Lab-made dairy products are now a reality
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
This is interesting research, but lab-made cheese is far away from being in the shelves. Producing casein with yeast is one thing, but that doesn't mean you can just make cheese out of it. In cow or goat milk (or sheep milk), there are 4 different casein proteins arranged in micelles together with other molecules. That exact set up is important, because when you add rennet (i.e. mostly the enzyme chymosin) to it for coagulation, it cuts the kappa caseins (which are on the outside of the micelles) at a specific position. That's key to the process that is set in motion after that, leading to the texture, taste and function we know from different cheeses.
Other challenges include the mass production of casein in this way. Cheeses contain typcially between 10-15% protein per weight, so you need to produce a lot of it. This is unlike e.g., Impossible Foods, which also produce heme with yeast, but of course they need much less of it per kg of meat.
We're looking at ways of directly make cheese from plant proteins by finding an enzyme that works similarly how chymosin works with casein. It's not clear if this will work - but if does, it will be a cheaper and simpler process than trying to produce milk synthetically.
That doesn't mean that I dismiss the synthetic casein approach - I think it can work, it's just important to understand that it's not as simple it sounds. In the future, we might see cheeses made with both approaches, maybe each with their pros and cons.
It is curious how so much bio technological/financial effort is spent on something that not only does not contribute to the extension of human life but also serves no other purpose than it’s own end. In general milk is more of a cultural commodity than an anything close to a necessity.
Personally I would much rather biotech focused efforts on life saving/extending tech and then we can address other desires later like more perfect hairlines, longer orgasms and memories ect, but such is the conundrum of capitalism trying to determine which humanitarian goal to solve.
Unless there's a plan to wean off all industries off cow milk, we'll need it to vastly reduce environmental impact.
My local grocery store has a ton of them, mostly based on soybeans or nuts like cashews. Presumably you had something different in mind?
The article talks about an unsatisfactory one at the beginning.
Just like there are companies working on lab-grown meat vs. meat-like products (e.g. Impossible, Beyond, Planted).
The goal was to just have bacteria, feed them molasses (which is cheap and easy to come by) and get raw milk protein as a result. Much more efficient than actually going through a cow.
"I would love to say that products in stores is only 2 years away, but let's say 5 to be on the safe side".
Milk is substitutable. You loose the taste for it in a year or so. Cheese? I have tried many vegan cheeses. They all suck.
I think there's also a marketing issue with these things. This reminds of two anecdotes.
A few months ago, I got curious and tried one of those "alternative milks". As "milk", they all tasted terribly. Some tried to mimic the taste more than others. Some had tons of seed oils, which, I've heard, aren't all that great for the body. But one of these, I actually liked. It didn't really taste like milk, and it had next to nothing aside from oats and water.
A few years ago, I was out at a bar in Paris and caught a discussion between three people, one French, one Italian and one Wisconsinite. The subject was the cheese brought from the US. And the part that stuck with me was along the lines of: "This doesn't taste like Parmigiano at all. / But it's still very, very good cheese. / I think you'd have much more success selling it as its own name".
My point is that maybe instead of trying to recreate "vegan steaks" or "vegan cheese" or whatever, call it something new and let it stand on its own. It will probably never be the same as "the real thing", and that's OK. Even better if it can forego all those weird, highly processed ingredients needed to try to give it a semblance of texture, etc.
But in general I do think there are great products out there already. In the last years in Sweden tempeh started becoming available, and more brands of tofu (especially smoked varieties) started showing up in the groceries.
People have been eating those for hundreds or thousands of years, and they are amazingly versatile products. I have come to the realization that I don't need new products. I just need to discover the ones that are already available.
I've been trying to make more environmentally conscious food choices: pretty much cut out meat, I didn't drink milk in the first place, but cheese... cheese is my nemesis.
Beyond that though, I'm really interested in foods that could be created that don't mimic existing foods derived from animals or plants. You could imagine a nutritionist defining requirements - combinations of proteins, fats and carbohydrates, various micronutrients. Now add the aesthetics of taste, texture, consistency etc. Some of these would be "ready to eat," either hot or cold, but others could be raw materials for traditional cooking: shred a block of this solid stuff, fry it in that liquid oily stuff, and drizzle some thick spicy stuff on it. Marketers to invent names, of course. Maybe we even get food tailored to us individually, based on specific nutritional needs, fitness goals, religious restrictions or palate.
This doesn't sound appetizing, so I think it would be a gradual process, where new products come out that aren't quite like natural foods, but are still acceptably tasty, and cheaper or more nutritious. Gradually we get things that are quite different. It would take a while, but I suspect in a few hundred years we'll have things that are unimaginable today but as accepted as cheese, beer or sausage. And with much, much lower impact on the biosphere.
That's literally what processed food is. Nothing from a Twinkie to cheese (one of the oldest processed foods) resembles anything that comes from animals or plants.
Humanity has been doing this for all of recorded history.
Often the processing came of necessity: many of our culinary traditions are simply things that evolved such that we could preserve food pre-refrigeration. The problem is that we still don't seem to be very good at making healthy processed foods, and once you stray away from basic foods, there's strong market pressures to optimize for taste (and, let's be honest, borderline addictiveness) above nutrition.
The zeitgeist seems to be about going back to more natural food though, at least in my circles.
The underlying fear is that what is sold as 'nutritionally complete' food is actually incomplete, but that we don't know enough about nutrition yet to notice it : so the best strategy is to keep a tried and true diet, like a Mediterranean diet.
This is what milk is, really. It's specifically designed to be the exact balance of nutrients needed -- by an infant. (And in this case, an infant cow.) It'll be hard to beat what we already have.
Some top chefs do something approaching this - not quite at the molecular level in the way mentioned here, in a lab (although it's called molecular gastronomy), but nevertheless experimenting with different combinations and techniques. Artisanal experimentation vs industrial production.
But all good tastes we know and enjoy are from animals or plants. You have to mimic existing foods for people to like (and buy) it.
The problem with Quorn [0] is that it's only just acceptably tasty. People looking for price will just buy rice and beans and oatmeal, and people looking for taste will buy meat or tastier, more modern meat substitutes (think Impossible).
I am hesitant to say it will never happen. On the other hand, Quorn has been on the market for a surprisingly long time, and AFAIK has not made any leaps in quality, so I don't know if it ever will.
Isn't this exactly what Soylent is/was?
Now this.
Isn't it just the logical consequence of non-European immigration? AFAIK lactose intolerance is a pretty well-known phenomenon (unlike gluten): mamals are lactose intolerant after weaning, and as such most humans are so. There exist a few places (northern Europe, subsaharian Africa, southern? India, somewhere in the middle East) where the same kind of nonsense mutation on the gene responsible for weaning appeared, so people from there are usually lactose tolerant even after being weaned. The more people not coming from there there is in your population, the less lactose tolerant your population will be.
Edit: incorrect english wording
Unless you know for sure that you have the mutation, stopping drinking milk or consuming dairies at some point in your life comes with a risk of not being able to drink milk ever again in your life. (I don't mean that going vegan is bad or anything, but I wish people knew it can come with a bigger commitment that what you may expect)
What does this mean in the context you're using it?
Citation needed.
It's the most common allergen. Even in smallest amounts it's inflammatory even in those without obvious IgE allergy (tests for allergies are notoriously imprecise, even things like RAST and in-vitro lymphocyte stimulation).
1. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Glycolylneuraminic_acid#Effe...
2. MedCram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRkRilP1OTU
Is that not largely due to the change in ethnic composition? (And a fairly slight effect at that)
Good. It's remarkable how much cheese is included in restaurant meals. If you want to avoid it then it narrows the choice substantially.
Making the milk taste correct, should not be easy. It contains many smaller compounds not found by just generating the primary proteins. Which is probably the reason the first companies are creating cheese from lab grown milk: https://www.realvegancheese.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galalith
Nowadays it is only used for buttons and some other small fashion accessories, but it has a lot of interesting properties, although the classic manufacturing process (curing) is very slow.
This interlock might mean a lot of pushback from the industry regarding this technology.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/26/dairy-di...
i don't want lab milk, i want milk from the cow that had a sweet and free life with its set of (good) bacteria
i don't want a pasteurized milk
it's an alternative to industrial milk, maybe
but not an alternative to fresh cow or other animal's milk
people who push this want to sell you a product, they don't care about what it is
i'll never buy one of their product
Oh and, life is already an open space lab
Cows are forcefully inseminated and once born their calves are taken away.
How would you feel if someone kept you in a Matrix-like farm to harvest energy or protein from you?
A particularly revolting example:
https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjz-2018-0140#.W9tXqRN...
A study published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology in 2018 found that from 2014 to 2016, 70 percent of moose calves in west-central Maine and northern New Hampshire died of emaciation by winter tick infestation. On average, each animal hosted 47,371 ticks.
bacterias are same kind of creatures as cows
oh and what's the point of life if everything is lab made and if we all live in a spaceship doing nothing but trying to reverse engineer life and reimplement everything in a lab
as pointless as everything else, including what i do
Yeah, I know it's off topic, but there are already complaints here about it being paywalled, so I had to vent.
They are helping making animal free icecream that might be better than current dairy free.
I can't access the article behind the paywall, but I ultimately have a very simple question: Where can I (living in Germany, Europe) buy one of these milk alternatives that tastes like milk? Can you name a shop?
I would like to buy it. I'm willing to pay a premium. I feel this is an important enough development given the high greenhouse gas impact of milk that I'd like to be an early adopter.
It's not the first time I read about something like this, but often enough if you look into some of these plant replacements it's some startup saying "we have fancy tech that allows us to create this product that really is like the original", but they only announce it, but haven't gotten to the point to actually produce and sell it.
> nobody has to convince regulators that the foods are fit for human consumption, because they are made using microorganisms and processes that are already “generally recognised as safe”.
But the only mention of the "food industry" is FDA, which is specific to the USA:
> When Perfect Day asked the FDA to approve its whey protein in 2020, the agency said yes right away.
We will never replicate the real thing closely enough. Microbiome/proteome alone is going to be impossible, without all the small peptides and antibodies - it will never be the same.
Milk itself isn't the healthiest food either. Cow milk is the most prevalent allergen, but it's mostly chronic inflammation instead of full blown anaphylaxis and thus ignored. You do not have to be lactose intolerant, it is true allergy to proteins in milk.
https://www.arthritis.org/health-wellness/healthy-living/nut...
Humans were not supposed to eat it. It was just something that helped us survive in frozen wastelands.
My concern is not my personal carbon footprint (I am very skeptical about the concept in general), my goal would be helping to make technologies available faster that can make a dent in societies carbon footprint as a whole.
And carbon offsets are hugely problematic. I'm inclined to say the vast majority of them are close to being a scam.
Doesn't personal footprint translate into societal footprint?
Otherwise, nothing short of banning all food and force-feeding everyone bugs, or having a few world wars is going to make a dent.
Carbon offsetting is a poor substitute for just not having a big carbon footprint to begin with. It's a sticking plaster at best, and incredibly hard to verify the impact of as an individual consumer.