4 ms·

"Homogenized bacterial carcasses" (the article's words, not mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer food product. It's not the sort of thi

"Homogenized bacterial carcasses" (the article's words, not mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer food product. It's not the sort of thing that humans have evolved to eat in bulk quantities, and unless the stuff is extremely well characterized, I'd be wary of small-molecule toxins and inflammatory agents, like lipopolysaccharides. The article also notes that: > Today, almost half the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that, an astounding 80% is dedicated to livestock grazing and animal feed If this invention can produce protein at a low enough cost -- which seems doubtful -- it might be interesting as a form of protein for animal feed. The trouble is that protein sources for animal feed are typically extremely cheap. For instance, "peanut cake" is a byproduct of peanut oil manufacture. It's what's left over after the oil is extracted, and it's ~35% protein, full of vitamins, and almost as cheap as dirt. I don't see how something made in a vat can compete with that. I suppose the "homogenized bacterial carcasses" could also be purified and broken down into their constituent amino acids, which would be useful if somewhat more niche.

krunck 2y ago
'"Homogenized bacterial carcasses" (the article's words, not mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer food product.' These seem to sell fine: compressed curdled cow leakage that was left on a shelf to grow mold for up to a few years - cheese wheat slurry foamed by bacterial activity then baked - bread
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  The two of those are about as old as human civilization, and can be made with stone age tech. Besides, the primaries are milk and wheat -- and you can make bread and cheese wholly without yeast and mold. (Tortillas, ricotta, etc.) I don't think that humans have ever consumed bulk bacteria as a food source.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > The two of those are about as old as human civilization, and can be made with stone age tech. Mainly demonstrating you can literally sell rotten milk so long as you label it "traditional". > I don't think that humans have ever consumed bulk bacteria as a food source. We never communicated across the globe by swiping our fingers across small sheets of transparent fused sand with glowing lights behind them, until one day we did. We never survived having our heart removed and a different one put in its place, until one day we did. We never saw the far side of the moon, until one day we did. But, as it happens, we have already done this with algae: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirulina_(dietary_supplement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirulina_(dietary_supplement) Not all changes are progress, but all progress involves change.
    - bagful 2y ago
      “Rotting” has a connotation of uncontrolled decay; cheesemaking is a well controlled process that enhances the base material.
    - antidiot 2y ago
      > Mainly demonstrating you can literally sell rotten milk so long as you label it "traditional". Cheese is the coagulated protein of fermented milk, not rotten milk. If it was rotten nobody would be able to eat it without dying often. Cheese is traditional, it's one of the main ways that diverse cultures around the world have harnessed the activity of bacteria to transform food and preserve it or alter its organoleptic qualities to make it more pleasant to eat. Works great without the need for experimental tech of dubious long-term safety, too.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        > Cheese is the coagulated protein of fermented milk, not rotten milk. If it was rotten nobody would be able to eat it without dying often. The difference is fundamentally if the result is one you like. I ferment, you grew a culture, they let their food rot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation > Works great without the need for experimental tech of dubious long-term safety, too. Several thousands of years ago, probably by some combination of accident and disaster (or possibly just a dare) that resulted in some humans sucking on a wild aurochs' teat, followed by an unknown duration (estimated to be a few thousand years) of this drink not being consumable by adults (adult lactose tolerance is a relatively recent mutation in humans) before someone in a relatively cool climate forgot to add salt to the cow stomach they were storing it in, the salt having been necessary for preservation in a hot climate but also prevented the necessary bacteria for cheese from growing. Not that any of them at the time knew any of that, because they had no means to see bacteria, let alone perform tests for lactose in the milk and lactase in the drinkers. The cows now milk themselves thanks to tech having replaced the need for the milkmaids whose experience catching cowpox inspired the first smallpox vaccine ("vacca" being the latin for cow). Basically everything invented before the industrial revolution was people guessing wildly, and if their guesses didn't kill them then people copied it. That is the tradition that led to this: a tradition of FAFO and YOLO.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    > I don't think that humans have ever consumed bulk bacteria as a food source. Spirulina, nostoc, fat choy. They're relatively niche though.
    - kragen 2y ago
      yogurt isn't niche
      - throwup238 2y ago
        Yogurt is bulk animal fat, cultured with a tiny bit of bacteria. It’s not bulk bacteria.
        kragen 2y ago
        your comment is incorrect from beginning to end - yogurt is not animal fat; it's milk, with or without the fat, but the crucial part for yogurtmaking is the lactose and protein, because that's what the bacteria eat - 'animal fat' is ambiguous but usually refers to adipose tissue cut from the body of an animal, which yogurt essentially never contains - while initially you inoculate the yogurt with a tiny quantity of bacteria, they multiply exponentially, doubling about 20 times, or a factor of a million. most of the bacteria die before yogurtmaking is complete, but the majority of the non-liquid mass of the yogurt at the end consists of living or dead bacteria
        throwup238 2y ago
        It's still not bulk bacteria.
        kragen 2y ago
        [flagged]
        throwup238 2y ago
  - tomcam 2y ago
    > I don't think that humans have ever consumed bulk bacteria as a food source. I’ve been incarcerated in the USA and I think maybe that characterization is false :0
- goda90 2y ago
  Kinda funny that you got the kingdoms backwards there. Cheese is cultured by bacteria, not mold(a fungus). Bread is leavened by yeast(a fungus) not bacteria.
  - tomjakubowski 2y ago
    Cheeses grow mold, too. In some cases it's intentional or even desirable. And see my sibling comment about bacterially-leavened bread.
    - goda90 2y ago
      Well the mold is just an add-on to the cheese in those cases, not the cause of it becoming cheese.
      - kragen 2y ago
        rennin is the cause of it becoming cheese, except for acid-curdled cheeses like paneer. bacteria and mold don't have much to do with it, traditionally, although nowadays you can buy vegan rennin made by genetically engineered bacteria instead of extracted from the stomachs of slaughtered calves
- tomjakubowski 2y ago
  Bacterially-leavened bread, fascinating! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt-rising_bread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt-rising_bread
- xedrac 2y ago
  Yes, but cheese and bread taste amazing.
  - im3w1l 2y ago
    Yup, at the end of the day people will eat it if it's tasty and safe.
    - solardev 2y ago
      It doesn't even have to be safe. Why are we so worried about bacteria soup when millions drink carbonated chemical syrups every day known to cause a variety of diseases? People will respond to anything you can market effectively and sell for cheap. You're not targeting their analytical brain, just their primitive taste buds that can be easily manipulated.
- Aperocky 2y ago
  Yeast is not bacteria, nor is mold.
gs17 2y ago
Most of their actual products making it to market in some way have been in pop-up stores in Singapore, so they're definitely not targeting something as low-end as animal feed.
0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
People already consume spirulina and Vegemite. I assume there are other microorganisms consumed in bulk. Just seems a matter of getting something edible, cheap, and can claim some minor lifestyle win (healthy, nutritionally complete, low effort preparation, etc)
- floam 2y ago
  I’m not sure you could Stockholm a free population into desiring Vegemite, outside a prison or convict camp type setting.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    It is Australian. So, just a few generations removed from the inmates and it is found desirable.
  - solardev 2y ago
    Just give them a big island full of venomous everything and soon they'll magically develop Vegemite all on their own. I guess when death is always just around the corner, you eat what you can...
- tuatoru 2y ago
  Trivium: vegemite was originally slated to be called "parwill" after an earlier product called marmite ("ma might, but pa will"). But the company didn't like this Boaty McBoatface winner of the naming competition and used vegemite instead.
hombre_fatal 2y ago
> It's not the sort of thing that humans have evolved to eat in bulk quantities Meh, our bodies can't even eat fatty meat / saturated fat in bulk quantities because it reduces liver LDL receptor expression that keeps ApoB in our arteries which lays down plaque and is independently causal for heart disease, and yet that fact that we've known for half a century doesn't stop Americans from speedrunning atherosclerosis. Novel foods that our bodies have no evolutionary experience with have an advantage over familiar foods.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Isn't the newer science that there is no relation between dietary cholesterol and atherosclerosis, except in people who already have elevated cholesterol levels?
  - DennisP 2y ago
    But GP mentioned saturated fat, not dietary cholesterol.
- kragen 2y ago
  i'd like to read more about this; do you have a doi?
Spivak 2y ago
I think it's just a branding thing. If you can give it a household name that sticks you'll be fine. Sodium bicarbonate vs baking soda, MSG vs seaweed salt, textured dairy protein solution vs milk. Impossible burger vs pea-protein patty. All the cool stuff happening in food these days is more chemistry than cooking.
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
  Agreed that branding would largely solve this. Look at the Quorn meat substitute, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein
ghxst 2y ago
I've never heard of this "peanut cake" but am very interested, does it taste horrible or what's the reasons that it's not sold for humans to eat?
- timschmidt 2y ago
  It may be: https://pb2foods.com/ https://pb2foods.com/
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  It's dry, full of fiber, and resembles roofing tiles -- but the main problem is that it's too often contaminated with excessive amounts of aflatoxin. See: https://www.feedipedia.org/node/699 https://www.feedipedia.org/node/699 Current market price is around $350/ton, though, which makes it one of the cheapest protein sources around... Edited to add: There's also soybean oil cake, sunflower oil cake, and others. Sunflower cake might be interesting as a low cost food/protein supplement in humans.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Not sure it is fully identical, but you can purchase peanut powder in stores. It is effectively powdered peanut butter. Tastes fine, but it seems like it would be tough to make a meal out of it. More a supplemental protein source you can mix into other foods. I last bought some years ago, but a tub of the stuff was very affordable.
JoshTriplett 2y ago
> For instance, "peanut cake" is a byproduct of peanut oil manufacture. It's what's left over after the oil is extracted, and it's ~35% protein, full of vitamins, and almost as cheap as dirt. I don't see how something made in a vat can compete with that. For animal feed, perhaps. For human consumption, at a minimum, it'd be nice to have a variety of alternatives, such as for people who can't eat peanuts.
- frabert 2y ago
  They're talking about animal feed
tomcam 2y ago
> "Homogenized bacterial carcasses" (the article's words, not mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer food product. Also, meat tastes really, really good
Reason077 2y ago
> “Homogenized bacterial carcasses" (the article's words, not mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer food product.” Doesn’t sound all that different to fermented vat-grown single-cell mycelium protein, which is commercially successful in the UK under the “Quorn” brand name.
- solardev 2y ago
  That stuff always smells like stinky socks to me. I take it out of the box and immediately want to vomit... do others not notice that? I wonder if I have some strange genetic aversion to it.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Interesting; I have no such reaction, and I actually miss it (they don't sell it in Germany).
    - solardev 2y ago
      No? Interesting. I think they actually taste pretty good and the texture's decent (as a vegetarian I eat a lot of fake meats), but the smell is so terribly off-putting I couldn't get myself to keep eating them. Weird. Wonder if I just got a bad batch or something...
      - ben_w 2y ago
        > Wonder if I just got a bad batch or something... Perhaps, but people do have diverse senses of smell, so it's entirely possible you can smell an odour that I can't. Or that you'll find it bad and I won't. (Weird fact about me: to me, wet dog smell is pleasant and indistinguishable from scrambled eggs).
- NoGravitas 2y ago
  I saw another mycelium protein product that branded the ingredient as "mushroom root". Which is a bit of poetic license, but I'd allow it.
DennisP 2y ago
I think fishmeal is mostly smaller fish. And as the article mentions, it'd be great if we could replace the enormous land area we devote to growing grains for animal feed. It doesn't sound like they've solved that completely, you probably need carbs and fiber...but it's a good start. They seem to be aware of safety issues: > “There were many boxes that had to be ticked,” Pitkänen told me. “Growth, safety, nutrition. All bacteria have mechanisms they use to hide and fight, a kind of chemical warfare. You need to find one that’s a pacifist.” > ...they found their bacterium in the pewter blue shallows of the Baltic.
ThrowawayR2 2y ago
> "'Homogenized bacterial carcasses' (the article's words, not mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer food product." Isn't that what Vegemite / Marmite is? I seem to recall that brewers' yeast was the main ingredient.

krunck 2y ago

'"Homogenized bacterial carcasses" (the article's words, not mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer food product.' These seem to sell fine: compressed curdled cow leakage that was left on a shelf to grow mold for up to a few years - cheese wheat slurry foamed by bacterial activity then baked - bread

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
The two of those are about as old as human civilization, and can be made with stone age tech. Besides, the primaries are milk and wheat -- and you can make bread and cheese wholly without yeast and mold. (Tortillas, ricotta, etc.) I don't think that humans have ever consumed bulk bacteria as a food source.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > The two of those are about as old as human civilization, and can be made with stone age tech. Mainly demonstrating you can literally sell rotten milk so long as you label it "traditional". > I don't think that humans have ever consumed bulk bacteria as a food source. We never communicated across the globe by swiping our fingers across small sheets of transparent fused sand with glowing lights behind them, until one day we did. We never survived having our heart removed and a different one put in its place, until one day we did. We never saw the far side of the moon, until one day we did. But, as it happens, we have already done this with algae: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirulina_(dietary_supplement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirulina_(dietary_supplement) Not all changes are progress, but all progress involves change.
  - bagful 2y ago
    “Rotting” has a connotation of uncontrolled decay; cheesemaking is a well controlled process that enhances the base material.
  - antidiot 2y ago
    > Mainly demonstrating you can literally sell rotten milk so long as you label it "traditional". Cheese is the coagulated protein of fermented milk, not rotten milk. If it was rotten nobody would be able to eat it without dying often. Cheese is traditional, it's one of the main ways that diverse cultures around the world have harnessed the activity of bacteria to transform food and preserve it or alter its organoleptic qualities to make it more pleasant to eat. Works great without the need for experimental tech of dubious long-term safety, too.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > Cheese is the coagulated protein of fermented milk, not rotten milk. If it was rotten nobody would be able to eat it without dying often. The difference is fundamentally if the result is one you like. I ferment, you grew a culture, they let their food rot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation > Works great without the need for experimental tech of dubious long-term safety, too. Several thousands of years ago, probably by some combination of accident and disaster (or possibly just a dare) that resulted in some humans sucking on a wild aurochs' teat, followed by an unknown duration (estimated to be a few thousand years) of this drink not being consumable by adults (adult lactose tolerance is a relatively recent mutation in humans) before someone in a relatively cool climate forgot to add salt to the cow stomach they were storing it in, the salt having been necessary for preservation in a hot climate but also prevented the necessary bacteria for cheese from growing. Not that any of them at the time knew any of that, because they had no means to see bacteria, let alone perform tests for lactose in the milk and lactase in the drinkers. The cows now milk themselves thanks to tech having replaced the need for the milkmaids whose experience catching cowpox inspired the first smallpox vaccine ("vacca" being the latin for cow). Basically everything invented before the industrial revolution was people guessing wildly, and if their guesses didn't kill them then people copied it. That is the tradition that led to this: a tradition of FAFO and YOLO.
- throwup238 2y ago
  > I don't think that humans have ever consumed bulk bacteria as a food source. Spirulina, nostoc, fat choy. They're relatively niche though.
  - kragen 2y ago
    yogurt isn't niche
    - throwup238 2y ago
      Yogurt is bulk animal fat, cultured with a tiny bit of bacteria. It’s not bulk bacteria.
      - kragen 2y ago
        your comment is incorrect from beginning to end - yogurt is not animal fat; it's milk, with or without the fat, but the crucial part for yogurtmaking is the lactose and protein, because that's what the bacteria eat - 'animal fat' is ambiguous but usually refers to adipose tissue cut from the body of an animal, which yogurt essentially never contains - while initially you inoculate the yogurt with a tiny quantity of bacteria, they multiply exponentially, doubling about 20 times, or a factor of a million. most of the bacteria die before yogurtmaking is complete, but the majority of the non-liquid mass of the yogurt at the end consists of living or dead bacteria
        throwup238 2y ago
        It's still not bulk bacteria.
        kragen 2y ago
        [flagged]
        throwup238 2y ago
- tomcam 2y ago
  > I don't think that humans have ever consumed bulk bacteria as a food source. I’ve been incarcerated in the USA and I think maybe that characterization is false :0
goda90 2y ago
Kinda funny that you got the kingdoms backwards there. Cheese is cultured by bacteria, not mold(a fungus). Bread is leavened by yeast(a fungus) not bacteria.
- tomjakubowski 2y ago
  Cheeses grow mold, too. In some cases it's intentional or even desirable. And see my sibling comment about bacterially-leavened bread.
  - goda90 2y ago
    Well the mold is just an add-on to the cheese in those cases, not the cause of it becoming cheese.
    - kragen 2y ago
      rennin is the cause of it becoming cheese, except for acid-curdled cheeses like paneer. bacteria and mold don't have much to do with it, traditionally, although nowadays you can buy vegan rennin made by genetically engineered bacteria instead of extracted from the stomachs of slaughtered calves
tomjakubowski 2y ago
Bacterially-leavened bread, fascinating! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt-rising_bread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt-rising_bread
xedrac 2y ago
Yes, but cheese and bread taste amazing.
- im3w1l 2y ago
  Yup, at the end of the day people will eat it if it's tasty and safe.
  - solardev 2y ago
    It doesn't even have to be safe. Why are we so worried about bacteria soup when millions drink carbonated chemical syrups every day known to cause a variety of diseases? People will respond to anything you can market effectively and sell for cheap. You're not targeting their analytical brain, just their primitive taste buds that can be easily manipulated.
Aperocky 2y ago
Yeast is not bacteria, nor is mold.

gs17 2y ago

Most of their actual products making it to market in some way have been in pop-up stores in Singapore, so they're definitely not targeting something as low-end as animal feed.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago

People already consume spirulina and Vegemite. I assume there are other microorganisms consumed in bulk. Just seems a matter of getting something edible, cheap, and can claim some minor lifestyle win (healthy, nutritionally complete, low effort preparation, etc)

floam 2y ago
I’m not sure you could Stockholm a free population into desiring Vegemite, outside a prison or convict camp type setting.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  It is Australian. So, just a few generations removed from the inmates and it is found desirable.
- solardev 2y ago
  Just give them a big island full of venomous everything and soon they'll magically develop Vegemite all on their own. I guess when death is always just around the corner, you eat what you can...
tuatoru 2y ago
Trivium: vegemite was originally slated to be called "parwill" after an earlier product called marmite ("ma might, but pa will"). But the company didn't like this Boaty McBoatface winner of the naming competition and used vegemite instead.

hombre_fatal 2y ago

> It's not the sort of thing that humans have evolved to eat in bulk quantities Meh, our bodies can't even eat fatty meat / saturated fat in bulk quantities because it reduces liver LDL receptor expression that keeps ApoB in our arteries which lays down plaque and is independently causal for heart disease, and yet that fact that we've known for half a century doesn't stop Americans from speedrunning atherosclerosis. Novel foods that our bodies have no evolutionary experience with have an advantage over familiar foods.

tsimionescu 2y ago
Isn't the newer science that there is no relation between dietary cholesterol and atherosclerosis, except in people who already have elevated cholesterol levels?
- DennisP 2y ago
  But GP mentioned saturated fat, not dietary cholesterol.
kragen 2y ago
i'd like to read more about this; do you have a doi?

Spivak 2y ago

I think it's just a branding thing. If you can give it a household name that sticks you'll be fine. Sodium bicarbonate vs baking soda, MSG vs seaweed salt, textured dairy protein solution vs milk. Impossible burger vs pea-protein patty. All the cool stuff happening in food these days is more chemistry than cooking.

JoshTriplett 2y ago
Agreed that branding would largely solve this. Look at the Quorn meat substitute, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein

ghxst 2y ago

I've never heard of this "peanut cake" but am very interested, does it taste horrible or what's the reasons that it's not sold for humans to eat?

timschmidt 2y ago
It may be: https://pb2foods.com/ https://pb2foods.com/
A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
It's dry, full of fiber, and resembles roofing tiles -- but the main problem is that it's too often contaminated with excessive amounts of aflatoxin. See: https://www.feedipedia.org/node/699 https://www.feedipedia.org/node/699 Current market price is around $350/ton, though, which makes it one of the cheapest protein sources around... Edited to add: There's also soybean oil cake, sunflower oil cake, and others. Sunflower cake might be interesting as a low cost food/protein supplement in humans.
0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
Not sure it is fully identical, but you can purchase peanut powder in stores. It is effectively powdered peanut butter. Tastes fine, but it seems like it would be tough to make a meal out of it. More a supplemental protein source you can mix into other foods. I last bought some years ago, but a tub of the stuff was very affordable.

JoshTriplett 2y ago

> For instance, "peanut cake" is a byproduct of peanut oil manufacture. It's what's left over after the oil is extracted, and it's ~35% protein, full of vitamins, and almost as cheap as dirt. I don't see how something made in a vat can compete with that. For animal feed, perhaps. For human consumption, at a minimum, it'd be nice to have a variety of alternatives, such as for people who can't eat peanuts.

frabert 2y ago
They're talking about animal feed

tomcam 2y ago

> "Homogenized bacterial carcasses" (the article's words, not mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer food product. Also, meat tastes really, really good

Reason077 2y ago

> “Homogenized bacterial carcasses" (the article's words, not mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer food product.” Doesn’t sound all that different to fermented vat-grown single-cell mycelium protein, which is commercially successful in the UK under the “Quorn” brand name.

solardev 2y ago
That stuff always smells like stinky socks to me. I take it out of the box and immediately want to vomit... do others not notice that? I wonder if I have some strange genetic aversion to it.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Interesting; I have no such reaction, and I actually miss it (they don't sell it in Germany).
  - solardev 2y ago
    No? Interesting. I think they actually taste pretty good and the texture's decent (as a vegetarian I eat a lot of fake meats), but the smell is so terribly off-putting I couldn't get myself to keep eating them. Weird. Wonder if I just got a bad batch or something...
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > Wonder if I just got a bad batch or something... Perhaps, but people do have diverse senses of smell, so it's entirely possible you can smell an odour that I can't. Or that you'll find it bad and I won't. (Weird fact about me: to me, wet dog smell is pleasant and indistinguishable from scrambled eggs).
NoGravitas 2y ago
I saw another mycelium protein product that branded the ingredient as "mushroom root". Which is a bit of poetic license, but I'd allow it.

DennisP 2y ago

I think fishmeal is mostly smaller fish. And as the article mentions, it'd be great if we could replace the enormous land area we devote to growing grains for animal feed. It doesn't sound like they've solved that completely, you probably need carbs and fiber...but it's a good start. They seem to be aware of safety issues: > “There were many boxes that had to be ticked,” Pitkänen told me. “Growth, safety, nutrition. All bacteria have mechanisms they use to hide and fight, a kind of chemical warfare. You need to find one that’s a pacifist.” > ...they found their bacterium in the pewter blue shallows of the Baltic.

ThrowawayR2 2y ago

> "'Homogenized bacterial carcasses' (the article's words, not mine,) are going to be an extremely tough sell as a consumer food product." Isn't that what Vegemite / Marmite is? I seem to recall that brewers' yeast was the main ingredient.