Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production

rethinkx.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 164 posts

Re: We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production

#41

Post by carapace »

thetopher wrote: post #19
hirundo wrote: post #12

> By 2030, the number of cows in the U.S. will have fallen by 50% and the cattle farming industry will be all but bankrupt. There's an impressive lack of humility here. Predictions are hard, particularly about the future. I challenge the authors to construct a longbets.org wager on the above. I wonder if spelling out verifiable details and putting a significant amount of cash on the line would soften their certainty…

This is where I stopped reading. How can somebody claim to be on the cusp of disrupting a market when they evidently don't understand the consumer? Nutritional equivalence will not bankrupt the cattle industry.

I'm too lazy at the moment to look up a link but fast food restaurants are already adopting these faux-beef burgers and people love them.

Re: We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production

#42

Post by slimed »

worik wrote: post #30

Meh. The hippies were right. Eat food your grandmother would recognise. Eat it as unprocessed as practical. Eat a lot of it raw. But I bet where people have no choice (in prison, public hospitals, schools, on food stamps...) it will become compulsory.

Or how about the billions more people we will have in the coming decades? Population growth in the global south in addition to crop destabilization due to climate change will be a crisis. This is one possible solution.

Eating "real" food may end up a luxury for most.

Re: We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production

#43

Post by seveneightn9ne »

zaroth wrote: post #32

Looking around I see examples like this everwhere, where the science seems to be rapidly advancing new approaches and techniques which will feed, cloth, transport, teach, and entertain billions of people in ways that are more economical and ecological . Examples like these are why I'm convinced that environmental impact reduction and ultimately rejuvenation is possible without massively disrupting life as we know it.…

I'll believe that when our CO2 output per year stops accelerating (never mind when it actually starts shrinking!)

Re: We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production

#44

Post by DoreenMichele »

slimed wrote: post #36
DoreenMichele wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guilty conscience concerning global warming? People who don't want to personally change their lifestyle seem to frequently look for "magic" solutions at the societal level, often overlooking logic fails in the scenario that is being painted. It's like they imagine if the whole world changes, then I don't have to. Or something.

Isn't that exactly what technology enables? Ways of living and solving problems that were previously impossible with little to no additional effort from the actual consumer?

If the whole world changes, your life changes with it, often in ways you didn't anticipate.

If you want to keep eating like you currently eat and this prediction comes true, then you have to put in additional effort to try to keep doing the same things.

Re: We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production

#45

Post by slimed »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #44
slimed wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that exactly what technology enables? Ways of living and solving problems that were previously impossible with little to no additional effort from the actual consumer?

If the whole world changes, your life changes with it, often in ways you didn't anticipate. If you want to keep eating like you currently eat and this prediction comes true, then you have to put in additional effort to try to keep doing the same things.

Yeah, I see now what you're getting at.

Re: We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production

#46

Post by Spooky23 »

slimed wrote: post #36
DoreenMichele wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guilty conscience concerning global warming? People who don't want to personally change their lifestyle seem to frequently look for "magic" solutions at the societal level, often overlooking logic fails in the scenario that is being painted. It's like they imagine if the whole world changes, then I don't have to. Or something.

Isn't that exactly what technology enables? Ways of living and solving problems that were previously impossible with little to no additional effort from the actual consumer?

Not always.

The shitshow of American agriculture is due to the technological wonders that moved most vegetable production to the California desert and the over utilization of the Midwest aquifers.

Most of our sustainable east coast growing areas are subdivisions now.

Re: We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production

#47

Post by witten »

zplizzi wrote: post #24
jmartrican wrote: post #18

The author had me till they said "This is the result of rapid advances in precision biology that have allowed us to make huge strides in precision fermentation, a process that allows us to program microorganisms to produce almost any complex organic molecule." Is there anything on the market now that uses this technique?

Yes - this is how impossible foods makes the heme protein which is central to their burger tasting "meaty". There are tons of startups working on this for other food products, but it's well established in other industries. Many pharmaceuticals are produced via synthetic biology, for example.

And xanthan gum, another example of this general process (perhaps without the "programming"), has been around since the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan_gum

Re: We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production

#48

Post by bitL »

vturner wrote: post #27

I'm curious how one is attracted to precision "chemically engineered" food. As I am gaining interest week by week in consuming foods in their most natural form, I want the opposite of what this article claims is "the future" (I'm a vegiterean too, it's not an animal VS impossible burger thing for me). What am I missing here to be excited about a future of custom fermented food products?

What would you say if you knew 50% of European produce never saw soil, and was instead growing on top of some chemical "water"? Disruptive "scientific" companies are buying high-quality cheap soil in Eastern Europe and impregnating top layer with their experimental chemical ingredients, leading to prediction the soil will be written off in 20 years; it survived thousands of years, reaching top quality, yet some get-rich-quick companies from Netherlands and Denmark destroy it within a single generation, while shouting "we are green" to their investors. I can't wait until these companies manage to disrupt the whole food production that we end up with famine.

Re: We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production

#49

Post by sologoub »

As others mentioned, this reads more like a PR piece than a research claim.

More importantly, the health benefits claim has been debunked before: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/impossible-burger-or-b...

> The challenge here is that these offerings aren’t actually any healthier. The Impossible Whopper, for instance, not only has comparable caloric and fat levels as its meat-based counterpart, but it has more salt per serving; the Del Taco options are comparable. The Impossible Slider has more calories, more fat and more sodium than the meaty original (before you add cheese to either).

The salt content is significantly higher and protein sources are ultra processed, which we have ample research to show that ultra processed foods have adverse health effects.

The environmental claims appear more straightforward, but we don’t need to engineer our food to drastically reduce impact - simply switch from beef to chicken.

“No question chicken is a fraction of beef’s carbon emissions and it likely has the lowest carbon footprint of any animal protein,”

Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/choos...

In short, we don’t need to wait until 2035 to cut our overall food carbon footprint in half. Better yet, let’s include more unprocessed vegetable sources and eat less animal protein all together. (I know... not going to happen)

Post reply on HN