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Comment by magic_beans | Hacker News Reader

Can vegetarians on Earth benefit from this sustainable protein as well?

It would be great to have options beyond soy, vital wheat gluten, and the usual bean/grain/yeast medleys!

The single-cell protein sounds a lot like Mycoprotein (brand name: Quorn) which is normally grown/fed with glucose syrup as well as CO2. Sounds like they've come up with a novel variation or process that doesn't need the glucose?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein

I believe that fungi are considered closer to animals than to plants.

I'll let vegans ponder that one...

I'll leave that here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC48023/

"This congruence among multiple lines of evidence strongly suggests, in contrast to traditional and current classification, that animals and fungi are sister groups while plants constitute an independent evolutionary lineage."

Regardless of their evolutionary lineage, the important ethical consideration is whether one's food has a central nervous system. Most animals have those whereas fungi and plants do not.

It seems to me that the "ethical considerations" are highly personal and vary from people to people.

In any case, I note that tongue-in-cheek comments are not appreciated. Sad.

You can't just retreat to ethics are personal when you just implied that a group of people were irrational for being willing to eat fungus. If you didn't intend to imply that then then downvotes show you should work on your communication skills.

Or perhaps you should work on your interpersonal and maturity skills... I didn't imply anything, you lost it over nothing trying to see things where there was obviously none. I was just tongue-in-cheek by putting some scientific facts out there, which may in fact trigger a real reflection of what not eating any animal product might mean to someone (and your point was just a generalisation that does not represent all views).

It's like Reddit here. Too bad. It was a good resource.

The poster that you'r replying to didn't "[lose] it". They replied to the contents of your comments and addressed your points.

"Tongue-in-cheek" comments are more popular on reddit.

There's a suggestion in a piece on this in yesterday's Guardian they hope it can become a bulk filler in foods. Still light on details as it goes off into "what ifs".

Unlike Quorn and other microbials it doesn't need a carbohydrate input so should be able to reduce agriculture needs markedly if it works as hoped.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/31/electr...

Normal mushrooms quite protein rich as well, 2.5 g protein for every 4.3 g of carbs: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/301907?format=Full

(Not to mention nuts, peas, lentils, etc)

They also tend to have all the protein varieties you need in your diet.

http://lentein.com/

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