Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

Note that they are not yet "pumping" out anything. Their plan is to start selling next year, which means that it probably will take another few years.

I think that it makes much more sense to make meat and cheese directly from plant proteins, without going through the trouble of growing meat in bioreactors.

Assuming that both will have a similar endproduct (and Impossible shows that it's possible), making from plant proteins directly will always be cheaper, faster, require less resources and be healthier.

That said, I'm not against companies going in this direction. I think it's worth exploring. It's just a bit sad that this "high tech" gets much more press and hype than the more boring alternative, which is already here and reducing greenhouse gas emissions TODAY (which is the key). This is very similar to direct-air-capture technologies, which some day might be viable, but there are plenty of things that we can today that are just not as sexy and therefore don't get hyped in the media.

To be clear: I see a future where most meats and cheeses will be made directly from plants, and a small minority made using cultured cells.

> making from plant proteins directly will always be cheaper, faster, require less resources and be healthier

This is not clear at all. If you look into what goes into making something like an Impossible Burger, it is basically none of those things.

Which part is not clear?

For one thing, plant based meats require a ton of resources, and for another there’s no clear evidence that it’s any healthier than vat grown meat.

Ok, let's leave out the health part because nutritional health is a tricky topic. We could argue days and nights about this.

But what we can tell for certain is that it does not require a ton of resources. The cultured cells in the bioreactor also need energy and nutrtients from somewhere, they don't just create it out of thin air. The energy and nutrtients ultimately comes from plants.

Basic physics dictates that there will be a conversion loss. So it is always better to directly eat the plants than to feed plants to something else and eat that.

There are amino acids you can't get from plant protein.

From first principles, how is this possible? Food animals get their amino acids from eating plants.

Of course there are amino acids that don't exist in plants, but they are not essential (i.e. can be synthesized in the human body and don't need to be taken from external sources).

From first principles, it's possible because e.g. cows could make amino acids that are not found in plants, but those are not essential (I don't know if cows make any non essential amino acids that are not found in plants, this is just an example)

Clearly plants get them from eating animals.

All essential amino acids are found in plants, and some plant proteins (soy or hemp for example) contain all the essentials in a single protein.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, this is true.

Is it in a "reasonable" amount? As in, is the concentration comparable?

Yes, there is an index called the Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score which shows exactly this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_Digestibility_Correcte...

No, all essential amino acids can be found in plants. We have a long way to go if even people here on HN (which I would consider more educated than the average person) gets something as basic as this about nutrition wrong.

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