TechCrunch is publishing what appears to be an adaptation of a company PR release from a company called Solar Foods.
Solar Foods is growing bacteria to be used as a protein source which can replace traditional sources like meat, fish and soybeans, thus reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture/food production.
From the TechCrunch hagiographic take:
Fermentation has a long, rich history in food production, from beer and wine to yogurt and cheese, leavened bread and coffee, miso and tempeh, sauerkraut and kimchi, to name just a few of the tasty things we can consume thanks to a chemical process thought to date back to the Neolithic period.
[...]
The industrial biotech startup is working on bringing a novel protein to market — one it says will offer a nutritious, sustainable alternative to animal-derived proteins. The product, a single-cell protein it's branding Solein, is essentially an edible bacteria; a single-cell microbe grown using gas fermentation. Or, put another way, they're harvesting edible calories from hydrogen-oxyidizing microbes.
[...]
The production of Solein requires just a handful of 'ingredients': Air, water and energy (electricity) — which means there's no need for vast tracts of agricultural land to be given out to making this future foodstuff. It could be produced in factories located in remote areas or inside cities and urban centers.Nor indeed are other foods needed to feed it to create an adequate yield, as is the case with rearing livestock for human consumption.
I guess if it's cheap enough, it's not a bad idea. Much less waste than this site's namesake I'd reckon.
What say you, Soylentils? Is a bacteria-based burger in your future? Should there be?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2022, @10:06AM (1 child)
The Whopper is KING!
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Saturday September 24 2022, @07:13PM
No need to kiss your beloved beef goodbye.
Just use the environment-friendly food for the majority of your day-to-day nutrition, while still enjoying natural meat now and then.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2022, @10:59AM (22 children)
I'm open to the concept, but it's gonna be a tough row to hoe.
The veggie boys have not got it down pat yet either, nor have I managed to keep one down.
It's a taste, aftertaste, and texture thing. It's not gonna be easy to pull off a good barbeque with fake meat. It was hard enough to make oleomargarine.
What gives me hope is they are making some pretty good fake crab meat these days. I can barely tell it from the real thing when served as an ingredient in crab salad.
It's worth more research. We are gonna have to do something if we don't throttle back all these baby-making machines.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Friday September 16 2022, @11:18AM (4 children)
Jonathan Swift had a solution for that. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 16 2022, @11:35AM (2 children)
The core problem I see with the Swift proposal is that the rich won't pay too much for the children of the poor, otherwise the poor wouldn't be poor anymore.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Friday September 16 2022, @04:40PM (1 child)
The plan is to eat the babies, not sell them!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 16 2022, @05:08PM
No monetary compensation whatsoever?
Does he also ask the parents to dress, cook and serve the food, because you know: thus relieved of the burden of the extra children, the poor people will have more free time on their hands... can't allow that.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday September 16 2022, @02:37PM
"I want my baby-back baby-back baby-back ..........ribs....."
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 16 2022, @11:26AM (9 children)
I don't doubt that science and industry will eventually make a fake meat that passes whatever nutritional and safety tests they deem necessary which will be lower economic cost to deliver to the consumer and rated as more appealing "better than beef" in blind taste tests.
What I do doubt is that their nutrition and safety tests will cover all the important points of long term health both known and unknown. Will long term consumption of this product cause cancer, obesity, Alzheimer's, or some presently rare and awful condition in greater abundance among people who consume the product regularly?
Then there is the question of true total costs, what is the process of production of the product getting "for free" that is paid some other way? Tax breaks, pollution, the above mentioned health consequences. This is a fairly radically new technology, it is likely to have as yet unknown long term consequences, most likely in areas we aren't thinking of yet.
Finally, this is like the next level of processed food. It's not just a fried potato paste chip, or a sugar infused cereal product. It's going to synthesize texture and flavors of a highly spoilable meat product. What are the odds of industry discovering and exploiting new addictive properties of food and boosting them in their product to make it more appealing?
Acrylimides (not so good for you compounds found in high temperature cooked foods) come immediately to mind, but it's the new and presently unknown things that are most likely to lead to unpleasant surprises.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Friday September 16 2022, @01:06PM (2 children)
This doesn't worry me - the existing real thing does this today.
You may have a point with "some presently rare and awful condition" but I don't think that this is a significant risk. Man currently eats lots of vegetables and non-meat products and probably at many times in the past they tried eating things that were poisonous too. They learned not to do that. Today we have modern science which, although not perfect, can test exactly what is in a product and assess how that might affect a human being if consumed. That is certainly better than letting the first testers simply die.
Cars kill people - but we haven't banned them. Electricity kills people but I do not see any to switch to different form of power to replace it. Damn, even water kills people - but we still need it everyday. Some risks seem to be acceptable. If the alternative are starvation or ecological disaster then perhaps overcoming our resistance to anything new will have to change.
Hopefully, sometime in the future people will look back at us and laugh at what we eat today and our fears of something different.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 16 2022, @02:10PM
> Today we have modern science which, although not perfect, can test exactly what is in a product and assess how that might affect a human being if consumed.
I feel like today's modern food safety science hasn't progressed tremendously much since the food safety science that gave us saccharine as a "safe" sugar substitute, then "oops, that one causes cancer, how about this new one over here: aspartame" which is clearly unhealthy in moderate quantities with immediate negative effects... Oops again, the studies on saccharine were "flawed," even though we used them to ban the product from the market. It's as much about the political regulatory climate surrounding the science as it is the science itself. That climate alternately holds science up as a barrier to competition for existing (influential) products, and periodically lets the barrier down for new (influential) competitors.
>Cars kill people - but we haven't banned them. Electricity kills people
Yep, speaking of barriers to entry and the grandfathering of existing influential industries... Cars and electricity both have another thing going for them that more modern inventions don't: immediate obvious benefits. No horse poop to scoop, faster speeds, longer distances without stopping, bright reliable light at night... the benefits and risks were pretty obvious to the common person (maybe not so much with electricity until photos of electrocutions were widely circulated...) although the hidden pollution of electric power generation and ecological impacts of power generation and transmission still misguides people's opinions about how "clean and green" electricity is overall.
Magic industrial processes that turn cheap source material into tasty meat-like products? Doubtless a bit of cutting edge nano-tech here and there for maximizing positive perceptions while minimizing negative ones, doubtless some kind of GMO to tailor the input stocks to streamline the process. Bottom line: most people are going to be seriously misguided about what's really going on with imitation meat and the decisions about how it rolls out in society are going to be mostly guided by a small group of people who stand to benefit quite a bit vs a slightly larger group of people who are going to see tremendous impacts (that they no doubt perceive as negative) on what has been a way of life in their families for generations, both throwing overblown near-misinformation at the public as fast and hard as they can afford to, like it was a presidential campaign.
>future people will look back at us and laugh
Inevitably. The question is: will the cycle of future people looking back and laughing ever end, or just go on until the dominant species is no longer recognizable as human?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 16 2022, @05:02PM
> the existing real thing does this today.
Yeah, unfortunate facts of modern life: pumping your livestock with massive doses of antibiotics does get them to the market with more weight faster, that's money squared and will not be ignored by most growers. Growth steroids - same deal. Genetically selecting chickens and pigs for rapid growth and compatibility with factory farm conditions - same deal again. How does this affect the end product that consumers consume? Well, it doesn't fail any of the previously established health and safety guidelines, if that's what you are asking...
Dad, why do the chickens smell so bad? That's the smell of money, son.
If your retort is: chickens always smelled bad, I challenge you to visit a backyard henhouse, take a good look around inside, then go visit a commercial chicken shed and try to do the same. You are 100% forgiven if you can't even get to the door of the commercial shed without vomiting. We looked at 50 acres of land in East Texas for potential purchase. Nice place, except... the neighbors had two commercial chicken sheds - not even a big operation compared with most, but the way the wind was blowing that day there wasn't a single place on the 50 acres next door that didn't smell at least vaguely of foul fowl. We took a drive up the neighbors' gravel road to the chicken sheds, the gravel was a uniform deep green, whatever had been getting on it was promoting the richest algal growth I ever saw in inland Texas. The smell of fowl was no longer vague at that point, we didn't get out of the truck.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday September 16 2022, @03:12PM (5 children)
It's not THAT new - NASA was working on it as a food source for long-duration missions (e.g. to Mars) in the ... 60/70s I think? And given their "failure is not an option" mindset I imagine they tested the health impacts rather thoroughly.
It's microbes - we eat them it all the time: Beer, cheese, bread, yogurt, a huge range of other fermented foods, not to mention huge numbers of "bystanders" in pretty much everything else we eat. We're designed to handle them, and I would feel far safer eating them than the huge array of synthetic additives in modern processed foods. Or breathing city air for that matter. Or even drinking fresh mountain rainwater with its now rich payload of pseudo-estrogens and other synthetic hormones.
The energy and resource cost should also be FAR lower than meat - potentially even considerably lower than plants. Microbes are at the bottom of the food chain, with very limited individual mobility, and tend to be *extremely* well optimized to make use of available resources.
I only see a few possibilities for potentially high-cost inputs
- they're going to need to produce hydrogen to feed the bacteria, probably via electrolysis. That's going to take a lot of electricity, though we are getting pretty efficient at it, and a large portion of that energy is going to be converted into food calories by the bacteria.
- if they're grown in water, separating them from the water may be energy intensive, though concentrating them into a thick soup shouldn't be too difficult, and that may actually be a good starting point for processing into a more palatable form in-house - pretty much everything includes water in the ingredient list.
Finally - they don't seem to be specifically targetting fake meat, though they do mention the possibility of using it as an alternative to other protein powders in such products. It's an alternative source of protein - there's plenty of room to be its own thing. Kinda like how there's lots of veggieburgers that are really delicious in their own right - not just the kind that try to imitate meat.
In fact it sounds like they may be initially targeting foods that traditionally use heavily spiced meat paste - stuff that doesn't actually taste much like meat to begin with. And there's a huge range of other existing foods that use various protein powders in their production, and might profitably switch to a less resource-intensive alternative.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 16 2022, @04:54PM (4 children)
>I would feel far safer eating them than the huge array of synthetic additives in modern processed foods
As would I. What I will be absolutely shocked by is: if the commercially successful derivatives of the basic NASA tech have a smaller array of synthetic additives than the current batch of commercially dominant processed foods.
>It's an alternative source of protein - there's plenty of room to be its own thing.
Grocery (and other) stores already sell protein powders from various sources. When the kids go on a fussy eating streak my wife buys an industrial sized can of it and tries to sneak it in to their milk and other foods. Generally, about 10% to 30% of the can is consumed before she gives up the effort for one reason or another and the giant can of protein powder sits there, taking up shelf space, for up to a year before being discarded, then replaced the next time she thinks the kids aren't eating well enough again. It's not the hallmark of a wildly successful commercial product to languish unconsumed for long periods, nor to be sold mostly in generically labeled "giant economy sized" containers far larger than most people need.
Sure, you _could_ sneak just about any protein into a curry or similar mixed-spices and vegetable dish. But the question becomes: who will be choosing to do this? Until "real" meat undergoes a much more dramatic price increase than what has happened recently, I doubt many people will be changing their eating habits for this. And, for the record, we make chicken curry about once a month, and when the quality of our chicken supplier recently dropped - we first noticed it in the curry dish. It's not really a mask for the meat, you may not notice subtle flavor differences in the meat, but texture sure threw us off - to the point that we quit buying chicken from the place we had been getting it for the previous 15 years when their customer service agent basically said: "that's the way it is, if you don't like the texture you need to cook it differently" - yeah, dude, we've been buying your stuff for 15 years and you think we're dissatisfied because we somehow changed the way we've been cooking it?
I do hope this tech progresses, and succeeds, I'm just highly skeptical that it will succeed in the larger commercial marketplace without additives and processing steps far more "innovative" than sour cream and onion potato chips use.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Saturday September 17 2022, @02:57PM (3 children)
>Grocery (and other) stores already sell protein powders from various sources.
They do, though I suspect use as a commercial food additive make a much larger portion of the total market. And I'd be willing to bet most consumers use them a lot more regularly. I certainly do (protein enriched oatmeal makes a big difference in my day's energy). And most of them are expensive, milk-derived and already taste weird, so a cheaper, more environmentally friendly microbial version might not have to work very hard to make a place for itself. There's soy too - but that has its own issues, especially for kids.
Actually - for kids you might look into PB Fit powdered peanut butter (usually in with diet foods rather than gym-rat stuff) - not as protein rich as the gym-rat powders, but no weird flavors, and what kid doesn't love peanut butter? Add a little water for a silky smooth, moderately sweetened "peanut butter sauce" great for dipping apple slices, celery, chocolate, etc., or add to cereal (or a glass of milk) for peanut-butter flavored milk. I suspect it's the roasted, powdered leftovers from making peanut oil. (There's also a chocolate version, but I'm not a fan)
As for using it instead of meat - meat is likely to get rather expensive in the coming decades, as agriculture becomes increasingly unreliable, and carbon taxes or other deterrents become more pronounced in the face of rapidly increasing problems. Having alternative protein sources - fake meat or otherwise, is going to be important for the vast majority of people that can't afford paying outrageous meat prices on a regular basis. It wasn't that long ago that "a chicken in every pot" was an outrageous campaign promise, and it's looking very likely it will become so again. Meat is inherently expensive, we only managed to make it cheap for a while through incredibly environmentally destructive and ethically questionable industrial farming. Cloned meat may eventually catch on as a somewhat cheaper option - though even as a fan of the idea in theory, it still has an "ick factor" for me, and is unlikely to compete with the price of microbial protein.
And nothing says it has to substitute for meat in all ways - you might make your curry sauce the protein rich component, while relying on your vegetable selection for an enjoyable texture. Maybe not as satisfying to a palate accustomed to meat as a staple, but there are never any promises that you'll be able to maintain your desired lifestyle in the face of even a very slow-moving apocalypse.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 18 2022, @02:36AM (2 children)
Yes, the question really is: how to deal with the apocaslope we are sliding down.
Make me king of the world: first order of business is to ensure I remain king of the world long enough to do something substantial. Next: put the world on a human population reduction course with a goal of 1B to 2B total in a sustainable fashion. The Georgia guidestones we're a bit aggressive at 500M. Along with that, implement some form of "Half Earth" conservation of biodiversity policies with real teeth and otherwise mostly let people work out things for themselves.
I'd really like to avoid the future where bug paste is haute cuisine.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday September 18 2022, @03:44PM (1 child)
I'm all for population reduction, but I much prefer discouraging reproduction over several generations to mass murder. And sadly at this point I think the problem is urgent enough that mass murder is the only way to make reduction work as the primary solution or mitigation. And with our big pandemic not even offering a 50% fatality rate, I don't think Nature is going to get the ball rolling for us. Though global resource wars and genocide would seem to have some dismaying potential.
Barring that... If we limit our resource consumption to something that lets the biosphere recover from the damage we've already done... I think we may need to plan to eat a lot of "bug paste" for a few generations in penance for the sins of our fathers as our population falls to something more sustainable. It's not so bad - a *huge* part of our diet is processed foods anyway, and who really cares if the fats, sugars, and flour in our breads, cereals, pastries and pastas came from plants, animals, or microbes? Protein powder is probably where the big money is to start with, but those others are already waiting in the wings. If we can virtually eliminate the environmental impact of those staple ingredients - corn, wheat, rice, palm, etc., I think there's a good chance we can maintain the quality of the more whole foods in our diet. Though we may have to cut back on the meat - we've gone a little crazy with that in recent generations.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 18 2022, @04:29PM
>discouraging reproduction over several generations to mass murder
Oh, me as well, of course, but I have no idea what my circumstances as king of the world would look like...
>If we limit our resource consumption to something that lets the biosphere recover from the damage we've already done... I think we may need to plan to eat a lot of "bug paste" for a few generations
That's a big if that I doubt very much will happen quickly enough for the very reason you state: the generations that need to adjust to make it happen aren't the ones that will end up eating big paste when they fail. To
>who really cares if the fats, sugars, and flour in our breads, cereals, pastries and pastas came from plants, animals, or microbes?
My experience of fresh meats and vegetables vs canned vs processed and the apparent health impacts therefrom care very much. What you say is true in theory, but in practice there is a lot that can and has gone wrong in food processing, particularly when it has been done by commercially competitive industry.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 16 2022, @11:32AM (5 children)
Re: fake crab. Back in the 1980s I discovered that "imitation crab" was 5% real crab and 95% fish.
The real crab infused the fish with crabby flavor and many people preferred it to the more intense flavor of 100% real crab. Not just the flavor either, the fish texture was more familiar too and therefore more appealing. But it still smells like crab.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday September 16 2022, @01:42PM (1 child)
FWIW, the last time I checked one of the main ingredients of "fake crab" was sugar.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 16 2022, @02:17PM
Last time I cared enough to read a package was probably 35 years ago now. Back then the big choice in the fake crab market was 5% vs 3% "real crab meat" and I think some variation in the type of fish used as the 95-97% filler.
Not surprising that sugar infused crab flavored stuff would sell better than sugarless...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday September 16 2022, @04:42PM (2 children)
When I was in college I worked in a factory that made that shit! I worked in the slurry department where we ground up huge slabs of frozen fish in the giant industrial size blenders.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 16 2022, @05:10PM (1 child)
Nice. Slightly different: we had relatives from Ketchikan, AK - one of them worked in the salmon cannery there. Spookiest part of the whole town for me was all the little white dots in the trees above the cannery: bald eagles that would swoop down to get the fish scraps when available.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Friday September 16 2022, @05:16PM
I have a friend in Bellingham WA who does IT for Microsoft during the winter and works the cannery boats during the summer 'cause the boats pay better!
(Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Friday September 16 2022, @11:53AM
They're not aiming for burgers:
That is, beyond just adding it to flours, they'll processes it into Tofu-like blocks with macros close to Chicken levels for ready-meal factories to use in stir-fried Thai chicken or Japanese miso soup where texture comes from the vegetables and taste comes from the sauces.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Friday September 16 2022, @11:30AM
The rest of the world will then just replace Solar Foods with real foods.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday September 16 2022, @11:35AM (7 children)
I'm a vegetarian, have been for a long time. And the best non-meat dishes didn't try to be like meat in any way.
For example, take burgers. I've had beef burgers - they're fine. I've had imitation meat burgers like Beyond and Impossible - they're not quite as good as beef. But if you want me to be happy with my meal, give me a patty of black beans and wheat germ with some nice chipotle seasoning, because that will have a lot more flavor.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday September 16 2022, @11:34PM
The veggie burgers I got when visiting in England were vastly better than the ones I could get here in Canada.
The English ones were made of vegetables and tasted like it. No one tried to make them imitate meat. Honest food.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 17 2022, @11:42AM
Respectfully, I disagree. I've been vegan for over 20 years, and I still much prefer fake meat patties to bean burgers. My particular favourite is the Linda McCartney quarter pounders. I don't think the Beyond and Impossible brands are particularly good.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday September 17 2022, @03:33PM (4 children)
Hear, hear. I generally prefer food that embraces what it is, rather than pretending to be something it isn't. Though... I will say Impossible sausage on a Little Caesar's pizza was possibly an upgrade.
However, it sounds like they're not actually chasing fake meat - they're making meat-quality protein powder. Which could certainly be incorporated into fake meat, but has plenty of other applications. Protein powders tend to make for richer and creamier sauces for example, as well as being profitably incorporated into breads, or as a filler (possibly even binder) in your bean patty.
Getting a complete protein blend of amino acids is one of those things you really need to pay attention to with vegetarian diets, if these folks can provide an all-natural, vegetarian source of meat-quality protein in the form of a mostly flavorless powder you can incorporate into whatever you may be making? That could be a real boon. Especially if it's actually cheaper and more environmentally friendly than vegetables, which it has the potential to become. In fact at that point it could start looking attractive to the majority of the world's population that doesn't currently eat much meat.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday September 17 2022, @04:10PM (3 children)
That does raise the question: Is bacteria animal or vegetable? Actually, it's neither.
So what does that mean for vegetarians/vegans? Are such diets only plant-based? If so, bacteria aren't plants.
That's an interesting question. And one (as I'm not a vegetarian or a vegan) I hadn't considered when I submitted this "story."
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday September 17 2022, @04:40PM (2 children)
Both movements seem primarily concerned with the ethical, environmental, and/or health impacts of eating meat or animal products. (I've even known some vegetarians that would make an exception for wild-caught meat)
I'm pretty sure fermented foods (bread, sauerkraut, alcohol, etc.) are considered vegan-friendly.
And besides, microbes are *everywhere*, including in and on 100% of the food you eat. Everyone eats them in large quantity, and in fact even if you ate a sterile diet, a large part of what you actually digest is the gut microbes that digested all the food you ate but couldn't digest yourself.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday September 17 2022, @08:54PM
All your points are valid and reasonable. What's more you're probably right too.
I do wonder, however, if some folks will balk (especially the vegans) since it's not "plant-based."
Which is fine. More for me. :)
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday September 18 2022, @05:45PM
At least in my veggie circles, bacteria-involved foods like yogurt and sauerkraut are totally fine. As is yeast and mushrooms even though they're not plants either.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 16 2022, @11:43AM (1 child)
The more I read about companies trying to replace real food with artificial substitutes, the more I suspect it would be better for our health to grow and eat our own food.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Saturday September 17 2022, @03:49PM
Nothing artificial here though, except the highly optimized growing environment. And the hydrogen I suppose, but hydrogen made by artificial means is completely identical to naturally sourced.
We already eat yogurt, sauerkraut, beer, bread, and other microbe-rich foods, and have been doing so for thousands of years. This is just another version of that, only using microbes that feed on hydrogen rather than sugars and starches.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2022, @11:21PM
Humans are omnivores. We only recently moved in to cities where it was possible to stuff our faces with sugar and flour. We only recently figured out how to stuff our faces with meat all the time.
Cut most of the sugar and flour. Eat real meat once in a while. JMHO. I'm not interested in being a guinea pig. If it turns out that these highly processed lab created foods are OK, we won't really know until 100 years from now, or maybe even more when we have long term data on outcomes of those who consume them.
Some of my ancestors lived in to their 90s at a time when the diet was poor, but it was all real food. I plan to eat real food in moderation for the rest of my life.