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Comment by jcampbell1 | Hacker News Reader

The protein yield per acre for soybeans vs mung beans is 6x. No amount of try hard is going to make mung bean protein close in price to soy.

What gets me is that I can’t even source tofu that is cheaper than chicken. Chickens are very good reactors for turning carbohydrates into protein.

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> Chickens are very good reactors for turning carbohydrates into protein.

The remnant wiring from my chemistry and biology classes tells me this is impossible. Did a little digging and no animal seems capable of this feat.[1] Chickens are fed a mix of cheap grains, like wheat and corn that are ~16% protein.[2] What they are is efficient at turning this protein into body mass/eggs.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-organism-that-can-convert-...

[2] my backyard chickens

In the UK a popular plant based "meat" is Quorn. I believe that is grown by an organism that is fed glucose. The glucose is predigested maize starch. So perhaps not a single organism but two to make it.

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

You still need a nitrogen source. They are using the glucose energy to turn nitrogen (ammonia in this case) into protein.

I'm not sure I agree with your wording, ie use "glucose energy to turn nitrogen into protein". Proteins are made up of amino acids which are made from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms. The glucose not only provides energy to the process but also carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. In fact, this is a very common process in plants.

Note: The comment I originally responded to appears to have changed their wording from "living organism" to animal. Although curiously this might not be correct either. For example, humans synthesize some “nonessential amino acids” from glucose (eg glucose → pyruvate → alanine). It's possible similar amino acid pathways can be combined into a protein completely synthesized by the human body. It also seems very likely that this happens in other animals.

https://www.quora.com/Can-the-human-body-turn-excess-glucose...

Sure it's an oversimplification, I excluded everything else glucose provides besides energy, but glucose alone cannot produce protein.

Nitrogen source is rarely the most expensive BOM component for cell culture/fermentation, so it's all kind of moot.

I made a typo above when I said glucose provides nitrogen that should be hydrogen.

>The protein yield per acre for soybeans vs mung beans is 6x.

While this is probably not too unfair for mung vs. soy, it's important to remember that yield per acre can't always be compared directly across crops that grow in different climates. Tropical climates can average well over 50" of rain per year while cold climates are wet if they hit 25", and the conservation of mass already affects cold-climate growth before taking into account any other factors.

Hence chickens, which can live almost anywhere.

The optimal crop certainly depends on weather. In northern Brazil they double crop corn for insane yields of 22M calories per acre. In Wisconsin they grow wheat for 4m calories per acre. Farmers in the Midwest split between soybean (oil/protein 6m calories per acre) and corn (carbs 11m calories per acre).

Optimizing yield per acre, adjusting for the value of oil/protein/carbs and weather is the best explanation for the current state of what gets planted.

If you have a desert with access to cheap labor, water, and transportation, then the best thing to do is sell organic strawberries to rich people. Rich people don’t like spots on their fruit.

I am a believer that the invisible hand is what drives farm decisions. As soon as someone invents a robot that can pick blueberries and deliver them to a store, I’ll never eat another banana.

I didn't quite get your last comment. Don't you have blueberries in your store already? Or was it a point about price?

I definitely prefer bananas over blueberries so maybe I'm just confused.

Another factor is the amount of protein that each contains: Google says soy beans are 36g per 100g, whereas it's 24g for mung beans, so you'd need less quantity of soy to yield a given amount of protein.

As a separate comment: wow, I had no idea mung beans contained that much protein!

Is that because soy has been engineered that way and mung beans have not? I pose the question because I remember my grand uncle who has been a soy farmer his whole life telling me that when they switched to Monsanto seeds they got some huge multiple of crop yield, 3x? 4x? I can’t remember the exact multiple I just remember it seeming like a lot.

Generally when people refer to Monsanto seeds, they mean Roundup ready soy. The glyphosate resistant gene actually reduces yield by 5%. The upside is you either have huge labor savings from not having to deal with weeds manually, or you get yield increases compared to co-cropping with weeds.

I would love to see how much of that is based on subsidies.

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