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.<p>The paper notes:<p>>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).<p>The challenges of developing economic single cell protein products, that are suitable for human consumption, are described in chapter 3 here:<p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin-Hofrichter-2/publication/338461559_Fungal_Peroxygenases_A_Phylogenetically_Old_Superfamily_of_Heme_Enzymes_with_Promiscuity_for_Oxygen_Transfer_Reactions/links/5e1c56fa4585159aa4cbb474/Fungal-Peroxygenases-A-Phylogenetically-Old-Superfamily-of-Heme-Enzymes-with-Promiscuity-for-Oxygen-Transfer-Reactions.pdf#page=67" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin-Hofrichter-2/pub...</a>
There are better alternatives than consuming the whole cells.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If done correctly this method produces only healthy protein without contaminants.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Finally vegans can get gout too!
Hilarious and literally my same thought.<p>I think it is _fascinating_ how we can modulate these amazing biological machines to do all kinds of tricks.<p>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.
And go on Atkin’s if it’s a fatty enough fungus!
recent study that genetics has a underappreciated role in gout<p><a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/massive-study-reveals-where-gout-comes-from-and-its-not-what-we-thought" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencealert.com/massive-study-reveals-where-gou...</a>
Also it's a multi-species mutation that stuck in humans and the great apes which broke the urate oxidase enzyme.<p>If we fixed it, nobody would get gout.<p>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)<p>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.<p>e.g the amount of backlash thought emporium got when he genetically engineered himself to remove lactose intolerance: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY</a><p>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.
> The paternalistic state does not allow you autonomy over your own body.<p>Evidence to the contrary - fishing during free time.
Whom did he get backlash from and what was their stated reason?
I would love for my gout to be genetically engineered away.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Gemini:<p>> 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.<p>Wikipedia:<p>> 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]<p>> 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]<p>> 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]<p>> 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]<p>> 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]<p>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.
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.
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)<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
><i>Technically, any gene sequence can be achieved with enough time and resources.</i><p>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.
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.
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?
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.<p>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.
Fungus probably needs more much too, because no photosynthesis.
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.
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.
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 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.<p>That's a pretty substantial backyard operation.
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.
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.<p>They would probably need more pasture in monoculture hellholes that have cornfields for 100km in each direction.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I use a chicken tractor that is big enough to let me hold about 33 at a time.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 :)
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.<p>But I will say, when you buy chicken at the grocery store, the quality can vary. Mine has always been good.
> the cost of feed<p>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<p>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)
Wild to think that there's 6-7 chickens for every human in America at all times
This is not how the overwhelming majority of chickens live - they live in high intensity farm operations in horrible conditions
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.
If all the meat you eat is from chicken raised in your backyard , that's environmentally perfect.<p>In the US per capita chicken consumption is 100 pounds per year.
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.
That is not how most of the chicken is raised (over 70 billions are slaughtered per year).
how big is your backyard?
I had vaguely remembered that chitin was equivalent to cellulose in our inability to digest. The article addresses it:<p>"The first modification, eliminating a gene for chitin synthase, resulted in thinner fungal cell walls."<p>This also has an enormous potential benefit of reducing avian flu and other zoonotic bird diseases.
Fish foods with chitin is marketed as roughage.<p>for humans, does shellfish allergy (tropomyosin and other proteins) diagnosis imply chitin allergy?
> This also has an enormous potential benefit of reducing avian flu and other zoonotic bird diseases.<p>How?
By replacing (some) farmed meat with farmed fungi protein.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
This product is the sort of product I suspect the fad blitz against "ultraprocessed foods" is <i>really</i> targeted at.
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.<p>This really looks like an attempt to get investors to come back and push the stock price.
Classic belter fare
The paper linked in the article: <a href="https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/abstract/S0167-7799(25)00404-4?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0167779925004044%3Fshowall%3Dtrue" rel="nofollow">https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/abstract/S0167-779...</a>
We've gone from GMOs are bad to lab meat being okay.
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.
When I hear the word fungus, I think of "The Last of US" ;(
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.<p>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
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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
> 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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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.
> Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.<p>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 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.
There are plenty of "synthetic" flavours - Takis, Twinkies, and bubblegum drinks spring to mind.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!
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.<p>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 <i>meat</i>? Now that’ll sell.
That's because 166.2% of the population are allergic to wheat.
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.
Jello doesnt really have much taste by itself. what youre tasting is mostly sugar.
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<p>Remember the target audience - people would rather drink and die from raw milk than get a shot for a completely preventable sickness.
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 <i>life</i> 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.
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.
"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.
Do we live in The Expanse universe now?
Mmmm, nothing like a crispy fungus burger!
No, thank you.
For chickens you do not have to pay license fees for the CRISPR technology.<p>This is a huge disadvantage. Not every farmer is a biological research institute.
That's what she said.
If the goal is reduced CO2, wouldn’t it be better to take aim at plants, rather than fungi?
Why? I am not sure photosynthesis plays a large role in the lower carbon footprint.
> If the goal is reduced CO2<p>... let's start on tearing down bullshit AI datacenters.<p>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]<p>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.<p>A 1% reduction in livestock emissions is therefore about the same as a 50% reduction in data center emissions.<p>[1]: <a href="https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environment/livestock-dont-contribute-14-5-of-global-greenhouse-gas-emissions" rel="nofollow">https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.carbon-direct.com/insights/understanding-the-carbon-footprint-of-ai-and-how-to-reduce-it" rel="nofollow">https://www.carbon-direct.com/insights/understanding-the-car...</a>
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<p>It's a bit extreme to refer to that "climate" summit "guests" as cattle, but I won't deny it gave me a chuckle.<p>>the inhumane conditions in which the cattle are raised<p>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.<p>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.<p>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? <a href="https://as1.ftcdn.net/jpg/03/06/17/72/1000_F_306177230_izPAvBc5ZZ1dxV4jyHYCkO0uwMArmTfL.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://as1.ftcdn.net/jpg/03/06/17/72/1000_F_306177230_izPAv...</a>
what is the context for this photo please? (that is not a calf btw?)<p>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?<p>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: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4cHn6NX4wQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4cHn6NX4wQ</a>
Meat is useful. "AI" datacenters are 100% harm in every possible way. Let's start with that.
Meat <i>was</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <a href="https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20250514-greenpeace-studie-umweltauswirkungen-ki.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20250514-greenpeace-...</a> and Our World In Data's estimates for livestock and manure <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector</a>
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.<p>I'd like to see meat consumption to something like half to a quarter of its current level rather than eliminate it outright.
> it does so at a cost orders of magnitude lower environmental harm than meat<p>Thanks for the quip. Does this come from a Big AI talking points memo?<p>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?<p>It comes from the evidence I linked you to.<p>Which includes, to repeat, *<i>Greenpeace</i>*.<p>Also to repeat: I think this is a bubble, I also want it to be a bubble for various reasons.<p>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".<p>> ridiculous<p>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.<p>You may also notice from me saying that AI is 0.5-0.25 of that, that I'm <i>not</i> using "Market Cap" of AI in this comparison. Market cap != market size. This is about what revenue AI and meat gets per year.
Another angle for sustainable protein: <a href="https://www.airprotein.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.airprotein.com/</a><p>Details are a bit vague but it seems like it's viable.
"Pleasant taste; some monsterism."
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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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
Not just vegetables, also hash browns, fried potatoes, french fries, pancakes, spaghetti, etc.<p>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<p>But you can't make any money selling hash browns as veggie food, it's much more profitable to sell fake meat
I believe this is about the perceived switching cost for the masses who, in the US and Europe for example, are predominantly not vegetarian.
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. :-)