In my opinion, with animal cell cultures it is extremely unlikely to ever be able to produce proteins at a competitive cost. By competitive cost I mean that any such proteins should cost much less than chicken meat (per protein content).
What I believe to be the right solution, because this should be able to produce high-quality proteins at lower costs than from any animal source, is to use cultures of genetically-modified fungi, which produce some high-quality proteins, e.g. whey protein or egg white protein. There already exist genetically-modified strains of the fungus Trichoderma, which produce such animal proteins, instead of the enzymes that they normally secreted into their environment. Such proteins can be separated from the fungal culture medium by ultrafiltration, in the same way how one makes from whey or milk whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate.
Fungi protein sounds cool though. I would totally add that to my diet. But I also think insects are an underutilized protein source, so I might be an outlier
There are 3 reasons for avoiding meat. One is the ethical reason, because during the last century meat production has transitioned everywhere to using methods that can hardly be considered anything else but continuous torture. There are also certain health risks associated with meat and there is also the reason that the real cost of meat may be greater than it appears to be, due to negative environmental consequences (i.e. pollution).
If some kind of protein extract or some kind of fake meat is more expensive than real meat (per protein content), you can be rather certain that the negative environmental consequences are worse than for real meat, because the higher cost is likely to be determined by the consumption of more energy and of various kinds of chemicals during the production of the meat substitute.
Being "certain that the negative environmental consequences are worse" seems an stretch from weak initial judgement.
This is missing the key point that like 95% of people in the world are not vegans, don't find any moral issues with eating meat, and thus produce zero social pressure. Fungi burgers MUST come with an actual benefit for the majority of people. It needs to be seen as some combination of "Tastey", "healthy", "cost effective". If fungi burgers were $2/lbs and tasted pretty close to a beef burger, then people would flock to them. The problem with Impossible burgers were worse, more expensive, questionably "more healthy" and entirely relied upon the moral/social issues which only mattered in a few small slices of society.
It will never go away but if it becomes more niche then it's likely that what is produced will be done so more humanely (branding and perception of quality)
Including protein powder as a cooking ingredient does not do much for improving the taste of food (though the food definitely feels more satiating), but it ensures that it is healthy enough.
Even if I liked meat, I never felt any kind of addiction to it. There are many years since the last time when I ate meat and I feel no need to eat again, as long as I have a lot of other options for food that is tasty and healthy.
For several years I have not used any animal protein sources, but this forced too inconvenient constraints on what I could eat, so eventually I gave up and now I use in cooking some whey or milk protein concentrate powder, whenever it is necessary to increase the protein content. This has provided much more freedom in menu choice.
So for me, if instead of having to buy protein extracted from whey or milk (which costs about the same as chicken meat, i.e. many times cheaper than protein concentrates extracted from plants, which must use much more complicated processes than the filtration of whey or milk) there would be the option of buying similar protein from a fungal culture, that would be enough to cover all my needs.
From other comments that I have seen about the fake meat products, I am pretty sure that there are many others like me, who do not care whether they eat meat or not, as long as they eat some good food.
Eliminating beef, fowl, and fish leaves a universe of foods including all fungi, fruits and vegetables, grains, nuts, and legumes. It also includes all spices and herbs.
Kimchi & Sauerkraut to wet the appetite.
Don't use salt, use Miso. The darker the better.
Tempeh is awesome and comes with soy (nutty), lentil (strong taste like aged meat), chickpeas (floral), beans (melty), or other legume/cereal/nut. Can include spices and seed for extra taste and crunch.
Nuts cheese tastes "cheesy" in a similar way similar to their diary version (Roquefort, Cheddar, Blue, Camembert, Brie...) depending on the ferment, without the "milky" taste. Nut taste instead, obviously but that can be offset with other oils/fats.
0 https://www.jay-joy.com/collections/affine/products/le-jeann...
1 https://www.jay-joy.com/collections/affine/products/jil-from...
What? Outside of Indian food, which does have many vegan options, but the best food is usually still non-vegan (lots of dairy and butter used). Chinese and Latin American food is almost never vegan. Chinese love meat, and you would have to be a buddhist monk to actually find vegan food in China. Even with a lot of cheap plant protein options, like tofu, most things use some meat for flavor. Latin America loves cooking in animal fats.
I've seen plenty of vegan food in restaurants serving those cuisines, so that's not true. Why is it important to you to insist that vegan food is somehow difficult?
If you just mean 'in China', that's irrelevant to this conversation - only a small proportion of people here eat their Chinese food in China. But I acknowledge, lots of people on HN like to demonstrate their worldliness by making sure we know they've been to China, relevant or not.
> the best food is usually still non-vegan (lots of dairy and butter used)
It's a bit hard to make a definitive statement about what is 'best'. Personally, I much prefer Indian without all the ghee. That vegan food exists in many varieties is an objective fact, however.
There is a case to be made for many species of plants effectively being a previously unidentified manner of lichen. Created on mineral soil much the same way lichen grew on rocks.
> There are as many as 12 million species of fungi, yet there are just 155,000 or so known species, leaving vast numbers undescribed.
"There are as many as 12 million species of fungi, yet there are just 155,000 or so known species..."
The second number makes sense: it's how many species we've identified. But the first number... how can we know how many we don't know?
This kind of thing pops up all the time (X number of crimes go "unreported"... if they're unreported how can we say that?).
I get that they may be estimates. If so, it's pretty important that that estimation process is described.
Might as well say there are as many as 12 trillion species of fungi.
If, for example, k=1 then N is likely small. On the other hand if k=n then N is likely large.
The most computer-sciencey way is to look at n at which you get a repeat, ah! a hash collision.
One can make these ideas more quantitative under assumptions about the numbers of each types of marbles.
The math of hashing, birthday paradox, coupon collection and hyperloglog are good places to start.
Then there are other ways. Two of you count the number of typos in a tedious text. One says N the other says n and out of them only k are common. From this you can estimate the likely number of typos in the text.
But TFA's estimate is perplexing because it is NOT a contrived scenario. We don't have marbles, we have some territory to cover. The territory isn't randomly distributed, we can't adequately randomly sample (presumably?).
It feels like the estimate could be wildly wildly off, in which case why estimate.
Regarding why estimate at all knowing they can be wrong ? Estimates are very useful for planning. Sophisticated models would also yield probabilities of over and underestimated, these combined with cost of over and underestimation errors are very useful for decision making.
See the German tank problem. Turns out the allied forces overestimated the number to f tanks left, still helped in planning.
Basically, you bulk sequence some sample like some soil, and from there you can call certain taxa and make estimates of unique species or unidentified sequences.
There are thousands of different species of many branches of the taxonomy tree (insects, molds, bacteria, etc.) and like fungi, each have tons of species not even identified.
Scientists estimate that something like 99% of species that ever existed, are extinct. I understand why people get upset when something like elephants hit the endangered list, but should we really care if some obscure species of dung beetle is endangered?
Species of beetle or of fungi or of any other kind of living beings may look very similar, but nonetheless they may differ in their ability to synthesize various chemical compounds by using various enzymes that may not have equivalents in other living beings.
The popular literature is full of triumphalist b*s*t which makes it appear that most basic sciences, like physics, chemistry and biology are solved, but this is extremely far from the truth. We are still a few decades away from being able to understand well enough how a living being works, so that we would be able to replicate similar processes for making whatever we want.
Until then, every kind of living being which disappears is an irreversible loss of precious information, which may have saved an unpredictable amount of time in the future, which will be needed to rediscover similar results with those produced by natural evolution during millions of years.
“Unreported” is usually short for “unreported to police”
I assume researchers ask people if they’ve seen a crime and not talked to the police about it.
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