We are on the cusp of the deepest, fastest, most consequential disruption in food and agricultural production since the first domestication of plants and animals ten thousand years ago. This is primarily a protein disruption driven by economics. The cost of proteins will be five times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035 than existing animal proteins, before ultimately approaching the cost of sugar. They will also be superior in every key attribute – more nutritious, healthier, better tasting, and more convenient, with almost unimaginable variety. This means that, by 2030, modern food products will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace.
First time in nearly a year I walked through our Grocery Outlet and was surprised that they had an entire cooler full of a wide variety of fake meats and two shelves of fake dairy. They actually had more fake milk than real milk.
I'm skeptical. Most of the foods that are coming out now and are filling headlines are full of chemicals and seed oils. There was a photo that lined up the ingredient list for the Impossible burger, the Beyond burger and dog food. The only major difference was in the order of ingredients. Otherwise they were practically the same. I think the popularity is due to novelty more than anything. This goes against the trend over the past decade and a half of returning to more local and whole food sources, meat or not. I don't think this (the product line) will age well.
Isn't this stuff just a more presentable version of Soylent? I don't think most people want fake food.
First time in nearly a year I walked through our Grocery Outlet and was surprised that they had an entire cooler full of a wide variety of fake meats and two shelves of fake dairy. They actually had more fake milk than real milk.
The world is changing fast.
Seems like there's a bit of wishful thinking is at play here. I'll need to read the report and not just the executive summary though
I'm not a vegetarian, but I'd be extremely happy if this were true as the destructive impact of the meat industry is tremendous. We aren't vegetarians, but with my wife we have adopted what we like to call a "responsibly omnivore" diet, meaning meat from farmed animals is consumed as little as possible (we are around 2lbs per month for the two of us).
Having good and healthy alternatives would be great, it's just that having worked in the food and beverage industry my whole life, "Food-as-software" scares me a bit and reeks of BS.
When I was a kid they were pumping us full of factory fats (hydrogenated oil and transfats) that were marketed as way healthier and "better" than natural fats. One famous one started as a candidate lubricant for diesel engines. I'm mistrustful of foods that come out of chemical factories. The good news maybe is that we may be coming into an era where increased agricultural production worldwide is a real thing.
Basically, you are just farming tiny "animals" instead of large animals. Legumes wouldn't offer high protein if it weren't for their symbiosis with soil bacteria. So, there is an extent to which this can be hacked on a low-tech locavore level. You can't (yet)move around heme gene in your own kitchen lab, but you could do something like building an artificial cow stomach in your back yard, and it would likely be more efficient, less wasteful, by some measures than actually keeping a cow in your own backyard.
IOW, IMO there is a level on which this is cool and functional, because science, and another level on which it is reductionist and fragile, because dependent on high tech.
I’m with IlliniDave - don’t trust this. I generally don’t like eating anything with more than 3 ingredients on the label, and better yet if it doesn’t have any ingredients list (i.e whole food)
Seppia makes some good points and if this helped sway people away from factory farming maybe it’s a good thing. Not for me though.
"Food-as-software" scares me a bit and reeks of BS.
Does it scare you in terms of your career or for some other reason?
The story mentions this....
This model ensures constant iteration so that products improve rapidly, with each version superior and cheaper than the last. It also ensures a production system that is completely decentralized and much more stable and resilient than industrial animal agriculture, with fermentation farms located in or close to towns and cities.
This sentence could be written about a hundred different industries. The decentralized ideal seems to be in the early stages in everything from automobile manufacturing to lab grown meat. As the technology needed to make it happen is coming online will the typical Costco customer care about whether their bag of chicken nuggets is made with real chicken or lab grown stuff? Since it is genetically identical, is there any reason why it wouldn't fly? There will certainly be some who resist but this trend seems to be a continuation of what the Walmart model did to the world. Perhaps the decentralization model will be the defining characteristic of the 2020-29 decade.
Ultimately you need to consider energy supply. All of this "decentralized" production is dependent upon electricity; for clean safe energy supply and maintenance/transmission of complex information. It is also dependent upon production of very high tech electronic components used as tools in production process. So, you need to perform a bit of a trace-back in order to determine some metric roughly equivalent to overall decentralization. There are a hundred ways from Sunday to make the math look pretty if it helps you sell a concept.
OTOH, I have recently become convinced that just about any way you do the math vegetarianism will whup locavorism in battle to lower overall emissions. IOW, even if you do keep the cow in your own backyard, buying tempeh at Costco will reduce negative secondary effects of needful nitrogen cycle more*. Of course, growing your own delicious peas in your own backyard will work even better.
*But the opposite is true if the resilience of your personal nitrogen/protein acquisition cycle is the factor to be maximized.
