The end of farming

[living sounds]

Lab grown food is poised to take over:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet

 

[Tubetec]

Ireland is a massive dairy producer and theres a palpable sense that the sector is in big trouble here ,prices to the farmer are shockingly bad .  Theres no doubt the 10:1 ratio it takes to produce meat could go a long way to fixing the defecit with the ecosystem , but you cant simply expect farmers just to give up a way of life .Its the little guys that will get squashed first , the impact of that on rural life in this country would be catastrophic . 

https://farmsubsidy.org/IE/ 

Theres something fishy about how those figures are presented ,
but even the big boys of the Irish dairy food industry are subsidised up the yingyang .
Cooking up foodstuffs in tanks of nutrients does show great benefits in energy terms , but whats it going to taste like a mouthfull of pond scum ?  anyone fancy trying a frogspawn smoothie 

 

[fazer]

Brave new world.  Will dairy become engineered to be more like human milk?  The possibility is endless.  The next 20 years will be change like I’ve not seen in a lifetime.      Soylent  green anyone?

 

[ruffrecords]

Brave new world.  Will dairy become engineered to be more like human milk? 

I hope not. Human milk tastes horrid.

Cheers

Ian

 

[fazer]

I hope not. Human milk tastes horrid.

I was thinking more about problems people have digesting cows milk.  Not me though.  I love dairy.  Milk, yogurt, cheese.    I would be disappointed if it tasted like the substitutes used today. Some like sweetens soy milk are ok but other synthetic coffee creamers are horrible.

 

[cyrano]

The ecological impact of some vegetables and fruit is worse than, fi small-scale chicken.

The real problem with most crops is the scale, not the product.

 

[s2udio]

So let me get this straight....
We give up natrualy growing crops for lab grown food to save the planet ???!!!.
Boy there are some crazy batsh*t idears about nowadays, this one takes the biscuit
The writter of this article has no understanding of the way this world of ours actually works.
Obviously siting in his micro ai inviroment.
Idiot.

 

[living sounds]

So let me get this straight....
We give up natrualy growing crops for lab grown food to save the planet ???!!!.
Boy there are some crazy batsh*t idears about nowadays, this one takes the biscuit
The writter of this article has no understanding of the way this world of ours actually works.
Obviously siting in his micro ai inviroment.
Idiot.

I can't comment on the viability of the scenario the author is offering, but I found it very interesting.

If it tastes the same, people will eat it, since production is vastly more cost-efficient than farming and there will be pressure to eliminate the farm subsidies that people are paying a lot of taxes for.

It's debatable how "natural" farming actually is, isn't it? Historically agriculture is the very definition of a "cultural vs. natural" process. And factory farming? Covering the lands with monocultures that use up resources at an unsustainable rate? Entire lakes filled with animal waste?

And don't get me started about dairy. I love cheese and other milk products, but there are some very disgusting aspects to their production. If there was cheese that tasted just as good but was grown entirely in a lab, I would certainly buy that.

In the end it's only organic molecules, neither our taste buds nor our digestive systems care one bit how the molecules were assembled.

 

[shabtek]

Its the little guys that will get squashed first , the impact of that on rural life in this country would be catastrophic

there are no more little guys...greencore group plc must be the little-est, they needed the most help

used to be lots of farms, now lots of support services for few farms. as for enviro impact IDK...seems strange the amount of fuel/ energy used to plant and grow, harvest transport and turn crop into fuel...livestock is a lossy system

 

[fazer]

the amount of fuel/ energy used to plant and grow, harvest transport and turn crop into fuel.

This is the dumbest thing the US has perpetuated .  There is no way it adds up to any savings on fuel.  Not to mention the complete up set it creates in farm prices around the world. 

 

[Tubetec]

I found a locally produced milk in a glass refundable bottle, costs 2.50 euro including 70 cents refund on the bottle , compared to 80 cent for standard supermarket own brand milk in a paper or plastic carton .  Supermarket milk probably has to around 350 miles to get to me , co-op milk is about 1/10th the distance traveled. The other thing is the taste ,I find about 50% of the amount of co-op milk is required for the same amount of flavour  in a drink like coffee or tea .

Someone told me a story about onboard a navy ship here one time ,they couldnt source fresh milk ,there was uproar about the UHT long life stuff which has a noticable taste .  The solution in the end was powdered milk made up the night before and served iced cold in the morning ,no one knew the difference  . 

The only reason ethanol gets added to fuel is it insulates the market from fluctuations in crude oil prices , as noted it actually hurt the prices farmers see for produce , the chemistry involved in blending oil and water is enviromentally problematic as well as the damage it can cause to older machinery , theres absolutely nothing environmentally friendly about it at all .

 

[s2udio]

In the end it's only organic molecules, neither our taste buds nor our digestive systems care one bit how the molecules were assembled.

So any old waste product tastes good then.......why not recycle our own waste product, mmmmm

 

[cyrano]

There is a lot of potential in industrial scale processes for anything related to funghi at least. It was tried for tofu, but it seems bamboo is needed and inox or plastic aren't good replacements for bamboo baskets.

So it's not a good/bad thing, but just another way to process fermented foods. And food science needs to learn about those, as we've lost most knowledge in the past three-four centuries.

The clearest example is ketchup. In the 16th century, every town in Europe had it's own ketchup. The name came much later, from ketjap, the Asian condiment. These local ketchups were very diverse. Some were made from mushrooms. Others from unripe fruit (Verjus, in France, one of the survivors), shellfish, seaweed or nuts.

None had tomatoes, since America hadn't been discovered yet. No sugar, as sugar wasn't available. Most of these sauces were fermented.

Just a few remain.  Most of the knowledge is gone. Some recipies are easy to "modernise". These sauces could be potentially lethal.

 

[cyrano]

why not recycle our own waste product, mmmmm

Mankind has been doing that for about twenty thousand years...

 

[living sounds]

Mankind has been doing that for about twenty thousand years...

Indeed. It doesn't get more literal than this, I think:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet

 

[cyrano]

I experienced one of those in India. I was pretty amazed.

The next tourist came out looking like he aged twenty years.  ;D

 

[rob_gould]

I think the most extraordinary thing is that if it's cheap, most people won't care where or how it's grown.

My impression is that most people are so disconnected these days from where their food actually comes from, it won't make a huge difference to them whether food is grown in a field or in a laboratory.

 

[rob_gould]

So let me get this straight....
We give up natrualy growing crops for lab grown food to save the planet ???!!!.
Boy there are some crazy batsh*t idears about nowadays, this one takes the biscuit
The writter of this article has no understanding of the way this world of ours actually works.
Obviously siting in his micro ai inviroment.
Idiot.

 

[living sounds]

I think the most extraordinary thing is that if it's cheap, most people won't care where or how it's grown.

My impression is that most people are so disconnected these days from where their food actually comes from, it won't make a huge difference to them whether food is grown in a field or in a laboratory.

In a way, many people (different subsets for different reasons) care a lot more about where their food comes from than was the case in earlier times. But yes, certain people don't seem to care at all.

Artificial food production and food processing has been practised by humanty for millenia. The process of making beer or coffee is no more natural than the processes described in the article. The new processes are way more efficient and do not rely on photosynthesis or lifestock (bacteria are not animals).

The complex taste of beer primarily comes from the bacterial composition of the yeast involved. I don't think this new type of food has to taste bland at all.

Personally, I am way more disgusted by fois gras (in case anyone doesn't know, read up how that is made) or even pork (I'm not a vegetarian but find the taste vomit-inducing) than by a protein-rich powder created by bacteria metabolizing hydrogen.

I think we should ramp up production as high and as quickly as we can. There are many reasons why agriculture may suddenly not yield sufficient results to meet demand: The disappearance of pollinating insects or a catastrophic volcano eruption (after the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora temperatures dropped so badly that people soon were eating their horses and the bicycle was invented). So if anything like this happened, we would have a stable backup source to get through the rough patch.

 

[JohnRoberts]

For one perhaps germane observation, a strong market for vegetable based faux-meat is India where some 25-30% of the population is vegetarian...

JR