Thread · HN Continuity

Even if I very much hope to live to see a profitable production of animal proteins without growing and killing animals, I do not believe that there is the slightest chance that this approach, of the "lab-grown meat" will ever succeed to produce meat that is tasty and cheaper than e.g. chicken breast.

In the long term, the only way to produce artificial meat that looks like natural meat, but is cheaper, would be to create a a genetically-engineered multicellular organism, derived from some fungus, which would feed like a fungus, but which would grow some parts containing muscle tissue, instead of growing mushrooms.

In the short term, there already exists the technology to produce protein powder with the same composition as natural whey protein concentrate or as egg-white powder, but obtained from a culture of some genetically-modified strains of the fungus Trichoderma, which have been modified to secrete the desired animal protein, instead of an enzyme that is secreted by the unmodified strains.

There exist some startups that hope to eventually sell such fungus-produced animal protein powders, initially as ingredients for industrial food processing. Unlike "lab-grown meat", this technology has the potential to achieve a lower cost than the protein powders made from cow milk or chicken eggs.

For some people, like myself, the availability of such a protein powder as a cooking ingredient would be enough to eliminate their dependency of any natural animal protein sources.

I have eaten only proteins from vegetable sources for about 4 years, but eventually I gave up, because that forced too rigid constraints in what I could eat without exceeding the calories threshold that would make me gain weight rapidly and without exceeding the cost of a diet including meat, while also taking too much of my time with plant protein extraction at home, because the commercial plant protein concentrates are much more expensive than meat, so I do not consider their use acceptable.

So now I still eat vegan food that I cook myself, but when cooking certain dishes I enhance their protein content with whey protein.

Thus for me whey protein from a fungal culture would already be enough, but for those who want the taste of meat without killing an animal, that is much farther in the future, after we will understand much better the relationship between genome and multicellular growth and morphogenesis.