A key limiting factor for dietary use of single cell protein is the high mass fraction of nucleic acid, which limits daily consumption due to uric acid production during metabolism. High rates of RNA synthesis are unfortunately necessary for high protein productivity.
The paper notes:
>It is important to note that MP products often contain elevated levels of nucleic acids, constituting ~8% of the dry weight [17], which necessitates consideration when assessing their suitability for human consumption. To address this, a heat treatment process is employed at the end of fermentation that reduces the nucleic acid content in the fermented biomass to below 0.75/100 g, while simultaneously deactivating protease activity and F. venenatum biomass. However, this procedure has been observed to induce cell membrane leakage and a substantial loss of biomass, as evidenced in the Quorn production process [17], which also utilizes F. venenatum as the MP producer. Our experimental trials have encountered similar challenges, achieving a biomass yield of merely ~35%, and observed that heating process increased the relative protein and chitin content (Figure 2D,E), which may be related to the effect of membrane leakage, while the intracellular protein of the FCPD engineered strain was less likely to be lost to the extracellular. Thus, concentrating the fermentation broth to enhance protein and amino acids content in successive steps to produce a highly nutritious water-soluble fertilizer appears to be an effective strategy for adding value to the process (Figure 1).
The challenges of developing economic single cell protein products, that are suitable for human consumption, are described in chapter 3 here:
While the paper is behind a pay wall, the abstract highlights that they used knock out gene editing, meaning this is not a GMO of the old days, with trans genes, but a mkdifcation one could have achieved with classical breeding if given enough time and resources.
If I understand this right, this would even in the EU now be allowed to be sold without the GMO label.
Technically, any gene sequence can be achieved with enough time and resources. Thats what evolution is afterall. Using CRISPR but not labelling it as genetically modified seems pretty wild, but then again EU does have some funky regulations.
>Technically, any gene sequence can be achieved with enough time and resources.
not in a meaningful way, no. the probability that a new mutation you want will occur is much much lower than the probability you can breed offspring without a gene that's already in the bloodline.
Once a desirable sequence modification is identified through artificial means, what is often done in practice is to simply expose samples of the organism to UV until the desired sequence appears "naturally." The output of this process is not typically considered GMO, at least for regulatory purposes.
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.
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.
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.
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).
This is not how the overwhelming majority of chickens live - they live in high intensity farm operations in horrible conditions
If all the meat you eat is from chicken raised in your backyard , that's environmentally perfect.
In the US per capita chicken consumption is 100 pounds per year.
Thats about 45kg, I wish I had that average American backyard.
That is not how most of the chicken is raised (over 70 billions are slaughtered per year).
Back of the envelope, for a family of 4 eating US quantities of chicken... you need to be slaughtering ~100 chickens per year. In a homesteading setting it usually takes a chicken about 12 weeks to reach slaughter weight, so you need to be raising a minimum of 25 at any time.
That's a pretty substantial backyard operation.
That's... Not too bad, actually. My grandmothers used to have maybe 8 chickens and 12 ducks or so. They were very low maintenance, and had very minimal pastures, with the only difficult to reproduce part of the process being that the houses were in fairly wild surroundings.
They would probably need more pasture in monoculture hellholes that have cornfields for 100km in each direction.
If everyone had backyard chicken operations on that scale, I suspect we'd have a lot more disease problems! Decentralized isn't necessarily better for disease, if the overall scale stays the same.
At least where I live, you can't have chickens in quite the same way our great-grandparents had. You need to comply with veterinary regulation for one, and for good reasons.
Wild to think that there's 6-7 chickens for every human in America at all times
In commercial operations they are also raising chickens much faster - maybe only 6 weeks for a meat chicken, so you only need half as many at any one time
how big is your backyard?
This sounds like they took a product that failed in the market - fungus based meat substitutes, and hinted at some superscience magic thats years from coming out, and that's if it proves safe, economical and a genunie improvement.
This really looks like an attempt to get investors to come back and push the stock price.
Quorn is based on fungus. I'm not a huge fan of it myself but it's sold across the EU, and it's in almost all stores where I live.
I had vaguely remembered that chitin was equivalent to cellulose in our inability to digest. The article addresses it:
"The first modification, eliminating a gene for chitin synthase, resulted in thinner fungal cell walls."
This also has an enormous potential benefit of reducing avian flu and other zoonotic bird diseases.
Fish foods with chitin is marketed as roughage.
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.
How?
By replacing (some) farmed meat with farmed fungi protein.
Although it's theoretically possible for a disease to infect both fungus and animals, because the biology is so different, the risk is greatly, greatly reduced.
In addition, it may be possible to reduce the use of treatments such as antibiotics which, in their currently mass application to farmed animals, could directly lead to the development of antibiotic resistant in diseases which affect humans and animals.
Plus, chucking the contents of a few biotanks in case of infection is a hell of a lot better than having to kill and waste millions of birds.
I mean, industrial slaughter isn't a pretty process, even in better plants, which most aren't, but where they come to wipe out the barn, they're not putting animal welfare first.
This product is the sort of product I suspect the fad blitz against "ultraprocessed foods" is really targeted at.
Not necessarily.
It might be some Big Meat conspiracy to combat these upstarts, but there's also reasonable data indicating that less processing results in better health outcomes.
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!
Classic belter fare
"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.
When I hear the word fungus, I think of "The Last of US" ;(
That would make for a great spinoff: farm the infected for food!
The association is undiminshed by their web server being down. Uh oh.
meet tastes great and all, but I wonder where science is at (if at all) on making original food that tastes good. How about food that doesn't taste like any natural food we've had, but still tastes really good?
Jell-o (gello?) is a good example, nothing tastes like it naturally. Why aren't there tasty food that are original in terms of taste and texture but good for health and the environment? I suppose part of the struggle is that food is entrenched into culture so much. burgers and bbq are inextricable from july 4th and memorial day for example.
The trouble is that “tastes good” isn’t a blank canvas. It’s built on hardwired signals plus learned associations. Our basic tastes evolved as nutritional indicators: sweet signals energy, umami signals protein, bitter warns of potential toxins. And our brains are rather insistent about finding flavors more pleasant when they match patterns we’ve already learned are safe.
Jell-O actually proves this rather than refuting it. It succeeds because it hits that hardwired sweet preference, not because it invented some novel taste dimension. A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.
So you’d have to either work within those existing taste channels while creating novel combinations and textures, or somehow condition people to associate genuinely new sensations with safety and reward. The latter is slow going. We’re quite literally built to be suspicious of unfamiliar foods.
> A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.
We have five taste receptors, so it's it's actually impossible to get something that doesn't map unto those five. Instead, what we call the taste of food, and what GP was referring to, is actually the smell of food, or more commonly, its aroma, which we can detect both from the outside by sniffing it with our noses, and while it is in our mouths via molecules wafting up to our respiratory tract.
Unlike the simplicity of taste, we have a huge array of smell receptors, with most of them having much more indirect associations, if any, with any specific survival need. It's very much possible, and in fact quite common, to synthesize novel smells/aromas which don't resemble any natural food.
> Unlike the simplicity of taste, we have a huge array of smell receptors, with most of them having much more indirect associations
Slightly unrelated, but what I find very cool is thinking about your taste sense as a hyper-sensitive molecule detector. Individual aromas are just the signal your brain generates for different kinds of molecules, and it's very good at that. That's why at wine tastings, for example, people come up with all these elaborate terms for specific aromas—it's a way to name the molecule composition.
> Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.
At first. If the food has nutrients that are important to the brain, it will recognize that in the future. There are animal experiment confirming this.
The 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.
There are also a wide variety of textures that are heavily industrialised. If you go to some fine dining restaurants, you'll find smells and colours which you simply cannot replicate at home - let alone make from scratch.
Most synthetic meat and fish is really just a flavour carrier for whatever sauce people like. I've had imitation chicken, shrimp, beef, crab, etc. They all taste great - but that's mostly because the sauces are the same as their meaty counterparts.
Right. Chicken is more of a texture than a flavor. When you buy a Spicy Zinger Burger from KFC you're tasting more of the zingy than the cluck-cluck.
The chicken that KFC uses, sure. There’s a huge difference between that and a chicken that’s been raised well and allowed to get to a sensible age before slaughter.
Your question is rather ambiguous. Do you mean using chemistry to develop new techniques or combine unusual ingredients to create food that has novel flavors or textures? That would fall under Molecular Gastronomy, which has been highly influential within fine dining in the last few decades.
Do you mean processing ingredients with the goal to take cheap ingredients and make a product as hyper-palatable as possible? That would generally be called "ultra-processed food"; you're not going to find a Doritos chip in nature.
Do you mean developing completely completely new flavors via chemical synthesis? I don't think there's much possibility there. Our senses have evolved to detect compounds found in nature, so it's unlikely a synthetic compound can produce a flavor completely unlike anything found in nature.
Also, I think you're overestimating jelly. Gelatine is just a breakdown product of collagen. Boil animal connective tissue, purify the gelatine, add sugar and flavoring and set it into a gel. It's really only a few of techniques removed from nature. If you want to say it's not found in nature, then fair enough, but neither is a medium-rare steak.
I find this highly annoying. Here we've had very tasty wheat based slices that can serve the same purpose as sliced salami/meats on bread, and didn't try to muck anything in particular. But they disappeared from the shelves while the stuff branded as Vegan Salami seemingly does well.
I guess for casual buyers having a familiar reference point is just crucial.
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.
Jello doesnt really have much taste by itself. what youre tasting is mostly sugar.
Plus small amounts of perfumes similar to fruits or other bits of plants, usually.
Like you said I think it's culture, particularly ones that are food oriented. It's gonna be hard to get buy-in if people think it's too weird.
> doesn't taste like any natural food
Remember the target audience - people would rather drink and die from raw milk than get a shot for a completely preventable sickness.
I have all my shots and drink pasteurized milk, and I prefer familiar chicken-like substances over experimental cuisine.
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
... let's start on tearing down bullshit AI datacenters.
Oh no, a billion Nvidia cards are envronmentally friendly, you say, better to lazer-focus on the cow farts?
Livestock emits between 10% to 20% of global greenhouse gases (in carbon equivalent/100y-GWP) [1]
In contrast, all data centers (not just AI) currently use less than 1.5% of all electricity, making up less than 0.3% of global emissions [2]. Although recent increases in data center electricity usage is lamentable, even in the short term future, much of this can and more importantly _will_ be low-carbon energy, and the ratio should continue to improve with time.
A 1% reduction in livestock emissions is therefore about the same as a 50% reduction in data center emissions.
> Oh no, a billion Nvidia cards are envronmentally friendly, you say, better to lazer-focus on the cow farts?
The numbers are what the numbers are, not what you want them to be.
Minimizing cow farts is simply a better focus.
[flagged]
Are you making up a guy to be mad at?
It's only game, why you heff to be mad?
The cow farts, the important forests being torn down far cattle, the important forests being torn down for soy beans that feed the cattle, the inhumane conditions in which the cattle are raised. The problem you dismissed is indeed far larger than the one you're worried about.
>the important forests being torn down far cattle
It's a bit extreme to refer to that "climate" summit "guests" as cattle, but I won't deny it gave me a chuckle.
>the inhumane conditions in which the cattle are raised
Gosh, that's sad.
One way to go about it is to vote with your hard-earned and only buy meat from the Ethically Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows that look quite happy on the photos then.
No need to be snarky, a lot of people are already implementing such changes in the way the buy and consume food.
what is the context for this photo please? (that is not a calf btw?)
It certainly does not look very nice, are you relating this to the "Ethically Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows" in the comment you replied to?
In truth, they just take the calves away from the mothers after a short while, ship them out to the abbatoir. There is no benefit to them being in the same enclosure with a spiky nose ring, it seems that this must have a different purpose than the one you mentioned.
I suggest reading/listening a little bit outside of the PETA propaganda bubble. For example, here's a good short discussion on the topic with a cattle farmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4cHn6NX4wQ
Meat is useful. "AI" datacenters are 100% harm in every possible way. Let's start with that.
For chickens you do not have to pay license fees for the CRISPR technology.
This is a huge disadvantage. Not every farmer is a biological research institute.
We already have licensing fees for GMO seeds. Can't be all that long before they CRISPR an actual chicken breed, and start charging licensing fees for those as well.
Details are a bit vague but it seems like it's viable.
"Pleasant taste; some monsterism."
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
It's so odd to me as a veggie that people want something that "tastes like meat". If you've been immersed in decent veggie food for a while this isn't something you crave. Why would I want to eat a bit of dead animal? It's something I might do in a survival situation in a barren place, like Han Solo or something, but not if there are fresh veggies to hand.
If you want to do this for ethical reasons, which you should, then just eat vegetables. They taste way better. You just have to recalibrate your senses to deal with the higher levels of flavour.
But if people really want "chicken nuggets" for some reason then there's no reason it should have to involve animals at all, so this is a good thing, I guess.
Not just vegetables, also hash browns, fried potatoes, french fries, pancakes, spaghetti, etc.
There are plenty of vegetarian meals (or vegan ones, though that's harder). It's just that we have relegated most of them to side dishes, entres or breakfast because meat is too popular as a main dish. But this is a very recent phenomenon
But you can't make any money selling hash browns as veggie food, it's much more profitable to sell fake meat
I believe this is about the perceived switching cost for the masses who, in the US and Europe for example, are predominantly not vegetarian.
I'm sorry, I've been vegetarian (mostly vegan, no eggs or milk) for over 10 years, and I crave meat. A juicy burger. Spicy chicken wings. Actually those are mainly it.
I am so thankful of advances that let me eat something my brain enjoys. I get the best of both worlds - no animal harmed in the process.
Why do vegs have to neg on other vegs for what they eat? I hate that. To each their own. I encourage everyone to be vegetarian to support animal rights, but I also would never tell them that their cravings aren't real or how to go about doing it.
> Why do vegs have to neg on other vegs for what they eat?
It's not a "neg", it's my opinion. I don't think you need to crave meat, you are just lacking the proper cuisine that would satisfy you completely. Try Gobi 65 and you'll never crave "spicy chicken wings" again. I feel like people go veggie by just removing meat from a cuisine that is centred around it. Imagine British food without meat: nothing and mash, nothing and chips, roast nothing... mmm... delicious. You need to completely change. There's nothing "missing" from a vegetarian Indian meal.
A key limiting factor for dietary use of single cell protein is the high mass fraction of nucleic acid, which limits daily consumption due to uric acid production during metabolism. High rates of RNA synthesis are unfortunately necessary for high protein productivity.
The paper notes:
>It is important to note that MP products often contain elevated levels of nucleic acids, constituting ~8% of the dry weight [17], which necessitates consideration when assessing their suitability for human consumption. To address this, a heat treatment process is employed at the end of fermentation that reduces the nucleic acid content in the fermented biomass to below 0.75/100 g, while simultaneously deactivating protease activity and F. venenatum biomass. However, this procedure has been observed to induce cell membrane leakage and a substantial loss of biomass, as evidenced in the Quorn production process [17], which also utilizes F. venenatum as the MP producer. Our experimental trials have encountered similar challenges, achieving a biomass yield of merely ~35%, and observed that heating process increased the relative protein and chitin content (Figure 2D,E), which may be related to the effect of membrane leakage, while the intracellular protein of the FCPD engineered strain was less likely to be lost to the extracellular. Thus, concentrating the fermentation broth to enhance protein and amino acids content in successive steps to produce a highly nutritious water-soluble fertilizer appears to be an effective strategy for adding value to the process (Figure 1).
The challenges of developing economic single cell protein products, that are suitable for human consumption, are described in chapter 3 here:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin-Hofrichter-2/pub...
recent study that genetics has a underappreciated role in gout
https://www.sciencealert.com/massive-study-reveals-where-gou...
Finally vegans can get gout too!
While the paper is behind a pay wall, the abstract highlights that they used knock out gene editing, meaning this is not a GMO of the old days, with trans genes, but a mkdifcation one could have achieved with classical breeding if given enough time and resources.
If I understand this right, this would even in the EU now be allowed to be sold without the GMO label.
Technically, any gene sequence can be achieved with enough time and resources. Thats what evolution is afterall. Using CRISPR but not labelling it as genetically modified seems pretty wild, but then again EU does have some funky regulations.
>Technically, any gene sequence can be achieved with enough time and resources.
not in a meaningful way, no. the probability that a new mutation you want will occur is much much lower than the probability you can breed offspring without a gene that's already in the bloodline.
Once a desirable sequence modification is identified through artificial means, what is often done in practice is to simply expose samples of the organism to UV until the desired sequence appears "naturally." The output of this process is not typically considered GMO, at least for regulatory purposes.
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.
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.
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.
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).
This is not how the overwhelming majority of chickens live - they live in high intensity farm operations in horrible conditions
If all the meat you eat is from chicken raised in your backyard , that's environmentally perfect.
In the US per capita chicken consumption is 100 pounds per year.
Thats about 45kg, I wish I had that average American backyard.
That is not how most of the chicken is raised (over 70 billions are slaughtered per year).
Back of the envelope, for a family of 4 eating US quantities of chicken... you need to be slaughtering ~100 chickens per year. In a homesteading setting it usually takes a chicken about 12 weeks to reach slaughter weight, so you need to be raising a minimum of 25 at any time.
That's a pretty substantial backyard operation.
That's... Not too bad, actually. My grandmothers used to have maybe 8 chickens and 12 ducks or so. They were very low maintenance, and had very minimal pastures, with the only difficult to reproduce part of the process being that the houses were in fairly wild surroundings.
They would probably need more pasture in monoculture hellholes that have cornfields for 100km in each direction.
If everyone had backyard chicken operations on that scale, I suspect we'd have a lot more disease problems! Decentralized isn't necessarily better for disease, if the overall scale stays the same.
At least where I live, you can't have chickens in quite the same way our great-grandparents had. You need to comply with veterinary regulation for one, and for good reasons.
Wild to think that there's 6-7 chickens for every human in America at all times
In commercial operations they are also raising chickens much faster - maybe only 6 weeks for a meat chicken, so you only need half as many at any one time
how big is your backyard?
This sounds like they took a product that failed in the market - fungus based meat substitutes, and hinted at some superscience magic thats years from coming out, and that's if it proves safe, economical and a genunie improvement.
This really looks like an attempt to get investors to come back and push the stock price.
Quorn is based on fungus. I'm not a huge fan of it myself but it's sold across the EU, and it's in almost all stores where I live.
I had vaguely remembered that chitin was equivalent to cellulose in our inability to digest. The article addresses it:
"The first modification, eliminating a gene for chitin synthase, resulted in thinner fungal cell walls."
This also has an enormous potential benefit of reducing avian flu and other zoonotic bird diseases.
Fish foods with chitin is marketed as roughage.
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.
How?
By replacing (some) farmed meat with farmed fungi protein.
Although it's theoretically possible for a disease to infect both fungus and animals, because the biology is so different, the risk is greatly, greatly reduced.
In addition, it may be possible to reduce the use of treatments such as antibiotics which, in their currently mass application to farmed animals, could directly lead to the development of antibiotic resistant in diseases which affect humans and animals.
Plus, chucking the contents of a few biotanks in case of infection is a hell of a lot better than having to kill and waste millions of birds.
I mean, industrial slaughter isn't a pretty process, even in better plants, which most aren't, but where they come to wipe out the barn, they're not putting animal welfare first.
This product is the sort of product I suspect the fad blitz against "ultraprocessed foods" is really targeted at.
Not necessarily.
It might be some Big Meat conspiracy to combat these upstarts, but there's also reasonable data indicating that less processing results in better health outcomes.
The paper linked in the article: https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/abstract/S0167-779...
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!
Classic belter fare
"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.
When I hear the word fungus, I think of "The Last of US" ;(
That would make for a great spinoff: farm the infected for food!
The association is undiminshed by their web server being down. Uh oh.
meet tastes great and all, but I wonder where science is at (if at all) on making original food that tastes good. How about food that doesn't taste like any natural food we've had, but still tastes really good?
Jell-o (gello?) is a good example, nothing tastes like it naturally. Why aren't there tasty food that are original in terms of taste and texture but good for health and the environment? I suppose part of the struggle is that food is entrenched into culture so much. burgers and bbq are inextricable from july 4th and memorial day for example.
The trouble is that “tastes good” isn’t a blank canvas. It’s built on hardwired signals plus learned associations. Our basic tastes evolved as nutritional indicators: sweet signals energy, umami signals protein, bitter warns of potential toxins. And our brains are rather insistent about finding flavors more pleasant when they match patterns we’ve already learned are safe.
Jell-O actually proves this rather than refuting it. It succeeds because it hits that hardwired sweet preference, not because it invented some novel taste dimension. A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.
So you’d have to either work within those existing taste channels while creating novel combinations and textures, or somehow condition people to associate genuinely new sensations with safety and reward. The latter is slow going. We’re quite literally built to be suspicious of unfamiliar foods.
> A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.
We have five taste receptors, so it's it's actually impossible to get something that doesn't map unto those five. Instead, what we call the taste of food, and what GP was referring to, is actually the smell of food, or more commonly, its aroma, which we can detect both from the outside by sniffing it with our noses, and while it is in our mouths via molecules wafting up to our respiratory tract.
Unlike the simplicity of taste, we have a huge array of smell receptors, with most of them having much more indirect associations, if any, with any specific survival need. It's very much possible, and in fact quite common, to synthesize novel smells/aromas which don't resemble any natural food.
> Unlike the simplicity of taste, we have a huge array of smell receptors, with most of them having much more indirect associations
Slightly unrelated, but what I find very cool is thinking about your taste sense as a hyper-sensitive molecule detector. Individual aromas are just the signal your brain generates for different kinds of molecules, and it's very good at that. That's why at wine tastings, for example, people come up with all these elaborate terms for specific aromas—it's a way to name the molecule composition.
> Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.
At first. If the food has nutrients that are important to the brain, it will recognize that in the future. There are animal experiment confirming this.
The 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.
There are also a wide variety of textures that are heavily industrialised. If you go to some fine dining restaurants, you'll find smells and colours which you simply cannot replicate at home - let alone make from scratch.
Most synthetic meat and fish is really just a flavour carrier for whatever sauce people like. I've had imitation chicken, shrimp, beef, crab, etc. They all taste great - but that's mostly because the sauces are the same as their meaty counterparts.
Right. Chicken is more of a texture than a flavor. When you buy a Spicy Zinger Burger from KFC you're tasting more of the zingy than the cluck-cluck.
The chicken that KFC uses, sure. There’s a huge difference between that and a chicken that’s been raised well and allowed to get to a sensible age before slaughter.
Your question is rather ambiguous. Do you mean using chemistry to develop new techniques or combine unusual ingredients to create food that has novel flavors or textures? That would fall under Molecular Gastronomy, which has been highly influential within fine dining in the last few decades.
Do you mean processing ingredients with the goal to take cheap ingredients and make a product as hyper-palatable as possible? That would generally be called "ultra-processed food"; you're not going to find a Doritos chip in nature.
Do you mean developing completely completely new flavors via chemical synthesis? I don't think there's much possibility there. Our senses have evolved to detect compounds found in nature, so it's unlikely a synthetic compound can produce a flavor completely unlike anything found in nature.
Also, I think you're overestimating jelly. Gelatine is just a breakdown product of collagen. Boil animal connective tissue, purify the gelatine, add sugar and flavoring and set it into a gel. It's really only a few of techniques removed from nature. If you want to say it's not found in nature, then fair enough, but neither is a medium-rare steak.
I find this highly annoying. Here we've had very tasty wheat based slices that can serve the same purpose as sliced salami/meats on bread, and didn't try to muck anything in particular. But they disappeared from the shelves while the stuff branded as Vegan Salami seemingly does well.
I guess for casual buyers having a familiar reference point is just crucial.
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.
Jello doesnt really have much taste by itself. what youre tasting is mostly sugar.
Plus small amounts of perfumes similar to fruits or other bits of plants, usually.
Like you said I think it's culture, particularly ones that are food oriented. It's gonna be hard to get buy-in if people think it's too weird.
> doesn't taste like any natural food
Remember the target audience - people would rather drink and die from raw milk than get a shot for a completely preventable sickness.
I have all my shots and drink pasteurized milk, and I prefer familiar chicken-like substances over experimental cuisine.
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
... let's start on tearing down bullshit AI datacenters.
Oh no, a billion Nvidia cards are envronmentally friendly, you say, better to lazer-focus on the cow farts?
Livestock emits between 10% to 20% of global greenhouse gases (in carbon equivalent/100y-GWP) [1]
In contrast, all data centers (not just AI) currently use less than 1.5% of all electricity, making up less than 0.3% of global emissions [2]. Although recent increases in data center electricity usage is lamentable, even in the short term future, much of this can and more importantly _will_ be low-carbon energy, and the ratio should continue to improve with time.
A 1% reduction in livestock emissions is therefore about the same as a 50% reduction in data center emissions.
[1]: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...
[2]: https://www.carbon-direct.com/insights/understanding-the-car...
Way ahead of you, buddy:
> Oh no, a billion Nvidia cards are envronmentally friendly, you say, better to lazer-focus on the cow farts?
The numbers are what the numbers are, not what you want them to be.
Minimizing cow farts is simply a better focus.
[flagged]
Are you making up a guy to be mad at?
It's only game, why you heff to be mad?
The cow farts, the important forests being torn down far cattle, the important forests being torn down for soy beans that feed the cattle, the inhumane conditions in which the cattle are raised. The problem you dismissed is indeed far larger than the one you're worried about.
>the important forests being torn down far cattle
It's a bit extreme to refer to that "climate" summit "guests" as cattle, but I won't deny it gave me a chuckle.
>the inhumane conditions in which the cattle are raised
Gosh, that's sad. One way to go about it is to vote with your hard-earned and only buy meat from the Ethically Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows that look quite happy on the photos then.
No need to be snarky, a lot of people are already implementing such changes in the way the buy and consume food.
Did you know they put nose rings with spikes on the calfs so they don't drink their mother's milk? https://as1.ftcdn.net/jpg/03/06/17/72/1000_F_306177230_izPAv...
what is the context for this photo please? (that is not a calf btw?)
It certainly does not look very nice, are you relating this to the "Ethically Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows" in the comment you replied to?
In truth, they just take the calves away from the mothers after a short while, ship them out to the abbatoir. There is no benefit to them being in the same enclosure with a spiky nose ring, it seems that this must have a different purpose than the one you mentioned.
I suggest reading/listening a little bit outside of the PETA propaganda bubble. For example, here's a good short discussion on the topic with a cattle farmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4cHn6NX4wQ
Meat is useful. "AI" datacenters are 100% harm in every possible way. Let's start with that.
For chickens you do not have to pay license fees for the CRISPR technology.
This is a huge disadvantage. Not every farmer is a biological research institute.
We already have licensing fees for GMO seeds. Can't be all that long before they CRISPR an actual chicken breed, and start charging licensing fees for those as well.
Another angle for sustainable protein: https://www.airprotein.com/
Details are a bit vague but it seems like it's viable.
"Pleasant taste; some monsterism."
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
It's so odd to me as a veggie that people want something that "tastes like meat". If you've been immersed in decent veggie food for a while this isn't something you crave. Why would I want to eat a bit of dead animal? It's something I might do in a survival situation in a barren place, like Han Solo or something, but not if there are fresh veggies to hand.
If you want to do this for ethical reasons, which you should, then just eat vegetables. They taste way better. You just have to recalibrate your senses to deal with the higher levels of flavour.
But if people really want "chicken nuggets" for some reason then there's no reason it should have to involve animals at all, so this is a good thing, I guess.
Not just vegetables, also hash browns, fried potatoes, french fries, pancakes, spaghetti, etc.
There are plenty of vegetarian meals (or vegan ones, though that's harder). It's just that we have relegated most of them to side dishes, entres or breakfast because meat is too popular as a main dish. But this is a very recent phenomenon
But you can't make any money selling hash browns as veggie food, it's much more profitable to sell fake meat
I believe this is about the perceived switching cost for the masses who, in the US and Europe for example, are predominantly not vegetarian.
I'm sorry, I've been vegetarian (mostly vegan, no eggs or milk) for over 10 years, and I crave meat. A juicy burger. Spicy chicken wings. Actually those are mainly it.
I am so thankful of advances that let me eat something my brain enjoys. I get the best of both worlds - no animal harmed in the process.
Why do vegs have to neg on other vegs for what they eat? I hate that. To each their own. I encourage everyone to be vegetarian to support animal rights, but I also would never tell them that their cravings aren't real or how to go about doing it.
> Why do vegs have to neg on other vegs for what they eat?
It's not a "neg", it's my opinion. I don't think you need to crave meat, you are just lacking the proper cuisine that would satisfy you completely. Try Gobi 65 and you'll never crave "spicy chicken wings" again. I feel like people go veggie by just removing meat from a cuisine that is centred around it. Imagine British food without meat: nothing and mash, nothing and chips, roast nothing... mmm... delicious. You need to completely change. There's nothing "missing" from a vegetarian Indian meal.