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Dairy Made from Grass in a Fermentor
- VBprogrammer 6y agoThe promise of this headline is amazing. Sadly, the linked page appears to be a X-prize / Latitude prize type competition to find a way of doing it, rather than an actual product.
- dukeofdoom 6y agoI would think cows eat more than one type of grass. I went to Mt. Mount Rainier and saw a mountain meadow for the first time, and was blown away how pretty and diverse it was in grasses. So do Swiss cows in the Alps make the best milk?
- spiderfarmer 6y agoIt makes for a great marketing opportunity, yes.
- 082349872349872 6y agoIt's pretty darn good milk, but there are many more differences besides feed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24816367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24816367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23474129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23474129 (I do note that the various cheese producers enforce restrictions on what their dairy suppliers feed, so I'm pretty sure that meadow biome is tastable even in processed form)
- germinalphrase 6y agoI grew up around dairy farmers in the Midwest. Anecdotally, yes - different grasses/plants cause changes in milk production/flavor. However, most is homogenized anyway so the differences don’t really matter unless it’s a specialty product.
- jjeaff 6y agoYou can really tell when your milk cow has discovered a patch of wild onions. Yuck.
- war1025 6y agoMy mom grew up on a dairy farm and said you could always tell when the cows got into the wild onions. Diversity is good, but flavors do come through in the milk, so there are some things that you want to avoid.
- DFHippie 6y agoThat's an event in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles": a cow at a dairy has eaten some wild garlic and the entire batch of milk is ruined. Everyone has to go out and walk the fields in a line to root out any garlic they come across. Full disclosure: I never finished the book (my attention wandered elsewhere), but I did get as far as this scene. ETA: Around this part of the book the words "hagrid" and "dumbledore" appear, suggesting J.K. Rowling was reading this around when she named the characters in Harry Potter.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoPfft. Should have made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayran from that and market it as a rare speciality :-)
- drjasonharrison 6y agoMost North American dairy cows eat corn, wheat, barley, and oat plants. Everything from just above the ground, chopped and pickled (silage). Stalk, ears, silk etc. Sometimes food or brewing waste(1). Plus some vitamins and minerals and salts(2). Plus some palm oil(3). 1. https://www.usdairy.com/news-articles/do-dairy-cows-eat-food-people-could-eat https://www.usdairy.com/news-articles/do-dairy-cows-eat-food... 2. http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/themes/documents/PUB6/P620.htm http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/themes/documents/PUB6/P620.htm 3. https://www.thetelegram.com/business/local-business/sylvain-charlebois-the-hard-truth-about-butter-in-canada-555678/ https://www.thetelegram.com/business/local-business/sylvain-...
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoNot necessarily. Look for something like this https://www.tasteatlas.com/heumilch https://www.tasteatlas.com/heumilch which is about not feeding them with other stuff during winter, bad weather or such. Which is more expensive, complicated (because storage requirements of dry hay). But tastes good! Also for Yoghurt made from that. I absolutely prefer it over any other type of milk.
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoIt will take a lot more than a single fungus to do the trick. Lactation and digestion in cows involve completely differently pathways. I am not sure why they insist on fungus, perhaps they are referring to genetically engineered yeast? Milk is primarily suspended fat in water. What is possible is to use a bacteria/microbe to convert plant matter to fat first and then use traditional industrial machinery to disperse it into water. However, you still need to find a way to remove the fiber that remains. Perhaps using a squeezer to extract the fats. All these will not truly replace real dairy, the result will be more akin to almond milk. Also, 2.5 million is absolutely peanuts. You need at least a magnitude higher funding unless you plan to outsource everything to India. If you want an exact replica of the cow mammalian milk production process that is molecule-to-molecule compatible then you need at least two dozen tissue engineers. This is slightly beyond what a "fungus" to do.
- Wheaties466 6y agoI think they might be referring to yeast. I know thats how Impossible "cracked the code" to making heme. seems to be a very ambitious project but im hopeful! This makes me want to do more research into how Perfect Day makes their Lab dairy.
- tom_mellior 6y ago> Milk is primarily suspended fat in water. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100+g+cow%27s+milk https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100+g+cow%27s+milk says it's primarily carbohydrates (7g/100g), protein (4g), and a bit of fat (2g) suspended in water. Also, the website is somewhat confusing, but poking around a bit it looks like they are targeting the production of protein (casein specifically), not fat. You may be attacking a strawman here... > You need at least a magnitude higher funding unless you plan to outsource everything to India. ... as well as a large fraction of the world's population, for no discernible reason.
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoCasein plays an important role in the meltiness of cheese[1] so it makes sense they'd want to replicate it (lots of almost-but-not-quite-vegan cheese alternatives like Trader Joe's almond cheese have ~1% casein in them for this reason). 1: https://www.finecooking.com/article/the-science-of-melting-cheese https://www.finecooking.com/article/the-science-of-melting-c...
- GZJOHN 6y agoThis is complete nonsense right on the top of the page: "Those Vegan Cowboys strive for healthy products with less saturated fats, which are suitable for people with lactose intolerance. " Lactose is a sugar and has nothing to do with saturated fat. If they don't understand one of the most fundamental qualities of milk how can they ever hope to recreate it?
- tom_mellior 6y agoI noticed the same, but I think some benefit of a doubt needs to be given because the text was probably written by someone who is not a native speaker of English. I think the phrasing is off, and they meant "products with less saturated fats, and in addition which are suitable for people with lactose intolerance". As in, listing two distinct properties, not one property implying the other.
- sva_ 6y agoExactly. The 'which' probably refers to 'healthy products', rather than to 'saturated fats'.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 6y agoI think you're just reading this incorrectly. It should be read as "thing which has quality A, and quality B" (where A is low saturated fat and B is no lactose), not "quality A which implies quality B".
- ricardobeat 6y agoLooks like 'dutch english' or maybe even an automated translation - google translate makes the same mistake of using 'products xx, which can...' instead of 'products xx, that can...'
- abeppu 6y agoThis sounds cool, but ... it's a little mystifying to me why food is the area where people are willing to work the hardest to recreate traditional products developed in a period where reality was just very different. I've never heard of anyone working to produce a vegan wool sweater with plant derived components to recreate a fair isle sweater, or a vegan cordovan leather shoe that lasts decades. Why do we put so much energy into trying to recreate exactly the experience of traditional animal based food products? I think most of us can be nostalgic for foods that didn't exist until the latter half of the 20th century. Pioneering chefs and restaurants create amazing experiences from flavors and textures that are new, unfamiliar, and surprising (maybe a point of comparison would be the fermentation experimentation that Noma got so much media for). So it's not that we can't really love new foods. If this energy and innovative spirit was directed differently, I wonder what new things we might be enjoying which are very different from traditional concepts but in many ways better, and which the next generation will consider foundational?
- sandworm101 6y ago>> recreate traditional products developed in a period where reality was just very different. Ever see a house with the Tesla solar roofing shingles? There is a line of thought that for customers to accept a new product it must be as externally similar as possible to a preexisting one, even if doing so means degrading the performance or practicality of that product.
- sojsurf 6y agoIt's easy to forget that old designs are not necessarily bad designs. The "original" shingles are wooden shingles, clay half-pipes, and slate shingles. These have some good things going for them: - Modular design makes transportation, storage and installation simple. - Modular design makes it easy to replace just a small section. - Simple design means it's easy to understand edge cases and failure modes. - Simple, standardized shapes make it easy to replace parts even if the original manufacturer is out of business. I can replace a shingle on a 100-year-old roof, no questions asked. What will people do when one or two of their custom Tesla roof shingles fail in 20 years? 30 years? Newer (or fancier) is not always better.
- pstuart 6y agoAn older effort for a somewhat similar goal: https://www.realvegancheese.org/ https://www.realvegancheese.org/
- kabdib 6y agoA science fiction story about synthetic milk, rather funny and one of my favorites: https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v62n06_1959-02_EXciter-LennyS/page/n69/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v62n06_1959-02_EXcite...
- Semiapies 6y agoThis story was my first thought when I saw the headline.
- dwd 6y agoThe first thing I thought of was the Cloaca (poop machine) at MONA Hobart which is a functional digestive system. The output is not quite as palatable.
- jbrot 6y agoThat was a fun read, thanks for sharing! Rather amusing to see how the 1959 story imagines money in 1996—Knox notes each researcher on the moon base costs “90 dollars a day” implying that that is a huge expense.
- amanaplanacanal 6y agoThe world was effectively still on a gold standard back then. Wrapping the mind around inflation seems to be innately very hard to do.
- tasogare 6y agoThat probably won’t work, and it will no be allowed to be marketed as milk in France (thanks to the loi relative à la transparence de l'information sur les produits agricoles et alimentaires). I hope EU and other countries have similar laws to protect their consumers.
- gmuslera 6y agoThey are focusing on the wrong end of the problem. Why try to produce cow milk/cheese? If they want a make food, they should start trying to make human milk, or Matrix's Tasty Wheat. Once you can turn grass or some easy to grow vegetable into everything our body needs you can add flavoring/texture later.