snake from degrassi tng would NEVER be allowed on US tv--even if he was a cast member from the series being rebooted--without having to wear a wig. that hairline is unamerican!

refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

pdfdrive.com

PDFDrive stopped working a couple months ago, but you can try oceanofpdf.com instead.

I went down the internet rabbit hole trying to figure out wtf vegan cheese is made of and I found articles like this one speaking praises of new food tech startups creating vegan alternatives to cheese that Actually work like cheese in cooking so I was like huh that's neat and I looked up more stuff about 'precision fermentation' and. This is not good.

Basically these new biotech companies are pressuring governments to let them build a ton of new factories and pushing for governments to pay for them or to provide tax breaks and subsidies, and the factories are gonna cost hundreds of millions of dollars and require energy sources. Like, these things will have to be expensive and HUGE

I feel like I've just uncovered the tip of the "lab grown meat" iceberg. There are a bajillion of these companies (the one mentioned in the first article a $750 MILLION tech startup) that are trying to create "animal-free" animal products using biotech and want to build large factories to do it on a large scale

I'm trying to use google to find out about the energy requirements of such facilities and everything is really vague and hand-wavey about it like this article that's like "weeeeeell electricity can be produced using renewables" but it does take a lot of electricity, sugars, and human labor. Most of the claims about its sustainability appear to assume that we switch over to renewable electricity sources and/or use processes that don't fully exist yet.

I finally tracked down the source of some of the more radical claims about precision fermentation, and it comes from a think tank RethinkX that released a report claiming that the livestock industry will collapse by 2030, and be replaced by a system they're calling...

I'm finding it hard to be excited about this for some odd reason

Where's the evidence for lower environmental impacts. That's literally what we're here for.

well that doesn't sound good.

Oh, so it will be better for the Earth because...we won't need to refrigerate. ????????

Oh Lord Jesus give me some numerical values.

There is nothing else in this report that I can find that provides evidence for a lower carbon footprint. Supposedly, an egg white protein produced through a similar process has been found to reduce environmental impacts, but mostly everything seems very speculative.

And crucially none of these estimations are taking into account the enormous cost and resource investment of constructing large factories that use this technology in the first place (existing use is mostly for pharmaceutical purposes)

It seems like there are more tech startups attempting to use this technology to create food than individual scientific papers investigating whether it's a good idea. Seriously, Google Scholar and JSTOR have almost nothing. The tech of the sort that RethinkX is describing barely exists.

Apparently Liberation Labs is planning to build the first large-scale precision fermentation facility in Richmond, Indiana come 2024 because of the presence of "a workforce experienced in manufacturing"

And I just looked up Richmond, Indiana and apparently, as of RIGHT NOW, the town is in the aftermath of a huge fire at a plastics recycling plant and is full of toxic debris containing asbestos and the air is full of toxic VOCs and hydrogen cyanide. ???????????? So that's how having a robust industrial sector is working out for them so far.

my brain isn't functioning after trying to research this for like 4 hours and I'm no longer sure what technology is being referred to on these websites half the time. RethinkX appears to claim that precision fermentation can replace traditional forms of agriculture, but that doesn't even make SENSE, because being able to produce a specific molecule is nowhere close to being able to produce food.

What the technology is actually doing is producing molecules that provide particular attributes of a food product. This is why current applications of precision fermentation are basically producing flavorings for imitation meats. It's not producing food. It's producing molecules that can be used as food additives. RethinkX somehow extrapolates this to

Putting aside the "man-made horrors beyond our comprehension" momentarily, if in this future we imagine "fermentation farms" being located "across the street" and easily accessible to all communities (a key part of the purported benefits, as listed in the report) that means building tens of thousands of these highly resource-intensive factories. (And we should call them factories, because they are factories.)

And again. This technology doesn't produce food, it produces molecules, and all current estimations of its costs, risks, and capacity are based on facilities devoted to production of One Specific Molecule. Producing thousands of different molecules in the same facility would require cycling through various strains of microbes that grow on different "fuels" and have different requirements for temperature and conditions. And YOU STILL DON'T GET FOOD. YOU GET MOLECULES.

RethinkX forges ahead with this in the least reassuring way possible:

...

THIS IS BAD. THIS IS NOT GOOD.

Please read the wikipedia page for Soylent. It is one psychological punch in the face after another, not least of which is the information that Soylent Green (sci-fi in which the meal replacement is made from human corpses) PRECEDES Soylent the product.

Here I was thinking that Soylent Green was a satirical take on the gross nutritional shake, but no, dude literally created the Torment Nexus from sci-fi classic Don't Create the Torment Nexus.

Anyway, RethinkX seems uninterested in the open problem of whether or not consuming exclusively Soylent will cause you to die, and focuses entirely on the market popularity of "meal replacement" bars and shakes, which in their opinion is proof that molecule factories will replace, you know, actual farming of things that are food.

The whole "go vegan/plant based to save the planet" thing is literally just an attempt to channel people's concern and willingness to take action about climate change into something that can provide the most profit to big companies.

And it's not that the scientists are paid off by Big Oil. It's that the scientists are asking and answering questions within the framework of "How do we get people to Buy More Product in a way that doesn't cause our extinction" (because they have to work with the world that we have)

It's that "go vegan/plant based" is the most accessible way forward that doesn't involve scrutinizing, changing or dismantling capitalism in any way

Hi, friendly neighborhood scientist here! I am also alarmed, but not by all of the same things and not for all the same reasons!

First thing:

Depending on what is being fermented, you do in fact get food! The existing product cited in one of the first "precision agriculture" articles, Quorn, uses a fungus to grow mycoprotein (literally, "fungus protein") that is then bound together with egg- or potato-based binders to achieve a meat-like texture.[1] What comes out of the reactor is not yet a food product, but it's most of the way there and those downstream processing steps should all be happening in the same facility.

Is it highly processed? Yes. But it is food.

And they seem to have the process down pretty well, seeing as Quorn has a growing presence in US supermarkets.

A lot of the "fake meat" products out there right now are pretty junk-y, but if a theoretical highly processed, slightly dystopian-sounding alternative food could be nutritionally equivalent, taste similar, and have lower environmental impact? That should not be rejected just because it's "molecules" instead of food - your regular reminder that everything is made of chemicals if you break it down to component parts.

(I'm not saying that was OP's argument, but people in general have a kneejerk reaction to things that are "unnatural" that I wanted to get ahead of.)

Moving on to environmental impacts:

I'm going to pull a bit from this paper in Nature about beef specifically here[2], rather than "traditional agriculture" as a whole. Carbon footprint in general is really hard to nail down, but depending on what meat product you're replacing, cellular agriculture (umbrella term for producing traditional agricultural products using cells grown in a bioreactor; "precision fermentation" falls under the umbrella) can actually have an edge here.

Beef is the number one driver of deforestation in tropical forests[3], followed by soy - and at least in the US, most corn and soy is itself used as animal feed. Livestock require huge amounts of land, both to house the animals themselves and to feed them, not to mention additional facilities to slaughter and process the carcasses.

The Nature paper lays out scenarios in which 20%, 50%, and 80% of beef production are replaced with fungus-derived mycoprotein (e.g., the Quorn from earlier); the fungus is grown using sugar as feedstock instead of corn or soy. In the 20% scenario, deforestation is halved compared to a scenario in which growing global meat demand continues to be met using traditional agriculture, due to the decreased need for pasture land.

The authors also sum up an analysis for different environmental benchmarks in this frankly confusing graph I will attempt to break down for y'all:

(viewing it here will probably be easier)

The x-axis features their 4 scenarios: MP0 is no change, continuing to produce all beef using cows. MP20 is replacing 20% of beef with microbe-grown mycoprotein, MP50 is 50%, MP80 is 80%.

If we look at the most conservative scenario, MP20, the authors calculate only modest changes in water use, nitrogen fixation, nitrogen oxide emissions, and methane emissions. (However, it should be noted that methane emissions punch above their weight, with 1 kilogram of methane trapping as much heat as 84 kilograms of carbon dioxide, so 11% reduction can be significant!) The biggest claimed wins are in reducing carbon dioxide and deforestation, both down a whopping 56%.

HOWEVER, two GIANT caveats: 20% replacement is ambitious: plant-based meat in the US, a relatively affluent market with a pretty good level of cultural acceptance for plant-based meat, had a measly 2.5% market share of retail packaged meat in 2022.[4]

Second, this analysis was just on land use. Their CO2 number, infuriatingly, does not take into account the emissions from the process to produce the mycoprotein itself.

So what is the carbon footprint of the process?

For that, I found a life cycle analysis for mycoprotein production[5]. (My apologies if it's paywalled; I think this link should work?) And I'm also drawing on this literature review's interpretation; I am not an environmental scientist or statistician, so admittedly this part of the analysis is outside my wheelhouse.

Depressingly, 1 kg of mycoprotein meat substitute is about equivalent to 1 kg of chicken in terms of carbon footprint (measured as "warming potential" in units of kg of CO2), largely due to the energy demands of processing it. Seeing as Quorn, the only mainstream mycoprotein product I'm aware of, is imitation chicken, not beef, this is bad news on a carbon footprint front.

So does precision fermentation reduce environmental impacts? Kind of, but it's difficult to conclusively quantify and making a significant impact would require these cultured products to displace market share from traditional meat at a pace consumers are probably not willing to undertake in the near future.

The big question: is the science there yet?

Listen y'all, I have a STEM degree. I have taken a good number of courses on biotechnology. I spent a whole semester studying cultured meat, which is a related but even more nightmarishly complicated rabbithole I do not have time to address right now.

Forgive me if I stop pulling sources here: the "fermentation farm," download a food app and have a tiny factory custom make you a precisely tailored food? That is not right on the horizon. I would call that firmly within the realm of science fiction for the foreseeable future.

Keeping all of those strains of microbes alive and in optimal growth conditions would require so much energy and labor that I cannot see that being a facility anyone wants to run, let alone put in "every community."

The reactors these microbes grow in have to be kept sterile and maintained at specific temperatures, with the liquid media circulated and periodically cycled in/out to avoid the microbes from essentially choking on their own waste. Contamination happens, reactors have to go down for maintenance, piping networks have to be set up to pump your microbes from place to place - there are a million moving parts on every production line, so every additional line you create is going to snowball the cost, energy demands, and footprint of your facility. A highly complex facility that can make "any" molecule almost by definition cannot be small, or else you'll spend so much time flushing lines, cleaning reactors, and switching between microbes that you'll never get anything done.

Addressing the "Liberation Labs" facility: there's a reason large scale cellular fermentation facilities have been limited to pharmaceuticals so far: pharma can charge astronomical prices that will cover these facilities. (Admittedly pharmaceuticals are using trickier cells and have to uphold stricter sterility standards - but growing tons and tons of cells is never going to be cheap)

If they're going ahead with building a plant in 2024, I assume they have some kind of analysis that makes them think they can turn a profit selling powdered proteins.

But the specific proteins they're making - the CEO highlights lactoferrin, a protein in mammalian milk, in one article[6] - are for alternative dairy products that are not mainstream yet, targeting projected demand that may never exist. They're making a huge gamble by going straight to bulk scale on, and I cannot emphasize this enough, a product that might never have a market.

If we find the right combination of protein, product, process, and demand... I won't say precision fermentation is a dead end. But what's happening right now? Is a lot of startup hype, big swings from companies that might end up making nothing but giant dead factories, and "environmentally friendly" products that don't actually have a smaller carbon footprint than the meat they replace.

Sources:

Right, so I'm aware that food is made of molecules, but just cuz a poem is made of words, doesn't mean having words equals having a poem. Or just cuz a house is made of bricks, doesn't mean that having bricks...you get the picture.

The point is that the process being described as revolutionary isn't in fact all of the steps required to make food (especially a variety of foods) and thus not all of the impacts are bound up in just the precision fermentation.

Not to mention that most foods are made up of a whole shit ton of molecules. And even being able to synthesize every single molecule in a tomato doesn't mean you can build a tomato as if with a 3D printer.

As for the carbon emissions...well, damn.

And that's not even taking into account the carbon emissions involved in building these huge facilities.

This is funny. The first thing I thought when I read the bit about synthetic foods being "10 times more efficient than cows" was..."chicken is 10 times more efficient than cows." The "friendly neighborhood scientist" mentioned it eventually in the context of energy efficiency, but it's bigger than that. Chickens are so efficient at converting feed into meat that there's a loooong way to go before synthetics are beating chickens at energy efficiency - AND, although this is subjective, chickens taste better than flavored fungus meal.

The energy efficiency argument for synthetic meat substitutes is essentially ridiculous. The "make any molecule" business is the most obvious woo on earth. And it's equally ridiculous to assert that very many consumers are using energy efficiency as a metric in their purchasing decisions here - any consumer who cared about that would already be eating chicken over beef.

But the market for synthetic meat replacements isn't informed, environmentally-conscious consumers, it's vegans & vegetarians, who are concerned primarily with ethicality rather than energy efficiency. And I think this is sneaky. When so-called "vegans" are just switching from burgers to slightly wack synthetic burgers, the dominance of processed food & meat in the diet is unaffected. Meat remains the "real thing" and synthetic meat remains "the weird alternative if you don't want the real thing." As long as that dynamic exists, most consumers will choose the "real thing".

What actually would reduce the environmental impact of meat by 90% is if everyone only ate 10% as much meat. This would also leave everyone still well-supplied nutritionally, without needing iron or B-vitamin supplements as vegans often do. It would also be a lot healthier than current habits. It also wouldn't require people to make a firm commitment to "never eat meat again" or to self-police, which has a tendency to cause people to give up entirely when they feel like they've "failed."

The western synthetic meat/meal replacement people are so cripplingly myopic. People in Asia, for example, have uncountable varieties of products which could be called "meat substitutes," mostly made of very energy-efficient soybeans - there's aisles full at my local 99 Ranch - but unlike in the west, these products aren't "the weird option for vegans," but rather a normal part of cuisine. When dishes with these substitutes are prepared, meat is usually present also as a minor ingredient or flavoring, as in the case of mapo tofu. This vastly reduces the quantity of meat consumed, and solves the problem of "how to make it taste like meat" in a beautifully elegant way: just put a little bit of meat in it.

I understand that "put a little bit of meat in it" isn't a solution that vegans might like. But consider Taco Bell "chili". It's about 25% beef and 75% textured vegetable protein (TVP). This is the chili everyone gets, it's not just "for weirdos". Does anyone really notice it's mostly not meat? Not really. If they knew, would people care? I doubt it. Why does Taco Bell do it? TVP is cheap, it's just soy protein. So here we have a case study in an extremely environmentally positive solution - just make the "meat" actually be 75% vegetable protein. No one notices, everyone is healthier, and the environment benefits.

This gets at a deeper issue with veganism, which is really simple: Millions if not billions of insects, birds, and mammals have to be exterminated to grow food crops. This is inevitable, whether the farming is organic or not, whether it's a small farm or Big Food, whether it's feed corn or heirloom cucumbers. Thus a true "ethical analysis" of how much your food harms animals is in reality a lot more complicated than "am I eating an animal or not." It could be that ten times more rodents have to be killed in the farming of strawberries compared to blueberries. I'm not saying that's true, but it could be - certainly there will be differences in the "animal harm quotient" of various food crops.

That considered, there could exist a situation where growing enough food crops to satisfy a vegan's nutritional requirements would result in more harm to animals than if the vegan ate an animal. This is especially possible for animals like oysters, which are extremely dense in heme iron, something that's very difficult for vegans to get enough of otherwise. A vegan who is not amenable to eating oysters in such a situation - which is probably true in the present - actually does not care about minimizing animal harm over everything, but rather cares more about holding their body inviolate from the immediate signs of the worldwide animal slaughter that will go on as long as humans need to eat anything. This also serves as gatekeeping - it's patently ridiculous of western vegans to hold themselves out as paragons of ethicality when, by virtue of being in the west, their lifestyle and consumption does massively more harm to animals & nature than a person of average income in Indonesia who eats fish once or twice a week alongside a plethora of locally grown food crops and local traditional meat substitutes. Western overconsumption of meat is a cultural issue that synthetic inventions do not solve so much as obfuscate.

There’s one thing everyone is forgetting to talk about:

All the science in the world can’t beat the effects of evolution. Bodies aren’t machines, and molecules are not absorbed on a 1:1 basis, even in the same person on the same day.

Depending on where a person lives, we are not fully evolved, as humans, to eat meal replacements. We’re not evolved to eat one single way, either. There is actually a psychological component to nutrition that is vastly, vastly ignored by these biotech firms, and before anyone asks, yes, we do have research on this. I don’t have the links to it at present, but a simple google search would probably find them.

There was a study conducted amongst Filipino women with Swedish women as a control, in which they were fed two meals for comparison. Each group had a traditional Filipino meal on two different occasions. The first time the women ate, it was beautifully presented; it looked like it was prepared by a chef, and absolutely looked like the most mouth-watering delicacy. The second meal, made of exactly the same recipe with exactly the same ingredients, was presented in a sort of slopped-together pile that, while not actually materially different from the first meal in any way, just didn’t look nearly so appetising.

The result? The Filipino women absorbed 70% more iron from the first meal than the second. I know I’m forgetting some of the details that would make that result more intelligible, but the point was that how pleasurable our food is makes a great deal of difference even to how our bodies absorb the nutrition it gains from it. That’s why the control group was Swedish, so it had no emotional or nostalgic connection to the food they were being served. And I don’t care if meal replacements can actually be considered food or not, I very much doubt the very human eyeballs looking at this biotech stuff is going to judge it as food. Not to mention, this whole thing reeks of diet culture (as does veganism and vegetarianism, often), which is an extremely Western point of view to take about nutrition and food. We did not evolve to consider food only for its utility, or we wouldn’t need taste buds. Food is supposed to be a heavily sensory experience, not just a thing that keeps us alive.

I understand that vegans and vegetarians have their heart in the right place, but sustainable agriculture is not about replacing what we consider food, it’s about making what food we already have in a way that is the least harmful and exploitative as possible. You don’t do that by throwing out the entire system humans evolved to derive energy from, because that’s simply not going to work or employ best practices ecologically. Talking about it in ways that only address energy efficiency is the most capitalistic way to approach that as possible. Not everything in life can or should be 100% efficient (a bad example, but think about a car engine without that tiny bit of oil on the pistons), and trying to solve problems that way only leads to more corporate malfeasance, rather than less.

It’ll sound funny, but we actually need more farms, not fewer. But they have to be smaller and use good land and livestock management practices. And quite frankly, treating everywhere in the world like it’s the West is how we got to this problem in the first place. The point shouldn’t be to reduce or reinvent our usual food system, it should be to reduce massive corporations. And I don’t see how any plan that vegans or biotech bros have put forth so far has done any of that, especially as their solutions generally do have more ecological impact than they want to allow, so we’re just trading one kind of consumption for another.

If people want to eat meat substitutes, that’s fine. If people don’t want to eat them, that’s also fine. Whether one is “better” or not than the other is not the point; every system has its pros and cons. What matters is that it can exist in harmony with our current ecological framework, and the way we eat, for most of us, simply doesn’t support that on either side.

this tweet is making me choke to death

1. precisely 2. really really enjoying this phrasing

So pure...

nothings happening

ohh

three years ago today, a new me was born

Check out this fucking shit

CHOO CHOO ALL ABOARD MOTHERFUCKERS the transfemme glow up train is leaving the station

Something like 4 years difference, 2 years before egg crack and 2 years after

2 years pre transition compared to 3 years HRT and two and a half weeks post FFS! HRT is magic but just being able to be yourself is life-changing

אני אוהב אותך!!!

Me, sobbing: fucfink sup erbb,

guess, what @rovermcfly​?

https://at.tumblr.com/spyld/speak-your-language-day/czjxygdt8j1k

I’d best be seeing that anti JKR energy for this twilight show too bc Smeyer continuing to profit off the Quileute tribe is not cute

I keep seeing people on Twitter being all "I'm sure they'll be more respectful and mindful of the Quileute tribe this time around."

Except, they won't be. Even if they get actual Native American actors to play these characters, even if they bring on a Native American to serve as a cultural advisor, it wont matter. Why? Because Smeyer appropriated a real Native American tribe and twisted their culture and history in her fantasy books for her own profit.

This fictional Quileute Tribe is and always will be disrespectful to the real life Quileute tribe.

The Quileute Tribe is still taking donations to move out of the immediate tsunami zone as of April 2023. Instead of directing attention to this TV series if/when comes out (and even if it doesn't honestly), please consider supporting the tribe financially here if you can afford it.

Coyote found a squeaky toy I accidentally left outside. Turns out coyote love squeaky toys too. 

(Source)

@blackbackedjackal

My tiny mind blown

The ability to make something beautiful look so easy and yet obviously requires mass amount of practice and skill is so underrated.

American trans men prior to the mid 20th century were like. I’m going to get into shootouts with the sheriff. I’m going to date 5 women at once. I’m going to drive a stage coach at 60 mph. I will be a menace to society. And I will be so sexy and cool while doing it.

this is one post where I love to everyone’s blorbo tags

Gameboy peripheral PediSedate was designed for dentists and dosed kids with nitrous oxide as they played games.

Time to enter the ＧＡＭＥＲ ＺＯＮＥ

Camera, printer, sewing machine, now a fucking anaesthetic adminstrator…was there anything the Game Boy didn’t have an accessory for?

Do you know about the fish finding sonar?

gameboy sprinted so smart phones could lag and be ugly

Go to the Wikipedia page of Schizoid Personality Disorder for a beautiful image of the sea

woag

Yup

where else can i go

Oregon