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Comment by brianberns | Hacker News Reader

I stopped reading at "single-celled protein", which indicates to me that the author does not understand basic biology. Does anyone have a better take on this?

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If it has a wikipedia page does that change things?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-cell_protein

Single-cell protein is a thing. Single-celled protein isn't. The website has the former; the article, the latter.

I'm curious why you think the distinction matters? Surely there's no confusion. And "single-celled organism" is an acceptable phrase. And a "single-cell protein" in fact _is_ a "single-celled organism".

I think precision always matters in writing, especially science writing. If the author of the article is making obvious mistakes, it's reasonable to wonder whether they're making mistakes I am not qualified to spot.

FWIW, a Google search for "single-celled protein" turns up a bunch of scientific papers using that term as well. I would guess that it's just a situation where both variants are acceptable. Maybe it's a regional thing like "color" vs. "colour".

When I seach for "single-celled protein" I don't see any scientific papers on the first page, and the first two hits are this very discussion. Suggesting that if the phrase is really by scientists, it's used so very rarely that it's a mistake, just like it is here.

Precision absolutely matters, but I'm questioning your assertion that the author was imprecise. I don't know that I believe that it's a mistake.

They probably just don't want to say "bacteria" because that sounds unhealthy.

The "single-cell protein" phrase is straight from the parent company's home page.

https://solarfoods.fi/

That’s lazy.

The paragraph immediately before that term is used talks about a natural fermentation process similar to the one that produces yeast and lactic acid bacteria which provides context for the single-cell protein concept.

No, you're on the money: they're growing yeast and pretending it's magic.

single-cell protein, also called single-celled protein (for example https://scialert.net/fulltextmobile/?doi=ajft.2011.103.116 uses both), refers to the process of producing the protein using unicellular (or "single-celled") organisms rather than implying that the protein is composed of cells (or of single-cell organisms).

The same term is all over their actual webpage. I don’t know what it means either but perhaps it’s referring to the process somehow.

Edit: I looked into this briefly, but now I think the sibling comments are more helpful than mine here.

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