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Comment by SapporoChris | Hacker News Reader

They've altered Fusarium venenatum which is currently what Quorn utilizes in its products. "The production process of gene-edited MP is more environmentally friendly than chicken meat and cell-cultured meat." That's good news, if they get to the point where it is more economically friendly than chicken meat it will be great news.

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The farming lobby will try to ban it as soon as it becomes a viable alternative to poultry. I hope consumers will have the awareness to fight back.

The feedstock has to come from somewhere, right? I’m assuming many farmers would prefer feeding it into stable vats of algae or fungus than dealing with the risks of another epidemic-induced chicken cull.

Fungus probably needs more much too, because no photosynthesis.

> I’m assuming many farmers would prefer feeding it into stable vats of algae or fungus than dealing with the risks of another epidemic-induced chicken cull.

Many farmers don't have the financial means to redesign their entire pipeline to move from birds to fungus. "farming" is in the name but I also suspect there is nothing in common between raising chicken in cages and mushrooms in sterile containers in term of know-how, maintenance, &c.

Factory farms consume far more feed than they can grow on site though, so the real power isn’t in the chicken farmers, it’s the ones growing chicken feed, and they’re probably used to switching crops to suit market demands.

And the farmers who do grow their own feed are probably smaller operations targeting higher quality meat than factory-farmed chicken, so they’re not the ones that vat-grown meat-substitutes would be competing with.

They would probably prefer that their expertise and massive investments in infrastructure for raising chickens isn't made worthless.

Looks like the feed is 95% glucose derived from corn starch[1]. They claim to have 1/4 the carbon footprint of chicken[2].

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

[2] https://eathealthy365.com/quorn-vs-meat-the-2025-environment...

Alternatively, one of the poultry meat giants will just buy it and produce it themselves so they can capture the vegan/vegetarian market too. Why compete when you can consolidate?

I would love to eat meat free alternatives. Quorn gives me IBS. Same with the highly processed meat free "meat". Beans are my basic goto for protein plus eggs.

Have you tried dehydrated granules from 90% pea protein, 10% jackfruit? It has no weird additional ingredients besides those two and for my wife and I has replaced ground beef except for burgers

Where do you even get that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.

I get the brand Lotao, but they are German (also available in UK IIRC). Our drug store DM also has a house brand of it. I assumed that if there are 2, there are probably more elsewhere ;)

This one?

https://www.lotao.com/en/pages/english

Yeah that's the one, I have it on subscription, 1kg/2 months (about 3kg of finished product)

But considering the simplicity of the product, I assume any brand will be very similar.

I've tried pea protein products before that had a kind of bitter taste. What is the flavor profile like?

Extremely neutral to me. I have pea protein powder and there I taste a bit of bitterness.

Seitan is pretty good, otherwise soy based things like tofu and tempeh can be extremely tasty. The highly processed shit is probably as bad as highly processed meat so I avoid it too.

I’ve cooked and eaten tofu that was acceptable, and tempeh that was slightly better. I’ve never had tofu that came anywhere close to plain chicken breast—just salted and fried—in terms of taste, let alone something I’d call extremely tasty.

So, I guess, question is, how do you make extremely tasty tofu? Do you have to get some tofu that is not available in Europe?

If you don't like tofu you're not going to like it. I vastly prefer it to chicken, which I find unpleasant, and I don't even like tofu that much.

> how do you make extremely tasty tofu

Marinades, breading, spices... even better if [broth, spices, vegetables...] are added in the mix before tofu coagulation. Some shops sell those but not very common.

Tempeh on the other hand is easier to elevate because the fungus "sip" marinades very quickly. If one day you find yourself in the way to cook some again don't be shy to give it your cooking love : paprika+garlic+thyme+oliveOil / coconut+curry+lime / pepper+cheese+cream. Tempeh is very adaptable and forgiving. Can be boiled, fried, poached (better when fresh), bbq...

In my humble experience a very good taste is achieved in ~5 min like so:

- mix 1/2 soy sauce + 1/2 neutral oil. Slice or dice the tempeh and dip or surround with sauce for >10sec

- pan for a few minutes with some oil. It can be eaten raw but it's better with a crust

- serve with thym and pepper on top

I've been making Socca from chickpea flour and using that for my pizza crusts, in case you need new ways to consume bean protein. Super quick and easy to whip up.

Despite enjoying Quorn for a few months once or twice a week, after a while it started making a family member throw up (so thanks for the IBS tip). Chickpeas are also out. I can feed them tofu, tempeh and beans and lentils for vegan protein.

Morningstar Vegan Breakfast Sausage Patties. Great with eggs.

If you're living in the US, reduced fat paneer is very good, and protein dense.

I was coming to write about Quorn. I wondered if it was in the family because Quorn is an industrialised bioreactor process. This should translate over, unless weakened cell walls make for a process unfriendly change.

Neurospora crassa is also pretty good. Meati sells slabs of it.

There’s little chance that the statement is true. Chickens kept in a backyard can live on bugs and kitchen scraps and there’s no delivery cost for eggs or eventual meat.

This is not how the overwhelming majority of chickens live - they live in high intensity farm operations in horrible conditions

That is not how most of the chicken is raised (over 70 billions are slaughtered per year).

If all the meat you eat is from chicken raised in your backyard , that's environmentally perfect.

In the US per capita chicken consumption is 100 pounds per year.

Thats about 45kg, I wish I had that average American backyard.

A negligible fraction of chicken production is backyard operations. Any quote talking about chicken production is referencing how they are actually produced, which is generally huge industrialized farms (often hundreds of thousands to millions of birds a year).

how big is your backyard?

Back of the envelope, for a family of 4 eating US quantities of chicken... you need to be slaughtering ~100 chickens per year. In a homesteading setting it usually takes a chicken about 12 weeks to reach slaughter weight, so you need to be raising a minimum of 25 at any time.

That's a pretty substantial backyard operation.

Wild to think that there's 6-7 chickens for every human in America at all times

In commercial operations they are also raising chickens much faster - maybe only 6 weeks for a meat chicken, so you only need half as many at any one time

If everyone had backyard chicken operations on that scale, I suspect we'd have a lot more disease problems! Decentralized isn't necessarily better for disease, if the overall scale stays the same.

At least where I live, you can't have chickens in quite the same way our great-grandparents had. You need to comply with veterinary regulation for one, and for good reasons.

If every yard in a town or city was full of chickens, I wouldn't call it decentralized. Just one very broad centre.

Or you could just call it the developing world lol. It’s very common in many places.

That's... Not too bad, actually. My grandmothers used to have maybe 8 chickens and 12 ducks or so. They were very low maintenance, and had very minimal pastures, with the only difficult to reproduce part of the process being that the houses were in fairly wild surroundings.

They would probably need more pasture in monoculture hellholes that have cornfields for 100km in each direction.

Yeah, the real question is whether they can forage enough food in this kind of scenario. Without supplementary grain, they are going to need a whole lot of insects to grow that quickly...

Well, no, they won't be able to forage enough if it's a small pasture. They do need extra feed.

I'm guessing that the more you do to get them forage the better the meat and eggs will be, for instance larger pasture and making sure your other animals leave plenty of dung around.

I did ~100 chickens last year, and more like 85 this year.

12 weeks is incorrect, you can buy the same Cornish crosses that the big farms use. So they can be ready in as little as 6-7 weeks but I usually stretch it to 8 or 9; my time to process them is fixed so I might as well get a little bit more meat for my efforts.

I use a chicken tractor that is big enough to let me hold about 33 at a time.

So it’s an operation that needs to run for about half the year. If you time it right, you can work around vacations and stuff. Daily operations are actually pretty minimal in terms of time spent, but you do lose three weekends a year to process them if you don’t outsource that.

All of that to say: I’m not sure if I want to agree with your characterization. It’s less of a time commitment than you think. But there is a substantial cost to it all: capital costs are notable and the cost of feed and birds is such that you basically break even against high-end organic products for sale. You’re always going to look at the Costco chicken and wonder why you are doing it. I treat it as a “touch grass” hobby that kinda breaks even.

No real point, just excited to have something to say about this haha

> the cost of feed

Note that in the scenario I was responding to, they are arguing for input-neutral chickens, so they can't just buy in feed, and have all the complications of maintaining their feed source as well

Average household probably isn't going to produce enough food scraps to feed 25+ chickens (we've done it in the past, but we had a restaurant kitchen to supply the food scraps)

Oh, for sure, good point. Meatbirds are crazy eaters. One of my batches this year ate 500lb of feed to yield 160lb of carcass weight.

>> You’re always going to look at the Costco chicken and wonder why you are doing it.

It depends. My friend's dad has chickens and the meat is tough and grey-dark, very much not like the supermarket white and soft meat. Also the meat tastes of... chicken; I guess. And you can see even the bones are significantly harder (I can't snap them with my fingers like the supermarket chickens' bones). I always assumed this is because of the way they're raised, allowed to roam freely (within an enclosure, but it's a big one) and feed on scraps and everything they can forage for, in addition to grain.

What does your chickens' meat look and taste like? If it's the same as supermarket chicken then, I don't know, but if it's the other kind then it's definitely worth it. Although it takes a couple hours cooking to soften it :)

It looks like supermarket chicken. I tried something more like a heritage breed once but I have young children who want massive white meat chicken breasts, so that’s what I’m doing for now.

But I will say, when you buy chicken at the grocery store, the quality can vary. Mine has always been good.

>> I tried something more like a heritage breed once but I have young children who want massive white meat chicken breasts, so that’s what I’m doing for now.

Heh. Over here (UK and the rest of Europe I reckon) the kids love chicken thighs. Acquired tastes eh?

They're simply completely different breeds. Factory-farmed supermarket broiler breeds are optimized for producing as much bland, white meat as possible in as short time as possible. Everything else, like the ability to walk, is secondary, they're never getting enough space to walk anyway in their two-month life.

Breeds optimized to egg-laying are an entirely separate category, and they don't produce much meat, and the meat is… different, as you described. Apparently some hybrid breeds are also available for backyard meat+egg co-production. I don't know what their meat is like.

People didn't really eat that much chicken meat before the 70s, at least in the West. Wouldn't have been even possible to consume this much chicken meat, before these fast-growing breeds and industrial-scale farms.

Well that's how we lived for thousands of year, we only eat so much meat now because of the insane industrial processes we developed around animals.

Americans simply need to release chickens into the urban environment the way they released domesticated pigeons. Soon any swift child will be able to catch a feral chicken and break it's neck on the way home from school, providing protein for the whole family.

Chicken used to be a very expensive meat when they were treated like this. It didn’t become the cheapest meat until the 1990s, and that’s because of the massive efforts that were put into creating the Cornish cross breed and raising them at scale.

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