CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat

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.

There’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.

This is not how the overwhelming majority of chickens live - they live in high intensity farm operations in horrible conditions

That is not how most of the chicken is raised (over 70 billions are slaughtered per year).

If 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.

A 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).

how big is your backyard?

Thats about 45kg, I wish I had that average American backyard.

Neurospora crassa is also pretty good. Meati sells slabs of it.

Back 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.

I 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.

I 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.

Wild to think that there's 6-7 chickens for every human in America at all times

If 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.

In 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

That's... Not too bad, actually. My grandmothers used to have maybe 8 chickens and 12 ducks or so. They were very low maintenance, and had very minimal pastures, with the only difficult to reproduce part of the process being that the houses were in fairly wild surroundings.

They would probably need more pasture in monoculture hellholes that have cornfields for 100km in each direction.

Yeah, the real question is whether they can forage enough food in this kind of scenario. Without supplementary grain, they are going to need a whole lot of insects to grow that quickly...

If every yard in a town or city was full of chickens, I wouldn't call it decentralized. Just one very broad centre.

Or you could just call it the developing world lol. It’s very common in many places.

The 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.

Americans 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.

Have 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

I did ~100 chickens last year, and more like 85 this year.

12 weeks is incorrect, you can buy the same Cornish crosses that the big farms use. So they can be ready in as little as 6-7 weeks but I usually stretch it to 8 or 9; my time to process them is fixed so I might as well get a little bit more meat for my efforts.

I use a chicken tractor that is big enough to let me hold about 33 at a time.

So it’s an operation that needs to run for about half the year. If you time it right, you can work around vacations and stuff. Daily operations are actually pretty minimal in terms of time spent, but you do lose three weekends a year to process them if you don’t outsource that.

All of that to say: I’m not sure if I want to agree with your characterization. It’s less of a time commitment than you think. But there is a substantial cost to it all: capital costs are notable and the cost of feed and birds is such that you basically break even against high-end organic products for sale. You’re always going to look at the Costco chicken and wonder why you are doing it. I treat it as a “touch grass” hobby that kinda breaks even.

No real point, just excited to have something to say about this haha

Chicken 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.