Making honey without bees and milk without cows | Hacker News Reader

Making honey without bees and milk without cows

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64 pointselorant84 comments

Taken to the extreme, is replacing insects and animals with a microbial production pipeline any better?

It feels like steps to completely lose any healthy relationships with our environment and simply industrialize everything. That is a scary vision.

Pray tell what "healthy relationship" we have with nature with the current status quo?

Using science and technology for good by reimagining the antiquated methods of creating stuff like milk, cheese, beef , honey, leather, etc is a good thing.

I'm vegan, btw.

Some vegans do oppose lab-grown meat (perhaps also dairy), on the grounds that humankind will never treat our animal brothers and sisters justly until we have lost the very appetite for their flesh.

Every religion has extremists.

Replacing these "antiquated" methods with extensive supply chains (even more) dependent on non-renewable resource extraction doesn't seem like using technology "for good"

Supply chains and process can be streamlined. A herd of cows is a herd of cows.

A barrel of oil is a barrel of oil.

> Renewable energy has entered the chat

Right, because all of the plastics used in these labs are made from renewable sources?

Yes, it’s possible but you can’t say the same about live feed. Cows will be cows, pigs will be pigs.

Agriculture itself has been industrialized for a century in the developed world. It's increasingly industrialized all over the world. Only a small part of the world's cultivated land is worked with techniques recognizable to the farmer of 1850.

If agricultural productivity declined to pre-industrial rates, many people would starve to death. The good news is that population growth is slowing and will probably reverse in the present century. It's still going to be a while yet before widespread de-intensification can be embraced without widespread starvation.

In the mean time, microbial production looks like a good option to provide food for growing populations while limiting environmental damage. It can produce food with lower demands on land, water, and artificially fixed nitrogen than ordinary agriculture. It's resilient against extreme weather events and pest outbreaks.

I didn’t claim otherwise. What I do think, is that

1) these views are heavily colored by industrialization in the USA / low animal welfare / high-intensity farming, which is not matched anywhere else

2) we can lower demands on land and water by moderating our consumption of meat (the US average is something like 1 burger pp/day?) while still growing most of our food in natural ways

Turning to more industrialization seems like a cop-out instead of real (hard) solutions: change of consumption habits, organic farming, strong environmental laws and so on.

I don’t particularly look forward to having most of my food being some form of goo coming out of a massive factory, completely inscrutable, which is where this is leading.

The United States could feed its own population with significantly reduced industrial inputs, particularly if Americans were content to eat only as much meat per capita as e.g. Japanese people [1]. But the United States has over twice as much arable land per capita as the world average:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC

The US is currently one of the world's top exporters of corn, wheat, and soy beans. If the US exported less food then other countries would intensify production further. I don't think that any dietary changes could prevent mass starvation if the world abruptly stopped using artificial nitrogen fertilizers altogether.

Microbial protein production is one of the ways that the world could gradually cut back on artificial nitrogen fertilizers, though. Some chemoautotrophs are capable of assimilating atmospheric nitrogen.

"Autotrophic nitrogen assimilation and carbon capture for microbial protein production by a novel enrichment of hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria"

https://www.powertoprotein.eu/wp-content/uploads/pagination_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...

In that list the USA is the top consumer of meat per capita, along with other highly developed countries. You just proved my point.

> If the US exported less food then other countries would intensify production further

> abruptly stopped

> mass starvation

Heh. That’s one of the most creative cop-outs I’ve seen recently.

Vegetarians have been trying to get people to eat less meat for decades but worldwide, per capita meat consumption has grown steadily since 1961.[1] The percentage of Americans identifying as vegetarian or vegan has held steady for twenty years.[2] Maybe it's time to look for other solutions.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2018/08/03/you-m...

Some people eating more meat doesn't change what the problem is or how it can be addressed.

Also, I think you claim that vegetarianism/veganism hasn't grown is pretty dubious.

My source for the second claim was the Washington Post. Can you provide a contrary one? It does say that people have moderated their consumption a bit, but it's not visible in the global trend.

The rise in meat consumption over the past sixty years mostly comes from poor countries getting richer. It's been inexorable. Meatless Mondays in rich countries aren't going to make a dent in it.

Lab-grown meat cheaper than farmed would be another matter. We didn't stop whaling with public relations campaigns. It stopped when kerosene made it mostly obsolete. Thirty years after kerosene came on the market, 95% of whaling had stopped.

> but it's not visible in the global trend. The rise in meat consumption over the past sixty years mostly comes from poor countries getting richer

Gonna need a source for that too, the numbers available say otherwise.

Um...the source is my first link above. Rich countries eat the most meat, but their consumption has been steady over the past 50 years. Meanwhile:

> Growth in per capita meat consumption has been most marked in countries who have underwent a strong economic transition – per capita consumption in China has grown approximately 15-fold since 1961; rates in Brazil have nearly quadrupled. The major exception to this pattern has been India

If you disagree, what is your source?

Trying to get Americans to sacrifice their lifestyles for anything is like trying to squeeze blood out of a diamond.

“ Turning to more industrialization seems like a cop-out instead of real (hard) solutions: change of consumption habits, organic farming, strong environmental laws and so on.”

This. I used to carry the view that going to a full industrial processes would eliminate the inefficiencies. It just ignores the core problem, we are no longer in coexistence.

moving away from sprawl, and back to high tax revenue older school forums of urbanization(which we are seeing as new age urban spaces), agroforestry, more cyclical product “end of life” supply chains

At the scale we do it, farming is not a healthy relationship to the environment. It does immense damage.

Right now, livestock are 60% of the biomass of all mammals on the planet. Humans are 36%, leaving only 4% wild mammals. Our poultry has three times the biomass of wild birds.[1] Food production takes up 40% of the Earth's land mass.[2]

Scientists have defined nine "planetary boundaries" we need to avoid crossing to avoid environmental catastrophe. For the ones related to farming, we've already crossed the boundaries for land use, biodiversity, and the nitrogen cycle, we're close for the phosphorus cycle, and over halfway there for freshwater use.[3]

According to the book Clean Meat, a 2011 study found that cultured beef would use 99% less land and 96% water. We feed nine calories to chicken to get one calorie of meat.

If we were to convert to cultured meat and milk, we could stop most deforestation and let most of that 40% of land mass revert to native forest and prairie. We'd pull back from those planetary boundaries and absorb gigatons of carbon. Do the same with fish and maybe ocean populations could recover.

That would be a healthy relationship with our environment.

[1] https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.h...

[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/agricultu...

[3] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2011/08/05/have-we-crossed-the...

Thanks for this, wholeheartedly agree.

If we are ever to restore earth to the Eden garden we'd all like it to be, then these type of advances are the only way this'll ever happen.

I don't want Eden. I want medicine, engines, cheap energy and internet.

We can have all of it. For medicines in particular, preserving biodiversity actually helps, we're still discovering new medicines in wild plants. Doing away with animal farming wouldn't hurt the rest of your list either.

There's no reason why you can't have both.

> We feed nine calories to chicken to get one calorie of meat.

This is not a byproduct of the current farming landscape, but an artifact of the food chain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer... & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency.

In general, from one level of the food chain to the next, only 10% of the energy is able to be converted.

My chickens eat bugs around the house.

Edit: I'm not joking. Old-school local farm chickens really do eat bugs. They feed themselves a good part of the year. Bugs and vegetable scraps. I'm not sure what new-school corporate farm chickens eat. And foxes will eat the chickens (if they get a chance). The food chain.

A few years ago I got to know a commercial chicken farmer. He showed us his "chicken houses," which were large dirt-floor buildings packed so full of chickens you could barely see the ground. They ate whatever grain he threw in there. By contract he had to buy grain from Tyson and sell them the chickens.

> By contract he had to buy grain from Tyson and sell them the chickens.

I’m assuming a contract he signed

Edit: similarly you could say by contract Tyson had to sell him the grain and buy chickens from him

I wasn't making a moral judgement, just emphasizing that the chickens eat grain and will continue eating grain.

I could also get into a discussion of market inequities and whatnot but it'd be a bit off-topic in this discussion of environmental impacts.

Confirming this. Chickens are fierce predators when given the chance. One of the walls on our stables is usually covered with flies chilling in the warmth of the sun. The chickens (and the local magpie population) go there to prey on them whenever they get the chance. Chickens will also hunt mice, lizards and other critters small enough for them to catch and devour.

However, the fact that our chicken use one of the walls of our stable as a hunting ground kinda puts things in perspective; for most people, a stable, or obtaining meat from farm chickens is simply not possible. Industrial farming is the big issue, and replacing industrial farming will require new methods. I'm not sure more over-processed products is the answer though.

"Chickens will also hunt mice, lizards and other critters small enough for them to catch and devour."

Your comment reminded me that chickens (and indeed, birds) have descended from dinosaurs (many of who were carnivores).

The idea of a group of T-Rexes hunting and fighting over prey like a flock of chickens is outright scary. :D

> If we were to convert to cultured meat and milk, we could stop most deforestation and let most of that 40% of land mass revert to native forest and prairie

Or, due to human/life nature, human population will grow even larger and take up that space too :(

Urbanization has been the trend for decades. With most farming obsolete, it would probably accelerate.

Not only do we take less space that way, but urban populations tend to have lower birth rates.

Urbanization isn't all fine and dandy. In fact, I really don't like living in high density housing at all. I start getting itchy way before we reach high density. Why is it so important to use less space?

I like using more space per person but having less people. Does away almost magically with many issues we see in high density urban areas. I'm not saying we should all live on a farm. Just don't cram thousands of people into a high rise and then build one high rise next to the other for miles.

"Oh, great; now we can support an additional 5 billion people!"

This is 100% true as long as human motivations are not factored into play.

The equally plausible reverse scenario is that as soon as artificial honey is preferred, bees will be killed off for being useless in the capitalist sense, and the planet will die.

Nothing is ever black and white.

Out of curiosity: would you categorize milk-producing cows as a part of our natural environment?

I'm not an expert, but I don't believe they existed as we know them today until man took an active hand in selectively breeding them into the very useful animal they are today.

In other words, we're now just doing - albeit with sharper tools - to bacteria what we've been doing for millenia to all kinds of animals and plants in our "environment".

> I'm not an expert, but I don't believe they existed as we know them today until man took an active hand in selectively breeding them into the very useful animal they are today.

I don't know either, but that feels counter-intuitive. Would ancient humans figure "hey, see that animal over there? I bet with a selective breeding program we could make it produce milk when it calves and we'd be able to drink that and get nutrients".

I do remember reading a research article a long time ago saying that is precisely what happened with wheat (did not exist in the wild as we know it today, was bred over millenia into the flour-yielding plant we know today).

It's not a long shot to imagine that animals like cows and goats (or dog, for that matter, although not with food as a goal) were given the same treatment.

Not a long shot at all - nearly every animal you encounter today is the result of domestication or human interaction, unless you go for a safari. Even pidgeons.

Chickens have changed a lot in the last 50 years as well. This 2014 paper [0] compares the growth of chicken breeds from 1957, 1978, and 2005. The pictures of chickens at 56 days are pretty striking.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003257911...

They don't. In fact they can't actually currently exist on their own. If a calf tried to feed off it's mother it would drown because the mothers produce far too much milk. They actually have to bottle feed the calves now.

> If a calf tried to feed off it's mother it would drown because the mothers produce far too much milk.

Yep, Isn't wonderful pseudoscience? It has all the answers and all are wrong and satisfactory.

Animals -know- when they are satiated.

If that were actually true, there wouldn't be a obesity epidemic.

Well, humans are a little special. This is true. But we were talking about milk, not candy-filled people. So far as I know, neither science nor empiric observations of farmers all around the world had supported the idea that if let alone a calf will suck milk until exploding. Vet handbooks don't describe this hypothetical condition and such obesity epidemic of calf is not happening anywhere.

Not much different than claiming that people left on a lakeshore will drink water until getting sick or dying, because there is to much water. Nope; this is not what we observe in the real life.

Therefore the original claim is just new-age ideology without any scientific base.

I think you're gonna need to back up that extraordinary claim with evidence.

Ask a dairy cattle farmer. That's where I heard it.

I’m not vegan myself, but if the environmental costs of harvesting milk and honey can be offset by producing them in a lab and the products are safe and cost-effective then I’m all for it.

Milk has fairly significant environmental costs (cows are large animals, after all), but bees make honey while they're pollinating plants (including our crops), and we depend on that pollination. I find the idea that humans are cruelly exploiting bees to be hard to wrap my head around. Beekeepers don't rob hives of too much honey, as that would kill them. I've been a vegetarian for 35 years, and I avoid dairy products for the most part (mainly for environmental reasons, but also ethical ones), but honey doesn't seem problematic to me, I'd keep bees myself if my neighbors would let me...

I'm not familiar with how honey is produced large scale, but I can't imagine it's the same image you think of when looking at small scale beekeepers. In order to get that much volume of honey that looks and tastes the same, you're going to need giant fields of monocrops, or maybe blending a massive collection of honey together.

I do know that there a massive issue with honey fraud. Where honey is being diluted with other substances. That's where I see these lab grown producers being better. You're buying from the supplier, or at least know more about where the honey is coming from. If they can compete on price, then companies no longer need to import honey that comes from some country that let's slide some product that doesn't hold true to it's ingredient list. So for mass market products, I'd imagine we'd get higher quality product.

So while not truly "Vegan", idk how far down that rabbit hole many Vegans will be willing to go down in order to adhere to that standard. (I myself eat >90% vegan).

> In order to get that much volume of honey that looks and tastes the same, you're going to need giant fields of monocrops, or maybe blending a massive collection of honey together.

… or add plain old sugar. Which is what most honey what comes from China (they produce & export a lot of it) contains. They are so good at it now that you can't even tell just by tasting it, you need to do chemical analysis, and there it's easily visible if the honey was stretched with sugar or is all natural.

> bees make honey while they're pollinating plants (including our crops), and we depend on that pollination

Domesticated honeybees aren't the best pollinators: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6127/1608 "Overall, wild insects pollinated crops more effectively; an increase in wild insect visitation enhanced fruit set by twice as much as an equivalent increase in honey bee visitation."

> Beekeepers don't rob hives of too much honey, as that would kill them.

Large scale beekeepers are very willing to harvest the entire store of honey, and feed the bees sugar water over the winter to keep them alive.

The act of beekeeping, no matter how gentle and well-intended the beekeeper, involves killing bees. They're non-native to north america, and negatively impact our hundreds of native bee species in ways that we're just beginning to study and understand. They're not exploited on the same level as cows or pigs, and don't have the same environmental impact as factory farming, but it's not a benign industry.

Source: I kept bees for ~6 years

Is this really any worse than the scale of harm to insects and small mammals which occurs due to mechanised crop agriculture?

Ah, that's interesting to learn. That is clearly more exploitative, though again it doesn't sound like killing the hive is the idea. I guess my general skepticism comes from just how far the idea of exploiting other living creatures should go - cows are mammals like humans, chickens are warm-blooded if a little dinosaur-y, but if keeping bees is exploitation, is using yeasts to make bread or beer? Growing plants? The answer to those is 'yes' in a sense, but is it unethical? I hope not...

If you are concerned I'd suggest obtaining your honey from farmers markets and small producers, rather than shareholder profit driven corporates.

In my country it's very popular for individuals to own bee hives, and I can't remember the last time I bought honey in the supermarket. The quality of the honey, the taste and the texture is completely different. Whenever I only have access to commercial honey (e.g. travelling), it just tastes like sugar syrup to me.

Well I watched this documentary about honeybee treatment in the US and I came away believing it is a highly abusive and exploitative industry to the bees. Take a look:

https://youtu.be/n4ddWBEHlpo

EDIT: I should add that buying locally produced small batch honey is a good thing as it supports beekeepers that actually tend to respect the bees. The big industry stuff however is bad news as is the case with all animal industry in the US.

It's almost as if big industry is just exploitative by nature or something...

It's important to note that industrial pollinating bees are different from bees used to make honey. (Similar to how leather cows are different from beef and dairy cows) Also, the European Honey Bee used to make honey is a genetic monoculture that has trouble surviving in the wild but competes with wild bees.

[I know this is tangentially related to your point] Do you have a source on "leather cows"? My understanding is that cow leather is nearly entirely a by-product of beef and dairy cows.

The possibility of bio-identical lab-produced dairy is particularly exciting to me. Existing substitutes only resemble the originals in the most superficial ways and fall flat outside of a very narrow band of expectations. Given that the end products are of reasonably high quality I would happily be among early adopters, even if it comes at a bit of a premium.

Hmm. Given that a lot of the purported benefits of honey with respect to allergies are from the pollens, eating honey grown in a lab seems... questionable.

It may be a benefit but it isn't the main reason people eat it. Roughly local honey/similar biome would be the relevant one for that niche assuming the advertised benefits truly stack up.

I'm vegetarian and try my best to reduce milk and egg products (while having to feed kids and eat in canteens on occasion). But I don't really see any compelling reason to stop eating honey Yes, some bees die during 'harvesting', especially when you go to the industrial scale. But just eat local honey from a beekeeper you know and that problem is minimal. More importantly there is simply no way to avoid insects dying for out food, unlrss you hand-plant and hand-harvest everything, and probably even then its impossible. I eat organic as much as possible. The best standards can guarantee that there is no toxins leaking into the ground, killing frogs, polluting rivers and seas, and making the soil a barren dessert, but it simply cannot work without bees.

I think the most bee-friendly thing we could all do is to eat as much (locally/small-scale produced) honey.

There usually isn't a good argument for entirely excluding foods, and in part for that reason, I haven't really done so. There does seem to be mounting evidence that sugar causes quite a few health issues though. If that's a concern, it might be worth flipping the question around and asking why you should eat honey at all, or other sources of sugar, besides its delightful flavour. I looked, and didn't find much other than hearsay that there was a compelling difference between adding honey or other sugars to other food.

Because it's better than whatever candy bar you'd buy in the store or granulated sugar which is easy to overdose.

What is it that makes it better? That was the main question. I quite like a candy bar, and I quite like honey, but both seem to me like equivalent indulgences, unless the honey is added to something substantially more filling and nutritious. I wasn't able to *quickly* find anything that indicated a tablespoon of honey being different from the equivalent granulated sugar, so I just stopped buying it. It's too expensive for the little it adds to my food.

Because it's not riddled with arbitrary additives and supposedly has micronutrients in it. Candy is overpriced for being mostly molten sugar wrapped in hard sugar.

Ya, idk, that doesn't seem terribly compelling. Especially because honey is also basically molten sugar. If you like honey, and why wouldn't you, that's great. But it still seems to me like just a more palatable way to add candy to your cereal or tea.

When maple syrup, molasses, maple/corn/rice/malt syrup, agave etc. and soy/rice/oat/almond/coconut milk are readily available and affordable now, it's easy to avoid honey and milk today if you want to for environmental and/or ethical reasons.

I'm pessimistic that e.g. lab grown meat will have a big impact unless it tastes identical to beef while being cheaper - the above alternatives are available now for other food types but it's still not enough incentive for most people to change. Any difference in taste will be a huge downside (most won't give their tastebuds a little time to adapt to a new taste without a good reason) and there's always going to be unfounded claims about what's healthy and natural.

Honey is one of the most faked foods in the world

https://www.insider.com/fake-honey-problems-how-it-works-202...

I simply don't believe we wouldn't be risking harm to the environment or farming (which also means harm to the environment) by cutting back on bee production.

Honey is just flavoured sugar water. So it shouldn't be technically hard to replace. Arguably that's what jam does.

The Chinese had some bumper crops when they hand pollinated after the bees went missing. Which allows super pesticide use which also helps I guess.

Does anyone know the comparative environmental/climate change damage between soy (for milk) versus cows?

Seems soy isn't great: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200507104446.h...

A quick online search for “soy vs dairy milk environment” will give you plenty of comparative environmental research to digest.

Growing food far away from where it is consumed is an environmental disaster regardless of what that food is. The ScienceDaily release you linked doesn’t say anything about the relative impact of soy versus dairy milk, it simply quantifies the transportation cost of Brazilian production.

Since ~77% of soy is used as animal feed[0], your dairy cow is probably also consuming soy imports, so your dairy milk now combines the negative environmental impact of soy-based feed with the negative environmental impact of animal husbandry and the efficiency losses of feed conversion.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/soy#more-than-three-quarters-of-g...

Thanks that's the same link I found too! makes me feel slightly better that US is soy country.

I never drank milk, even as a kid. But lately I've been doing more dairy and milk actually tastes ok in small quantities and it absorbs protein supplements better.

Though if you've never had actual food fresh soy milk it's very very good the store stuff is weak water in comparison.

I hadn’t thought about this before, but the reason vegans don’t eat honey is basically because it is forced animal labor, right?

But isn’t industrial scale pollination also forced labor of bees?

How do those two square up?

I don't think the bees mind if we borrow some of their surplus.

A more organic approach to cow's Milk I think might be sustainable as well.

And money without trees.

So regardless of all other factors, this person tries to convince me a high tech lab food synthesis is somehow more environmental friendly than honeybees who have been doing just that (without electricity!) for millions of years?

I claim bullshit. Their only motivation is to target vegan market. No way its more environmentally friendly.

The pipette tips alone will generate far more waste

It's delusional, somehow many people have convinced themselves that further abstracting food production with whatever novelty "lab" technology (which by definition require more energy input, necessitate increased resource extraction, etc.) is the solution to environmental challenges instead of an act of doubling down on their causes.

Or, to take the pessimistic view, it might be the case that many individuals in these industries realize this and simply see emergent capital flows they can tap into.

I think we have to look beyond just the vegan market - I perceive it to be about about reuniting the vegan and non vegan markets by replacing the supply chain of the actual target food to comply with veganism further down the road. As a business opportunity, the potential for growth is not limited to a relatively small percentage of the population who take on the personal baggage to hold themselves to a vegan diet (though they are a critical evangelistic user base to start from), it's to corner the entire market by making it cheap, patentable and ubiquitous.

The promise of environmental benefits helps to encourage investment from all camps open to the notion. The hope that it might bear fruit would for many outweigh any risks they see, because there's a 100% chance the sky will fall, displacing sea levels upwards if we don't do enough to control our impact on it, and a less than 100% chance that this research will backfire enough in this department to not be worth exploring.

You'd have to be either be highly risk-averse about some physical possibility like pollenization/natural immunity/unforeseen consequences (prepare for them), or have some kind of philosophical/religious reason at a metaphysical level to oppose it.

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