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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
There's probably a really good answer using statistics, but it's beyond me.
> 12 trillion species of fungi
Give it enough time, it could happen
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)