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:
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.
>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
>> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
It's not just risky, it's hard to know if it really "worked" for many reasons.
This is why we run double-blind, randomized control trials- to be convinced that the treatment "worked".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Evolution does not optimize for quality of life. And evolution certainly creates some pretty stupid outcomes, as it favors slapping on quick fixes at random rather than intelligently engineering the problem away. So we have hardware problems like our blind spots that got 'fixed' in software, unlike other species that evolved eyes separately and happened to get the wiring right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I’ve cooked and eaten tofu that was acceptable, and tempeh that was slightly better. I’ve never had tofu that came anywhere close to plain chicken breast—just salted and fried—in terms of taste, let alone something I’d call extremely tasty.
So, I guess, question is, how do you make extremely tasty tofu? Do you have to get some tofu that is not available in Europe?
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
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 ;)
Despite enjoying Quorn for a few months once or twice a week, after a while it started making a family member throw up (so thanks for the IBS tip). Chickpeas are also out. I can feed them tofu, tempeh and beans and lentils for vegan protein.
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.
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.
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).
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... 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.
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...
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.
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.
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
>> 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 :)
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.
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.
>> 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?
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Any 'fad blitz' you see is just mindless flailing, trying to deal with a category of food we know is unhealthy but are still trying to work out the mechanisms and reasons why (which would enable improved categorizations). It doesn't seem particularly targeted at anything, and most industry players profit from ultra processed foods. I think the interesting edge case is soy milk and similar. Most brands including organic ones count as ultra processed by the nutritionists definition, with vitamins and calcium supplementation. And this very supplementation is how many vegans and vegetarians keep their calcium and B vitamin levels up, even if they don't always realize it.
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.
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.
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.
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:
That paper unequivocally states in the beginning that the authors aren't trying to contradict that food processing affects health outcomes, they're just dissatisfied with the low quality of the classification system.
So there's no debate that ultra processed foods affect health, there's only debate on whether the category itself is good enough. And if you go deeper into the subject, it becomes pretty obvious that the Nova system is a pretty bad model.
But it's a simple model that can be easily communicated to Doomscroll Sally. The better models we have haven't caught on anywhere near as well.
"The participants in this debate agree that food processing vitally affects human health, and that the extent of food processing significantly affects diet quality and health outcomes. They disagree on the significance of ultra-processing, as defined within the Nova food classification system."
“The NO position argues that the concept of UPF is poorly defined; gives rise to misclassification of foods; is without clear mechanisms of action; and that the observed associations with obesity are likely confounded.“
Is my point. There’s a lot of correlation but whole classification system is poorly designed and mechanisms are not really explained. The whole idea of labelling foods as ultra processed as a proxy for bad seems poorly conceived. If I was to go further I’d say it has a whiff of naturalistic fallacy about it.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
I am never going to stop eating beef or poultry, no matter what any scientist or politician thinks about sustainability.
We have been using these as healthy, nutritious food sources for eons. I'm fine with people creating alternatives and making them available, but far too many people want to see the former disappear because they're misled by bad science and hysteria.
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.
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.
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!
> 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
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.
It all burned out because the market for 'fake meat' is tiny, the meat loving ethical or ignorant vegetarians. The vast bulk of the vegetarian market would prefer a lentil burger. In the real market for 'fake meat', it needs to compete economically with factory chicken, which is one of the cheapest protein sources on the planet.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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
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?
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-greenpeace-... and Our World In Data's estimates for livestock and manure https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
>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
>> 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?
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.
> a startup company
https://perfectday.com/ ?
I've had their product as protein powder and in an ice cream that contained it.
Finally vegans can get gout too!
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.
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.
And go on Atkin’s if it’s a fatty enough fungus!
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.
Breatharians are several steps ahead of you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia
recent study that genetics has a underappreciated role in gout
https://www.sciencealert.com/massive-study-reveals-where-gou...
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?
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!
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.
It's not just risky, it's hard to know if it really "worked" for many reasons. This is why we run double-blind, randomized control trials- to be convinced that the treatment "worked".
He went from being unable to eat many foods, to eating a full cheese pizza on camera. Pretty sure it worked.
Whom did he get backlash from and what was their stated reason?
That's incredible. How has he not patented the process and made a fortune from selling a cure for lactose intolerance?
> The paternalistic state does not allow you autonomy over your own body.
Evidence to the contrary - fishing during free time.
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.
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.
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!
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/
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.
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.
>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.
Evolution does not optimize for quality of life. And evolution certainly creates some pretty stupid outcomes, as it favors slapping on quick fixes at random rather than intelligently engineering the problem away. So we have hardware problems like our blind spots that got 'fixed' in software, unlike other species that evolved eyes separately and happened to get the wiring right.
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.
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.
First you need a gene therapy delivery system that doesn't produce any off-target mutations at all, ever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That’s do interesting. I never would have assumed that single-celled animals have significantly more nuclear material per-weight than meat.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
They would probably prefer that their expertise and massive investments in infrastructure for raising chickens isn't made worthless.
Fungus probably needs more much too, because no photosynthesis.
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?
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.
If you're living in the US, reduced fat paneer is very good, and protein dense.
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.
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.
I’ve cooked and eaten tofu that was acceptable, and tempeh that was slightly better. I’ve never had tofu that came anywhere close to plain chicken breast—just salted and fried—in terms of taste, let alone something I’d call extremely tasty.
So, I guess, question is, how do you make extremely tasty tofu? Do you have to get some tofu that is not available in Europe?
If you don't like tofu you're not going to like it. I vastly prefer it to chicken, which I find unpleasant, and I don't even like tofu that much.
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
Where do you even get that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.
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 ;)
This one?
https://www.lotao.com/en/pages/english
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.
I've tried pea protein products before that had a kind of bitter taste. What is the flavor profile like?
Extremely neutral to me. I have pea protein powder and there I taste a bit of bitterness.
Despite enjoying Quorn for a few months once or twice a week, after a while it started making a family member throw up (so thanks for the IBS tip). Chickpeas are also out. I can feed them tofu, tempeh and beans and lentils for vegan protein.
Morningstar Vegan Breakfast Sausage Patties. Great with eggs.
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.
Neurospora crassa is also pretty good. Meati sells slabs of it.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
If every yard in a town or city was full of chickens, I wouldn't call it decentralized. Just one very broad centre.
Or you could just call it the developing world lol. It’s very common in many places.
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
>> 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 :)
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.
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.
>> 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?
> 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)
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.
Wild to think that there's 6-7 chickens for every human in America at all times
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
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.
This is not how the overwhelming majority of chickens live - they live in high intensity farm operations in horrible conditions
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.
Thats about 45kg, I wish I had that average American backyard.
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.
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.
That is not how most of the chicken is raised (over 70 billions are slaughtered per year).
how big is your backyard?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Which you can do for knockouts, but not for the "splice in a new gene 400BP long".
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.
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
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.
> This also has an enormous potential benefit of reducing avian flu and other zoonotic bird diseases.
How?
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.
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.
Fish foods with chitin is marketed as roughage.
for humans, does shellfish allergy (tropomyosin and other proteins) diagnosis imply chitin allergy?
This product is the sort of product I suspect the fad blitz against "ultraprocessed foods" is really targeted at.
Any 'fad blitz' you see is just mindless flailing, trying to deal with a category of food we know is unhealthy but are still trying to work out the mechanisms and reasons why (which would enable improved categorizations). It doesn't seem particularly targeted at anything, and most industry players profit from ultra processed foods. I think the interesting edge case is soy milk and similar. Most brands including organic ones count as ultra processed by the nutritionists definition, with vitamins and calcium supplementation. And this very supplementation is how many vegans and vegetarians keep their calcium and B vitamin levels up, even if they don't always realize it.
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.
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.
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.
You can wait for causal connections forever while reasonable people take precautions when seeing strong correlations.
Start sailing the high seas to reduce global warming.
I’ve seen very little that isn’t just correlation of highly processed food consumption and generally poor lifestyle
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
I think my counter position is well explained here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
Edit to add: I think it’s also clear from this that there isn’t anything like the scientific consensus you believe there is on this issue.
That paper unequivocally states in the beginning that the authors aren't trying to contradict that food processing affects health outcomes, they're just dissatisfied with the low quality of the classification system.
So there's no debate that ultra processed foods affect health, there's only debate on whether the category itself is good enough. And if you go deeper into the subject, it becomes pretty obvious that the Nova system is a pretty bad model. But it's a simple model that can be easily communicated to Doomscroll Sally. The better models we have haven't caught on anywhere near as well.
"The participants in this debate agree that food processing vitally affects human health, and that the extent of food processing significantly affects diet quality and health outcomes. They disagree on the significance of ultra-processing, as defined within the Nova food classification system."
“The NO position argues that the concept of UPF is poorly defined; gives rise to misclassification of foods; is without clear mechanisms of action; and that the observed associations with obesity are likely confounded.“
Is my point. There’s a lot of correlation but whole classification system is poorly designed and mechanisms are not really explained. The whole idea of labelling foods as ultra processed as a proxy for bad seems poorly conceived. If I was to go further I’d say it has a whiff of naturalistic fallacy about it.
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.
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.
Processing food doesn't necessarily make food less healthy, but it does it so often that it should not be considered neutral.
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...
> 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.
"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.
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.
Hen of the woods has like 1 gram of protein per cup. The point of this one is that it has more protein.
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.
It would be better to give an understandable measurement weight per weight (percentage) instead of the weight per football field type of weirdness.
Classic belter fare
Or those living in the Caves of Steel!
Fut beltalowda
The paper linked in the article: https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/abstract/S0167-779...
I am never going to stop eating beef or poultry, no matter what any scientist or politician thinks about sustainability.
We have been using these as healthy, nutritious food sources for eons. I'm fine with people creating alternatives and making them available, but far too many people want to see the former disappear because they're misled by bad science and hysteria.
FYI, the fungus Fusarium venenatum has been used for decades to produce vegan protein by companies like Quorn.
https://www.quorn.us/
What's the protein density? For ordinary mushrooms it's around 2.5% by weight, vs. around 27% for beef.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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
I have a feeling this will be solved somehow with peptides in the long run
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.
It all burned out because the market for 'fake meat' is tiny, the meat loving ethical or ignorant vegetarians. The vast bulk of the vegetarian market would prefer a lentil burger. In the real market for 'fake meat', it needs to compete economically with factory chicken, which is one of the cheapest protein sources on the planet.
Another angle for sustainable protein: https://www.airprotein.com/
Details are a bit vague but it seems like it's viable.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
Tempeh is pretty common at health food stores. More common than seitan, less common than tofu.
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.
That's because 166.2% of the population are allergic to wheat.
Jello doesnt really have much taste by itself. what youre tasting is mostly sugar.
Plus small amounts of perfumes similar to fruits or other bits of plants, usually.
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.
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.
> 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.
I have all my shots and drink pasteurized milk, and I prefer familiar chicken-like substances over experimental cuisine.
When I hear the word fungus, I think of "The Last of US" ;(
The association is undiminshed by their web server being down. Uh oh.
That would make for a great spinoff: farm the infected for food!
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 ;)
This would be outstanding for organic recycling in space.
We've gone from GMOs are bad to lab meat being okay.
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).
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.
Do we live in The Expanse universe now?
If the goal is reduced CO2, wouldn’t it be better to take aim at plants, rather than fungi?
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.
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[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.
Why? I am not sure photosynthesis plays a large role in the lower carbon footprint.
Fungi produce CO2 and sequester O2.
> 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?
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...
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The numbers are what the numbers are, not what you want them to be.
Minimizing cow farts is simply a better focus.
I never said anything about electricity consumption in my origional post, my disingenuous friend.
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Are you making up a guy to be mad at?
It's only game, why you heff to be mad?
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.
>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.
> 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?
No need to be snarky, a lot of people are already implementing such changes in the way the buy and consume food.
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.
Did you know they put nose rings with spikes on the calfs so they don't drink their mother's milk? https://as1.ftcdn.net/jpg/03/06/17/72/1000_F_306177230_izPAv...
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.
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
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?
I believe he was a vegan for a long time, but has since started eating some ethically-farmed meat
Meat is useful. "AI" datacenters are 100% harm in every possible way. Let's start with that.
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-greenpeace-... and Our World In Data's estimates for livestock and manure https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Mmmm, nothing like a crispy fungus burger!
I enjoy a grilled portobello cap now and then.
No, thank you.
"Pleasant taste; some monsterism."
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Soon, humanity will have zero excuse to kill any animal. Neat!
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.
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.
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.
That's interesting. Is there a video that shows this process up close at the microscopic level? How long does this process take?
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.
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.
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?
It's just you and me I'm afraid.
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
Like pineapple?
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.
Don't eat a large bowl of fresh cranberries for breakfast.
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. :-)
Do you prefer huge wasteful trucks and wide roads too?
I think that is implied.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I believe this is about the perceived switching cost for the masses who, in the US and Europe for example, are predominantly not vegetarian.
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.