Hacking the genome of fungi for smart foods of the future

See also:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/12/quorn-r...

Muscles burn Lactic Acid before they burn glucose.

FWIU LAB Lactic Acid Bacteria use Glutamate to control pH by GABA production.

And GABA, well https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%93-Aminobutyric_acid :

> [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?

> 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?

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.

I can assure you that they aren't standard restaurant fare in Europe, either.

Oh, I see: you saw a chance to bash "Americans", and took it.

> How can eating an insect burger be worse than eating chicken nuggets?

How many restaurants in your city serve "insect burgers"?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Carry on.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

We just consume way too much beef

How much of a cow's diet do you believe comes from resources that would not be otherwise useful to humans?

Cattle farming uses most of the water in the west. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23655640/colorado-river-wa...

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

We just consume too much beef