quorn
| utilizes in its products. "The production process of gene-edited
| MP is more environmentally friendly than chicken meat and cell-
| cultured meat." That's good news, if they get to the point where
| it is more economically friendly than chicken meat it will be
| great news.
| shrubble wrote:
| There's little chance that the statement is true. Chickens kept
| in a backyard can live on bugs and kitchen scraps and there's
| no delivery cost for eggs or eventual meat.
| truekonrads wrote:
| This is not how the overwhelming majority of chickens live -
| they live in high intensity farm operations in horrible
| conditions
| asterix_pano wrote:
| That is not how most of the chicken is raised (over 70
| billions are slaughtered per year).
| Certhas wrote:
| If all the meat you eat is from chicken raised in your
| backyard , that's environmentally perfect.
|
| In the US per capita chicken consumption is 100 pounds per
| year.
| johanvts wrote:
| Thats about 45kg, I wish I had that average American
| backyard.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| A negligible fraction of chicken production is backyard
| operations. Any quote talking about chicken production is
| referencing how they are actually produced, which is
| generally huge industrialized farms (often hundreds of
| thousands to millions of birds a year).
| exe34 wrote:
| how big is your backyard?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Back of the envelope, for a family of 4 eating US quantities
| of chicken... you need to be slaughtering ~100 chickens per
| year. In a homesteading setting it usually takes a chicken
| about 12 weeks to reach slaughter weight, so you need to be
| raising a minimum of 25 at any time.
|
| That's a pretty substantial backyard operation.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| Wild to think that there's 6-7 chickens for every human in
| America at all times
| swiftcoder wrote:
| In commercial operations they are also raising chickens
| much faster - maybe only 6 weeks for a meat chicken, so
| you only need half as many at any one time
| vintermann wrote:
| If everyone had backyard chicken operations on that scale,
| I suspect we'd have a lot more disease problems!
| Decentralized isn't necessarily better for disease, if the
| overall scale stays the same.
|
| At least where I live, you can't have chickens in quite the
| same way our great-grandparents had. You need to comply
| with veterinary regulation for one, and for good reasons.
| a96 wrote:
| If every yard in a town or city was full of chickens, I
| wouldn't call it decentralized. Just one very broad
| centre.
| K0balt wrote:
| Or you could just call it the developing world lol. It's
| very common in many places.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| That's... Not too bad, actually. My grandmothers used to
| have maybe 8 chickens and 12 ducks or so. They were very
| low maintenance, and had very minimal pastures, with the
| only difficult to reproduce part of the process being that
| the houses were in fairly wild surroundings.
|
| They would probably need more pasture in monoculture
| hellholes that have cornfields for 100km in each direction.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Yeah, the real question is whether they can forage enough
| food in this kind of scenario. Without supplementary
| grain, they are going to need a whole lot of insects to
| grow that quickly...
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Well, no, they won't be able to forage enough if it's a
| small pasture. They do need extra feed.
|
| I'm guessing that the more you do to get them forage the
| better the meat and eggs will be, for instance larger
| pasture and making sure your other animals leave plenty
| of dung around.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I did ~100 chickens last year, and more like 85 this year.
|
| 12 weeks is incorrect, you can buy the same Cornish crosses
| that the big farms use. So they can be ready in as little
| as 6-7 weeks but I usually stretch it to 8 or 9; my time to
| process them is fixed so I might as well get a little bit
| more meat for my efforts.
|
| I use a chicken tractor that is big enough to let me hold
| about 33 at a time.
|
| So it's an operation that needs to run for about half the
| year. If you time it right, you can work around vacations
| and stuff. Daily operations are actually pretty minimal in
| terms of time spent, but you do lose three weekends a year
| to process them if you don't outsource that.
|
| All of that to say: I'm not sure if I want to agree with
| your characterization. It's less of a time commitment than
| you think. But there is a substantial cost to it all:
| capital costs are notable and the cost of feed and birds is
| such that you basically break even against high-end organic
| products for sale. You're always going to look at the
| Costco chicken and wonder why you are doing it. I treat it
| as a "touch grass" hobby that kinda breaks even.
|
| No real point, just excited to have something to say about
| this haha
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > the cost of feed
|
| Note that in the scenario I was responding to, they are
| arguing for input-neutral chickens, so they can't just
| buy in feed, and have all the complications of
| maintaining their feed source as well
|
| Average household probably isn't going to produce enough
| food scraps to feed 25+ chickens (we've done it in the
| past, but we had a restaurant kitchen to supply the food
| scraps)
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Oh, for sure, good point. Meatbirds are crazy eaters. One
| of my batches this year ate 500lb of feed to yield 160lb
| of carcass weight.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> You're always going to look at the Costco chicken and
| wonder why you are doing it.
|
| It depends. My friend's dad has chickens and the meat is
| tough and grey-dark, very much not like the supermarket
| white and soft meat. Also the meat tastes of... chicken;
| I guess. And you can see even the bones are significantly
| harder (I can't snap them with my fingers like the
| supermarket chickens' bones). I always assumed this is
| because of the way they're raised, allowed to roam freely
| (within an enclosure, but it's a big one) and feed on
| scraps and everything they can forage for, in addition to
| grain.
|
| What does your chickens' meat look and taste like? If
| it's the same as supermarket chicken then, I don't know,
| but if it's the other kind then it's definitely worth it.
| Although it takes a couple hours cooking to soften it :)
| Brendinooo wrote:
| It looks like supermarket chicken. I tried something more
| like a heritage breed once but I have young children who
| want massive white meat chicken breasts, so that's what
| I'm doing for now.
|
| But I will say, when you buy chicken at the grocery
| store, the quality can vary. Mine has always been good.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> I tried something more like a heritage breed once but
| I have young children who want massive white meat chicken
| breasts, so that's what I'm doing for now.
|
| Heh. Over here (UK and the rest of Europe I reckon) the
| kids love chicken thighs. Acquired tastes eh?
| Sharlin wrote:
| They're simply completely different breeds. Factory-
| farmed supermarket broiler breeds are optimized for
| producing as much bland, white meat as possible in as
| short time as possible. Everything else, like the ability
| to walk, is secondary, they're never getting enough space
| to walk anyway in their two-month life.
|
| Breeds optimized to egg-laying are an entirely separate
| category, and they don't produce much meat, and the meat
| is... different, as you described. Apparently some hybrid
| breeds are also available for backyard meat+egg co-
| production. I don't know what their meat is like.
|
| People didn't really eat that much chicken meat before
| the 70s, at least in the West. Wouldn't have been even
| possible to consume this much chicken meat, before these
| fast-growing breeds and industrial-scale farms.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Well that's how we lived for thousands of year, we only eat
| so much meat now because of the insane industrial processes
| we developed around animals.
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| Americans simply need to release chickens into the urban
| environment the way they released domesticated pigeons. Soon
| any swift child will be able to catch a feral chicken and
| break it's neck on the way home from school, providing
| protein for the whole family.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Chicken used to be a very expensive meat when they were
| treated like this. It didn't become the cheapest meat until
| the 1990s, and that's because of the massive efforts that
| were put into creating the Cornish cross breed and raising
| them at scale.
| buu700 wrote:
| Neurospora crassa is also pretty good. Meati sells slabs of it.
| Flere-Imsaho wrote:
| I would love to eat meat free alternatives. Quorn gives me IBS.
| Same with the highly processed meat free "meat". Beans are my
| basic goto for protein plus eggs.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Have you tried dehydrated granules from 90% pea protein, 10%
| jackfruit? It has no weird additional ingredients besides
| those two and for my wife and I has replaced ground beef
| except for burgers
| lukas099 wrote:
| Where do you even get that? I don't think I've ever seen
| it.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I get the brand Lotao, but they are German (also
| available in UK IIRC). Our drug store DM also has a house
| brand of it. I assumed that if there are 2, there are
| probably more elsewhere ;)
| Flere-Imsaho wrote:
| This one?
|
| https://www.lotao.com/en/pages/english
| Semaphor wrote:
| Yeah that's the one, I have it on subscription, 1kg/2
| months (about 3kg of finished product)
|
| But considering the simplicity of the product, I assume
| any brand will be very similar.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Seitan is pretty good, otherwise soy based things like tofu
| and tempeh can be extremely tasty. The highly processed shit
| is probably as bad as highly processed meat so I avoid it
| too.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I've been making Socca from chickpea flour and using that for
| my pizza crusts, in case you need new ways to consume bean
| protein. Super quick and easy to whip up.
| ggm wrote:
| I was coming to write about Quorn. I wondered if it was in the
| family because Quorn is an industrialised bioreactor process.
| This should translate over, unless weakened cell walls make for
| a process unfriendly change.
| jcfrei wrote:
| The farming lobby will try to ban it as soon as it becomes a
| viable alternative to poultry. I hope consumers will have the
| awareness to fight back.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| The feedstock has to come from somewhere, right? I'm assuming
| many farmers would prefer feeding it into stable vats of
| algae or fungus than dealing with the risks of another
| epidemic-induced chicken cull.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Fungus probably needs more much too, because no
| photosynthesis.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > I'm assuming many farmers would prefer feeding it into
| stable vats of algae or fungus than dealing with the risks
| of another epidemic-induced chicken cull.
|
| Many farmers don't have the financial means to redesign
| their entire pipeline to move from birds to fungus.
| "farming" is in the name but I also suspect there is
| nothing in common between raising chicken in cages and
| mushrooms in sterile containers in term of know-how,
| maintenance, &c.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Factory farms consume far more feed than they can grow on
| site though, so the real power isn't in the chicken
| farmers, it's the ones growing chicken feed, and they're
| probably used to switching crops to suit market demands.
|
| And the farmers who do grow their own feed are probably
| smaller operations targeting higher quality meat than
| factory-farmed chicken, so they're not the ones that vat-
| grown meat-substitutes would be competing with.
| zardo wrote:
| They would probably prefer that their expertise and massive
| investments in infrastructure for raising chickens isn't
| made worthless.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Looks like the feed is 95% glucose derived from corn
| starch[1]. They claim to have 1/4 the carbon footprint of
| chicken[2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusarium_venenatum
|
| [2] https://eathealthy365.com/quorn-vs-meat-
| the-2025-environment...
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Alternatively, one of the poultry meat giants will just buy
| it and produce it themselves so they can capture the
| vegan/vegetarian market too. Why compete when you can
| consolidate?
| chasil wrote:
| I had vaguely remembered that chitin was equivalent to cellulose
| in our inability to digest. The article addresses it:
|
| "The first modification, eliminating a gene for chitin synthase,
| resulted in thinner fungal cell walls."
|
| This also has an enormous potential benefit of reducing avian flu
| and other zoonotic bird diseases.
| boxed wrote:
| > This also has an enormous potential benefit of reducing avian
| flu and other zoonotic bird diseases.
|
| How?
| curtisf wrote:
| By replacing (some) farmed meat with farmed fungi protein.
|
| Although it's theoretically possible for a disease to infect
| both fungus and animals, because the biology is so different,
| the risk is greatly, greatly reduced.
|
| In addition, it may be possible to reduce the use of
| treatments such as antibiotics which, in their currently mass
| application to farmed animals, could directly lead to the
| development of antibiotic resistant in diseases which affect
| humans and animals.
| brnt wrote:
| Plus, chucking the contents of a few biotanks in case of
| infection is a hell of a lot better than having to kill and
| waste millions of birds.
|
| I mean, industrial slaughter isn't a pretty process, even
| in better plants, which most aren't, but where they come to
| wipe out the barn, they're not putting animal welfare
| first.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Fish foods with chitin is marketed as roughage.
|
| for humans, does shellfish allergy (tropomyosin and other
| proteins) diagnosis imply chitin allergy?
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| If the goal is reduced CO2, wouldn't it be better to take aim at
| plants, rather than fungi?
| kalessin wrote:
| Why? I am not sure photosynthesis plays a large role in the
| lower carbon footprint.
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| Fungi produce CO2 and sequester O2.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > If the goal is reduced CO2
|
| ... let's start on tearing down bullshit AI datacenters.
|
| Oh no, a billion Nvidia cards are envronmentally friendly, you
| say, better to lazer-focus on the cow farts?
| ragequittah wrote:
| The cow farts, the important forests being torn down far
| cattle, the important forests being torn down for soy beans
| that feed the cattle, the inhumane conditions in which the
| cattle are raised. The problem you dismissed is indeed far
| larger than the one you're worried about.
| mos87 wrote:
| >the important forests being torn down far cattle
|
| It's a bit extreme to refer to that "climate" summit
| "guests" as cattle, but I won't deny it gave me a chuckle.
|
| >the inhumane conditions in which the cattle are raised
|
| Gosh, that's sad. One way to go about it is to vote with
| your hard-earned and only buy meat from the Ethically
| Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows that look quite happy on the
| photos then.
| kleiba wrote:
| No need to be snarky, a lot of people are already
| implementing such changes in the way the buy and consume
| food.
| mos87 wrote:
| Amsterdam or Portland? Anyway, you're welcome to munch
| grass (we're not made for that), eat bugs, and wash em
| down with beetroot smoothies.
|
| While billions of Asians would farm and devour everything
| they can get their teeth on.
| asterix_pano wrote:
| Did you know they put nose rings with spikes on the calfs
| so they don't drink their mother's milk? https://as1.ftcd
| n.net/jpg/03/06/17/72/1000_F_306177230_izPAv...
| clort wrote:
| what is the context for this photo please? (that is not a
| calf btw?)
|
| It certainly does not look very nice, are you relating
| this to the "Ethically Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows" in
| the comment you replied to?
|
| In truth, they just take the calves away from the mothers
| after a short while, ship them out to the abbatoir. There
| is no benefit to them being in the same enclosure with a
| spiky nose ring, it seems that this must have a different
| purpose than the one you mentioned.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I suggest reading/listening a little bit outside of the
| PETA propaganda bubble. For example, here's a good short
| discussion on the topic with a cattle farmer:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4cHn6NX4wQ
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Just for some context, is the guy on the left with the
| white shirt a vegan who however supports ethical farming
| practices or did I get totally the wrong impression?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I believe he was a vegan for a long time, but has since
| started eating some ethically-farmed meat
| ben_w wrote:
| > Gosh, that's sad. One way to go about it is to vote
| with your hard-earned and only buy meat from the
| Ethically Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows that look quite
| happy on the photos then.
|
| In a discussion about genetically modified fungus as a
| meat substitute?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Meat is useful. "AI" datacenters are 100% harm in every
| possible way. Let's start with that.
| ben_w wrote:
| Meat _was_ useful, back when we had not yet selectively
| bred fantastically better than natural crops of all
| kinds, back when we had not yet invented synthetic
| fertiliser that 's now the ultimate source of 70-80% of
| the nitrogen in the body of someone in an industrialised
| nation, back when hunger was a bigger problem than
| obesity.
|
| Now? Now meat's mostly a problem, not a good thing. Even
| if you ignore every ethical argument, regardless of if
| your concerns are your own health or the environment,
| meat's not good.
|
| Data centres... well, I think this is a bubble, I also
| want it to be a bubble for various reasons, but the AI
| running on them today is in fact already useful.
|
| Even if current AI wasn't at all useful (despite it
| having about half to one quarter of the market size as
| meat already), it does so at a cost orders of magnitude
| lower environmental harm than meat. Convincing half of
| the population to have "meat-free Mondays" (so, reducing
| consumption by 1/14th) would do more than switching off
| all the AI DCs, given the estimates from Greenpeace for
| AI https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20250514-green
| peace-... and Our World In Data's estimates for livestock
| and manure https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-
| sector
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > it does so at a cost orders of magnitude lower
| environmental harm than meat
|
| Thanks for the quip. Does this come from a Big AI talking
| points memo?
|
| Judging by the ridiculous and absolutely non-sequitur
| "one quarter of the market size" phrase, yeah, I think
| so.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Does this come from a Big AI talking points memo?
|
| It comes from the evidence I linked you to.
|
| Which includes, to repeat, * _Greenpeace_ *.
|
| Also to repeat: I think this is a bubble, I also want it
| to be a bubble for various reasons.
|
| As in, I do not buy into Big AI's talking points about
| how this is "it", and we're on a path to radical AI-based
| abundance. Not yet. Plus I think it would be bad even if
| we were on that track at this point, so I want it to be
| "not it".
|
| > ridiculous
|
| The global meat market is around 1.5 trillion USD, give
| or take. That is literally the value of meat, which like
| all things in a free economic sector can be measured in
| money.
|
| You may also notice from me saying that AI is 0.5-0.25 of
| that, that I'm _not_ using "Market Cap" of AI in this
| comparison. Market cap != market size. This is about what
| revenue AI and meat gets per year.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I'll be the first to cheer if we get rid of industrial
| agriculture but there's an awful lot of land in the world
| that doesn't receive enough rain for farming but which is
| still fine grazing land and when used for grazing still
| supports most of its original ecology. And there's a lot
| of damaged, blemished, etc produce that pigs are happy to
| eat but which can't be sold in a supermarket.
|
| I'd like to see meat consumption to something like half
| to a quarter of its current level rather than eliminate
| it outright.
| ben_w wrote:
| OK, but (1) also a lot of good land is being used to feed
| livestock, the biomass of livestock is quite a bit higher
| than the biomass of humans; and (2) even reducing it just
| by a quarter is several times more than the combined
| impact of all the AI data centres.
| curtisf wrote:
| Livestock emits between 10% to 20% of global greenhouse gases
| (in carbon equivalent/100y-GWP) [1]
|
| In contrast, all data centers (not just AI) currently use
| less than 1.5% of all electricity, making up less than 0.3%
| of global emissions [2]. Although recent increases in data
| center electricity usage is lamentable, even in the short
| term future, much of this can and more importantly _will_ be
| low-carbon energy, and the ratio should continue to improve
| with time.
|
| A 1% reduction in livestock emissions is therefore about the
| same as a 50% reduction in data center emissions.
|
| [1]: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-
| environm...
|
| [2]: https://www.carbon-direct.com/insights/understanding-
| the-car...
| vkou wrote:
| No, because if you're directly eating whatever is being grown,
| the carbon is in a closed cycle. (Feedstock -> Your food -> You
| -> Air you exhale -> Plants turn it into feedstock.)
|
| CO2 is not really a 'sustainability' problem for food
| production, because food production and consumption is steady
| state.[1] Methane is somewhat of a problem (Because it's a
| potent greenhouse gas that is not part of the food chain, but
| does eventually break down), but also eventually reaches a
| steady state, where you add emit it as quickly as it breaks
| down.
|
| The bigger sustainability problem for food production comes
| from non-steady-state, non-reversible actions. Burning down a
| rainforest to permanently turn it into pasture[1]. Overfarming
| a plot of land, and exhausting all the nutrients from it.
|
| ----
|
| [1] Using fossil-fuel diesel-powered machinery to grow,
| harvest, and transport food, however, is _not steady-state_.
| That _is_ a sustainability issue for food production.
| Fortunately, it 's a very small part of overall human GHG
| emissions.
|
| [2] Do enough of that, and this is irreversible - you can't
| ever turn that pasture back into rainforest, because you need
| existing rainforest to bootstrap new rainforest.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| meet tastes great and all, but I wonder where science is at (if
| at all) on making original food that tastes good. How about food
| that doesn't taste like any natural food we've had, but still
| tastes really good?
|
| Jell-o (gello?) is a good example, nothing tastes like it
| naturally. Why aren't there tasty food that are original in terms
| of taste and texture but good for health and the environment? I
| suppose part of the struggle is that food is entrenched into
| culture so much. burgers and bbq are inextricable from july 4th
| and memorial day for example.
| Vanit wrote:
| Like you said I think it's culture, particularly ones that are
| food oriented. It's gonna be hard to get buy-in if people think
| it's too weird.
| isodev wrote:
| > doesn't taste like any natural food
|
| Remember the target audience - people would rather drink and
| die from raw milk than get a shot for a completely preventable
| sickness.
| cwillu wrote:
| I have all my shots and drink pasteurized milk, and I prefer
| familiar chicken-like substances over experimental cuisine.
| awestroke wrote:
| The trouble is that "tastes good" isn't a blank canvas. It's
| built on hardwired signals plus learned associations. Our basic
| tastes evolved as nutritional indicators: sweet signals energy,
| umami signals protein, bitter warns of potential toxins. And
| our brains are rather insistent about finding flavors more
| pleasant when they match patterns we've already learned are
| safe.
|
| Jell-O actually proves this rather than refuting it. It
| succeeds because it hits that hardwired sweet preference, not
| because it invented some novel taste dimension. A truly new
| taste that doesn't map onto the existing five basics would
| likely register as "off" rather than delicious. Your brain
| wouldn't know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.
|
| So you'd have to either work within those existing taste
| channels while creating novel combinations and textures, or
| somehow condition people to associate genuinely new sensations
| with safety and reward. The latter is slow going. We're quite
| literally built to be suspicious of unfamiliar foods.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > A truly new taste that doesn't map onto the existing five
| basics would likely register as "off" rather than delicious.
| Your brain wouldn't know what to do with it, nutritionally
| speaking.
|
| We have five taste receptors, so it's it's actually
| impossible to get something that doesn't map unto those five.
| Instead, what we call the taste of food, and what GP was
| referring to, is actually the smell of food, or more
| commonly, its aroma, which we can detect both from the
| outside by sniffing it with our noses, and while it is in our
| mouths via molecules wafting up to our respiratory tract.
|
| Unlike the simplicity of taste, we have a huge array of smell
| receptors, with most of them having much more indirect
| associations, if any, with any specific survival need. It's
| very much possible, and in fact quite common, to synthesize
| novel smells/aromas which don't resemble any natural food.
| 9dev wrote:
| > Unlike the simplicity of taste, we have a huge array of
| smell receptors, with most of them having much more
| indirect associations
|
| Slightly unrelated, but what I find very cool is thinking
| about your taste sense as a hyper-sensitive molecule
| detector. Individual aromas are just the signal your brain
| generates for different kinds of molecules, and it's very
| good at that. That's why at wine tastings, for example,
| people come up with all these elaborate terms for specific
| aromas--it's a way to name the molecule composition.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| A good example might be one that came up recently (on
| "Tasting History") is musk, which tastes of and has the
| bouquet of laundry detergent, or basil (which if you eat it
| plain and in isolation has a bizarre chemical flavor and
| bouquet), etc.
| majkinetor wrote:
| > Your brain wouldn't know what to do with it, nutritionally
| speaking.
|
| At first. If the food has nutrients that are important to the
| brain, it will recognize that in the future. There are animal
| experiment confirming this.
| Nevermark wrote:
| The term "acquired taste" quite literally means this.
|
| We don't link a sensation initially, until our mind
| associates it with feeling good in some way. Then we like
| it.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I was not suggesting inventing a new fundamental taste but
| new foods that are unlike existing foods. "meat" is not a
| taste for example. I can't give you an example, because
| that's the whole point, someone needs to experiment and find
| out. But the fundamental tastes like sweet and umami will
| remain of course.
| dkbrk wrote:
| Your question is rather ambiguous. Do you mean using chemistry
| to develop new techniques or combine unusual ingredients to
| create food that has novel flavors or textures? That would fall
| under Molecular Gastronomy, which has been highly influential
| within fine dining in the last few decades.
|
| Do you mean processing ingredients with the goal to take cheap
| ingredients and make a product as hyper-palatable as possible?
| That would generally be called "ultra-processed food"; you're
| not going to find a Doritos chip in nature.
|
| Do you mean developing completely completely new flavors via
| chemical synthesis? I don't think there's much possibility
| there. Our senses have evolved to detect compounds found in
| nature, so it's unlikely a synthetic compound can produce a
| flavor completely unlike anything found in nature.
|
| Also, I think you're overestimating jelly. Gelatine is just a
| breakdown product of collagen. Boil animal connective tissue,
| purify the gelatine, add sugar and flavoring and set it into a
| gel. It's really only a few of techniques removed from nature.
| If you want to say it's not found in nature, then fair enough,
| but neither is a medium-rare steak.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I mean using chemistry to create food using atypical
| ingredients that aren't normally classified as food or
| entirely synthetic. Take more simpler or more abundant
| compounds to create original food instead of using plants and
| wildlife. Flavors don't need to be new, but as others
| mentioned there are plenty of recently invented flavors.
| Doritos is ultra-processed corn, what i'm saying is Doritos
| but there is no corn involved. The original article is about
| meat-like food, I was saying "why meat-like" , if it is food
| that has similar taste like meat, that's fine, but it doesn't
| need to be like meat, it just needs to taste good and have
| palatable texture. Maybe we can have something tastes better
| than meat!
| edent wrote:
| There are plenty of "synthetic" flavours - Takis, Twinkies, and
| bubblegum drinks spring to mind.
|
| There are also a wide variety of textures that are heavily
| industrialised. If you go to some fine dining restaurants,
| you'll find smells and colours which you simply cannot
| replicate at home - let alone make from scratch.
|
| Most synthetic meat and fish is really just a flavour carrier
| for whatever sauce people like. I've had imitation chicken,
| shrimp, beef, crab, etc. They all taste great - but that's
| mostly because the sauces are the same as their meaty
| counterparts.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Right. Chicken is more of a texture than a flavor. When you
| buy a Spicy Zinger Burger from KFC you're tasting more of the
| zingy than the cluck-cluck.
| dentalnanobot wrote:
| The chicken that KFC uses, sure. There's a huge difference
| between that and a chicken that's been raised well and
| allowed to get to a sensible age before slaughter.
| h-c-c wrote:
| I'd argue that Jell-o tastes good because sugar tastes good and
| that it's just the novel texture coupled with sweetness that is
| the attraction. I doubt many people know what unsweetened
| gelatin tastes like or if that even tastes good.
| bcoates wrote:
| The taste/texture of jello is just collagen (roughly, "meat
| stew flavor"), fruit juice, and (tons of) sugar. It's just an
| extremely heightened version of natural flavors. There is
| nothing new under the sun.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Not to mention that "nothing tastes like it naturally" is
| false. Plenty of fruits have a jelly like consistency,
| they're just not common in the modern western world. Consider
| ripe persimmons, caimito, or abiu. Jelly palm and quince are
| cooked into literal jelly. Further afield you also have aloe
| leaf and cooked nopal.
| Certhas wrote:
| I find this highly annoying. Here we've had very tasty wheat
| based slices that can serve the same purpose as sliced
| salami/meats on bread, and didn't try to muck anything in
| particular. But they disappeared from the shelves while the
| stuff branded as Vegan Salami seemingly does well.
|
| I guess for casual buyers having a familiar reference point is
| just crucial.
| throwaway808081 wrote:
| That's because 166.2% of the population are allergic to
| wheat.
| refactor_master wrote:
| The crusade against gluten probably did it. Tofu lives as un-
| refrigerated grey blobs and tempeh never even made it to the
| shelf, probably because of hormone-disrupting soybeans. But
| hyper-engineered single cell _meat_? Now that'll sell.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Tempeh is pretty common at health food stores. More common
| than seitan, less common than tofu.
| gs17 wrote:
| This is really frustrating to me, it's hard to find seitan
| outside of Chinese shaokao (BBQ skewers) restaurants. There's
| a local brand of wheat-meat that even runs a deli that's
| pretty good, but people are so afraid of gluten.
| aydyn wrote:
| Jello doesnt really have much taste by itself. what youre
| tasting is mostly sugar.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Plus small amounts of perfumes similar to fruits or other
| bits of plants, usually.
| sp4nner wrote:
| You may be interested in the biotech startup Oobli
| <https://oobli.com/>. They're attempting to commercialize a
| protein-based sweetener, where the protein itself is
| interacting with your taste receptors and registering as
| 'sweet'.
|
| The technology is based on some naturally occurring proteins
| from fruit native to West Africa, but I'd say the idea of sweet
| things that are good for you is pretty novel!
| SilentM68 wrote:
| When I hear the word fungus, I think of "The Last of US" ;(
| Bad_Initialism wrote:
| The association is undiminshed by their web server being down.
| Uh oh.
| brnt wrote:
| That would make for a great spinoff: farm the infected for
| food!
| SilentM68 wrote:
| It seems that when the apocalypse finally arrives, I will
| skip the Michelin stars and go straight to nightmare cuisine.
|
| Soylent Green is People, too!
|
| Sighhh, Sol Roth ;)
| fithisux wrote:
| For chickens you do not have to pay license fees for the CRISPR
| technology.
|
| This is a huge disadvantage. Not every farmer is a biological
| research institute.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| We already have licensing fees for GMO seeds. Can't be all that
| long before they CRISPR an actual chicken breed, and start
| charging licensing fees for those as well.
| anotherpaul wrote:
| The paper linked in the article:
| https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/abstract/S0167-779...
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| "Pleasant taste; some monsterism."
| anotherpaul wrote:
| While the paper is behind a pay wall, the abstract highlights
| that they used knock out gene editing, meaning this is not a GMO
| of the old days, with trans genes, but a mkdifcation one could
| have achieved with classical breeding if given enough time and
| resources.
|
| If I understand this right, this would even in the EU now be
| allowed to be sold without the GMO label.
| aydyn wrote:
| Technically, any gene sequence can be achieved with enough time
| and resources. Thats what evolution is afterall. Using CRISPR
| but not labelling it as genetically modified seems pretty wild,
| but then again EU does have some funky regulations.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Technically, any gene sequence can be achieved with enough
| time and resources._
|
| not in a meaningful way, no. the probability that a new
| mutation you want will occur is much much lower than the
| probability you can breed offspring without a gene that's
| already in the bloodline.
| viciousvoxel wrote:
| Once a desirable sequence modification is identified
| through artificial means, what is often done in practice is
| to simply expose samples of the organism to UV until the
| desired sequence appears "naturally." The output of this
| process is not typically considered GMO, at least for
| regulatory purposes.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Which you can do for knockouts, but not for the "splice
| in a new gene 400BP long".
| airstrike wrote:
| Classic belter fare
| rubyfan wrote:
| Fut beltalowda
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Or those living in the Caves of Steel!
| dbcooper wrote:
| A key limiting factor for dietary use of single cell protein is
| the high mass fraction of nucleic acid, which limits daily
| consumption due to uric acid production during metabolism. High
| rates of RNA synthesis are unfortunately necessary for high
| protein productivity.
|
| The paper notes:
|
| >It is important to note that MP products often contain elevated
| levels of nucleic acids, constituting ~8% of the dry weight [17],
| which necessitates consideration when assessing their suitability
| for human consumption. To address this, a heat treatment process
| is employed at the end of fermentation that reduces the nucleic
| acid content in the fermented biomass to below 0.75/100 g, while
| simultaneously deactivating protease activity and F. venenatum
| biomass. However, this procedure has been observed to induce cell
| membrane leakage and a substantial loss of biomass, as evidenced
| in the Quorn production process [17], which also utilizes F.
| venenatum as the MP producer. Our experimental trials have
| encountered similar challenges, achieving a biomass yield of
| merely ~35%, and observed that heating process increased the
| relative protein and chitin content (Figure 2D,E), which may be
| related to the effect of membrane leakage, while the
| intracellular protein of the FCPD engineered strain was less
| likely to be lost to the extracellular. Thus, concentrating the
| fermentation broth to enhance protein and amino acids content in
| successive steps to produce a highly nutritious water-soluble
| fertilizer appears to be an effective strategy for adding value
| to the process (Figure 1).
|
| The challenges of developing economic single cell protein
| products, that are suitable for human consumption, are described
| in chapter 3 here:
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin-Hofrichter-2/pub...
| gsf_emergency_6 wrote:
| recent study that genetics has a underappreciated role in gout
|
| https://www.sciencealert.com/massive-study-reveals-where-gou...
| colechristensen wrote:
| Also it's a multi-species mutation that stuck in humans and
| the great apes which broke the urate oxidase enzyme.
|
| If we fixed it, nobody would get gout.
|
| I kinda wonder sometimes why medicine doesn't try to fix some
| of these species level genetic problems more broadly or more
| quickly. There's this enzyme every other mammal produces, why
| isn't there a fast track to engineering a micro-organ to
| produce it or inject an engineered version in gout patients
| (I did some research and yes people are somewhat doing these
| things... slowly)
|
| Why can't I, a healthy adult, be genetically engineered to
| start producing my own Vitamin C like every other mammal?
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| The paternalistic state does not allow you autonomy over
| your own body.
|
| e.g the amount of backlash thought emporium got when he
| genetically engineered himself to remove lactose
| intolerance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY
|
| Risky, but it's his body!
| tomrod wrote:
| > The paternalistic state does not allow you autonomy
| over your own body.
|
| Evidence to the contrary - fishing during free time.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Whom did he get backlash from and what was their stated
| reason?
| striking wrote:
| It's a cool video but it's formatted almost like a
| tutorial, with folks in the comments appearing excited to
| actually try it on their own bodies with lab equipment
| they have access to. It's pretty irresponsible given that
| I don't think he fully expressed the risks of doing this
| to your own body.
| devmor wrote:
| WRT genetic engineering, I believe the main barrier to
| these things is that our genes are quite multipurpose. You
| may turn on the ability to produce vitamin C, and that same
| sequence of genes could also turn your eyeballs into
| calcified lumps.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Eh, while that's true for many things, there are plenty
| of genetic diseases for which it is not ("diseases" or
| whatever you might call the human lack of vitamin C
| synthesis)
|
| In this case the gene encoding L-gulonolactone_oxidase is
| broken, and that's the last step in the process. That
| gene catalyzes something into a substance which decays
| into vitamin C.
| roywiggins wrote:
| First you need a gene therapy delivery system that
| doesn't produce any off-target mutations at all, ever.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Extract tissue from patient, build a cell line, CRISPR in
| vitro, build a cell line, sequence to verify. Use
| verified cell line to build pseudo-organs or to inject
| cells or stem cells.
|
| ex vivo gene therapy.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Cells don't survive sequencing, any that you do implant
| have not been sequenced. At best you can get some
| confidence that the error rate is small.
| colechristensen wrote:
| This is why I said build a cell _line_, i.e. cells that
| all come from a single parent cell. Clones. Make
| monoclonal stem cell lines, use CRISPR on them, make a
| NEW monoclonal cell line post-CRISPR and pull some cells
| to validate success or failure.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| When choosing what my life's work would be, I filtered out
| tasks that involved genetically engineering humans so that
| my solution cold compete with "eating a nice, fresh
| orange". Maybe I'm just lazy and unambitious.
| mapt wrote:
| Gemini:
|
| > Therapeutically, recombinant urate oxidase (like
| rasburicase or pegylated urate oxidase) is used as a
| medication to rapidly lower uric acid levels, treating
| tumor lysis syndrome, hyperuricemia, and gout, especially
| when other treatments fail or are contraindicated.
|
| Wikipedia:
|
| > It has been proposed that the loss of urate oxidase gene
| expression has been advantageous to hominoids, since uric
| acid is a powerful antioxidant and scavenger of singlet
| oxygen and radicals. Its presence provides the body with
| protection from oxidative damage, thus prolonging life and
| decreasing age-specific cancer rates.[15]
|
| > Children with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL), specifically
| with Burkitt's lymphoma and B-cell acute lymphoblastic
| leukemia (B-ALL), often experience tumor lysis syndrome
| (TLS), which occurs when breakdown of tumor cells by
| chemotherapy releases uric acid and cause the formation of
| uric acid crystals in the renal tubules and collecting
| ducts. This can lead to kidney failure and even death.
| Studies suggest that patients at a high risk of developing
| TLS may benefit from the administration of urate
| oxidase.[17] However, humans lack the subsequent enzyme HIU
| hydroxylase in the pathway to degrade uric acid to
| allantoin, so long-term urate oxidase therapy could
| potentially have harmful effects because of toxic effects
| of HIU.[18]
|
| > Higher uric acid levels have also been associated with
| epilepsy. However, it was found in mouse models that
| disrupting urate oxidase actually decreases brain
| excitability and susceptibility to seizures.[19]
|
| > Graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) is often a side effect
| of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation
| (HSCT), driven by donor T cells destroying host tissue.
| Uric acid has been shown to increase T cell response, so
| clinical trials have shown that urate oxidase can be
| administered to decrease uric acid levels in the patient
| and subsequently decrease the likelihood of GVHD.[20]
|
| > Urate oxidase is formulated as a protein drug
| (rasburicase) for the treatment of acute hyperuricemia in
| patients receiving chemotherapy. A PEGylated form of urate
| oxidase, pegloticase, was FDA approved in 2010 for the
| treatment of chronic gout in adult patients refractory to
| "conventional therapy".[21]
|
| As a general rule though, you can effectively treat/prevent
| gout by significantly increasing consumption of water and
| by replacing proteins with cereal grains (or fruits and
| vegetables or vegetable fats). These are inexpensive,
| fairly safe solutions.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Whatever engineered solution could happen, it will almost
| certainly have more side effects than a diet that includes
| vitamin C, and even if not, cost way more.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I would love for my gout to be genetically engineered away.
|
| I didn't have a flare up until my late 20s but it finally
| explained the very slight ache in my big toe. After the
| first one, the second and third happened within a year. I
| stopped drinking almost entirely aside from some gin a few
| times a year.
|
| I reduced various food consumption with no change.
| Whisky/beer will cripple me if I have more than one of
| either. After some research, vegan marathon runners are
| even plagued by this.
| morkalork wrote:
| If you haven't already tried it, Allopurinol is an
| effective and almost entirely side-effect free treatment.
|
| I lament the time I lost living without it!
| monkpit wrote:
| I second Allopurinol. Your doctor will try to tell you
| gout is due to your diet and lifestyle. The reality is
| (according to nearly everyone who actually has gout on
| the internet) that you just _have gout_ - you can't diet
| it away.
|
| I cut out all drinking and went vegetarian after a gout
| diagnosis and still had flare ups. I never drink sugary
| drinks or eat fast food, and yet doctors would constantly
| recommend cutting these out and "lifestyle changes".
|
| Allopurinol is the only thing keeping me from being
| bedridden on days I can feel a flare up.
| nradov wrote:
| For anyone who wants a deep dive on uric acid metabolism
| this Peter Attia Drive podcast with Rick Johnson, M.D. is a
| great resource.
|
| https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson2/
| rsync wrote:
| Evolution isn't stupid ... it's not a random outcome that
| we don't produce our own vitamin c, or have an appendix, or
| (urate oxidize blah blah).
|
| I wish you all the luck in fixing these problems and would
| be fascinated to see the outcomes... However, this notion
| that these changes would be cost free is a mistaken one.
|
| Mutants with these characteristics have certainly existed
| over evolutionary time... Our version outcompeted them.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >Evolution isn't stupid
|
| Evolution also isn't smart. Have so much of something in
| your diet and you'll tend to lose the ability to
| manufacture it because there's little evolutionary
| pressure to maintain it. If you're a VitaminCless mutant
| you don't die and your children survive just fine and
| suddenly this becomes common in the species.
|
| It didn't get lost because it was advantageous for it to
| be gone, it just wasn't important enough to get
| maintained.
| jyounker wrote:
| > I kinda wonder sometimes why medicine doesn't try to fix
| some of these species level genetic problems more broadly
| or more quickly
|
| Because the technology to do so doesn't exist yet.
|
| We're at the point where we're trying to fix only most
| severe conditions, conditions for which there are no other
| treatment options.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Finally vegans can get gout too!
| tomrod wrote:
| Hilarious and literally my same thought.
|
| I think it is _fascinating_ how we can modulate these amazing
| biological machines to do all kinds of tricks.
|
| I wish we had a better effect discovery process, something
| akin to alphafold where the space can be explored and defined
| beyond wait-and-see.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Seriously, I love software but a geneticist/biologist would
| have been a fascinating career.
|
| DNA, evolution, etc. is insanely powerful and you are kind
| of reverse-engineering and tweaking it to get different
| outcomes, but like you point out it is very slow. We just
| need to live for like 10,000 years and then a lifetimes
| work would become more exciting.
| cbflak wrote:
| And go on Atkin's if it's a fatty enough fungus!
| pfdietz wrote:
| Why use microorganisms when fats can be synthesized
| abiotically?
|
| https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/food-without-
| agricultu...
|
| Be an ultra-vegan; don't even kill microorganisms.
| chihuahua wrote:
| Breatharians are several steps ahead of you.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia
| adrian_b wrote:
| There are better alternatives than consuming the whole cells.
|
| There have been other attempts to use genetically-modified
| fungi (Trichoderma) for protein production, where they secrete
| in the cultivation medium a water-soluble animal protein, e.g.
| a cow whey protein or chicken egg white protein.
|
| Then, through filtration and ultrafiltration, the desired
| protein is separated from the fungal cells and the cultivation
| medium, producing a protein powder in the same way how one
| makes whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate.
|
| If done correctly this method produces only healthy protein
| without contaminants.
|
| However, searching right now online if there has been any
| progress with this, I see that against a startup company that
| has already produced such whey protein powder from a fungal
| culture there is a lawsuit that alleges that they have not
| separated properly the whey protein and that what they have
| sold contained more fungal protein of uncertain quality and
| safety than the good whey protein that they claimed to sell.
|
| Even if that company might be guilty of trying to exploit the
| technology before being perfected, the principle is sound and
| there is no doubt that this can be done, producing pure high-
| quality protein.
|
| I actually use whey protein concentrate to provide a
| significant fraction of my protein consumption, so I hope that
| its production from fungi will succeed in a not too distant
| future.
|
| Trichoderma is among the fungi that secrete enzymes in their
| environment, so the genetic modification that replaced its
| enzyme with whey protein or egg albumin is much simpler than
| the many modifications described in the parent article in order
| to make the whole cells more palatable, without really
| achieving this.
|
| For producing a protein powder that can be used as an
| ingredient in cooking food from vegetable sources, the approach
| used with Trichoderma is sufficient. The techniques used in the
| parent article are justified because they do not want to make a
| healthy food, but they want to make a meat imitation. For
| myself, enhancing the quality of vegetable food is a much more
| important goal than attempting to simulate meat, but at least
| in USA it is likely that the second goal might make more money.
| lentil_soup wrote:
| >> There have been other attempts to use genetically-modified
| fungi (Trichoderma) for protein production, where they
| secrete in the cultivation medium a water-soluble animal
| protein
|
| Honest question, what does "animal protein" mean here in
| regards to it being produced by a fungi? is it that it's the
| same as as one from a cow at the molecular level?
| adrian_b wrote:
| Yes, they have replaced the gene used to synthesize the
| fungus protein that was secreted in the environment with a
| cow gene or a chicken gene.
|
| So the cow lactoglobulin or chicken ovalbumin produced by
| the fungus is chemically identical to that from the protein
| powders that are currently made from cow milk or whey or
| from chicken egg white.
|
| That means that such fungus-produced protein has an optimal
| amino acid profile, unlike the natural fungal proteins and
| if it forms a part of the daily protein intake (e.g. around
| a third) it can compensate the inadequate amino acid
| profiles of vegetable proteins.
|
| For about 4 years I have eaten only vegetable proteins, but
| this created some constraints in what I could eat that were
| too inconvenient, so eventually I gave up. While now most
| of my protein intake remains of vegetable origin, I use
| some whey protein powder in the cooking of certain foods,
| to enhance their protein content, which has enabled me to
| make much more varied choices in the menu. Therefore I
| would know how to use such a product from fungi, if it
| would become widely available. There are a few startups in
| this domain, both in USA and in Europe, but for now their
| target is mostly in selling to big industrial producers of
| food, not at retail.
| stackghost wrote:
| >against a startup company that has already produced such
| whey protein powder from a fungal culture there is a lawsuit
| that alleges that they have not separated properly the whey
| protein and that what they have sold contained more fungal
| protein of uncertain quality and safety than the good whey
| protein that they claimed to sell.
|
| Sounds like par for the course in the VC-backed startup world
| justonceokay wrote:
| That's do interesting. I never would have assumed that single-
| celled animals have significantly more nuclear material per-
| weight than meat.
| globular-toast wrote:
| It's so odd to me as a veggie that people want something that
| "tastes like meat". If you've been immersed in decent veggie food
| for a while this isn't something you crave. Why would I want to
| eat a bit of dead animal? It's something I might do in a survival
| situation in a barren place, like Han Solo or something, but not
| if there are fresh veggies to hand.
|
| If you want to do this for ethical reasons, which you should,
| then just eat vegetables. They taste way better. You just have to
| recalibrate your senses to deal with the higher levels of
| flavour.
|
| But if people really want "chicken nuggets" for some reason then
| there's no reason it should have to involve animals at all, so
| this is a good thing, I guess.
| walterlw wrote:
| I believe this is about the perceived switching cost for the
| masses who, in the US and Europe for example, are predominantly
| not vegetarian.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| I'm sorry, I've been vegetarian (mostly vegan, no eggs or milk)
| for over 10 years, and I crave meat. A juicy burger. Spicy
| chicken wings. Actually those are mainly it.
|
| I am so thankful of advances that let me eat something my brain
| enjoys. I get the best of both worlds - no animal harmed in the
| process.
|
| Why do vegs have to neg on other vegs for what they eat? I hate
| that. To each their own. I encourage everyone to be vegetarian
| to support animal rights, but I also would never tell them that
| their cravings aren't real or how to go about doing it.
| globular-toast wrote:
| > Why do vegs have to neg on other vegs for what they eat?
|
| It's not a "neg", it's my opinion. I don't think you need to
| crave meat, you are just lacking the proper cuisine that
| would satisfy you completely. Try Gobi 65 and you'll never
| crave "spicy chicken wings" again. I feel like people go
| veggie by just removing meat from a cuisine that is centred
| around it. Imagine British food without meat: nothing and
| mash, nothing and chips, roast nothing... mmm... delicious.
| You need to completely change. There's nothing "missing" from
| a vegetarian Indian meal.
| engcoach wrote:
| What about people who have eaten extensive quantities (and
| variations) of vegetarian Indian food but still crave meat?
| It's not a matter of exposure, it's also a matter of taste.
| botanical76 wrote:
| I don't agree with your conclusion, but just wanted to say
| the segment on "roast nothing" was hilarious and absolutely
| true. Quite right that many cuisines depend on meat to be
| worth eating. I'm just happy that the food I eat no longer
| consumes animal lives; the mechanism to do that is a
| triviality compared.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Not just vegetables, also hash browns, fried potatoes, french
| fries, pancakes, spaghetti, etc.
|
| There are plenty of vegetarian meals (or vegan ones, though
| that's harder). It's just that we have relegated most of them
| to side dishes, entres or breakfast because meat is too popular
| as a main dish. But this is a very recent phenomenon
|
| But you can't make any money selling hash browns as veggie
| food, it's much more profitable to sell fake meat
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I want umami and a meatlike texture sometimes. Beans and
| mushrooms are usually fine for this, and seitan is pretty good
| for texture, but a nice slab of textured mushroom protein would
| be great. I don't really care if it tastes like animal flesh or
| not, but having the texture would be great.
| pstuart wrote:
| Another angle for sustainable protein:
| https://www.airprotein.com/
|
| Details are a bit vague but it seems like it's viable.
| inkcapmushroom wrote:
| I wish they would just say what's producing the protein. "Our
| cultures" and talk of fermentation makes me think it's just
| yeast maybe?
| pstuart wrote:
| Yeah, considering the age of the project that inspired it,
| yeast would be a good bet. Hopefully they do well and we
| learn more about it; we need all the options we can get to
| feed the planet in a sustainable manner.
| cregy wrote:
| This! Would love if we spent some of that sweet AI money into
| engineered new food sources. I've been watching Soylent for a
| while now. Food that can be made in space is what we need for
| interplanetary travel. Qudos to this crispr research!
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Food that can be made in space is what we need for
| interplanetary travel.
|
| Given how fucked up astronauts who spends just a few month in
| space come back to earth I think we have dozens if not hundreds
| of other things to solve before even considering food. Your
| bones, muscles, eyes, circulatory system, &c. are not made for
| anything other than good ol earth
| rapatel0 wrote:
| I have a feeling this will be solved somehow with peptides in
| the long run
| ericmcer wrote:
| We had a pretty huge "fake meat" funding craze in 2021. Beyond
| meat traded at >$200 for a bit, now it is $1. Not sure why it
| all burned out and disappeared.
| vintermann wrote:
| This product is the sort of product I suspect the fad blitz
| against "ultraprocessed foods" is _really_ targeted at.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Not necessarily.
|
| It might be some Big Meat conspiracy to combat these upstarts,
| but there's also reasonable data indicating that less
| processing results in better health outcomes.
| padjo wrote:
| I've seen very little that isn't just correlation of highly
| processed food consumption and generally poor lifestyle
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Here, this is a solid intro you can thread out of at your
| leisure. There's really no controversy around this at a
| scientific level, only on social media:
|
| https://www.thelancet.com/series-do/ultra-processed-food
| vintermann wrote:
| But of course there is! That's not the point. You could also
| probably produce reasonable data indicating that food
| starting with the letter F results in worse health outcomes.
| But if you then avoid fenugreek, fava beans and fiddlehead
| ferns, you're not making up for the fried potatoes, fried
| cheese and fudge sundaes which really carried the
| correlation!
|
| We want _causal_ correlations. Someone decided that instead
| they wanted to divide food into categoried in this specific
| way, and then rank categories. And I don 't think all of them
| were naive about what they were doing. I've read Merchants of
| Doubt, I don't give harmful industries the benefit of doubt
| when it comes to things like this.
| kelipso wrote:
| You can wait for causal connections forever while
| reasonable people take precautions when seeing strong
| correlations.
| op00to wrote:
| Start sailing the high seas to reduce global warming.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| It's certainly not the food industry that decided to brand
| some of its own foods as Ultra-Processd and harmful for
| health. That kind of categorisation is the work of
| nutrition researchers of various kinds. The way I
| understand it the food industry's interests trend the
| opposite way, trying to convince you that everything they
| sell you is good for you.
| happosai wrote:
| Processing itself doesn't make foods more or less healthier.
| Many highly processed foods are healthier than their
| unprocessed natural form. Yogurt is healthier than milk while
| butter isn't.
|
| It why people ultra process foods - to make them more tasty
| and addictive by processing in more fats, salts and sugars.
| Take soda for example. They added acidic CO2 bubbles so they
| can add more sugar .
|
| The problem with the term ultra processed has, it bags in
| huge amounts of different foods and classifies them all bad.
| delichon wrote:
| Processing food doesn't necessarily make food less healthy,
| but it does it so often that it should not be considered
| neutral. * it frequently removes the fiber
| and structure, making it faster to eat, and easier to over
| consume. * it frequently adds sugar, salt, etc., not
| just making it easier to over consume, but with a payload
| that itself does extra damage. * simply changing the
| form of food, without changing the contents, itself can
| have serious nutritional consequences [0].
|
| For my own choices ultra processing is guilty until proven
| innocent. Believing that implies a radical change to how
| most people eat.
|
| [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-
| journal-of-n...
| pessimizer wrote:
| > to make them more tasty and addictive by processing in
| more fats, salts and sugars.
|
| This is a very specific definition of "ultraprocessed" that
| many people don't associate with the term at all. Most
| people are trying to avoid the strange chemicals and
| fillers used to market food (like color and shine), to
| preserve food (so it can last longer on the shelf/warehouse
| and travel farther), or fill food (to replace expensive
| fats, starches and sugars with cheap fats, starches and
| sugars, or even to add indigestible elements for bulk and
| texture.) We have no idea of a lot of the long-term effects
| of some of this stuff, and much of it has never been tested
| for safety, just assumed to be safe.
|
| Other people are trying to tell people to eat healthy food.
| This is your camp. You don't have to "ultraprocess" things
| to dump sugar into them. You can just dump sugar into them.
| I'm a home cook who doesn't really eat much processed food
| at all, but I certainly eat a lot of fats, salt, and sugar.
| I can tell you exactly how much. I put it in because I like
| it. I'm not interested in anybody's suggestion that I cut
| it other than my doctor. It's a public morals crusade
| disguised as a health crusade. "Ultraprocessing" often
| comes in when you dump some strange chemical in to disguise
| the lack of butter, the lack of a real sugar, or to lower
| salt content.
|
| But with the other stuff, I hate that it's all lumped
| together in an "ultraprocessed" category. Each of the types
| of processing that is done on food is different, each
| should be justified on its own merits, the process should
| be _public_ , and things that are notable should be
| _labeled_ so people who want to avoid them can. Lobbyists
| fight in order not to label things, and not to have to test
| things.
|
| I also don't mean to be overcritical about people who want
| people to eat healthier, but I believe that it undermines
| the fight to not have unknown dangers in food to turn it
| into an orthorexia crusade.
| vintermann wrote:
| I notice some have said "hyperpalatable" foods, and that is
| better, at least it's not such a good stick to use at
| vegetarian meat alternatives, but it still leaves alcoholic
| drinks, steaks, traditional smoked food etc. off the hook.
| They're not usually "boosted" with exotic processing.
|
| But "hyperpalatable" also misleading in that heavy
| processing of unhealthy food often just makes things a lot
| more storable but only a little less tasty (e.g. sweet
| baked goods).
|
| For "ultra-processed", not only is the choice of classes to
| divide food into suspect, but they're gerrymandering those
| classes too. Much fried food isn't especially processed.
| Extract the oil, fry the vegetable in it, basically two
| steps. Certainly fewer steps than say, rye bread.
|
| From what I've seen, the studies of ultra-processed food
| find excuses to count many processing steps for obviously
| unhealthy food, and fewer for benign ones.
| metalman wrote:
| "Chicken of the woods", Hen of the woods?, whatever, shelf
| fungus, grows on dieing hardwoods, often in huge quantities,
| cooks like chicken, looks like chicken, tastes like chicken, but
| costs more unless you can gather it yourself.It also lasts for
| weeks on top of the fridge, but there must be ways to keep it
| longer.
| westmeal wrote:
| Probably tastes better than this stuff. My mother is super into
| mushroom foraging and made some for me with garlic and some
| herbal salt and while I don't think it tastes quite like
| chicken, it's definitely pretty damn good.
| imzadi wrote:
| Hen of the woods has like 1 gram of protein per cup. The point
| of this one is that it has more protein.
| machomaster wrote:
| It would be better to give an understandable measurement
| weight per weight (percentage) instead of the weight per
| football field type of weirdness.
| metalman wrote:
| Ah!, though the hen of the woods must be all carbs then, as
| it didn't leave me hungry and, it occurs to me that in
| certain tests, fungus might be smarter than chickens,
| something something, maze/logic tests of mycelium.
| torginus wrote:
| This sounds like they took a product that failed in the market -
| fungus based meat substitutes, and hinted at some superscience
| magic thats years from coming out, and that's if it proves safe,
| economical and a genunie improvement.
|
| This really looks like an attempt to get investors to come back
| and push the stock price.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| Quorn is based on fungus. I'm not a huge fan of it myself but
| it's sold across the EU, and it's in almost all stores where I
| live.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Quorn is fine, but it's neither better nor cheaper than the
| plant-based fake chicken nuggets, so I'm not super
| enthusiastic about it.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| No, thank you.
| sgt wrote:
| Mmmm, nothing like a crispy fungus burger!
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I enjoy a grilled portobello cap now and then.
| fuzzy_biscuit wrote:
| Do we live in The Expanse universe now?
| bawana wrote:
| I cant wait to see the unintended consequences. Imagine eating a
| food which then digests you from the inside out. Wait, wasnt
| there a video game like this?..,,,half-life
| dan_hawkins wrote:
| Like pineapple?
| Nevermark wrote:
| Don't eat a large bowl of fresh cranberries for breakfast.
| op00to wrote:
| I used to wonder how the US population could be so stupid to
| elect someone counter to their best interests, then threads
| like these remind me that people are really, really bad at
| logic and such.
| djaouen wrote:
| Soon, humanity will have zero excuse to kill any animal. Neat!
| Y_Y wrote:
| Who needs an excuse? You might think it's immoral, but that's a
| minority position and developing new fungi is going to be much
| easier than convincing billions of people to adopt your values.
| eudamoniac wrote:
| I feel that eating meat is unethical yet I make no attempt to
| reduce my consumption; I just acknowledge I am behaving
| unethically in this regard. Do you think that is such a
| minority position?
| Y_Y wrote:
| It's just you and me I'm afraid.
| Bender wrote:
| Fungus is very much alive and to meet peoples caloric
| requirements means massacring hundreds of trillions of them. We
| just can't easily hear them scream. They communicate with one
| another over massive fungal networks in forests and jungles.
| Fungus are fascinating. They can recognize patterns and make
| decisions. Slime mold is even more interesting in that it can
| remember complex patterns, solve mapping challenges and make
| decisions without a nervous system suggesting our understanding
| of the term _life_ is likely very incomplete. Slime mold can
| remember feeding times and locations.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| We're only massacring the fruiting bodies. The mycelium is
| just fine and lives on to create even more fruiting bodies.
| It's like picking apples from an apple tree. The tree itself
| isn't harmed in the slightest. The only difference is that
| many fruits are designed to be eaten so that the seeds can
| pass an germinate, whereas mushrooms achieve this through
| spore release.
| Bender wrote:
| That's interesting. Is there a video that shows this
| process up close at the microscopic level? How long does
| this process take?
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| I feel like this might have been shown in the 2019
| documentary 'Fantastic Fungi'
| (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8258074/) - really
| interesting and fun movie.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| For some of these fungal meat-substitute products, I think
| you do eat the mycelia (for bystanders, the fruiting body
| we eat is mushrooms). But I don't think the fungus is
| bothered about it the same way the chicken is.
| b800h wrote:
| You could make a substitute that mimicked meat entirely. I'd
| still take the thing that grew in a cow. In "Culture" terms, I'm
| with the Affront. :-)
| lillecarl wrote:
| Do you prefer huge wasteful trucks and wide roads too?
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I think that is implied.
| theultdev wrote:
| We've gone from GMOs are bad to lab meat being okay.
| Arch485 wrote:
| Well, no, I know a lot of people who think lab meat is
| seriously NOT ok (these are the same people who think GMO corn
| will somehow kill you).
| theultdev wrote:
| Most comments here are pretty positive, other than noting
| it's not like meat. But nothing really about health aspects.
|
| I'm fine with GMOs, a lot of produce would be pretty inedible
| without it.
|
| It's a lot more natural then what we're doing here.
| vzaliva wrote:
| I'm vegetarian. The "tastes like meat" claim is misleading. The
| main issue isn't the taste, it's the texture. Impossible Burger
| came close. Most mushroom-based substitutes I've tried are
| nothing like it.
| goda90 wrote:
| I eat meat. I tried some Quorn turkey the other day and it was
| surprisingly like turkey. Not perfect but better experience
| than a poorly done dry turkey breast
| api wrote:
| This would be outstanding for organic recycling in space.
| joshuamcginnis wrote:
| FYI, the fungus Fusarium venenatum has been used for decades to
| produce vegan protein by companies like Quorn.
|
| https://www.quorn.us/
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