I’m naturally quite cautious about things like this, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
I think we shouldn’t be torturing pigs on an industrial scale to make soybeans taste or feel different.
Did you read the article? It’s about splicing the DNA snippets that produce umami proteins onto plants.
I did.
The article is riddled with blind support for plant based capitalism and suggests using the tech to improve existing meat products.
I also read a little about moolec, which itself grew out of is quite cozy with the pork industry.
Finally, where are they getting the DNA subsequences? Is such a company going to build a small library of DNA and then never grow/purchase new pigs to deconstruct to catalog taste, texture, and genetic material?
Soybeans are good, and they don’t need to taste or feel like pigs for people to enjoy them.
It’s Wired: of course it’s going to be riddled with blind support for capitalism.
Finally, where are they getting the DNA subsequences?
From the industrial scale pig torture infrastructure that was already here.
Soybeans are good, and they don’t need to taste or feel like pigs for people to enjoy them.
Scolding people into eating their beans has been going great so far.
Chinese people have been making plant based umami tofu since before fictional Jesus Christ was around
There’s literally no reason to bring a pig into it when you could just use mushrooms or something else for umami flavor
Crackkkers trying to reinvent the soy wheel, badly, with more animal cruelty
I absolutely agree with that statement. I guess I had assumed, maybe wrongly, that you wouldn’t have to do any of that. Do you know of a source that goes into the specifics?
you wouldn’t have to do any of that.
I would think the animal exploitation is only absolutely necessary early in R&D where they’re still figuring out stuff like which sequences code for production of what proteins, how those are expressed and how these interact with other instructions in the plant dna.
However, I also expect there’s much more profit to be made in continued testing, more animal-based R&D in the form of trying to translate desirable phenotypes in animal meat to the plant-produced analog, and in selling the protein back to the meat industry who can mix it with similarly graded animal protein and sell it to omnivores as a greenwashed meat product. All I’m trying to say is that I think they should do the R&D without exploiting more animals.
and in selling the protein back to the meat industry who can mix it with similarly graded animal protein
I can absolutely see this happening. I can also see them slowly replacing the actual meat with more and more nonmeat fillers over time, as fewer and fewer people can even afford meat.
I also expect there’s much more profit to be made in continued testing, more animal-based R&D in the form of trying to translate desirable phenotypes in animal meat to the plant-produced analog, and in selling the protein back to the meat industry who can mix it with similarly graded animal protein and sell it to omnivores as a greenwashed meat product.
Reflecting on what we know about the world I’m sure you are correct when it comes to that.
I was just coming at from the point of view that we probably all know some people in our lives that are never going to go Vegan because it’s the morally correct thing to do. They just don’t care. So, while I wouldn’t support a scenario you described it would still be better for those people to at least transition to something like that.
I realize it’s far from ideal, and I’m not promoting it, but it would objectively be better than those same people eating tortured baby animals the way humanity does it currently.
All I’m trying to say is that I think they should do the R&D without exploiting more animals.
I agree with that.
I’m hoping that people turn to alternatives as the costs keep rising. I was taking a look at the effects of inflation on groceries and it seems that animal products were the hardest hit. I know so many people that will complain yet still buy at these high prices because of a combination of not caring and being addicted to these foods. If they had an alternative maybe they would opt for it.
Any drop in demand is a compounding effect. It’ll just accelerate the price increases as volume drops and hopefully one day we get to a point where we can extinguish these industries.
Obviously I realize that’s an optimistic point of view.
it’s an interesting idea, and in exploring it we would certainly learn new things
In June 2023, Moolec revealed that it had inserted genes from pigs into soy plants in order to make soybeans that expressed porcine proteins. The experiments were carried out at the company’s greenhouses in Wisconsin. In some of the soybeans, over a quarter of the soluble proteins were identified as pig. It’s not quite the bleeding soybean that he first imagined, but Palidini was still impressed with just how much pig protein his soybeans seemed to produce. The beans have a pinky hue and a meaty taste, he says, though the company is still awaiting a full analysis of their nutritional qualities. Next year, Paladini hopes to take the soybeans to
outdoortrials in Wisconsin.
but this is not the way to do it
I’m just assuming you’re concerned about cross-pollination. From my understanding as long as adequate buffer zones between similar crops are followed there’s very little to worry about. Like stories about farmers getting sued for having their fields pollinated with GM variants were bogus and the farmer everyone usually sites was found to just be replanting GM seed.
There’s still the risk of people spreading it. Sortta like espionage vineyard grafts of heirloom grapes or something. This kinda thing worries me, in this case I don’t think there’s such thing as too much precaution.
I’m not really sure what you mean by spreading it, like some bad actors are going to porkify the soy industry through guerilla farming? The challenge of gathering and preserving that much seed aside, for commercial farmers who grow GM crops it’s very finicky to get those beneficial traits to be expressed through each subsequent generation through traditional breeding.
Adequate buffer zones won’t be 100% implemented, though. Nobody’s going to make them do that worldwide.
Would be better to introduce genetic incompatibilities so that GMOs were infertile with non-GMOs.
Would be better to introduce genetic incompatibilities so that GMOs were infertile with non-GMOs.
I guess if that was your goal they would probably have to insert a novel gene that wouldn’t be present in say, the over 10,000 different varieties of conventionally bred tomatoes and then engineer the plant to produce sterile seeds, but that seems like a much more concerning trait to let out into the wild than beans expressing umami flavor. Terminator seed technology has been around for a while but as far as I know there have been no commercial applications because it worries a lot of different groups.
I feel like this is probably going to be a hard sell for people who are already veggie/vegan, who generally have an aversion to anything that is considered genetically modified. But the demographic they may be shooting for could be more veggie-curious people.
I’m inclined to agree. I was offered one of those fake meat burgers, either Impossible or Beyond, something like that, and it was rather disturbing how similar it was.
I’m not the target demographic, but there are people I know, including family members, that could be swayed by something like this.
It was probably the Impossible burger, Beyond still has a weird taste to it. But with how far faux meat options have come over the past 20 years I’m not sure what it would be useful for, curious if the umami flavors would translate to soy protein isolate.
It certainly might have been. Is that the company that tested on animals? I remember reading that about either Impossible or Beyond, I forget which one. That while the “meat” they produce is entirely vegan from the point of view of the ingredients they did do animal testing during the initial stages of developing some of those ingredients.
Pig Genes in Soy Beans
I’ve got my new band name
This is just advanced pbc, vegans shouldn’t support this
