4 ms·

Don't really think that's going to happen. Pork is one of the cheapest meats you can raise. Just the spore costs to produce a lb of mushrooms can rival the to

Don't really think that's going to happen. Pork is one of the cheapest meats you can raise. Just the spore costs to produce a lb of mushrooms can rival the total cost to raise a lb of pork (commercial pork can be as cheap as $64/CWT carcass weight - so $0.64/lb. Mushroom spore can be as high as $1.00 in spore costs to generate 1lb of mushroom). Processing the meat will raise costs, but it's hardly like mushrooms have low care/processing costs (If you don't know, they often require clean room levels of care to ensure proper spores without contamination). There's a reason white mushrooms (unsliced) goes for $4.49/lb at my local Kroger, and the boneless pork goes for $1.99/lb. I don't see this ever being cheaper.

sibane 4y ago
What do you mean by spore costs? Wouldn't most large scale farming operations work with liquid cultures based on live mycelium? Liquid cultures are easy to multiply and inject into pasteurized substrate with needles. Once the mycelium has taken over the growing medium, it also no longer needs to be kept in a fully sterile environment. I'm not at all convinced a pound of mushrooms is worth that much more than pork. Are you sure it's not the meat industry subsidies that are keeping the price down?
- VLM 4y ago
  There don't seem to be subsidies for Pork. There was a "Small Hog Operation Payment" last century that paid $10 per hog for the first 500 hogs sold by a farm, according to wikipedia, but they got rid of that a long time ago. That is well under 10% the sale price of a hog. The problem mushrooms have is scale, much like spices. We can grow 20K acres of mechanized corn, but mushrooms are a little less mechanized. So its to be expected for mushrooms to cost as much as basil or cilantro per pound.
binbashthefash 4y ago
It's the exact opposite where I'm at in the EU. I picked up 400 grams of king oysters from the market for 2 euros yesterday.

sibane 4y ago

What do you mean by spore costs? Wouldn't most large scale farming operations work with liquid cultures based on live mycelium? Liquid cultures are easy to multiply and inject into pasteurized substrate with needles. Once the mycelium has taken over the growing medium, it also no longer needs to be kept in a fully sterile environment. I'm not at all convinced a pound of mushrooms is worth that much more than pork. Are you sure it's not the meat industry subsidies that are keeping the price down?

VLM 4y ago
There don't seem to be subsidies for Pork. There was a "Small Hog Operation Payment" last century that paid $10 per hog for the first 500 hogs sold by a farm, according to wikipedia, but they got rid of that a long time ago. That is well under 10% the sale price of a hog. The problem mushrooms have is scale, much like spices. We can grow 20K acres of mechanized corn, but mushrooms are a little less mechanized. So its to be expected for mushrooms to cost as much as basil or cilantro per pound.

binbashthefash 4y ago

It's the exact opposite where I'm at in the EU. I picked up 400 grams of king oysters from the market for 2 euros yesterday.