Great article. Fungi produced the environment we now live in. The symbiotic relationship plants have with fungi is the basis behind the idea of no-till farming. Plants are much healthier and require less input when there is a thriving fungal community in the soil. Tilling kills fungal mycelium and turns the balance to bacteria.
Besides such uses in improving traditional agriculture, I believe that the future of protein production, which is needed to supplement plant-based food, does not stay in making fake meat from animal cell cultures, like many attempt to do today, in order to sell to rich vegans.
In my opinion, with animal cell cultures it is extremely unlikely to ever be able to produce proteins at a competitive cost. By competitive cost I mean that any such proteins should cost much less than chicken meat (per protein content).
What I believe to be the right solution, because this should be able to produce high-quality proteins at lower costs than from any animal source, is to use cultures of genetically-modified fungi, which produce some high-quality proteins, e.g. whey protein or egg white protein. There already exist genetically-modified strains of the fungus Trichoderma, which produce such animal proteins, instead of the enzymes that they normally secreted into their environment. Such proteins can be separated from the fungal culture medium by ultrafiltration, in the same way how one makes from whey or milk whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate.
Onego Bio is using fungi to produce ovalbumin, one of the major protein in eggs. Their process seems stable, so it might play a big role especially in industrial food production pretty quickly
It doesn't need to be cheaper than the cheapest meat to be competitive. If there's some social or moral incentive to avoid real meat, that adds value to plant based alternatives.
Fungi protein sounds cool though. I would totally add that to my diet. But I also think insects are an underutilized protein source, so I might be an outlier
Even when your personal budget would allow spending more for food, a price that is higher than that of meat is a serious red flag, indicating that it is likely that such a substitute for meat has greater environmental consequences than producing meat.
There are 3 reasons for avoiding meat. One is the ethical reason, because during the last century meat production has transitioned everywhere to using methods that can hardly be considered anything else but continuous torture. There are also certain health risks associated with meat and there is also the reason that the real cost of meat may be greater than it appears to be, due to negative environmental consequences (i.e. pollution).
If some kind of protein extract or some kind of fake meat is more expensive than real meat (per protein content), you can be rather certain that the negative environmental consequences are worse than for real meat, because the higher cost is likely to be determined by the consumption of more energy and of various kinds of chemicals during the production of the meat substitute.
Economy of scale and subsidies have a major influence on shelf prices. Is is a red flag to be a small producer and/or not profiting from public money? Some wouldn't cold-ban a product only based on it's price, especially if it's pioneering.
Being "certain that the negative environmental consequences are worse" seems an stretch from weak initial judgement.
Higher cost doesn't always indicate negative environmental consequences. It could be (and seems likely to me) that harvesting one cow's worth of plant protein is more labor intensive which isn't necessarily bad for the environment. If you compare two soy crops, one that uses herbicides and another that uses manual labor to pull weeds, the latter will be more expensive and better for the environment
Those are at least big enough that you don't have to eat the shells. (Fun aside: Technically, the grouping is closer to the other way around: insects are classed under crustaceans these days.)
>there's some social or moral incentive to avoid real meat, that adds value to plant based alternatives.
This is missing the key point that like 95% of people in the world are not vegans, don't find any moral issues with eating meat, and thus produce zero social pressure. Fungi burgers MUST come with an actual benefit for the majority of people. It needs to be seen as some combination of "Tastey", "healthy", "cost effective". If fungi burgers were $2/lbs and tasted pretty close to a beef burger, then people would flock to them. The problem with Impossible burgers were worse, more expensive, questionably "more healthy" and entirely relied upon the moral/social issues which only mattered in a few small slices of society.
Having it be cheaper would make it a real game changer -- if "chicken nuggets" and "burgers" were functionally equivalent (nutrition, appearance, mouthfeel, etc) and cheaper, then we'd start to see serious changes in animal husbandry.
It will never go away but if it becomes more niche then it's likely that what is produced will be done so more humanely (branding and perception of quality)
Not everyone craves the flavor/texture of meat, but everyone needs an adequate intake of high quality protein.
Including protein powder as a cooking ingredient does not do much for improving the taste of food (though the food definitely feels more satiating), but it ensures that it is healthy enough.
Even if I liked meat, I never felt any kind of addiction to it. There are many years since the last time when I ate meat and I feel no need to eat again, as long as I have a lot of other options for food that is tasty and healthy.
For several years I have not used any animal protein sources, but this forced too inconvenient constraints on what I could eat, so eventually I gave up and now I use in cooking some whey or milk protein concentrate powder, whenever it is necessary to increase the protein content. This has provided much more freedom in menu choice.
So for me, if instead of having to buy protein extracted from whey or milk (which costs about the same as chicken meat, i.e. many times cheaper than protein concentrates extracted from plants, which must use much more complicated processes than the filtration of whey or milk) there would be the option of buying similar protein from a fungal culture, that would be enough to cover all my needs.
From other comments that I have seen about the fake meat products, I am pretty sure that there are many others like me, who do not care whether they eat meat or not, as long as they eat some good food.
You're missing out on an infinity of great food - great for anyone, vegan or not. Just think of all the Chinese, Latin American, Indian, etc. food that is vegan. Think of many appetizers even in mostly-meat restaurants. And there are world-class restaurants that serve vegan dishes
Eliminating beef, fowl, and fish leaves a universe of foods including all fungi, fruits and vegetables, grains, nuts, and legumes. It also includes all spices and herbs.
Double that. I'll also recommend to try some fungi/bacteria pre-processing as it bumps the taste:
Kimchi & Sauerkraut to wet the appetite.
Don't use salt, use Miso. The darker the better.
Tempeh is awesome and comes with soy (nutty), lentil (strong taste like aged meat), chickpeas (floral), beans (melty), or other legume/cereal/nut. Can include spices and seed for extra taste and crunch.
Nuts cheese tastes "cheesy" in a similar way similar to their diary version (Roquefort, Cheddar, Blue, Camembert, Brie...) depending on the ferment, without the "milky" taste. Nut taste instead, obviously but that can be offset with other oils/fats.
IMHO the Chèvre (goat) [0] and Morbier (bleu) [1] from Jay and Joy are very close. They also comes a bit cheaper in non-organic version [2]. I mostly buy from those guys but the curious may try a few from their local brands: when talking about cheese every recipe is has it's subtlety.
Vegan Chinese food? Ah, if you are vegan and go to China you need to be careful because there isn’t much vegan food, although plenty of veggies and they even have a few vegetarian restaurants in recent years.
Wherever you are, the local Chinese food is an adaptation - there is Indian Chinese, for example. But tofu, for example, has a long history in China, and you can find vegan food in Chinese restaurants in many places. I expect most people on HN don't eat their Chinese food in China.
Ok, that makes sense. You’ll find tofu art in China as well, but it usually doesn’t pass the vegan threshold unless you go to a fancy Singaporean chain (Pure Lotus was the only one I knew of in Beijing). Even then it feels wrong, tofu really shouldn’t taste like chicken.
>Just think of all the Chinese, Latin American, Indian, etc. food that is vegan.
What? Outside of Indian food, which does have many vegan options, but the best food is usually still non-vegan (lots of dairy and butter used). Chinese and Latin American food is almost never vegan. Chinese love meat, and you would have to be a buddhist monk to actually find vegan food in China. Even with a lot of cheap plant protein options, like tofu, most things use some meat for flavor. Latin America loves cooking in animal fats.
> Chinese and Latin American food is almost never vegan.
I've seen plenty of vegan food in restaurants serving those cuisines, so that's not true. Why is it important to you to insist that vegan food is somehow difficult?
If you just mean 'in China', that's irrelevant to this conversation - only a small proportion of people here eat their Chinese food in China. But I acknowledge, lots of people on HN like to demonstrate their worldliness by making sure we know they've been to China, relevant or not.
> the best food is usually still non-vegan (lots of dairy and butter used)
It's a bit hard to make a definitive statement about what is 'best'. Personally, I much prefer Indian without all the ghee. That vegan food exists in many varieties is an objective fact, however.
In my lifetime the conversation has shifted from mineral farming with chemical fertilizers to managing microbes to microbes doing the managing.
There is a case to be made for many species of plants effectively being a previously unidentified manner of lichen. Created on mineral soil much the same way lichen grew on rocks.
Consider a contrived scenario where an opaque jar contains N distinguishable marbles. You take one out and note it's type and put it back in. You repeat this n times. If k out of n are unique it conveys information about N.
If, for example, k=1 then N is likely small. On the other hand if k=n then N is likely large.
The most computer-sciencey way is to look at n at which you get a repeat, ah! a hash collision.
One can make these ideas more quantitative under assumptions about the numbers of each types of marbles.
The math of hashing, birthday paradox, coupon collection and hyperloglog are good places to start.
Then there are other ways. Two of you count the number of typos in a tedious text. One says N the other says n and out of them only k are common. From this you can estimate the likely number of typos in the text.
Right. That makes sense in the contrived scenario (although in that contrived scenario we know the probabilities with absolute surety).
But TFA's estimate is perplexing because it is NOT a contrived scenario. We don't have marbles, we have some territory to cover. The territory isn't randomly distributed, we can't adequately randomly sample (presumably?).
It feels like the estimate could be wildly wildly off, in which case why estimate.
The contrived scenario is just a starting point. One can make more and more sophisticated ecological statistics models about the situation.
Regarding why estimate at all knowing they can be wrong ? Estimates are very useful for planning. Sophisticated models would also yield probabilities of over and underestimated, these combined with cost of over and underestimation errors are very useful for decision making.
See the German tank problem. Turns out the allied forces overestimated the number to f tanks left, still helped in planning.
It's probably something like, here are the environments where we've done comprehensive surveys, here are the kind of different situations where we expect to find different species (decomposers of various types, mycorrhizal, within plants, within animals, on surfaces, specialists, generalists, climates, etc). Multiply the species from places where we've probably found most of them by the number of places where we've only found the most obvious fungi. However it works it's going to have big error bars, reflected in the fact that 12M species is the upper end of a range starting at 2.2M.
We have better DNA sequencing technology today, so we can detect how many species living in sample (soil/water/...) and guess something. But if someone want to "descripting" these fungi, they should plant the fungus species in lab and detect its feartures; this is more expensive, harder and usually impossible.
Basically, you bulk sequence some sample like some soil, and from there you can call certain taxa and make estimates of unique species or unidentified sequences.
Also, how would they really know if a species is endangered? With millions of species that haven't even been identified, how would they know how common any of them are?
There are thousands of different species of many branches of the taxonomy tree (insects, molds, bacteria, etc.) and like fungi, each have tons of species not even identified.
Scientists estimate that something like 99% of species that ever existed, are extinct. I understand why people get upset when something like elephants hit the endangered list, but should we really care if some obscure species of dung beetle is endangered?
For now, our science is not yet so advanced as to be able to appreciate what we will lose if an obscure species of dung beetle disappears.
Species of beetle or of fungi or of any other kind of living beings may look very similar, but nonetheless they may differ in their ability to synthesize various chemical compounds by using various enzymes that may not have equivalents in other living beings.
The popular literature is full of triumphalist b*s*t which makes it appear that most basic sciences, like physics, chemistry and biology are solved, but this is extremely far from the truth. We are still a few decades away from being able to understand well enough how a living being works, so that we would be able to replicate similar processes for making whatever we want.
Until then, every kind of living being which disappears is an irreversible loss of precious information, which may have saved an unpredictable amount of time in the future, which will be needed to rediscover similar results with those produced by natural evolution during millions of years.
Great article. Fungi produced the environment we now live in. The symbiotic relationship plants have with fungi is the basis behind the idea of no-till farming. Plants are much healthier and require less input when there is a thriving fungal community in the soil. Tilling kills fungal mycelium and turns the balance to bacteria.
Besides such uses in improving traditional agriculture, I believe that the future of protein production, which is needed to supplement plant-based food, does not stay in making fake meat from animal cell cultures, like many attempt to do today, in order to sell to rich vegans.
In my opinion, with animal cell cultures it is extremely unlikely to ever be able to produce proteins at a competitive cost. By competitive cost I mean that any such proteins should cost much less than chicken meat (per protein content).
What I believe to be the right solution, because this should be able to produce high-quality proteins at lower costs than from any animal source, is to use cultures of genetically-modified fungi, which produce some high-quality proteins, e.g. whey protein or egg white protein. There already exist genetically-modified strains of the fungus Trichoderma, which produce such animal proteins, instead of the enzymes that they normally secreted into their environment. Such proteins can be separated from the fungal culture medium by ultrafiltration, in the same way how one makes from whey or milk whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate.
Onego Bio is using fungi to produce ovalbumin, one of the major protein in eggs. Their process seems stable, so it might play a big role especially in industrial food production pretty quickly
https://www.onego.bio/product
It doesn't need to be cheaper than the cheapest meat to be competitive. If there's some social or moral incentive to avoid real meat, that adds value to plant based alternatives.
Fungi protein sounds cool though. I would totally add that to my diet. But I also think insects are an underutilized protein source, so I might be an outlier
Even when your personal budget would allow spending more for food, a price that is higher than that of meat is a serious red flag, indicating that it is likely that such a substitute for meat has greater environmental consequences than producing meat.
There are 3 reasons for avoiding meat. One is the ethical reason, because during the last century meat production has transitioned everywhere to using methods that can hardly be considered anything else but continuous torture. There are also certain health risks associated with meat and there is also the reason that the real cost of meat may be greater than it appears to be, due to negative environmental consequences (i.e. pollution).
If some kind of protein extract or some kind of fake meat is more expensive than real meat (per protein content), you can be rather certain that the negative environmental consequences are worse than for real meat, because the higher cost is likely to be determined by the consumption of more energy and of various kinds of chemicals during the production of the meat substitute.
Economy of scale and subsidies have a major influence on shelf prices. Is is a red flag to be a small producer and/or not profiting from public money? Some wouldn't cold-ban a product only based on it's price, especially if it's pioneering.
Being "certain that the negative environmental consequences are worse" seems an stretch from weak initial judgement.
Higher cost doesn't always indicate negative environmental consequences. It could be (and seems likely to me) that harvesting one cow's worth of plant protein is more labor intensive which isn't necessarily bad for the environment. If you compare two soy crops, one that uses herbicides and another that uses manual labor to pull weeds, the latter will be more expensive and better for the environment
Shrimp, crayfish and lobster are pretty much insects, adored by many.
Those are at least big enough that you don't have to eat the shells. (Fun aside: Technically, the grouping is closer to the other way around: insects are classed under crustaceans these days.)
>there's some social or moral incentive to avoid real meat, that adds value to plant based alternatives.
This is missing the key point that like 95% of people in the world are not vegans, don't find any moral issues with eating meat, and thus produce zero social pressure. Fungi burgers MUST come with an actual benefit for the majority of people. It needs to be seen as some combination of "Tastey", "healthy", "cost effective". If fungi burgers were $2/lbs and tasted pretty close to a beef burger, then people would flock to them. The problem with Impossible burgers were worse, more expensive, questionably "more healthy" and entirely relied upon the moral/social issues which only mattered in a few small slices of society.
Having it be cheaper would make it a real game changer -- if "chicken nuggets" and "burgers" were functionally equivalent (nutrition, appearance, mouthfeel, etc) and cheaper, then we'd start to see serious changes in animal husbandry.
It will never go away but if it becomes more niche then it's likely that what is produced will be done so more humanely (branding and perception of quality)
vegan options lack flavor/texture. cost isn't the main issue
Not everyone craves the flavor/texture of meat, but everyone needs an adequate intake of high quality protein.
Including protein powder as a cooking ingredient does not do much for improving the taste of food (though the food definitely feels more satiating), but it ensures that it is healthy enough.
Even if I liked meat, I never felt any kind of addiction to it. There are many years since the last time when I ate meat and I feel no need to eat again, as long as I have a lot of other options for food that is tasty and healthy.
For several years I have not used any animal protein sources, but this forced too inconvenient constraints on what I could eat, so eventually I gave up and now I use in cooking some whey or milk protein concentrate powder, whenever it is necessary to increase the protein content. This has provided much more freedom in menu choice.
So for me, if instead of having to buy protein extracted from whey or milk (which costs about the same as chicken meat, i.e. many times cheaper than protein concentrates extracted from plants, which must use much more complicated processes than the filtration of whey or milk) there would be the option of buying similar protein from a fungal culture, that would be enough to cover all my needs.
From other comments that I have seen about the fake meat products, I am pretty sure that there are many others like me, who do not care whether they eat meat or not, as long as they eat some good food.
You're missing out on an infinity of great food - great for anyone, vegan or not. Just think of all the Chinese, Latin American, Indian, etc. food that is vegan. Think of many appetizers even in mostly-meat restaurants. And there are world-class restaurants that serve vegan dishes
Eliminating beef, fowl, and fish leaves a universe of foods including all fungi, fruits and vegetables, grains, nuts, and legumes. It also includes all spices and herbs.
Double that. I'll also recommend to try some fungi/bacteria pre-processing as it bumps the taste:
Kimchi & Sauerkraut to wet the appetite.
Don't use salt, use Miso. The darker the better.
Tempeh is awesome and comes with soy (nutty), lentil (strong taste like aged meat), chickpeas (floral), beans (melty), or other legume/cereal/nut. Can include spices and seed for extra taste and crunch.
Nuts cheese tastes "cheesy" in a similar way similar to their diary version (Roquefort, Cheddar, Blue, Camembert, Brie...) depending on the ferment, without the "milky" taste. Nut taste instead, obviously but that can be offset with other oils/fats.
I actually really like "milky" tastes - has there been much progress on replicating the flavour?
IMHO the Chèvre (goat) [0] and Morbier (bleu) [1] from Jay and Joy are very close. They also comes a bit cheaper in non-organic version [2]. I mostly buy from those guys but the curious may try a few from their local brands: when talking about cheese every recipe is has it's subtlety.
0 https://www.jay-joy.com/collections/affine/products/le-jeann...
1 https://www.jay-joy.com/collections/affine/products/jil-from...
2 https://www.lesnouveauxaffineurs.com/
Vegan Chinese food? Ah, if you are vegan and go to China you need to be careful because there isn’t much vegan food, although plenty of veggies and they even have a few vegetarian restaurants in recent years.
Wherever you are, the local Chinese food is an adaptation - there is Indian Chinese, for example. But tofu, for example, has a long history in China, and you can find vegan food in Chinese restaurants in many places. I expect most people on HN don't eat their Chinese food in China.
Ok, that makes sense. You’ll find tofu art in China as well, but it usually doesn’t pass the vegan threshold unless you go to a fancy Singaporean chain (Pure Lotus was the only one I knew of in Beijing). Even then it feels wrong, tofu really shouldn’t taste like chicken.
It also includes pork, and bison, and venison, and frogs, and snails, and rabbits, which are all quite tasty.
>Just think of all the Chinese, Latin American, Indian, etc. food that is vegan.
What? Outside of Indian food, which does have many vegan options, but the best food is usually still non-vegan (lots of dairy and butter used). Chinese and Latin American food is almost never vegan. Chinese love meat, and you would have to be a buddhist monk to actually find vegan food in China. Even with a lot of cheap plant protein options, like tofu, most things use some meat for flavor. Latin America loves cooking in animal fats.
You can find vegetarian food in (non-Tibetan) monasteries, it isn’t clear if it’s vegan since the Chinese aren’t strict about that.
> Chinese and Latin American food is almost never vegan.
I've seen plenty of vegan food in restaurants serving those cuisines, so that's not true. Why is it important to you to insist that vegan food is somehow difficult?
If you just mean 'in China', that's irrelevant to this conversation - only a small proportion of people here eat their Chinese food in China. But I acknowledge, lots of people on HN like to demonstrate their worldliness by making sure we know they've been to China, relevant or not.
> the best food is usually still non-vegan (lots of dairy and butter used)
It's a bit hard to make a definitive statement about what is 'best'. Personally, I much prefer Indian without all the ghee. That vegan food exists in many varieties is an objective fact, however.
There are plenty of vegan restaurants in Europe too. Does not mean that European cuisine is vegan.
In my lifetime the conversation has shifted from mineral farming with chemical fertilizers to managing microbes to microbes doing the managing.
There is a case to be made for many species of plants effectively being a previously unidentified manner of lichen. Created on mineral soil much the same way lichen grew on rocks.
As an aside, I'm always perplexed by these statements:
> There are as many as 12 million species of fungi, yet there are just 155,000 or so known species, leaving vast numbers undescribed.
"There are as many as 12 million species of fungi, yet there are just 155,000 or so known species..."
The second number makes sense: it's how many species we've identified. But the first number... how can we know how many we don't know?
This kind of thing pops up all the time (X number of crimes go "unreported"... if they're unreported how can we say that?).
I get that they may be estimates. If so, it's pretty important that that estimation process is described.
Might as well say there are as many as 12 trillion species of fungi.
Consider a contrived scenario where an opaque jar contains N distinguishable marbles. You take one out and note it's type and put it back in. You repeat this n times. If k out of n are unique it conveys information about N.
If, for example, k=1 then N is likely small. On the other hand if k=n then N is likely large.
The most computer-sciencey way is to look at n at which you get a repeat, ah! a hash collision.
One can make these ideas more quantitative under assumptions about the numbers of each types of marbles.
The math of hashing, birthday paradox, coupon collection and hyperloglog are good places to start.
Then there are other ways. Two of you count the number of typos in a tedious text. One says N the other says n and out of them only k are common. From this you can estimate the likely number of typos in the text.
Right. That makes sense in the contrived scenario (although in that contrived scenario we know the probabilities with absolute surety).
But TFA's estimate is perplexing because it is NOT a contrived scenario. We don't have marbles, we have some territory to cover. The territory isn't randomly distributed, we can't adequately randomly sample (presumably?).
It feels like the estimate could be wildly wildly off, in which case why estimate.
The contrived scenario is just a starting point. One can make more and more sophisticated ecological statistics models about the situation.
Regarding why estimate at all knowing they can be wrong ? Estimates are very useful for planning. Sophisticated models would also yield probabilities of over and underestimated, these combined with cost of over and underestimation errors are very useful for decision making.
See the German tank problem. Turns out the allied forces overestimated the number to f tanks left, still helped in planning.
It also makes sense in non-contrived scenarios ... the contrivance was just pedagogical.
Great explanation, thanks!
It's probably something like, here are the environments where we've done comprehensive surveys, here are the kind of different situations where we expect to find different species (decomposers of various types, mycorrhizal, within plants, within animals, on surfaces, specialists, generalists, climates, etc). Multiply the species from places where we've probably found most of them by the number of places where we've only found the most obvious fungi. However it works it's going to have big error bars, reflected in the fact that 12M species is the upper end of a range starting at 2.2M.
We have better DNA sequencing technology today, so we can detect how many species living in sample (soil/water/...) and guess something. But if someone want to "descripting" these fungi, they should plant the fungus species in lab and detect its feartures; this is more expensive, harder and usually impossible.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5118932/
Basically, you bulk sequence some sample like some soil, and from there you can call certain taxa and make estimates of unique species or unidentified sequences.
Also, how would they really know if a species is endangered? With millions of species that haven't even been identified, how would they know how common any of them are?
There are thousands of different species of many branches of the taxonomy tree (insects, molds, bacteria, etc.) and like fungi, each have tons of species not even identified.
Scientists estimate that something like 99% of species that ever existed, are extinct. I understand why people get upset when something like elephants hit the endangered list, but should we really care if some obscure species of dung beetle is endangered?
For now, our science is not yet so advanced as to be able to appreciate what we will lose if an obscure species of dung beetle disappears.
Species of beetle or of fungi or of any other kind of living beings may look very similar, but nonetheless they may differ in their ability to synthesize various chemical compounds by using various enzymes that may not have equivalents in other living beings.
The popular literature is full of triumphalist b*s*t which makes it appear that most basic sciences, like physics, chemistry and biology are solved, but this is extremely far from the truth. We are still a few decades away from being able to understand well enough how a living being works, so that we would be able to replicate similar processes for making whatever we want.
Until then, every kind of living being which disappears is an irreversible loss of precious information, which may have saved an unpredictable amount of time in the future, which will be needed to rediscover similar results with those produced by natural evolution during millions of years.
There's probably a really good answer using statistics, but it's beyond me.
Inference.
> 12 trillion species of fungi
Give it enough time, it could happen
> (X number of crimes go "unreported"... if they're unreported how can we say that?).
“Unreported” is usually short for “unreported to police”
I assume researchers ask people if they’ve seen a crime and not talked to the police about it.
Two mushrooms walk into a bar.
The bartender says "You can't come in here."
They say "Oh C'mon we're fun guys!"
He looks at the religious statues in the corner and says "the last of your lot ended up destroying Angels!"
For those who don't get the joke -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroying_angel (destroying angel mushroom)