This seems like a much more promising avenue than lab-grown meat. Fungi are already rich in protein, are a bit closer on the tree of life to animals than plants are, are sedentary by default, and are absolute chemical powerhouses.
If we can engineer a fungus to produce just the right amino profile, or whatever nutrition you're looking for, then you have a self perpetuating stock that should be much lower tech and simpler to manage than trying to grow muscle tissue in a "petri dish".
Heck, we could just be eating more mushrooms, they already are a pretty good source of protein.
The value you give for lentils might be for some kind of boiled lentils, including a lot of added water.
Raw lentils, as you buy them, have about 22% to 25% of protein, i.e. about the same as lean meat. However, while the rest of the meat is mostly water, the rest of the lentils is mostly starch.
Therefore, if you have a sedentary life style, lentils cannot provide a too big fraction of your daily protein intake, i.e. above 40% to 50%, otherwise they would provide too many calories.
Raw mushrooms have a high content of water and chitin, so their nutritional content is very low per mass, like also for most parts of vegetables, except seeds. Among non-animal sources, only the seeds (e.g. of cereals or legumes or nuts) or the oily fruits like olives or avocado, have high nutritional content per mass in their raw, unprocessed state.
For instance eating 167 g per day of lentils would provide a significant part of the daily protein intake and it will cover the daily necessities for all amino-acids except methionine. For a similar nutritional intake you would have to buy and eat more than 1.5 kg of mushrooms, which would be quite a challenge and it would also be much more expensive than eating meat.
Nevertheless, while for now mushrooms could not be a staple food, I agree that the future of food is in capturing solar energy and using it to synthesize some simple organic molecules, like glycine, by capturing carbon dioxide and dinitrogen, and then using those to feed bioengineered fungi or parasitic (i.e. non-photosynthesizing, like mistletoe) plants, which could produce the equivalents of any kind of animal or vegetable food that is eaten today.
> Therefore, if you have a sedentary life style, lentils cannot provide a too big fraction of your daily protein intake, i.e. above 40% to 50%, otherwise they would provide too many calories.
If you're going to respond with six paragraphs to every post, at least indulge us with some numbers when you make claims about food which you seldom seem to do even though you appear in every nutrition thread on the forum.
2000 calories of cooked lentils provides 156g protein which is over even the 1.6g/kg protein high-mark for a 200lb guy who still has more calories to spare. 930 calories of cooked lentils provides 72g protein which is the 0.8g/kg minimum threshold in less than half of the day's calorie budget.
A quick google search says a 200lb sedentary male needs 2150 to 2550 calories per day to maintain.
Numbers for "cooked lentils" are irrelevant, because they depend on how they are cooked.
All computations are easy and precise in terms of raw ingredients, because you know precisely which ingredients have been used as the starting point for cooking the food.
For lentils I know very well the values because I eat them frequently and if I do not control the amount of ingredients that I use for food I gain weight immediately.
For instance, the lentils that I use have 23% protein and 3120 kcal/kg.
The values that you give for a 200 lb sedentary male seem too big.
I am a male of average height and I weigh 170 lb. There was a time when I had much more than 200 lb (up to 250 lb), but then I was definitely obese and it took a great effort to come back to 170 lb.
Now, at 170 lb, if I eat more than 1900 to 2000 kcal per day I gain weight very quickly, even if I do around a half of hour of intense exercises per day. This is consistent with most studies that I have seen, where 2000 kcal per day was considered as the typical energy intake for a sedentary life.
The lentils have a better protein/kcal ratio than most non-animal alternatives. Nevertheless, you cannot eat only lentils and you cannot even use only lentils as the principal protein source, because they do not have enough methionine. To get enough methionine from lentils you need to eat e.g. 550 g/day, i.e. 1716 kcal, which does not leave enough room for the kcal provided by the rest of the food that you need.
If you replace a part of the lentils with cereals, those have a much lower protein content and after also adding the rest of the food that is required for other nutrients it becomes impossible to get a sum that is not much greater than 2000 kcal.
You can get a sum of 2000 kcal without meat or dairy and without expensive protein extracts by getting some protein from freerange chicken eggs, or, for a 100% vegan diet you can extract at home gluten from wheat flour.
For instance, for myself, an adequate daily protein intake within a vegan diet can be provided by 167 g of lentils + gluten extracted from 500 g of wheat flour (I prefer to not extract pure gluten, because that needs too much time and too much water, so I remove only about 75% of the starch, which needs less than 5 minutes of washing, and with the washed dough I make a bread that is highly enriched in protein in comparison with standard bread).
Also, regarding what you have said in your comment, it is true that I tend to reply to most nutrition threads. The reason is that I have neglected my health and I have been obese for many years. Then, after many failed attempts I have eventually succeeded to reduce my weight from 250 lb to 170 lb and then I have maintained the latter value for more than a decade and I have improved my health tremendously in comparison with my previous state. To achieve this, I had to study much of the existing nutrition literature and it took me years of experiments of cooking various kinds of food in order to find choices for an optimum compromise between how much time I waste for cooking, how much I enjoy the food and how well the food satisfies the nutritional requirements. For many things that I have found after many failed experiments I would have been very happy to find useful advice before wasting time with that.
I think the challenges with mushrooms as "whole foods" are similar to that of greens (also "good source of protein").
Challenge one: you need a truly huge volume of the uncooked stuff to get a meaningful amount of protein out. Lentils are way more compact.
Challenge two: when one cooks greens or shrooms, they tend to add a lot of oils and other stuff that destroys that ratio.
The proposal on offer here solves this for shrooms by preparing a packaged patty based on them (like today's extant Quorn product). This is cool and I'd love to see it, but it's not like they're trying to replace soy/lentils (which certainly have "good enough" protein content) as agricultural staples that you can harvest and eat with minimal preparation.
You shouldn’t be looking at whole mushrooms. You should be looking at mycoprotein which is a dense protein source found in fungi based meat alts like Quorn products.
While the protein extracts from fungi or from plants solve the problem of the non-animal sources of protein having an undesirable ratio between protein content and energy content, they are much more expensive than meat or eggs and they have an unknown environmental impact, due to high consumption of energy and of chemicals.
The fact that these protein extracts are more expensive than meat, per protein content, should be a strong clue that their real environmental impact is also worse, even if their producers avoid to document it.
I am aware of only a single method of protein extraction that can provide separated protein that is cheaper than chicken meat and which requires no chemicals that could leave residues in the protein and which uses little energy (but it requires an additional non-negligible water consumption). This is the extraction of gluten from wheat flour, by making a dough and washing it.
For the (relatively few) people who have gluten intolerance, this unique method is not applicable, but in many parts of the world (i.e. where soy is expensive) it is the only way that I know of that can be used for achieving a vegan diet that is less expensive than eating meat. Without gluten, a lower protein cost than for meat could be achieved only by combining vegetable protein sources like lentils with chicken eggs.
It's worse than animal agriculture based on what evidence?
Once you look at production at scale, these products dominate animal ag environmentally:
> a study published in Nature 2022 found that replacing 20 percent of per-capita ruminant meat, such as beef, with fermentation derived microbial protein, such as mycoprotein, could cut global deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions by 50% in addition to lowering methane emissions.
Also,
> it is the only way that I know of that can be used for achieving a vegan diet that is less expensive than eating meat.
I don't understand this. Even ChatGPT can come up with a solution to your question if you care to figure out how to eat a sufficient vegan diet without soy/gluten.
e.g. Legumes are cheaper than meat. For the sake of looking at real numbers, 1000 calories of cooked lentils has 80g protein (all of the EAAs) and 67% of the day's nutrients. Also, you'd have to substantiate why optimizing for protein is the only thing you seem to care about given that (1) you can reach the high end 1.6g/kg protein with this food and (2) there are dozens of other nutrients that matter.
But searching for these hypothetical cases where someone can't eat neither soy nor gluten just so you can finally launder in a chicken egg and go "A-ha!" seems to be a red herring that doesn't track anything in this conversation. Okay, now let's pretend they are allergic to chicken eggs, too. Ho hum.
A typical value would be to eat at least 1700 kcal of lentils to provide enough methionine (you need 543 g/day of lentils to provide enough methionine for an 170 lb human).
Even eating only 1000 kcal of lentils would not be considered pleasurable by most people, for whom such a quantity would be too much.
When you choose a diet, ensuring that you will enjoy that food is as important as not exceeding the kcal threshold and as exceeding the nutrient threshold.
Legumes are cheaper than meat (but not by much, chicken meat is only about 50% more expensive than legumes, per protein content), but you cannot eat only legumes and they cannot be the only important source of protein, you need at least a second source.
I care for protein because this is the main difficulty when you do not want to eat meat. Anything else can be easily obtained from vegetable sources or from supplements. I am annoyed when I see people who write vegan propaganda, while at the same time attempting to minimize the protein problem. I have been trying for years to become vegan, but without success, because I could not solve the protein problem, and almost all the vegan advice that I have seen has been completely useless, because it looked like it was written by people who did not care whether they pay $5 or $50 for a meal, or whether they waste 5 minutes for cooking or they waste an hour. Eventually I have solved the problem, but only after personal experiments and I would have liked very much to have wasted much less time with this.
I have no problem with gluten, so for myself gluten is a major source of protein. Nevertheless, if I had gluten intolerance, where I live, in Europe, the only alternative for achieving a 2000 kcal daily energy intake without meat and dairy (and without eating a diet that no free human would accept, like eating only lentils, water and a capsule of vitamins and minerals) would be chicken eggs (as a supplement for legumes).
At least here, protein extracts are typically 5 times more expensive than chicken meat (per protein content), so using them as a staple food would seem stupid.
You have not provided any alternative to what I have said and I bet that ChatGPT would give an answer that is either wrong or irrelevant.
> It's worse than animal agriculture based on what evidence?
Currently there is no evidence of any kind. The costs of meat production are well known, but the costs in energy and chemicals for the production of various kinds of protein extracts are not known, because they are "proprietary".
I nobody is able to offer for sale low-cost protein extracts for human consumption we can only assume that the production costs are high, i.e. that each pound of protein extract requires a large amount of energy and/or chemicals.
> a study published in Nature 2022 found that
Searching the Internet right now, I have found a non-paywalled copy of that study: "Projected environmental benefits of replacing beef with microbial protein".
Nevertheless, exactly like I have expected, that study is useless. It does not contain what the abstract says.
It contains what seems to be an accurate analysis of what would be gained if the production of meat would be reduced, by using an alternative source of protein.
Nevertheless, to compute the net benefit, we also need a computation of the production costs for the protein provided by the alternative source. Such a computation is missing from the article. There is no information about the energy consumption and about the chemicals consumption that would be required by the alternative sources.
Some forms of microbial fermentation can provide high-quality protein, perhaps even without any harmful substances that must be removed, but the protein has a low concentration in the growth medium. Separating the protein from the water and from the waste products of the fermentation would need much energy.
In the more distant future, growing a bioengineered multicellular organism, like a fungus or a parasitic plant, seems a much more viable path, because such an organism can grow a big edible fruiting body, with whatever nutritional composition and texture is desired. Such an edible fruiting body can be detached and used for cooking with minimal processing, without additional energy consumption.
Poor amino-acid composition is a major problem with non-animal protein sources. Every time we think we can "cheat" nutrition by reducing nutritional value to a small set of cherry-picked nutrients, we find that it leads to deficiencies elsewhere. It's like fad diets for technocrats.
We have enough data on how to supplement enough of those macro and micro nutrients. And there's plenty of studies showing no risk of going on a full plant based diet. Like here's a video discussing plant based protein for body building. The key take away is that you need some diversity in the stuff but it's fairly easy to get there
Yeah, you can debunk this trivially with cronometer.com which kinda reveals how many people repeat things without looking.
It’s like when people regurgitate that “add rice to beans for a complete protein” meme without realizing that rice is less dense in every amino acid, and beans have every amino acid in similar qualities, and you can simply eat more protein dense plant sources if you need more protein.
I eat 550g extra firm cooked tofu and 230g tempeh daily. Plug that into cronometer and show me the plant based amino acid hole.
Even though insect exoskeleton and fungi are both made of chitin, I find bouncy fungi tissue kind of fun to chew, while bug parts are crunchy in a sort of uncomfortable get-stuck-in-your-teeth sort of way, like the downsides of popcorn, but with less upside.
I also tried some "chirps" which were chips made with cricket powder, and then the texture just wasn't right. Hopefully the right chef is out there to change my mind, but for now I'm team fungus all the way.
I ate some food made with mealworm powder this weekend - it blew my mind. Some real good chefs cooked it up, they did blueberry donuts made with 20% mealworm powder. They also did tacos, where the tortillas were 20% mealworm powder, and the rest was just really good veggies/beans/sauce. They had fried ones with crickets you could sprinkle on top.
I got the cricket powder I linked and I put it in sometimes when I cook or bake something. You can't taste it or smell it so it doesn't feel like eating insects, although there is nothing wrong with that either. I recommend giving it a try. Beware that crickets and shellfish seem to be similar in terms of allergens though.
You already eat crabs, crayfish, shrimp, and honey. Asian peoples also consume many other insects as food, which reduces the demand and price for Western food.
Has the shell, legs, head, intestine and organs been removed from the cockroach so that only the meat is left? I would like to see the machinery needed to replicate the edible part of a lobster abdomen (or tail as it is called) in a cockroach.
The part that people generally eat on a lobster is the muscles of the claws and the muscles of the abdomen. The rest is generally discarded. It similar to how most people don't tend to eat the hair of cows, but rather the meat from cow muscles.
I would claim that it is actually a large difference between eating a cockroach and a lobster.
There is a literal global organization trying to force us to eat bugs?
Could we please not discuss ridiculous conspiracy theories on hn? Reddit is already infected with qanon an the like, we don't need that rubbish here. Thank you.
How come so many Americans are afraid of eating insects?
I have often seen this meme, and never understood it. I know that the average American is a bit more squeamish about a lot of things, from nudity to eating raw meat. The former can be explained by the puritan influence, the latter by the food standards which would possibly make things like Mett[0] a bit unsafe.
This, however - together with the opposition to walkable cities - I can't wrap my head around. How can eating an insect burger be worse than eating chicken nuggets?
You read a lot more into my comment than is actually there, which is probably the reason for your rather flippant and response.
In Europe, insect meat is still extremely rare, and where it is to be found, it is experimental and expensive. The latter will of course change through economies of scale once they reach a certain stage.
However, the public perception of insects as food is very different. I have never or heard seen a sulky "I will not eat ze bugs" comment in my language, the whole"globalists want you to eat bugs" conspiracy is mostly unknown, and would be seen as foolish.
I have not said that eating insects is the norm, but many here see it as part of the diet of the future, without that squeamishness that seems to be so prevalent in the US.
If I were to respond in the same tone as you, I would imply that you already knew that, but didn't want to let a chance pass to make yourself the victim, as Americans often like to pretend that all Europeans look down on you. However, I actually believe this is just a misunderstanding.
I know I probably won't get any information from you, since you now see me as a debate opponent instead of a discussion partner, but I was genuinely interested in the reason for the extreme opposition to insect food in the US. Maybe since English is my second language, which I learned in part by reading a lot of rather old books, my grammar and word choices are hindering me in making myself clear.
>Nah, you just wanted to bash "Americans", and the rest of this comment is just an attempt at deflection.
Ah, I was wrong then. It was not a misunderstanding, you are simply replying in bad faith.
Well, I hope your life gets better, to the point where you are at least partially at peace with your American identity, and no longer feel the need to write such embarrassing comments.
Not just europe! It's quite unheard of here in the developing third world too.
In fact, south american countries seem to be somewhat famous for their meat. Brazil is one of the biggest producers and exporters of meat in the world and if it were up to me I'd burn down the whole amazon jungle to make room for more production.
Except I'm not american. I'm brazilian. Puritan influence? Can't get any further than that. Do you actually think it's just americans who'd refuse to eat bugs?
I'm not gonna eat insects dude. I'm just not gonna do it. They could be the literal embodiment of protein and I still wouldn't eat them. There's just no way you can convince me to do that.
I don't care how much space, energy, water, whatever else is required for meat production either. That's what I want to eat. That's what I'm gonna eat.
I don't eat chicken nuggets either. I eat meat and assorted vegetables. Properly cooked.
OK, so my hypothesis was incorrect when it comes to your comment. But while you have convinced me that you feel quite strongly about it, I don't feel like you answered the "why", or maybe I just don't get it. You repeatedly told me that you would never consider it, and in the other comment you said that "if it were up to me I'd burn down the whole amazon jungle to make room for more production“.
The fact that this would accelerate global warming which will hit third world countries the most aside, why do you feel so strongly about this? I'm also not a vegetarian and I love a good steak, especially when it's served rare, but this does not form a part of my identity, so it's hard for me to understand.
The "why" is history. When I studied the past, I saw that in most societies the upper classes would gorge themselves on feasts containing the finest, fattiest meats while the lower classes would feed on left overs from the harvests. I say "history" like it's ancient but that was the reality of my previous generation: I literally grew up with my father telling me of his hardships, a major symbol of which was the fact there were times when he could not afford meat.
That's why it's an indignity to be reduced to eating insects. You can bet your house the billionaires of this world won't be eating them.
Feel strongly about it? A couple years ago in my country a president was elected partly by promising citizens they would be able to eat fine meat regularly again. He's a communist so of course he didn't deliver, and it looks like people are starting to feel the misery of it.
Also, global warming is not really a concern to me. Other countries have been destroying the planet for literal centuries and getting rich off it but when it's our turn to exploit our land we can't? I reject that notion.
People love to talk about the "externalities" of meat production. As far as I'm concerned, the biggest externality of all is the cost of my country not being rich and prosperous and developed. You know, like the former british empire with their famous steaks, now mostly represented by the US. They might want to factor that externality in before they talk to us about climate nonsense.
I just look at the nutritional profile and the conditions under which they are produced and see a good alternative to industrial meat (cow, pig, ...) production.
I think you should be aware that the world is much bigger than the US and in many other countries insects are part of their traditional cuisine: "Over 2 billion people are estimated to eat insects on a daily basis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insects_as_food
I'm not american, I'm brazilian. I'm very aware of the fact you mentioned and I think it's disgusting. I work hard because I want to live well in general and that includes not being reduced to eating literal insects.
I seriously didn't think I'd have to justify this. Why does everyone single out americans anyway? Do you think the rest of the world is okay with eating insects? No way. We want to eat well too. We want to live well.
Reducing the entire world to your standards - including what means "eating well" - is common around here to come from that country. But I was wrong in that assumption. And to your other question: yes I am fine eating insects, as a matter of fact I do and don't feel at all dystopian.
Diabetic Ketoacidosis is well documented in diabetic people[1], alcoholics, and in conditions of starvation[2] and the mechanism is the same. Ketone tests were developed for this purpose. Note starvation there, where the body starts using its own fats for energy. Here's a case report of it happening to someone on a ketogenic diet[3].
The body does that under circumstances of low calorie intake. The case study I posted shows a person developing keto acidosis just from following a ketogenic diet, it’s a well documented risk of ultra low carbohydrate diets if you bother to look. It happens frequently in people using these diets to treat diabetes, it just happens to be less dangerous than Type II diabetes.
>Also, you do need some fat and carbs in your diet to, you know, live.
Absolutely agreed that fat and carbs are part of a balanced diet, but many foods and cuisines have poor macro nutrient ratios and, as hiddencost states, it is all about the ratios.
FWIW, I have been massively successful in eliminating "dadbod" and getting to a super healthy weight by using this diet for several years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nR1juKxIRM
The TLDR is ~.8grams of protein per pound of body weight, small portions of carbs and fat and half your plate should be low calorie vegetables.
The critical limit with fungi, and other single cell protein foods, is the high amount of nucleic acid, which are converted into purines and then uric acid. The products have to undergo additional processing to reduce these levels before they can be consumed.
"Heck, we could just be eating more mushrooms, they already are a pretty good source of protein. "
Definitely, but mushrooms and meat also go very well together..
And I am open towards engineered mushrooms, but I doubt they will result in meat. But maybe in something that can convince enough people to reduce their meat consumption by eating that instead.
TBH many of us are not looking for a replacement for meat. I personally want something that potentially tastes better, and don't really care for the "fake meat" marketing (don't need it to be red or meat like)
How far is that from pre-existing products, like Quorn[1], which here in the UK is probably the main producer of vegan/vegetarian meat simulacra? The problem is that people don't like eating straight fungus, and so it is serially transformed through elaborate processing, to create meat-like products. Which it turns out are extremely unhealthy.
I think you are on more promising ground in your final remark. There are plenty of whole food plant-based sources of protein that are tested, economical and low-carbon, while possessing none of the health drawbacks of 'high tech' alternatives.
> Ultra-processed foods, as defined using the Nova food classification system, encompass a broad range of ready to eat products, including packaged snacks, carbonated soft drinks, instant noodles, and ready-made meals.
Quorn and other meat substitutes most certainly fit the criteria of ultra-processed foods, and as such may be implicated in poor health outcomes if they make up a significant portion of one's diet.
> Among generally healthy adults, contrasting Plant with Animal intake, while keeping all other dietary components similar, the Plant products improved several cardiovascular disease risk factors, including TMAO; there were no adverse effects on risk factors from the Plant products.
The list of illustrative examples may be misleading you. It is a wide category. Look at the Nova classification, then look at the ingredients list of meat substitutes. There is no debate on this point.
Are there other macronutrients in that much mass of food?
30g of Hemp Hearts (shelled hemp seeds) have 10g protein, 12g polyunsaturated fats (Omega 3 and 6), 1g sugar, and a bunch of other vitamins and minerals; but some brands have 2.3g Manganese (which 100% RDI) and Manganese toxicity occurs beyond 11mg (UL) and other brands don't have those nutrients listed on the nutrition facts label for their similar product:
https://images.app.goo.gl/a2v9imfaWWyG5hSn8
Flax has a better Omega 6:3 PUFA polyunsaturated fats ratio, but only 2g protein out of 11g.
>> High glutamine-to-glutamate ratio predicts the ability to sustain motivation: The researchers found that individuals with a higher glutamine-to-glutamate ratio had a higher success rate and a lower perception of effort.
That is interesting about the manganese and glutamate-to-glutamine angle, although it's worth noting that manganese in foods has very poor bioavailability:
Humans absorb only about 1% to 5% of dietary manganese. Infants and children tend to absorb greater amounts of manganese than adults. In addition, manganese absorption efficiency increases with low manganese intakes and decreases with higher intakes
Another interesting tidbit from the links you provide, 90% of glutamine synthesis happens in muscle cells (from glutamate and ammonia). So in theory, building more muscle mass (while getting adequate dietary glutamine and glutamate) be beneficial for regulating glutamine-to-glutamate ratios. Although it doesn't look like this has been studied specifically as of yet.
On the other hand, over-training and extreme endurance training without proper protein intake leads to depletion of circulating glutamine levels. It is suggested that depleted glutamine may be the cause of increased risks of infection and chronic fatigue during periods of over-training (even in elite athletes).
> [GABA] is the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter in the developmentally mature mammalian central nervous system. Its principal role is reducing neuronal excitability throughout the nervous system.
So, IIUC, when you feed LAB glutamate, you get GABA?
> Are there other macronutrients in that much mass of food?
By convention, those three are the macronutrients. Dietary fibre is sometimes included, 100g of quorn mince has 7.5 g.
The Wiki article has a detailed breakdown of the protein fraction by amino acid, but only breaks fats out into 'saturated' and 'not', which is reasonably common.
> Omega-3s and Omega-6s would be listed under "Polyunsaturated Fats" if it were allowed to list them on the standard Nutrition Facts label instead of elsewhere on the packaging.
Maybe someone else should ask FDA to allow food labelers to optionally include a breakdown of PUFAs Polyunsaturated Fats into at least Omega 6 and Omega 3 next time there is a public comment register on Nutrition Facts labels. There may be more justifying research on Omegas' relevancy to health now?
That's oft-repeated - rich in protein. When they have 10% of the protein of meat. How is that 'rich'? Something like 'nearly no protein, just detectable' would be more honest.
Sure, you eat bushels, you get as much protein as say a big mac. Not gonna go there; almost nobody is gonna sacrifice their juicy burger for a quart of spongy fungi. Give up already.
I don't completely agree I think we need to make something that tastes good, is healthy and cheap. As well as something that can also be adopted in as many of the worlds cuisines as possible instead of looking for replacements we should look for something that is liked or loved as that is the only way most people are going to decrease the use of meat. Then we need that ingredient to be adopted by the fast food type restaurant's of the world for it to penetrate into the minds of the world's populations.
Presumably it is still early days for modern agricultural fungus selection. I heard a story that thousands of years ago, corn had six kernels per cobb(might have been seven). Few generations of selective breeding and you produce monstrous varieties.
Presumably we could do the same thing with fungus if we saw the economic/moral/sustainability incentives.
Teosinte is a small, grass-like plant that forms ears of six to eight kernels. Each kernel is encased in an acorn-like shell. These encased kernels grow on a thin stem, not the thick cob that characterizes modern corn. The whole ear is about two inches long, the kernels no larger than peppercorns.
About 10,000 years ago, the Indigenous peoples of what is now southern Mexico began selectively breeding teosinte. Over time, those acorn-like coverings retracted and formed a cob. Now exposed, the kernels were easier to harvest and could be bred for increased number and size, Koch said.
That's true, but because mushrooms are so wet (~90% water), if you look at the numbers for dehydrated mushrooms vs meat, mushrooms start looking a lot better.
I think dry mushrooms are about 30% protein by weight, which is in the ballpark of dry meat.
Semi related, I recommend roasting then dehydrating and blending mushrooms if you can. Mushroom powder like this is an incredible addition to many things, though my kids will eat it on its own regardless. A massive pile of mushrooms will become a tiny jar of powder.
And less related, lacto ferment them. They're then outrageously good fried.
However, if you compare the energy and resource inputs to produce that 2-3g the picture starts looking a LOT more competitive. Not to mention a very attractive nutrient profile and potential medicinal benefits (eg a lot of bioactive tryptophan metabolites).
That's the "before" picture. Let's see what these scientists can get to with the "after" picture. If they can get it up to 50g/100g, I know what I'm eating.
> After these changes, the once-white fungi grew red. With minimal preparation -- removing excess water and grinding -- the harvested fungi could be shaped into a patty, then fried into a tempting-looking burger.
To me this is were we get lost.
There must an uncanny valley for meat, where it's just not great when you're trying to fake it perfectly.
Mushroom burgers already exist and they're delicious. I also like the meat burgers, they absolutely don't taste the same, but each side is still great.
If we can get more variety on the mushroom side with different textures, tastes, juiciness etc. it would be incredible, and it doesn't need to be red and meat like.
Agreed. This fake meat movement is so weird to me and is not feeling any gaps for me personally. Apparently it does for others, which is good I guess. Veggie burgers are delicious: black bean, wild rice, chickpea. Why the hell would I want you do make it "bleed" lol.
My gut feeling is there's a spectrum of people wanting meat replacement, and I'd expect very few to be at the extreme "it must look like meat, feel like meat, taste like meat and smell like meat" (I actually don't expect these people to ever give up meat if they have a choice)
We've been through this for other foods: we have artificial vanilla, "I can't believe it's not butter" butter, half cheese, fake crab meat etc.
There's probably a large number of people who'd settle for a white tofu if it actually tasted like delicious meat.
Yet the alt-meat section of the grocery store grows every year, and novel alt-meat foods constantly try to enter the market.
> it must look like meat, feel like meat, taste like meat and smell like meat
As someone who does buy these alt-meats, you're mischaracterizing the consumer behavior. It's not "It must emulate meat". It's "it's nice that I can have a non-meat burger that satisfies my taste for the burgers I grew up with from time to time".
People buy a whole range of products from Costco's tasty bean burgers to Impossible meat patties to everything else.
> There's probably a large number of people who'd settle for a white tofu if it actually tasted like delicious meat.
I doubt it. The more we understand about food and what makes food good, the more it seems to be a combo of all sorts of things including look, smell, and texture. Adding the perfect meat-tasting drops to some white tofu isn't going to cut it. Though it seems like an odd speculation from from someone who doubts the appeal of alt-meat that actually does look, smell, taste, and feel like meat.
You're right that there's a lot of personal viewpoint and I'm mot fully understanding the people buying alt-meats at their current state. I sampled a bunch that were touted to be good, and they tasted really meh to me.
They sure are hitting some "this could be meat" points, but not the good meat that would be a guilty pleasure, and more around the deadest and cheapest meat I'd find to make sure I get my protein count of the day. That's were I see the connendrum of paying premium for meh food by sheer guilt, it doesn't feel like a growing market (the elephant in room being that meat will never fully disappear, including ethically sourced meat like meat from wild species' population control)
In decades, perhaps. But as you point out the nostalgia part is strong, and nostalgia dies, so will it ever work out at some point ?
> look, smell, and texture.
This is cultural though. For instance looking at bread, historically brown, round, starchy and compact bread was the standard in europe. But the US moved to square, white, uniform, light taste and more processed white bread. Same with fish sticks, nuggets, meat balls, hash potatoes：we moved from a complex and close to the natural form, to heavily processed, standardized and geometrically shaped presentation, and it's widely accepted.
That's where I see focusing on taste instead of shape and texture to be a viable way forward in the long term.
I agree with your conclusion, but for a different reason.
Having been vegetarian for a long time, I have completely lost the inclination to eat something like meat, even if it isn't meat. I would love to try Impossible, but cannot bring myself to.
I've always wondered if we could potentially use genetic engineering to open up new possibilities for food. Would it be possible to make some inedible foods edible this way? For instance, what if you could make non-poisonous death cap mushrooms or nightshade berries?
why? we have like 200,000 edible plants known so far, yet, we have a pretty monoculture type of behaviour when eating... investing in tech for this type of thing feels a waste, unless we start to live the utopia of infinite resources
In this 2019 documentary [1], "Fantastic Fungi", it is briefly mentioned that fungi played a paramount role in the evolution of our brain (intelligence)
I am curious of there is potential for a structural application, like getting the fungi to produce chitin or cellulose. I could imagine providing a light lattice for a structure, spraying it with spores and a nutrient slurry, and then letting it grow and harden into a durable structure.
There is a start-up in Australia (https://fablefood.co/) that makes amazing mushroom like "pulled beef". It's pretty good when you cook it as they recommend, but I also burnt it on a bbq one day and it was AMAZING!!!
I've recently been thinking about how we will build a micro-nutrient rich diet through tightly controlling how our foods are manufactured. I'm sure this is being worked on somewhere, but I haven't seen much. Seems like most of the lab-grown stuff is more focused on the lack of land use than the ability to custom generate the food that best suits an individuals diet.
One of the first FDA drugs made from fungi was lovastatin, a statin sourced from Aspergillus terreus, a close relative to the Aspergillus in the subject article.
Fungi don't really need any help. Only reason they aren't even worse than what was depicted in TLoU is there's really no reason for them to be. There is literally no place on earth where you can stand and not be literally covered in all the fungal spores floating about. They are already ubiquitous. Human mind control would only reduce their fitness.
Framing is everything. Lobster was once for poor people, to the point that labor contracts limited how much lobster could be fed to workers. Now it's a delicacy.
Crucially, mushrooms aren't just cheap and efficient to produce, they're actually delicious, so I don't get the association with "poor" people unless one's obsessed with vanity.
Matter of perspective I guess. In the Foundation series the fungal/algae food of the Mycogen district is described as some of the best food the main character has eaten.
Yeah, why not? Humanity seriously needs to develop the technology required for space stations dedicated to farming and livestock, space industry in general. Much better than wasting human talent and potential on adtech nonsense, that's for sure.
That idea seems to show up occasionally in science fiction which has quite the uncanny ability to predict the future so I'm just gonna assume it's going to happen at some point.
If it's complicated you should probably explain. Your link doesn't disprove the parent -- it compares different water and land use of various cattle raising methods.
Over 60% of cropland in the US goes towards raising beef, a food which makes up a very low percent of the calories in an average person's diet.
>
>Beef cattle use nearly 60% of the world’s agricultural land but account for less than 2% of global calories and 5% of global protein consumed
I provide a study from the National Library of Medicine.
This study provides a nuanced view of the topic here,
and provides a lot of data.
If you did read the scientific study I linked to, then you would now know
that land that "food animals" occupy is often not at all suited for other forms
of agriculture.
You would also know that various food animals can be fed and raised on
waste from other agricultural processes that humans could not consume.
That is why I stated "It is more complicated than what the original soundbite
line portrayed it as.
> If you did read the scientific study I linked to, then you would now know that land that "food animals" occupy is often not at all suited for other forms of agriculture.
How much of a cow's diet do you believe comes from resources that would not be otherwise useful to humans?
Your image of cattle grazing out on the range is out of touch with reality. Nearly all beef consumed in America starts with diverting water that could go towards directly feeding humans
Most of the feed that cattle get on feedlots is waste from ethanol and biofuel production, aka distillers grains. We feed cattle very little fresh grain so all of the statistics about cropland use are extremely misleading. Several industries use that grain one after the other.
That feed along with the fresh hay is fed to cows at the end of their life to fatten them up for human consumption. Notice how the article you linked says 200 million acres of cropland used for beef and 325 million overall versus 900 million acres of total farmland? Most of the difference is marginal pasture that can’t grow anything for human consumption. We don’t fertilize or water it, it’s just grassland that grow by itself where we raise cows before sending them to feedlots. Without that cropland going to distillers and cows, over 60% of our farmland would be completely useless. Not only that but most of our cropland isn’t very useful either - 95% of the corn we grow is inedible dent corn. It’s one of the cheapest commodities on the planet that’s only worth growing as a last resort.
We make this tradeoff because those 600 million acres of otherwise unusable farmland are far more resilient than our cropland so we have a huge backup of calories incase of massive crop failure.
That's a good point, I know in Australia, NZ, the Uk/Wales etc, sheep and cattle graze in farmland that would not be easy to reshape (e.g. terraced) for agriculture. So that otherwise "useless" farmland ends up being useful.
Source: rock climbing one day and finding sheep grazing on plush grass in an otherwise inaccessible location. Apparently it's well known, and locals will climb up to look for said lost sheep.
Their feed and hay occupy land and use water that could be used more efficiently to directly feed humans.
My uncle was a cattle rancher in Arizona, on "marginal" land that didn't grow food for humans. It didn't grow enough for his cows either. We would leave out bales of alfalfa to keep the cows healthy. Alfalfa is grown in those big irrigated circles you've surely seen while flying.
Most beef consumed in the US comes from feedlots. Over 70% of "grass-fed" beef sold in the US is imported.
If you want to eat steak you can. But it is going to get less popular or more expensive in the future. There are a lot of negative externalities with consuming meat especially beef (in its current form of mass production). But I don't think anyone is going to ban it.
And hopefully one day we'll live in a world where steak has the incredibly high cost it actually deserves, and people like you can spend your hard-earned money on it still while everyone else eats the fungi equivalent for pennies on the dollar.
So you essentially want to go back to the good old days where the rich and powerful gorged and feasted on the finest foods imaginable while the rest of humanity fed on the scraps. You want the common man to be priced out of high quality meat which is both tasty and nutritious. You want them feeding on some amorphous fungal slop made just for them.
Not the poster: but I want the price of food to represent its true cost and not be artificially cheap (or expensive) because of externalities.
In the United States, we don't have a real market in water; hence, the cost of water in food isn't really represented.
Worse, we "export" a whole lot of water for artificially cheap. Countries with insufficient water to grow crops they would like buy water-intensive crops from the US where water is artifically cheap; hence the massive exports of alfalfa to China. In turn, US aquifiers are ending up depleted and catastrophe looms.
Fixing this, though, will have other effects like perhaps doubling the price of steak. We'll still eat more of it and at a lower cost than we did 75 years ago, but not as much or as cheaply as today. Quality will also probably rise, too, as the measures that produce higher quality beef will be a smaller proportion of the price.
Meat is not scalable. If 8+ billion people want to live on this planet, they will not all be eating steak every night. Sorry if that offends you. If people find an alternative that looks, tastes, and acts like meat but is as or more nutritional and much less ecologically damaging to produce, then great, problem solved.
Secondly, the only reason "the common man" can afford meat in the quantities he can now is because of massive amounts of subsidies and incredibly damaging practices.
So frame your overly-emotional argument however you want, but there are realities you aren't addressing and they don't go away because of your feelings.
Here's a reality you aren't addressing: people don't really want to eat insects. Here's another: about 2 years ago a president was elected in my country partly by promising that the poor would get to eat meat regularly once again.
Make people miserable at your own peril. The simple fact is nobody really wants to be reduced to eating worms and bugs. No one really gives a shit about how "scalable" it is either. Whoever finds a way to provide what people want will have enormous power.
> If people find an alternative that looks, tastes, and acts like meat
Pretty big if you got there. The "alternatives" so far don't really fulfill any of those criteria. They also have the added bonus of offending a person's basic dignity with the knowledge that they're eating insects. There are literal animals out there who receive better treatment.
I do not presume to know your dietary habits, but I find it interesting that only ~4% of US beef production is "grass fed" yet everyone claims to be only eating beef grazed on semi-arable land using regenerative agriculture.
"they graze on semi-arable areas where crops can't be grown"
That may or may not be where your steak comes from, but it is not, as a rule, where most steak comes from. Most steaks come from cattle started on grass and finished on corn, and an increasing amount come from cattle who graze on Brazilian rainforest land clear-cut just for that purpose.
Your numbers and definitions are apparently based on cooked google search results and are wrong. You should read more about how cows are fed and raised before forming opinions.
93% of cattle's caloric intake (whether grass or grain finished) does not compete with human suitable food sources.
Also, all cattle are grass-fed for some of their lives:
>While the diet provided to finishing cattle in feedlots relies on some human-edible inputs (i.e., corn grain), the forages and byproducts fed to cattle throughout their lives are largely inedible to humans. For example, once the entire lifetime feed intake of cattle is accounted for (meaning all the feed they consume from birth to harvest), corn accounts for only approximately 7 percent of the animal’s diet. The other 93 percent of the animal’s lifetime diet will consist largely of feed that is inedible to humans, thus not in direct competition with the human food supply.
You say "You should read more about how cows are fed and raised before forming opinions." And you shouldn't assume you know everything about strangers on the internet. I'm no rancher, but I'm quite familiar with cattle production. Growing up in rural Missouri I took part in most aspects of it.
You seem to be arguing against something other than my comment. "Also, all cattle are grass-fed for some of their lives"...yes...as I stated "Most steaks come from cattle started on grass and finished on corn"
There are certainly large swaths of the world where cattle production can be regenerative to the ecosystem, but not enough to support the demand. Meeting the world's increasing appetite for beef as developing nations adopt the dietary habits of wealthier nations is turning into an environmental catastrophe.
>The other 93 percent of the animal’s lifetime diet will consist largely of feed that is inedible to humans, thus not in direct competition with the human food supply.
Just because feed is inedible to humans does not mean it doesn't compete with the human food supply or lead to environmental and resource problems. Take alfalfa, which is one of the most popular feed crops for cattle:
>How much of California's water goes to alfalfa?
About 1,000,000 acres of alfalfa are irrigated in California. This large acreage coupled with a long growing season make alfalfa the largest agricultural user of water, with annual water applications of 4,000,000 to 5,500,000 acre-feet.
No, it doesn't compete with human suitable food or land used for growing human suitable food.
Without livestock agriculture, most of our farmland in the US would not be farmable. Also, most of the "grain" we feed cows is waste from ethanol production, not corn humans eat.
If you run into these people in person, ask them specifically where they get their beef. The facade of extreme scrutiny and knowledge over where their beef comes from falls apart immediately.
If we can engineer a fungus to produce just the right amino profile, or whatever nutrition you're looking for, then you have a self perpetuating stock that should be much lower tech and simpler to manage than trying to grow muscle tissue in a "petri dish".
Heck, we could just be eating more mushrooms, they already are a pretty good source of protein.