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We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production
- mark_l_watson 7y agoWhile I think it is good to create inexpensive healthy high protein foods, I also think we should have a fair free market for people who want to continue buying real meat, organic foods, non GMO foods, cheap foods produced with GMO and petrochemicals. Free choice and a free market, with strict accurate labeling laws is what I want.
- core-questions 7y agoFor sure. I mean, claims like: > The impact of this disruption on industrial animal farming will be profound. By 2030, the number of cows in the U.S. will have fallen by 50% and the cattle farming industry will be all but bankrupt. This is ridiculous. I'm not going to stop eating beef because of the availability of cheap weird unproven lab-grown protein. I might try the latter, maybe feed it to my pets, but as long as I can reasonably afford to eat real meat, I'm going to do so. The market that will suffer most is probably going to be the non-GMO organic stuff you mention, because it's already that much more expensive than the cheap stuff, so it will be even harder to justify for most folks, esp. if the lab-grown replacements get endorsed as being Healthy by the right Authorities on the issue.
- quaquaqua1 7y agoDo you ever eat at Taco Bell or McDonalds? Their beef is pretty much flavored soy at this point. Most consumers aren't going to be "knowingly" apart of this shift, I feel.
- Cd00d 7y agoCitation? "McDonald’s hamburger patties in the U.S. are made with 100% USDA-inspected beef. They are cooked and prepared with salt, pepper and nothing else; no preservatives, no fillers." From: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdonalds-100-beef/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdonalds-100-beef/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- albertsondev 7y agoThe angle is more on the lackluster taste than any concerns composition, I believe.
- worik 7y agoNo I do not!
- Jommi 7y agoYou might be not factoring in how long of a time 10 years will be.
- rcpt 7y ago> fair free market If we had that there wouldn't be so much meat in the first place. Currently, each year, American taxpayers subsidize the animal food system to the tune of $38 billion.
- o_p 7y agoThe problem with the free market is that mass starvation can perfectly be a market optimal, of all the things that are subsidized, food is the most important.
- rcpt 7y agoThere are many ways to prevent starvation without heavily subsidizing animal agriculture.
- windexh8er 7y agoAnd... > inexpensive healthy high protein Most people don't know how much protein they should actually be eating [0]. And while they're focusing on "high protein" they fail to understand the need for "high fiber". The Western diet focused on proteins isn't doing us any good in the long run by using the majority of our farm land for feed crops. And then we've been told eating chicken [1] 7 days a week, twice a day is "healthy". What Canada did by boxing out big agriculture and regroup their dietary recommendations is impressive by making it evidence based and not lobbyist driven [2]. [0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight-loss/when-it-comes-to-protein-how-much-is-too-much https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight-loss/when-it-... [1] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/110/1/24/5494812/ https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/110/1/24/5494... [2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canada-food-guide-healthy-eating-food-processors-industry-dairy-beef-lobbying-1.4970122 https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canada-food-guide-healthy-eat...
- mark_l_watson 7y agoGood point, and it is probably even more than $38B in subsidies.
- pfdietz 7y agoThe reduction in land could be even higher if the energy for the fermentation is produced by non-biological means. That is, instead of feeding the bacteria plant-derived compounds, feed them CO2, water and electrical energy. Photovoltaics are an order of magnitude more efficient than photosynthesis, can operate in places and times plants cannot grow (deserts, below freezing conditions), and require negligible amounts of water.
- jacknews 7y agoat sea
- o_p 7y agoFeel free to beta test that new "food". Ill stick with real animals thanks.
- ripdog 7y agoEven as those animals destroy the ecosystem?
- aaron695 7y agoIts all pretty obvious except the time line which is where the only value is. It counts on lab meat hitting $ parity in 2021. Not sure it will. The food as software is also a bit junky, no one has managed that across any industry yet. But it'll happen in a more informal way. Which will also slow their prediction.
- condour75 7y agoI'm very sympathetic to this argument, but it's really hard not to imagine this article being monologued by a supervillain while Bond is being lowered into a lava pit.
- mogadsheu 7y agoWhile I don’t disagree with the sentiment of the report, I do question its credibility. They don’t cite their sources, but do make bold claims with broad statistics and buzz words. Looking into the authors, they don’t lack credentials, but it seems like they’re newsletter and report writers, not people who are putting skin in the game to back their claims. First impression: be skeptical of “the Seba Technology Disruption Framework™“, named after the founder, but open to a change in opinion. Does anybody have experience with these guys? I could be way off!
- ianai 7y agoNo experience with them. I think they might just be riffing off some trends that may be emerging now and projecting them out. I’ve definitely wondered at this disruption as well. I think it’s a good avenue to supplant protein production with more environmentally friendly processes.
- _beams_ 7y agoThought the same thing; sounds like marketing copy
- mido22 7y agotry looking at the linked report, it has about 116 references.
- jstewartmobile 7y agomoney! money! money! very few of the citations are scientific in nature
- Jommi 7y agoDid you not read the actual report?
- rjknight 7y agoI know that "did you not read..." comments are normally (rightly) down-voted, but in this case I think it's a reasonable question. The article makes a number of bold claims, without citing evidence. This is only acceptable because it's a summary of a larger report which _does_ cite evidence, but the presentation of the page doesn't make this as obvious as it could. It would be quite easy to skim-read the post, observe that there are bold un-sourced claims being made, and fail to notice that the full report is available to download.
- hirundo 7y ago> By 2030, the number of cows in the U.S. will have fallen by 50% and the cattle farming industry will be all but bankrupt. There's an impressive lack of humility here. Predictions are hard, particularly about the future. I challenge the authors to construct a longbets.org wager on the above. I wonder if spelling out verifiable details and putting a significant amount of cash on the line would soften their certainty a bit. If the terms of the bet reflect the assurance in the executive summary I'd be willing to take the other side of it. Even if they're completely accurate about the benefits and the economics, I think they're greatly underestimating the canalization of human food choices.
- thetopher 7y agoThis is where I stopped reading. How can somebody claim to be on the cusp of disrupting a market when they evidently don't understand the consumer? Nutritional equivalence will not bankrupt the cattle industry.
- carapace 7y agoI'm too lazy at the moment to look up a link but fast food restaurants are already adopting these faux-beef burgers and people love them.
- em-bee 7y agoyes, but i doubt that cost-parity alone will get people to stop eating meat. there has to be more than that. the popularity of these alternatives is an indicator but not everyone primarily eats burgers. there is also still the general problem with all processed foods being less healthy than naturally grown foods...
- montalbano 7y agoFrom the report: > The cost of proteins will be five times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035 than existing animal proteins This is about more than nutritional equivalence. The meat in a burger is usually the most expensive component so artificial proteins could lead to a reduction in the price of a burger by approximately 5x. Also, naturally grown food means different things to different people. As mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, much of the naturally grown food we consume now is produced in a vastly different way than it would have been 100 years ago, sometimes to the detriment of nutritional value.
- cubano 7y agoWouldn't the correct buzzphrase be "Food as a Service" not "Food as Software"? They certainly make bold claims and some cites sure would help to convince me as to their claims.
- nine_k 7y agoFood as a Service is basically a restaurant; known for millennia and does not sound disruptive enough.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoColor me skeptical about these bold, precise and seemingly unsourced confident assertions. Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future. -- Niels Bohr
- chiefalchemist 7y agoToo much rant, too little if any data and facts.
- rcpt 7y agoThis all sounds great I hope they're right
- jmartrican 7y agoThe author had me till they said "This is the result of rapid advances in precision biology that have allowed us to make huge strides in precision fermentation, a process that allows us to program microorganisms to produce almost any complex organic molecule." Is there anything on the market now that uses this technique?
- zplizzi 7y agoYes - this is how impossible foods makes the heme protein which is central to their burger tasting "meaty". There are tons of startups working on this for other food products, but it's well established in other industries. Many pharmaceuticals are produced via synthetic biology, for example.
- witten 7y agoAnd xanthan gum, another example of this general process (perhaps without the "programming"), has been around since the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan_gum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan_gum
- 52-6F-62 7y agoJust don’t let it go near infants apparently. Holy hell! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrotizing_enterocolitis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrotizing_enterocolitis
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Jommi 7y agoSomething like this? https://solarfoods.fi https://solarfoods.fi
- mythrwy 7y agoYes. https://www.perfectdayfoods.com/how-it-works/ https://www.perfectdayfoods.com/how-it-works/
- torgian 7y agoMore disruption? Seems normal now;)
- basicplus2 7y agoI dont think this is correct, food contains many trace elements and things we need that we dont fully understand. Even slightly changing the natural feed of an animal we eat dramatically changes the quality and nutritional value. thinking that you can so dramatically change the production (and only produce one part of a food - one of the proteins) all the other elements we need are lost. It sounds like a recipe for malnutrition.
- vturner 7y agoI'm curious how one is attracted to precision "chemically engineered" food. As I am gaining interest week by week in consuming foods in their most natural form, I want the opposite of what this article claims is "the future" (I'm a vegiterean too, it's not an animal VS impossible burger thing for me). What am I missing here to be excited about a future of custom fermented food products?
- DoreenMichele 7y agoA guilty conscience concerning global warming? People who don't want to personally change their lifestyle seem to frequently look for "magic" solutions at the societal level, often overlooking logic fails in the scenario that is being painted. It's like they imagine if the whole world changes, then I don't have to. Or something.
- slimed 7y agoIsn't that exactly what technology enables? Ways of living and solving problems that were previously impossible with little to no additional effort from the actual consumer?
- DoreenMichele 7y agoIf the whole world changes, your life changes with it, often in ways you didn't anticipate. If you want to keep eating like you currently eat and this prediction comes true, then you have to put in additional effort to try to keep doing the same things.
- slimed 7y agoYeah, I see now what you're getting at.
- Spooky23 7y agoNot always. The shitshow of American agriculture is due to the technological wonders that moved most vegetable production to the California desert and the over utilization of the Midwest aquifers. Most of our sustainable east coast growing areas are subdivisions now.
- worik 7y agoMeh. The hippies were right. Eat food your grandmother would recognise. Eat it as unprocessed as practical. Eat a lot of it raw. But I bet where people have no choice (in prison, public hospitals, schools, on food stamps...) it will become compulsory.
- slimed 7y agoOr how about the billions more people we will have in the coming decades? Population growth in the global south in addition to crop destabilization due to climate change will be a crisis. This is one possible solution. Eating "real" food may end up a luxury for most.
- mido22 7y agoNot sure why are downvoted, You have made some valid points
- amanaplanacanal 7y agoIt sounds like the real solution is to stop making babies.
- slimed 7y agoPast experience shows that this does not happen until countries reach a certain level of wealth. We'll get there as a planet eventually.
- varjag 7y agoMy grandmother didn't live to 70.
- sten 7y agoYes, but isn't it predicted that the average life expectancy of the current generation will be less than that of the prior generations?
- momokoko 7y agoWhile beef is an easy target, we are able to produce chicken at an incredibly low price per gram of protein.
- slimed 7y agoMany people have a guilty conscience over how we achieve that incredibly low price. That will be a strong motivator.
- taneq 7y agoIt always boggles my mind how cheap chicken is now. A whole chicken, grown, fed, slaughtered, prepared, roasted, and ready to eat at the supermarket for a few dollars.
- zaroth 7y agoLooking around I see examples like this everwhere, where the science seems to be rapidly advancing new approaches and techniques which will feed, cloth, transport, teach, and entertain billions of people in ways that are more economical and ecological. Examples like these are why I'm convinced that environmental impact reduction and ultimately rejuvenation is possible without massively disrupting life as we know it. It would be great if governments could better align taxes and incentives for the development and real-world deployment of these technologies, but they seems to be progressing quite well even in a maximally dysfunctional political environment.
- thrower123 7y agoLife... finds a way. Someday, we'll hit a Malthusian bottleneck that we can't innovate our way out of, presumably. However, to date, every time disaster looms, something occurs that kicks the can down the road. It makes it very difficult to take seriously the endlessly repeatedly claims that the world as we know it is coming to an end in the short term - the result of such hysteria seems to be to induce a lot of self-righteous and largely pointless churn, while unheralded technology quietly solves the crisis du jour without fanfare.
- marcus_holmes 7y agoNo idea why you're getting downvoted - this is perfectly true. I guess because people secretly long for the world to end. Rapture, Climate Change, nuclear armageddon, AIDS, Y2K, Peak Oil, take your pick. It's been a constant of life in Western civilisation for the last 50 years at least. There has never been a period in my life when there hasn't been some impending catastrophe that was going to destroy life as we know it. I would blame the media - and that is definitely part of it. But the media only does this because we lap it up. Something about human psychology loves this idea that we're in the End Times.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoMaybe it's the function of development levels we've reached? It's only in the last 60 years that we've reached a level at which we can cause a man-made Armageddon. In the "boy crying wolf" story, the wolf eventually came. > Peak Oil, Climate Change Makes more sense if you consider this (and other related scares) as symptoms of the same phenomenon, which shows no sign of stopping. Let's talk about how we're going to innovate ourselves off the exponentially growing resources -> consumption -> trash pipeline we're running. I don't see much happening that would address it.
- sologoub 7y agoAs others mentioned, this reads more like a PR piece than a research claim. More importantly, the health benefits claim has been debunked before: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/impossible-burger-or-beyond-meat-aren-t-healthy-fast-food-ncna1050911 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/impossible-burger-or-b... > The challenge here is that these offerings aren’t actually any healthier. The Impossible Whopper, for instance, not only has comparable caloric and fat levels as its meat-based counterpart, but it has more salt per serving; the Del Taco options are comparable. The Impossible Slider has more calories, more fat and more sodium than the meaty original (before you add cheese to either). The salt content is significantly higher and protein sources are ultra processed, which we have ample research to show that ultra processed foods have adverse health effects. The environmental claims appear more straightforward, but we don’t need to engineer our food to drastically reduce impact - simply switch from beef to chicken. “No question chicken is a fraction of beef’s carbon emissions and it likely has the lowest carbon footprint of any animal protein,” Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/choosing-chicken-over-beef-cuts-carbon-footprint-surprising-amount/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/choos... In short, we don’t need to wait until 2035 to cut our overall food carbon footprint in half. Better yet, let’s include more unprocessed vegetable sources and eat less animal protein all together. (I know... not going to happen)
- pfdietz 7y agoYou are assuming that fat and sodium are unhealthy. I suggest the real health problem of beef could be a particular carbohydrate (Neu5Gc) that non-human mammals have Impossible Burgers would avoid this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Glycolylneuraminic_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Glycolylneuraminic_acid
- Jommi 7y agoDid you also not read the 90 page research paper on the topic that was linked on the page? Do you have a source on how "Processed" clearly relates to adverse health effects.
- lstroud 7y agoIf that happens the numbers of starving and diseased livestock will be a significant issue.
- gralx 7y agoMy first reaction was, "Wait - world food supply is about to be disrupted?" Then I realized "disruption" was meant in the marketing sense. This is why I read the comments first.
- WaltPurvis 7y agoI almost didn't click on the link because I didn't care to read another depressing prediction of imminent doom —- so I was pleasantly surprised to see the report was about an optimistic disruption.
- teumesios 7y agoWe already have the resources to feed the hungry. A third of all the food produced is thrown out. The problem is how we distribute it. Systemic change is the only thing that can address this problem in a meaningful way. Efficiency is great but producing more when we already have enough is completely missing the issue at hand.
- afarrell 7y agoKeep in mind: logistics and product-market fit are both hard problems.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoSometimes they sound like smart words used to deflect people from the issue that some products and services shouldn't be on the market if they waste so much of their inputs. There needs to be extra pressure applied to reduction of waste all across the supply chain.
- marcus_holmes 7y agoI used to work in the food distribution system, and regularly witnessed entire dumpsters full of perfectly good food being destroyed. Consumers, as usual, are the key to changing this. We'd have to change the eating and shopping habits of an entire generation to change this. Changing the system won't work without changing the way we think about food and food shopping.
- afarrell 7y agoCan you write some detailed stories of what led to those dumpsters being destroyed? I think there's not a good understanding of what leads to larger-scale food waste. For instance, I've seen a few people online pitching "ugly produce" startups. But what prevents Campbells Soup and Jamba Juice from buying all the ugly fruit/veggies?
- carapace 7y ago
- passiveincomelg 7y agoI love the optimism in this. Just hope "intellectual property" and corrupt politicians will not fuck this up. Unfortunately the latter is very likely to happen here in Germany. Our pork industry for example is abhorrent.
- concordDance 7y agoI'm worried that these new constructed foods will be lacking in components or structure in a way that our natural selection created digestive system is poorly optimized for, leading to mass malnourishment.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoSurprise! Current food is deficient in many ways, and not what our digestion is optimized for. The opportunity is, to create foods that better match what we need. Instead of eating the random cow we fixed on for our modern meat supply.
- scotch_drinker 7y agoI guess we'll never learn from things like margarine and other lab invented foods. Beyond Meat is heavily dependent on seed oils which are terrible for us (expeller pressed canola oil is ingredient #2). Red Meat actually isn't unhealthy at the levels most people currently eat it. While it wouldn't surprise me if more people ate Beyond meat and its ilk in the future, it doesn't make it better for us and will likely just make us sicker. https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2752326/effect-lower-versus-higher-red-meat-intake-cardiometabolic-cancer-outcomes https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2752326/effect-lower-vers...
- whamlastxmas 7y agoBeyond Meat has never claimed to be a healthier alternative to meat and it's a bit of a straw man to comment like they did. I also don't see many margarine induced illnesses or deaths. Everything is fine in moderation.
- urban_strike 7y ago> Beyond Meat has never claimed to be a healthier alternative to meat and it's a bit of a straw man to comment like they did. Not sure why you'd think that's a straw man when they explicitly state it on their website. First sentence on their Products page: "Imagine your favorite meaty dishes like burgers and tacos delivering the juicy, delicious taste you know and love, while being better for you and the planet." [0] [0] https://www.beyondmeat.com/products/ https://www.beyondmeat.com/products/
- ianai 7y agoMarketing speak is almost always going to be dubiously credible. It definitely can be made more healthy than red meat in future revisions of the recipe. But it’s undoubtedly better for the planet than to be “raising” and killing cattle for red meat. You don’t need 660 gallons of water to make plants for 1 pound of beyond burger like you do for one pound ground chuck.
- 7y ago
- jstewartmobile 7y agofilthy
- Amygaz 7y agoI am highly skeptical of what this piece is claiming. I doubt it will be as radical as what industrialization did to agriculture a 100 years ago. I also doubt that it will be 5 times cheaper for the consumer. When you include all the costs, not just productions, but government incentives and environmental costs for examples, one might claim that it will be socially cheaper, eventually... One can hope. It will also be easier to transport the system to another planet. But, this is very speculative, and the 5-10 years milestone is very very optimistic and probably takes into account some fairy magic dust here and there.
- SKILNER 7y agoMany comments here by people who would have said the iPhone was impossible, or Tesla could never succeed. Or that the iPhone is actually bad or a Tesla is actually bad. Not a lot of facts though. Such gleeful negativism in our gene pool. "Just because you don't know how to do something doesn't mean you can't."
- hyperpallium 7y agoFinally with Food-as-Software, world is eating the software. The purpose of this article is food deregulation advocacy. If you thought unregulated sugar was bad, just wait. I like the idea of returning pasture etc to forest and bush, but where will the raw materials for food manufacture be sourced?
- fallingfrog 7y agoThis reeks of theranos level obfuscation. It’s exactly the kind of investor-speak you use when trying to separate fools from their money.
- jacknews 7y agoi think this approach might work well to replace milk, juices, pulps, and possibly some ground/processed meats etc. It will take much much longer to replace a good steak, ribs, a crisp apple, etc
- mcculley 7y agoI don't understand why we would need to synthesize proteins. My understanding is that the body breaks proteins down into amino acids and then builds them into the proteins it needs. So could we just ingest amino acids? Would they be simpler to synthesize than proteins?
- Simulacra 7y agoFood production will continue to get cheaper, while food quality will continue to worsen. We are rapidly approaching a future of "let them eat cake" where the non-wealthy subside on fake food.