"The first modification, eliminating a gene for chitin synthase, resulted in thinner fungal cell walls."
This also has an enormous potential benefit of reducing avian flu and other zoonotic bird diseases.
Jell-o (gello?) is a good example, nothing tastes like it naturally. Why aren't there tasty food that are original in terms of taste and texture but good for health and the environment? I suppose part of the struggle is that food is entrenched into culture so much. burgers and bbq are inextricable from july 4th and memorial day for example.
Jell-O actually proves this rather than refuting it. It succeeds because it hits that hardwired sweet preference, not because it invented some novel taste dimension. A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.
So you’d have to either work within those existing taste channels while creating novel combinations and textures, or somehow condition people to associate genuinely new sensations with safety and reward. The latter is slow going. We’re quite literally built to be suspicious of unfamiliar foods.
Do you mean processing ingredients with the goal to take cheap ingredients and make a product as hyper-palatable as possible? That would generally be called "ultra-processed food"; you're not going to find a Doritos chip in nature.
Do you mean developing completely completely new flavors via chemical synthesis? I don't think there's much possibility there. Our senses have evolved to detect compounds found in nature, so it's unlikely a synthetic compound can produce a flavor completely unlike anything found in nature.
Also, I think you're overestimating jelly. Gelatine is just a breakdown product of collagen. Boil animal connective tissue, purify the gelatine, add sugar and flavoring and set it into a gel. It's really only a few of techniques removed from nature. If you want to say it's not found in nature, then fair enough, but neither is a medium-rare steak.
There are also a wide variety of textures that are heavily industrialised. If you go to some fine dining restaurants, you'll find smells and colours which you simply cannot replicate at home - let alone make from scratch.
Most synthetic meat and fish is really just a flavour carrier for whatever sauce people like. I've had imitation chicken, shrimp, beef, crab, etc. They all taste great - but that's mostly because the sauces are the same as their meaty counterparts.
Although it's theoretically possible for a disease to infect both fungus and animals, because the biology is so different, the risk is greatly, greatly reduced.
In addition, it may be possible to reduce the use of treatments such as antibiotics which, in their currently mass application to farmed animals, could directly lead to the development of antibiotic resistant in diseases which affect humans and animals.
... let's start on tearing down bullshit AI datacenters.
Oh no, a billion Nvidia cards are envronmentally friendly, you say, better to lazer-focus on the cow farts?
In contrast, all data centers (not just AI) currently use less than 1.5% of all electricity, making up less than 0.3% of global emissions [2]. Although recent increases in data center electricity usage is lamentable, even in the short term future, much of this can and more importantly _will_ be low-carbon energy, and the ratio should continue to improve with time.
A 1% reduction in livestock emissions is therefore about the same as a 50% reduction in data center emissions.
[1]: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...
[2]: https://www.carbon-direct.com/insights/understanding-the-car...
It's a bit extreme to refer to that "climate" summit "guests" as cattle, but I won't deny it gave me a chuckle.
>the inhumane conditions in which the cattle are raised
Gosh, that's sad. One way to go about it is to vote with your hard-earned and only buy meat from the Ethically Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows that look quite happy on the photos then.
If I understand this right, this would even in the EU now be allowed to be sold without the GMO label.
It certainly does not look very nice, are you relating this to the "Ethically Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows" in the comment you replied to?
In truth, they just take the calves away from the mothers after a short while, ship them out to the abbatoir. There is no benefit to them being in the same enclosure with a spiky nose ring, it seems that this must have a different purpose than the one you mentioned.
I guess for casual buyers having a familiar reference point is just crucial.
We have five taste receptors, so it's it's actually impossible to get something that doesn't map unto those five. Instead, what we call the taste of food, and what GP was referring to, is actually the smell of food, or more commonly, its aroma, which we can detect both from the outside by sniffing it with our noses, and while it is in our mouths via molecules wafting up to our respiratory tract.
Unlike the simplicity of taste, we have a huge array of smell receptors, with most of them having much more indirect associations, if any, with any specific survival need. It's very much possible, and in fact quite common, to synthesize novel smells/aromas which don't resemble any natural food.
> Oh no, a billion Nvidia cards are envronmentally friendly, you say, better to lazer-focus on the cow farts?
That's a pretty substantial backyard operation.
The paper notes:
>It is important to note that MP products often contain elevated levels of nucleic acids, constituting ~8% of the dry weight [17], which necessitates consideration when assessing their suitability for human consumption. To address this, a heat treatment process is employed at the end of fermentation that reduces the nucleic acid content in the fermented biomass to below 0.75/100 g, while simultaneously deactivating protease activity and F. venenatum biomass. However, this procedure has been observed to induce cell membrane leakage and a substantial loss of biomass, as evidenced in the Quorn production process [17], which also utilizes F. venenatum as the MP producer. Our experimental trials have encountered similar challenges, achieving a biomass yield of merely ~35%, and observed that heating process increased the relative protein and chitin content (Figure 2D,E), which may be related to the effect of membrane leakage, while the intracellular protein of the FCPD engineered strain was less likely to be lost to the extracellular. Thus, concentrating the fermentation broth to enhance protein and amino acids content in successive steps to produce a highly nutritious water-soluble fertilizer appears to be an effective strategy for adding value to the process (Figure 1).
The challenges of developing economic single cell protein products, that are suitable for human consumption, are described in chapter 3 here:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin-Hofrichter-2/pub...
https://www.sciencealert.com/massive-study-reveals-where-gou...
If you want to do this for ethical reasons, which you should, then just eat vegetables. They taste way better. You just have to recalibrate your senses to deal with the higher levels of flavour.
But if people really want "chicken nuggets" for some reason then there's no reason it should have to involve animals at all, so this is a good thing, I guess.
Details are a bit vague but it seems like it's viable.
not in a meaningful way, no. the probability that a new mutation you want will occur is much much lower than the probability you can breed offspring without a gene that's already in the bloodline.
I am so thankful of advances that let me eat something my brain enjoys. I get the best of both worlds - no animal harmed in the process.
Why do vegs have to neg on other vegs for what they eat? I hate that. To each their own. I encourage everyone to be vegetarian to support animal rights, but I also would never tell them that their cravings aren't real or how to go about doing it.
At first. If the food has nutrients that are important to the brain, it will recognize that in the future. There are animal experiment confirming this.
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.
Slightly unrelated, but what I find very cool is thinking about your taste sense as a hyper-sensitive molecule detector. Individual aromas are just the signal your brain generates for different kinds of molecules, and it's very good at that. That's why at wine tastings, for example, people come up with all these elaborate terms for specific aromas—it's a way to name the molecule composition.
I mean, industrial slaughter isn't a pretty process, even in better plants, which most aren't, but where they come to wipe out the barn, they're not putting animal welfare first.
There are plenty of vegetarian meals (or vegan ones, though that's harder). It's just that we have relegated most of them to side dishes, entres or breakfast because meat is too popular as a main dish. But this is a very recent phenomenon
But you can't make any money selling hash browns as veggie food, it's much more profitable to sell fake meat
