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They've altered Fusarium venenatum which is currently what Quorn utilizes in its products. "The production process of gene-edited MP is more environmentally fri
by SapporoChris 10mo ago
They've altered Fusarium venenatum which is currently what Quorn utilizes in its products.
"The production process of gene-edited MP is more environmentally friendly than chicken meat and cell-cultured meat."
That's good news, if they get to the point where it is more economically friendly than chicken meat it will be great news.
- shrubble 10mo agoThere’s little chance that the statement is true. Chickens kept in a backyard can live on bugs and kitchen scraps and there’s no delivery cost for eggs or eventual meat.
- truekonrads 10mo agoThis is not how the overwhelming majority of chickens live - they live in high intensity farm operations in horrible conditions
- asterix_pano 10mo agoThat is not how most of the chicken is raised (over 70 billions are slaughtered per year).
- Certhas 10mo agoIf all the meat you eat is from chicken raised in your backyard , that's environmentally perfect. In the US per capita chicken consumption is 100 pounds per year.
- johanvts 10mo agoThats about 45kg, I wish I had that average American backyard.
- tdb7893 10mo agoA negligible fraction of chicken production is backyard operations. Any quote talking about chicken production is referencing how they are actually produced, which is generally huge industrialized farms (often hundreds of thousands to millions of birds a year).
- exe34 10mo agohow big is your backyard?
- swiftcoder 10mo agoBack of the envelope, for a family of 4 eating US quantities of chicken... you need to be slaughtering ~100 chickens per year. In a homesteading setting it usually takes a chicken about 12 weeks to reach slaughter weight, so you need to be raising a minimum of 25 at any time. That's a pretty substantial backyard operation.
- lm28469 10mo agoWell that's how we lived for thousands of year, we only eat so much meat now because of the insane industrial processes we developed around animals.
- _dark_matter_ 10mo agoWild to think that there's 6-7 chickens for every human in America at all times
- swiftcoder 10mo agoIn commercial operations they are also raising chickens much faster - maybe only 6 weeks for a meat chicken, so you only need half as many at any one time
- vintermann 10mo agoIf everyone had backyard chicken operations on that scale, I suspect we'd have a lot more disease problems! Decentralized isn't necessarily better for disease, if the overall scale stays the same. At least where I live, you can't have chickens in quite the same way our great-grandparents had. You need to comply with veterinary regulation for one, and for good reasons.
- a96 10mo agoIf every yard in a town or city was full of chickens, I wouldn't call it decentralized. Just one very broad centre.
- 10mo ago
- jrjeksjd8d 10mo agoAmericans simply need to release chickens into the urban environment the way they released domesticated pigeons. Soon any swift child will be able to catch a feral chicken and break it's neck on the way home from school, providing protein for the whole family.
- Brendinooo 10mo agoChicken used to be a very expensive meat when they were treated like this. It didn’t become the cheapest meat until the 1990s, and that’s because of the massive efforts that were put into creating the Cornish cross breed and raising them at scale.
- buu700 10mo agoNeurospora crassa is also pretty good. Meati sells slabs of it.
- Flere-Imsaho 10mo agoI would love to eat meat free alternatives. Quorn gives me IBS. Same with the highly processed meat free "meat". Beans are my basic goto for protein plus eggs.
- Semaphor 10mo agoHave you tried dehydrated granules from 90% pea protein, 10% jackfruit? It has no weird additional ingredients besides those two and for my wife and I has replaced ground beef except for burgers
- lukas099 10mo agoWhere do you even get that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.
- Semaphor 10mo agoI get the brand Lotao, but they are German (also available in UK IIRC). Our drug store DM also has a house brand of it. I assumed that if there are 2, there are probably more elsewhere ;)
- Flere-Imsaho 10mo agoThis one? https://www.lotao.com/en/pages/english https://www.lotao.com/en/pages/english
- Semaphor 10mo agoYeah that's the one, I have it on subscription, 1kg/2 months (about 3kg of finished product) But considering the simplicity of the product, I assume any brand will be very similar.
- tdeck 10mo agoI've tried pea protein products before that had a kind of bitter taste. What is the flavor profile like?
- ggm 10mo agoI was coming to write about Quorn. I wondered if it was in the family because Quorn is an industrialised bioreactor process. This should translate over, unless weakened cell walls make for a process unfriendly change.
- jcfrei 10mo agoThe farming lobby will try to ban it as soon as it becomes a viable alternative to poultry. I hope consumers will have the awareness to fight back.
- YurgenJurgensen 10mo agoThe feedstock has to come from somewhere, right? I’m assuming many farmers would prefer feeding it into stable vats of algae or fungus than dealing with the risks of another epidemic-induced chicken cull.
- Ericson2314 10mo agoFungus probably needs more much too, because no photosynthesis.
- lm28469 10mo ago> I’m assuming many farmers would prefer feeding it into stable vats of algae or fungus than dealing with the risks of another epidemic-induced chicken cull. Many farmers don't have the financial means to redesign their entire pipeline to move from birds to fungus. "farming" is in the name but I also suspect there is nothing in common between raising chicken in cages and mushrooms in sterile containers in term of know-how, maintenance, &c.
- YurgenJurgensen 10mo agoFactory farms consume far more feed than they can grow on site though, so the real power isn’t in the chicken farmers, it’s the ones growing chicken feed, and they’re probably used to switching crops to suit market demands. And the farmers who do grow their own feed are probably smaller operations targeting higher quality meat than factory-farmed chicken, so they’re not the ones that vat-grown meat-substitutes would be competing with.
- zardo 10mo agoThey would probably prefer that their expertise and massive investments in infrastructure for raising chickens isn't made worthless.