
Cheese from the same proteins as milk, but from genetically modified yeast - asciimo
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/diy-biotech-vegan-cheese/
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poulsbohemian
Amateur cheesemaker here - coincidentally the research side of commercial
cheesemaking is already doing very similar things because separating milk into
its constituent components is more profitable than actually making cheese. I
attended a class about a month ago where the message was that in the future we
won't make cheese from milk, but rather we'll start with just those caseins
that have been extracted and concentrated. The thinking is that even the water
in the milk may have other commercial value apart from just the cheesemaking,
or at a minimum can be captured and used in lieu of needing an additional
water source. Wish they would have gone a little deeper on the science in the
article - they mention chymosin for example, but as far as I know the vast
majority of chymosin used in commercial cheese production today is already
vegan (at least in the US - Europe not necessarily).

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asciimo
Why so at cow's milk? "They also hope to engineer cheese based on the milk of
the narwhal, the most outlandish mammal they could imagine."

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tracker1
So, the real question is if the target audience is against using actual cow's
milk, don't they have a heavy correlation to the anti-gmo crowd?

~~~
schoen
I'm a vegan who's motivated by opposition to animal agriculture, so I
enthusiastically support research like this (and think it's the most promising
path I've heard of to a vegan human future). I went to a vegan advocacy
organization event a few months ago where this topic came up, and other
attendees shared my enthusiasm for this kind of research, but the diversity of
views and motivations in the vegan community makes me wary of claiming that
that means this is mainstream.

To answer your correlation question, probably yes -- but vegans' attitudes
toward "tampering with nature" vary widely from the view that it's the worst
possible thing humanity can do, on through to the view that it's the _best_
possible thing humanity can do (e.g., David Pearce), with a broad spectrum in
between. (I don't have an ideal example of the former group in mind, but I
could mention Sea Shepherd's Paul Watson, who advocates deep ecology and
opposes GMOs.)

I think we will see sharper divisions between environmentalist vegans
(especially advocates of deep ecology) and animal rights/animal welfare vegans
over time. I don't know how the population breaks down in the west today, or
how many people have even had to think about it that much.

~~~
rboyd
Your last sentence is pretty interesting to me. After months of prodding from
my girlfriend to go vegan, the book 'Abundance' and the chapter on the water
inefficiency of factory farming is what finally turned me. It was reasonably
easy for me to justify carnivorism as naturally occurring, harder to justify
water waste with so many humans going thirsty. Without even starting down the
emissions road.

That said, looking at it now (and especially once synthetic meats come online,
out of cost efficiency if nothing else), I think our children might look back
on the practice of animal slaughter as being pretty horrifically barbaric.

~~~
hollerith
>with so many humans going thirsty

Where are there humans going thirsty? Honest question.

~~~
Swizec
In places where they don't have water purification plants. Also in places that
are becoming uninhabitable to humans. Think expanding deserts and such.

~~~
jklein11
Isn't that an infrastructure problem? If we use less water in California that
doesn't mean less people will be thirsty in South America.

~~~
Swizec
Exactly. California's drought has literally zero effect on anybody else. Maybe
a bit on people downstream of California's rivers and such.

So the consideration that "people are going thirsty" should have zero effect
on how Californians deal with their problem. It serves nothing more than as an
emotional device to make people feel bad.

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Houshalter
A similar idea in the works is using bacteria to produce sugar and other
nutrients. One company claims they can make more than 30 times as much sugar
per acre as regular agriculture.

Some discussion and links on that here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/31zo1r/a_future...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/31zo1r/a_future_of_food_and_why_cities_wont_need_much/)

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bayesianhorse
From the standpoint of animal welfare, I think milk and cheese are some of the
least offending products. For about 7000 kilos of milk "only" one cow has to
live for a year, and birth one calve. With about a 50% chance of this calve
being raised for slaughter. And both cow and calve also yield meat. Compare
that to the one chicken per chicken.

If you don't want to go vegan, but reduce your animal welfare "footprint",
avoid meat from small animals like pigs and poultry.

~~~
guygurari
This belief is unfortunately misguided; there is much suffering involved in
industrial milk production [1]. It begins with the cow being separated from
its calf, usually when it is just newly born. The cow generally responds by
searching frantically for its lost calf, repeatedly crying out for it until
its throat becomes sore. The cow might also become sick and lose weight due to
the separation. It continues with the milking process, which is painful and
terrifying for the cows, as evidenced by their response. Milk-producing cows
have been bred to maximize milk production, which means they have oversized
udders that lead to illness. These are just a few examples of many. Generally
speaking, cows in the dairy industry lead a short and exceedingly miserable
life.

If the goal is to minimize suffering without going vegan, I think that wild-
caught fish provide the least offending animal-based food. But wild-caught
fish are generally bad from an ecological perspective.

[1] See for example [http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/real-talk-
milk/](http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/real-talk-milk/) ,
[http://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-
farming/dairy/](http://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/dairy/) ,
and the documentary films Earthlings and Food Inc. A quick google search will
reveal many more sources.

~~~
akamaka
I've spent time at an organic dairy farm, and I was not upset by anything that
I saw there. Although it's not a natural way of life for a cow, the animals
were treated very well. There were some processes that cause the animals
short-term pain, like removing horns to ensure they don't hurt each other, but
there was definitely no long-term suffering; certainly not around the milking
process.

I do completely agree that the vast majority of milk production is done in an
unethical way and I find mass-produced milk to taste terrible, but I've done
my research and I am satisfied that milk can be produced in a responsible way.

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jqm
The article mentions proteins can be produced by yeast, but an additional fat
(such as palm oil) will need to be added. Yeasts don't produce fats? Can
something else be modified to produce fats identical to milk fat? A plant
maybe?

~~~
george88b
E. coli can be genetically modified to produce fats. Yeast can too. The fat
content is just more varied requiring many different yeast clones to be
developed for production.

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aurora72
What about making a human without human? To those who try to outsmart nature:
Would they like to be produced without human?

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DiabloD3
I'm anti-GMO, anti-dairy, pro-cheese, and pro-beef (so Im not in the vegan
crowd at all)... yet I'd at least try this especially if it produced high
quality cheeses on par with the best unpasteurized cheeses I've had.

Why am I anti-diary? The pasteurization process produces denatured proteins
(linked to cancer), contains hormones that are not biologically inert for
humans (we are not baby cows), and contain huge amounts of lactose (a sugar
that some people are allergic to, and is not a particularly good thing to have
in our diets).

The production of most hard cheeses and some soft cheeses tends to remove a
lot of the hormone and lactose content, as well as some of the denatured
proteins. Cheese does not require pasteurized milk, nor does it benefit from
it in any way, as cheese was the first viable method for long term storage of
milk.

~~~
wyager
>I'm anti-GMO,

Why? The overwhelming scientific consensus is that it's perfectly safe.

>The pasteurization process produces denatured proteins (linked to cancer)

I think someone may have been playing a joke on you when they told you this.
Denaturing proteins is a critical part of the digestion process. Our body
can't really do anything with proteins that maintain their
secondary/tertiary/quaternary structure through digestion.

> [lactose] is not a particularly good thing to have in our diets

What makes you say this? Sure, some people don't produce lactase and can't
digest it, but it's fine for the rest of us.

~~~
DiabloD3
No, the overwhelming scientific consensus is it must be proven safe first on a
case by case basis, and that GMO in of itself is not good or bad. However, it
is not the science I am worried about, it is the willingness of companies to
put profit before human lives.

Denaturation of proteins is, as you have said, removing the
secondary/tertiary/quaternary structures. However, that doesn't mean that the
pasteurization process produces the same resulting denatured proteins our body
does.

Lactose is a sugar, and we simply do not benefit from diets high in sugars and
carbs.

~~~
jjoonathan
> it must be proven safe first on a case by case basis

Do you hold "natural" foods to the same standard? On average they tend to have
far more genetic variation away from "known good" genomes, yet I don't know
anyone who thinks that clinical trials are warranted when Farmer Bob's corn
cross-pollinates with Farmer Joe's corn.

> that doesn't mean that the pasteurization process produces the same
> resulting denatured proteins our body does.

It's possible that there's a significant difference, but assuming we process
denatured proteins similarly a reasonable null hypothesis that one probably
shouldn't reject merely on the basis of a single p=.049 study. Just how strong
is the evidence that convinced you it causes cancer?

[https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/everything-we-eat-
cause...](https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/everything-we-eat-causes-
cancer/)

> Lactose is a sugar, and we simply do not benefit from diets high in sugars
> and carbs.

Yeah but you didn't mention sugar and carbs in general, you mentioned lactose
specifically. Why? Was it just an example (it didn't come across that way)?

> contains hormones that are not biologically inert for humans (we are not
> baby cows)

I remember looking up the concentration of the hormone in human milk for
comparison and finding that it was 50x higher than what people were whining
about in cow milk. Do you think human milk is dangerous too?

~~~
Houshalter
>On average they tend to have far more genetic variation away from "known
good" genomes, yet I don't know anyone who thinks that clinical trials are
warranted when Farmer Bob's corn cross-pollinates with Farmer Joe's corn.

Some real world examples of foods being dangerous is Solanine in potatoes. All
potatoes contain a small amount of it, and they can sometimes mutate or be
accidentally bred to contain harmful amounts. Tomatoes also have small amounts
of solanine and tomatine, especially in their leaves.

