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Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

It is nice that they recognize that the main problem for all non-animal pure protein sources is how to achieve a price not greater than the price of animal proteins, such as chicken meat or chicken eggs.

Unfortunately, neither in this article, nor on the company site,

https://www.onego.bio/bioalbumen

is there any kind of estimated price for their "Bioalbumen".

Until a competitive price is announced, any such hopeful press releases are irrelevant.

At the right price, I would certainly prefer to buy ovalbumin extracted from fungi, as this would simplify a lot the problem of composing a vegan diet that contains enough protein, but without providing an excessive energy intake and without being more expensive than a meat-based diet.

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Eggs are crazy cheap even at Spring 2024 prices. Also very low-tech and decentralized, I am eating so many of them because we are helping our friends take care of a small flock of chickens and ducks. I hear it is a sophisticated nanotechnology that can self reproduce.

Look into where your feed comes from. You might be surprised how centralized that part of the supply chain is.

> and decentralized

The eggs eaten by the vast majority of people in the industrialised world are about as far from decentralised as you can get, and your friends would be unlikely to be able to supply the demand in the absence of factory farming.

I'm not entirely sure about that. An egg a day per chicken (outside of winter) really adds up. I basically supply 3-4 families with eggs with the few chickens I have.

They are not that centralized, I think there are parts like hatching the chickens, but for example Finland with population of 5,5 million has 230 farms producing eggs. Which I think is plenty of producers.

If you ignore the extremely centralised bits, they're not that centralised, yes.

As you say, the hatcheries are very centralised, as is feed production.

Yes and no. The problem with factory farming - and pardon me but the proper economics term escapes me atm - is not all the costs are directly shouldered by the farm. For example, waste run off... the cost of dealing with that flows downstream, literally.

Similar are fossil fuels. They're inexpensive, until you realize the aggregate burning of them increases pollution, as well as greenhouse gases. But cost of impact and resolution isn't in the cost of the product.

The point is, competing alternatives that don't have such "cost-free side effects" can't compete until the legacy products' price reflect the true and entire cost of manufacturing.

See also: massive subsidies to those same factory farms which further artificially lower the prices of their products for reasons of dubious merit.

The term you’re looking for is “externalities”, fwiw.

It was worth a lot. Thank you for taking the time to help me / the discussion.

> Unfortunately, neither in this article, nor on the company site, is there any kind of estimated price for their "Bioalbumen"

From the article: "Onego Bio is close to reaching competitive price points to traditional ways of making egg proteins"

A vegan diet is really not as hard as people make out to get protein from for the average person.

All I can think of is tofu and protein powders. Everything else, you have to eat a ton of carbs or fat to get to enough protein.

I agree.

Where I live, in Europe, tofu and protein extracts are many times more expensive than meat, e.g. 5 times more expensive than chicken breast per their protein content (chicken breast is only twice more expensive than lentils, both having the same protein content).

Therefore neither tofu nor protein extracts are a rational choice for a vegan diet.

I have made countless experiments in the attempt of composing a vegan diet that would not make me gain weight very rapidly and which would also be no more expensive than a meat-based diet.

At the prices from here, I have found only a single solution. I make at home a special kind of bread that is highly enriched in protein, with up to 50% protein. This is made by washing away most of the starch from the dough, enriching the dough in gluten. While it is possible to extract almost pure gluten from wheat flour, the so-called "seitan", this requires more time and more water than I am willing to spend every day. For the protein-enriched bread that I make, about 5 minutes of dough washing are enough.

Fungal ovalbumin would be a good alternative for this process, but I doubt that we would see it at a decent price any time soon.

The solution for that is for the government to stop preferentially subsidizing meat production.

Your statement is only true accidentally. A vegan diet does tend to be lower in protein, so you'll end up eating more carbs and fat, but still getting "enough" protein because most people on a western diet get too much protein.

If you're a professional athlete trying to be vegan, then sure, you'll end up with a weird diet to meet those absurd protein needs, but omnivorous professional athletes tend to have weird diets too for the same reason.

> If you're a professional athlete trying to be vegan, then sure, you'll end up with a weird diet

Professional athletes that are actually vegan are 4 sigma outliers. For most normal humans it's not possible to even be a more-that-casual athlete in any competitive sport eating plants. Animal meats contain more than just protein including things like iodine, creatine, vitamin D, etc. A quick google brings up numerous studies on the nutritional deficiencies of the typical vegan diet you would need to rely on external supplementation for. Keto diets and other fad diets are also not great for the competitive athlete.

If you're vegan because you don't want to eat animals there's nothing wrong with it. When the vegans start pointing to the outliers as evidence "it can be done" it's just a deep cope to make everyone as miserable as them.

I'm vegan and athletic. I get about .7g/lb of protein a day which by most any measure is enough for anybody save people doing steroids.

People approach veganism as "take out the meat", which leads to nutritional deficiencies. You can't do that, you basically have to reboot the way you eat. I tracked all my food for months when switching to learn what mix of foods gave me the nutrition I needed. Now it is habit and pretty easy. The only new thing I supplement with is vitamin B12 and a protein shake after workouts. (I did the protein shake before being vegan so no change there)

It isn't miserable at all, we love how we eat.

Your comment makes no sense. I know plenty of professional vegan athletes. None of them are outliers and they’re all perfectly healthy.

Im sure they are.

Look into beans, chickpeas, TVP (textured vegetable protein, it's processed soy), seitan (wheat based, you can make it from vital wheat gluten powder), tempeh, nuts and seeds for high protein and cheap sources (seitan and TVP in particular) that are minimally processed compared to fake meat products.

Also, look into how much protein is actually recommended per day to be realistic about how much carbs and fat on top is fine to eat. It's not like people eat meat/dairy without a serving of fat and carbs next to it, so it should be fine to get some extra fat and carbs from protein sources then rebalance elsewhere on the plate.

My understanding is if you eat enough calories with an okay diet without thinking about protein, you'll hit the recommended (non-athlete) amounts without trouble and will easily exceed them if you throw in a couple of high protein sources.

I'm getting the feeling your recommended protein amount is insanely low or only for super sedentary people... From that list, only TVP, seitan, tempeh has enough protein ratio. Nuts, legumes, seeds have very low protein amounts compared to carbs/fat. You'd pretty much have to eat some kind of fermented soy product every day to get enough protein through semi-normal meals, which is workable I guess though very boring.

The key tell with folks who don’t lift is they don’t know that to can be somewhat difficult for even a meat eating lifter to hit 2g of protein per kg of lean mass without also consuming a concentrated source like whey. All this “beans” stuff sounds pretty hilarious to me.

Yeah when I was starting and heard about beans, legumes, nuts as good sources of protein and then actually looked at the protein ratio...I'd have to eat just a ridiculous amount to get a decent protein intake.

The UK and US only recommend about 60g of protein a day for males which is easy to hit and I specifically mentioned non-althetes.

> You'd pretty much have to eat some kind of fermented soy product every day to get enough protein through semi-normal meals, which is workable I guess though very boring.

Althetes eat pretty weird and repetitively anyway, lots of chicken and protein shakes. TVP, seitan, tofu and tempeh are versatile, and there's plant based protein shakes too.

Call it my opinion but 60g is way too low and adult males should have at least 90g protein. I'm not an athlete but I lift somewhat regularly and I'm trying to hit at least 120g.

> Call it my opinion but 60g is way too low and adult males should have at least 90g protein.

For the average person that doesn't lift somewhat regularly, I think this means you're disagreeing with the health professionals from Canada, UK, US and more here.

What bad thing is meant to happen if the average person doesn't eat this much protein?

> means you're disagreeing with the health professionals from Canada, UK, US and more here.

The horror

> What bad thing is meant to happen if the average person doesn't eat this much protein?

60g (12% of a 2000 cal diet) is the low end of the recommended 10 to 35% protein intake by these organizations anyway. Low end is getting to barely preventing muscle wastage territory. Plenty of upsides and no downsides to taking more protein while plenty of downsides to not taking enough protein. Do your own googling I guess, not particularly interested in convincing you.

Lentils are great too. What do you think protein powders are made of? Chickpeas are another delicious and inexpensive option. There's also seitan, yum.

Please say how you can do that.

I have heard this sentence for years, but nobody has been able to provide an example whose price was not outrageous. I suppose that this sentence is written by people who do not care whether they pay $5 or $50 for their daily food. Such people are not average people.

While it is possible to compose a vegan diet with enough proteins at a reasonable cost, and I do this every day, it is really hard to avoid gaining weight, much, much harder than with a non-vegan diet, where you have access to cheap pure proteins, like chicken breast or turkey breast.

Ever since I have switched to a vegan diet, a couple of years ago, I have to monitor my weight permanently and I have to take corrective actions frequently, despite the fact that I eat much less than most people are used to.

Tofu. Problem solved.

tempeh (also made of soy). rice and beans. chickpeas.

Lentils, chickpeas and beans are the best sources of proteins among non-processed vegetables, but they still contain too much starch and it is impossible to use them exclusively to provide enough proteins within a diet of not more than 2000 kcal/day, suitable for a sedentary life style.

They are necessary for a vegan diet, but they are not sufficient. They must be combined with some other source of proteins, which must contain much methionine and which must have a better ratio between protein content and calories.

The commercial protein extracts from them are much more expensive than meat, so they are a non-solution.

"suitable for a sedentary life style" change this.

An adequate daily protein intake from food cooked from vegetables that have not been processed using special methods for protein separation would provide over 3000 kcal/day.

Using so much energy requires many hours of intense physical activity. When your job requires spending 8 hours or more per day sitting in front of a computer, then it is absolutely impossible to also do enough physical work to consume over 3000 kcal.

Therefore your suggestion is also a non-solution for many people.

It is true however that for most of our ancestors the problem of gaining weight when eating a strictly vegan diet would not have existed. This is indeed just a modern problem, of the sedentary people.

For instance, bread is normally considered to be an incomplete source of proteins, but that is just because one cannot eat enough. Eating bread made from 1 kilogram of flour per day provides enough of all essential amino-acids. It also provides about 3500 kcal/day. Someone doing hard physical work, like it was much more common in the past, could eat only bread without needing any other source of proteins.

You can use a lot of words, but it doesn't change the underlying fact that you're too lazy to make your dietary principles really work. Burning 3000 calories a day while working in software is absolutely possible. I did it today.

> but they still contain too much starch and it is impossible to use them exclusively to provide enough proteins within a diet of not more than 2000 kcal/day, suitable for a sedentary life style.

Lentils have 26g of protein and 353 calories per 100g, and eggs have 13g of protein and 143 calories per 100g, so the ratio is 13.5 for lentils and 11 for eggs.

Doesn't seem all that different.

Whole eggs, like also most kinds of dairy, have similar amounts of fat and proteins, so indeed they are not much better as sources of proteins than nuts or seeds.

On the other hand, lean meat is almost pure protein, so its ratio of protein vs. energy is 3 to 4 times better than for vegetable sources.

Even with whole eggs, you can get much less calories than with lentils, if they are used to supplement cereal proteins, because they have a significantly better lysine to calories ratio, so when the amount of required lysine is specified you can eat less of them than in the case when their amount would be computed to provide a specified amount of protein.

Where I live, in Europe, tofu is much more expensive than chicken meat or eggs, so it is a non-solution.

I suppose that in countries where soy is an important crop, tofu may have a competitive price, but not here.

I'm not vegan, but in most places in Europe lentils are really cheap (2.50€/kg)

Lentils are a good source of proteins and are about twice cheaper than the cheapest meat, but like any non-processed vegetables they have a too high ratio between energy and protein content.

For a sedentary life style it is impossible to compose a vegan diet that has enough proteins without containing too much energy.

It is necessary to use at least one protein source where a special method has been used to separate the proteins from the rest of the vegetable.

There are plenty of such products on the market, like tofu and various protein extracts, but all of them are much more expensive than chicken meat. At the tofu price mentioned by another poster it is 2.5 times more expensive than chicken breast, while other kinds of protein extracts that I have seen around are 5 times more expensive than chicken breast.

The discussion was strictly about how to get vegan proteins cheaper than meat. When you are willing to pay many times more than for meat, then of course it is trivial to eat a vegan diet.

Because all commercial products are more expensive than meat, the only other way is to extract vegetable protein at home. I am aware of only a single source of vegetable proteins where the proteins can be separated without any special equipment or chemicals (excluding soy, which is expensive in Europe), and that is wheat flour, from which the gluten can be separated from starch by simple washing.

Also consider that tofu is edible both raw and cooked, while meat must be cooked. So meat adds energy and labor costs of cooking.

But in any case, even paying double meat price for tofu protein, $.05/g of protein, is still "too cheap to meter" in the context of an industrialized lifestyle.

You can buy a block of tofu with 28 grams of protein for $2. What’s so hard about that?

I assume that this is a price in USA. Where I live, in Europe, it is somewhat more expensive, but indeed the difference is not great.

Nevertheless, this is still very expensive in comparison with the food I normally eat. At the prices typical in the European Union, I can eat a very complete, tasty and healthy food for about $5 per day (as a male of average size). This is true only because I cook myself and I buy only raw ingredients. Processed food would be much more expensive.

Chicken breast without bones and skin would cost here between $6 and $7 per kilogram. Even at the maximum $7/kg, that corresponds to about $0.78 per 28 g of protein, i.e. 2.5 times cheaper than tofu at your price. Therefore tofu is much too expensive to compete with meat.

To be able to eat a vegan diet, I remove most starch from wheat flour, making a bread enriched in protein. This is more than 10 times cheaper than tofu at your price, so tofu is something that I would never consider. I spend the money not wasted for something like tofu for vegetables or fruits that are rich in vitamins, which are usually much more expensive than the staple food that can ensure the required daily intake of protein and fat.

> To be able to eat a vegan diet, I remove most starch from wheat flour, making a bread enriched in protein.

I think that's similar to "seitan" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seitan , which is also pretty cheap in Europe (~13€/kg on amazon.it: https://www.amazon.it/Bongiovanni-Farine-bont%C3%A0-naturali... )

That is indeed a good price, because per its protein content it is cheaper than chicken breast.

Nevertheless you can still find meat that is cheaper than this, per its protein content, e.g. chicken gizzards, so it does not demonstrate the expected efficiency of eating directly vegetable proteins without passing them through animals.

It is likely that something like seitan should be cheaper to produce than this, since I can do it at home for many times less money than that, but most commercial products for vegans are overpriced.

I'm vegan, and I sometimes record my food intake in a nutrition tracking app as a sanity check. With "sometimes" I mean very rarely, about two days this year, on a weekend when I feel like it.

Reaching the Protein RDA is very easy for me. The RDA for me is 48g per day, but I usually eat >60g. Am I correct in assuming that you have a way higher protein target than that? That is, at least, what your comments seem to imply.

I get about 30g from my breakfast and dinner, where I usually eat cereal/oatmeal with some soy/oatmilk. That stuff is dirt cheap.

Getting 20g and more for lunch is super easy. Here are some examples I recorded in the past:

30g: Ragou (carrots, kidney beans, tomatoes,...) with noodles

35g: crumbled tofu and lentils (as vegan "minced meat"), in wrap with salad

43g: pasta with tomato sauce and a store-bought vegan schnitzel (I don't usually buy those meat substitutes, but I got that one as a gift)

25g: smoked tofu, rice, canned peas with carrots

20g: from a chickpea/potato soup

Edit: BTW, I also tracked the essential amino acids, and I get easily 150 to 300% of the RDA. I get all of them to >80% of RDA from breakfast and dinner alone, the average is 130% of the RDA per essential amino acids.

Oh, and if you are wondering I had an average of 2100 kcal per day.

Just get protein powder.

It's theoretically possible using raw foods only, but very very few things have the necessary protein to calorie ratio. There's lentils, soybeans, peas, and not much else. You can also get processed food (fake meat), if you're willing to eat that and can find it cheap near you.

A single portion of protein powder each day is cheap and it gives you the freedom to eat anything else you want for the rest of the day.

What about lentils, beans, wheat, soy etc? They're packed with protein and are cheaper than chicken where I live, especially if you get dried legumes. Are you saying that if you want a high protein diet low carb diet, then it's harder as a vegan? Probably. Just look at low fat cheese vs that vegan gunk.

I switched to vegan after 20 years of being a healthy vegetarian. I stuck at it 18 months, but reverted because I wasn't healthy. Colds, coughs were frequent and lasted weeks, often turning into infections. The worst was an on/off respiratory infections that went on for 3 months. Doctors were useless, I was handed antibiotics and inhalers (although the inhalers did help the symptoms) but a week after it had gotten 90% better, I'd wake up with night sweats and a fever and the whole cycle would start up again. I was on a by-the-book vegan diet, watching my vitamins etc. No idea what I was missing, my bloods looked fine, and I was still able to do 10km runs when I wasn't sick. I went back to vegetarianism have been fine ever since (5 years ago), aside from occasional minor colds and COVID. Never again.

I'll stick with my rib eye.

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