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

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171 points rguiscard | 15 comments | 12 Dec 25 00:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.651s | source | bottom
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SapporoChris ◴[12 Dec 25 03:23 UTC] No.46240533[source]▶
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.
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1. shrubble ◴[12 Dec 25 07:03 UTC] No.46241584[source]▶
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.
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2. truekonrads ◴[12 Dec 25 07:10 UTC] No.46241629[source]▶
This is not how the overwhelming majority of chickens live - they live in high intensity farm operations in horrible conditions
3. asterix_pano ◴[12 Dec 25 07:11 UTC] No.46241634[source]▶
That is not how most of the chicken is raised (over 70 billions are slaughtered per year).
4. Certhas ◴[12 Dec 25 07:14 UTC] No.46241652[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>46241800 #
5. tdb7893 ◴[12 Dec 25 07:15 UTC] No.46241654[source]▶
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).
6. exe34 ◴[12 Dec 25 07:16 UTC] No.46241659[source]▶
how big is your backyard?
7. johanvts ◴[12 Dec 25 07:42 UTC] No.46241800[source]▶
Thats about 45kg, I wish I had that average American backyard.
8. swiftcoder ◴[12 Dec 25 08:10 UTC] No.46241946[source]▶
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.

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9. _dark_matter_ ◴[12 Dec 25 09:01 UTC] No.46242224[source]▶
Wild to think that there's 6-7 chickens for every human in America at all times
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10. vintermann ◴[12 Dec 25 09:23 UTC] No.46242356[source]▶
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.

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11. swiftcoder ◴[12 Dec 25 09:37 UTC] No.46242441{3}[source]▶
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
12. literalAardvark ◴[12 Dec 25 10:21 UTC] No.46242691[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>46243065 #
13. swiftcoder ◴[12 Dec 25 11:21 UTC] No.46243065{3}[source]▶
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...
14. a96 ◴[12 Dec 25 11:44 UTC] No.46243212{3}[source]▶
If every yard in a town or city was full of chickens, I wouldn't call it decentralized. Just one very broad centre.
replies(1): >>46243275 #
15. K0balt ◴[12 Dec 25 11:53 UTC] No.46243275{4}[source]▶
Or you could just call it the developing world lol. It’s very common in many places.