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Hacking the genome of fungi for smart foods of the future
- LeroyRaz 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn The UK has been eating fungus based meat replacements for decades.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoNo Quorn in the us because of their insistence on marketing it as 'Made from Mushrooms!' when no mushrooms participate in it's manufacture whatsoever. Something broken there, not sure what.
- philipkglass 3y agoQuorn is definitely sold in the US. Here's one of their products sold by Kroger, a large American supermarket chain: https://www.kroger.com/p/quorn-meatless-nuggets/0083373500196 https://www.kroger.com/p/quorn-meatless-nuggets/008337350019...
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoAh! They changed their marketing for America: "Mycoprotein, which is sourced from the earth" Sounds better than 'made from fungus'
- z3ncyberpunk 3y agoPeople love to pretend plant proteins are a 1 to 1 replacement for animal proteins
- elevaet 3y agoThis seems like a much more promising avenue than lab-grown meat. Fungi are already rich in protein, are a bit closer on the tree of life to animals than plants are, are sedentary by default, and are absolute chemical powerhouses. If we can engineer a fungus to produce just the right amino profile, or whatever nutrition you're looking for, then you have a self perpetuating stock that should be much lower tech and simpler to manage than trying to grow muscle tissue in a "petri dish". Heck, we could just be eating more mushrooms, they already are a pretty good source of protein.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoThat's oft-repeated - rich in protein. When they have 10% of the protein of meat. How is that 'rich'? Something like 'nearly no protein, just detectable' would be more honest. Sure, you eat bushels, you get as much protein as say a big mac. Not gonna go there; almost nobody is gonna sacrifice their juicy burger for a quart of spongy fungi. Give up already.
- baxtr 3y agoafaik mushrooms contain about 2-3g protein per 100g. Meat has about 20-25g.
- elevaet 3y agoThat's true, but because mushrooms are so wet (~90% water), if you look at the numbers for dehydrated mushrooms vs meat, mushrooms start looking a lot better. I think dry mushrooms are about 30% protein by weight, which is in the ballpark of dry meat.
- IanCal 3y agoSemi related, I recommend roasting then dehydrating and blending mushrooms if you can. Mushroom powder like this is an incredible addition to many things, though my kids will eat it on its own regardless. A massive pile of mushrooms will become a tiny jar of powder. And less related, lacto ferment them. They're then outrageously good fried.
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- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoPresumably it is still early days for modern agricultural fungus selection. I heard a story that thousands of years ago, corn had six kernels per cobb(might have been seven). Few generations of selective breeding and you produce monstrous varieties. Presumably we could do the same thing with fungus if we saw the economic/moral/sustainability incentives. Edit: an article about ancient corn (https://blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/news/2023/01/24/uf-researchers-discover-missing-piece-in-corns-evolutionary-history/ https://blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/news/2023/01/24/uf-researchers-di...) Teosinte is a small, grass-like plant that forms ears of six to eight kernels. Each kernel is encased in an acorn-like shell. These encased kernels grow on a thin stem, not the thick cob that characterizes modern corn. The whole ear is about two inches long, the kernels no larger than peppercorns. About 10,000 years ago, the Indigenous peoples of what is now southern Mexico began selectively breeding teosinte. Over time, those acorn-like coverings retracted and formed a cob. Now exposed, the kernels were easier to harvest and could be bred for increased number and size, Koch said.
- altairprime 3y agoLab-grown lembas? Excellent news. (See also: "Sourdough", by Robin Sloan.)
- begueradj 3y agoIn this 2019 documentary [1], "Fantastic Fungi", it is briefly mentioned that fungi played a paramount role in the evolution of our brain (intelligence) [1]: https://www.netflix.com/fi-en/title/81183477 https://www.netflix.com/fi-en/title/81183477
- willmadden 3y agoDo you know what the food of the future sounds like to me? Steak.
- javaunsafe2019 3y agoCan you elaborate?
- willmadden 3y agoYes, I do not want to eat genetically engineered fungus or crickets. I prefer a steak.
- throwway120385 3y agoI prefer steak too but I only eat it once or twice a year due to the cost.
- orthecreedence 3y agoAnd hopefully one day we'll live in a world where steak has the incredibly high cost it actually deserves, and people like you can spend your hard-earned money on it still while everyone else eats the fungi equivalent for pennies on the dollar.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoSo you essentially want to go back to the good old days where the rich and powerful gorged and feasted on the finest foods imaginable while the rest of humanity fed on the scraps. You want the common man to be priced out of high quality meat which is both tasty and nutritious. You want them feeding on some amorphous fungal slop made just for them.
- mlyle 3y agoNot the poster: but I want the price of food to represent its true cost and not be artificially cheap (or expensive) because of externalities. 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.
- nelsonic 3y agoIsn’t “hacking fungi” the beginning of the plot of The Last Of Us? Let’s leverage the genome of cordyceps … what could go wrong?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoI thought that was a shot at climate change and natural evolution of the organism adapting to be tolerant of warmer temperatures.
- devb 3y agoIt wasn't a documentary.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoFungi don't really need any help. Only reason they aren't even worse than what was depicted in TLoU is there's really no reason for them to be. There is literally no place on earth where you can stand and not be literally covered in all the fungal spores floating about. They are already ubiquitous. Human mind control would only reduce their fitness.
- Dou8Le 3y agoYep, this is how you can make your own sourdough starter just by mixing some water and flour and leaving it out! Natural yeast spores all around us.
- ktosobcy 3y agoDidn't they eat lot of fungi-based food on the Expanse? usually on the poorer spectrum of society?
- fragmede 3y agoFraming is everything. Lobster was once for poor people, to the point that labor contracts limited how much lobster could be fed to workers. Now it's a delicacy.
- dns_snek 3y agoCaviar too, it used to be food for poor people. https://youtu.be/sClalDEIVbo?t=363 https://youtu.be/sClalDEIVbo?t=363 Crucially, mushrooms aren't just cheap and efficient to produce, they're actually delicious, so I don't get the association with "poor" people unless one's obsessed with vanity.
- throwway120385 3y agoYeah almost everything the belters ate was some combination of soy and fungus. It was the only thing that would grow in the faint light past Mars. Looking forward to finally having a recipe for red kibble.
- undersuit 3y agoMatter of perspective I guess. In the Foundation series the fungal/algae food of the Mycogen district is described as some of the best food the main character has eaten.
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- why_at 3y agoI've always wondered if we could potentially use genetic engineering to open up new possibilities for food. Would it be possible to make some inedible foods edible this way? For instance, what if you could make non-poisonous death cap mushrooms or nightshade berries?
- luqtas 3y agowhy? we have like 200,000 edible plants known so far, yet, we have a pretty monoculture type of behaviour when eating... investing in tech for this type of thing feels a waste, unless we start to live the utopia of infinite resources
- joshuamcginnis 3y agoOne of the first FDA drugs made from fungi was lovastatin, a statin sourced from Aspergillus terreus, a close relative to the Aspergillus in the subject article.
- InSteady 3y agoInteresting tidbit, but penicillin has it beat by about 50 years.
- joshuamcginnis 3y agoIt was the first statin approved by the FDA. Thanks for pointing that out.
- phyzome 3y agoWhat if we grew legumes?
- pedalpete 3y agoThere is a start-up in Australia (https://fablefood.co/ https://fablefood.co/) that makes amazing mushroom like "pulled beef". It's pretty good when you cook it as they recommend, but I also burnt it on a bbq one day and it was AMAZING!!! I've recently been thinking about how we will build a micro-nutrient rich diet through tightly controlling how our foods are manufactured. I'm sure this is being worked on somewhere, but I haven't seen much. Seems like most of the lab-grown stuff is more focused on the lack of land use than the ability to custom generate the food that best suits an individuals diet. Anyone know who's working on this?
- makeitdouble 3y ago> After these changes, the once-white fungi grew red. With minimal preparation -- removing excess water and grinding -- the harvested fungi could be shaped into a patty, then fried into a tempting-looking burger. To me this is were we get lost. There must an uncanny valley for meat, where it's just not great when you're trying to fake it perfectly. Mushroom burgers already exist and they're delicious. I also like the meat burgers, they absolutely don't taste the same, but each side is still great. If we can get more variety on the mushroom side with different textures, tastes, juiciness etc. it would be incredible, and it doesn't need to be red and meat like.
- lovemenot 3y agoI agree with your conclusion, but for a different reason. Having been vegetarian for a long time, I have completely lost the inclination to eat something like meat, even if it isn't meat. I would love to try Impossible, but cannot bring myself to.
- whitakerch 3y agoAgreed. This fake meat movement is so weird to me and is not feeling any gaps for me personally. Apparently it does for others, which is good I guess. Veggie burgers are delicious: black bean, wild rice, chickpea. Why the hell would I want you do make it "bleed" lol.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoBecause some people like the taste of meat but don't want to eat meat. It's that simple.
- makeitdouble 3y agoMy gut feeling is there's a spectrum of people wanting meat replacement, and I'd expect very few to be at the extreme "it must look like meat, feel like meat, taste like meat and smell like meat" (I actually don't expect these people to ever give up meat if they have a choice) We've been through this for other foods: we have artificial vanilla, "I can't believe it's not butter" butter, half cheese, fake crab meat etc. There's probably a large number of people who'd settle for a white tofu if it actually tasted like delicious meat.
- onthecanposting 3y agoI am curious of there is potential for a structural application, like getting the fungi to produce chitin or cellulose. I could imagine providing a light lattice for a structure, spraying it with spores and a nutrient slurry, and then letting it grow and harden into a durable structure.
- a_bonobo 3y agoThere are ways to get fungi to make fake leather: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8950489/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8950489/ There are a few US startups in this space. MycoWorks, Mylo, MycoFutures etc. pp. Some do 'proper' bioengineering, some are more on the chemical side.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoSame article, but with pictures and friendlier layout: https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2024/03/14/its-hearty-its-meaty-its-mold/ https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2024/03/14/its-hearty-its-meaty-i...