Long overlooked as crucial to life, fungi start to get their due

Including protein powder as a cooking ingredient does not do much for improving the taste of food (though the food definitely feels more satiating), but it ensures that it is healthy enough.

Even if I liked meat, I never felt any kind of addiction to it. There are many years since the last time when I ate meat and I feel no need to eat again, as long as I have a lot of other options for food that is tasty and healthy.

For several years I have not used any animal protein sources, but this forced too inconvenient constraints on what I could eat, so eventually I gave up and now I use in cooking some whey or milk protein concentrate powder, whenever it is necessary to increase the protein content. This has provided much more freedom in menu choice.

So for me, if instead of having to buy protein extracted from whey or milk (which costs about the same as chicken meat, i.e. many times cheaper than protein concentrates extracted from plants, which must use much more complicated processes than the filtration of whey or milk) there would be the option of buying similar protein from a fungal culture, that would be enough to cover all my needs.

From other comments that I have seen about the fake meat products, I am pretty sure that there are many others like me, who do not care whether they eat meat or not, as long as they eat some good food.

Eliminating beef, fowl, and fish leaves a universe of foods including all fungi, fruits and vegetables, grains, nuts, and legumes. It also includes all spices and herbs.

There are 3 reasons for avoiding meat. One is the ethical reason, because during the last century meat production has transitioned everywhere to using methods that can hardly be considered anything else but continuous torture. There are also certain health risks associated with meat and there is also the reason that the real cost of meat may be greater than it appears to be, due to negative environmental consequences (i.e. pollution).

If some kind of protein extract or some kind of fake meat is more expensive than real meat (per protein content), you can be rather certain that the negative environmental consequences are worse than for real meat, because the higher cost is likely to be determined by the consumption of more energy and of various kinds of chemicals during the production of the meat substitute.

It will never go away but if it becomes more niche then it's likely that what is produced will be done so more humanely (branding and perception of quality)

This is missing the key point that like 95% of people in the world are not vegans, don't find any moral issues with eating meat, and thus produce zero social pressure. Fungi burgers MUST come with an actual benefit for the majority of people. It needs to be seen as some combination of "Tastey", "healthy", "cost effective". If fungi burgers were $2/lbs and tasted pretty close to a beef burger, then people would flock to them. The problem with Impossible burgers were worse, more expensive, questionably "more healthy" and entirely relied upon the moral/social issues which only mattered in a few small slices of society.

According to the article they still rely on conventionally sourced eggwhite for that function.

Should be mentioned as in the general context of meat ersatz, anyway.

Regarding why estimate at all knowing they can be wrong ? Estimates are very useful for planning. Sophisticated models would also yield probabilities of over and underestimated, these combined with cost of over and underestimation errors are very useful for decision making.

See the German tank problem. Turns out the allied forces overestimated the number to f tanks left, still helped in planning.