
We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production - satchet
https://www.rethinkx.com/food-and-agriculture-executive-summary
======
hirundo
> 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 a bit. If the terms of the bet reflect the assurance in the
executive summary I'd be willing to take the other side of it.

Even if they're completely accurate about the benefits and the economics, I
think they're greatly underestimating the canalization of human food choices.

~~~
mikro2nd
I saw lots of talk about the meat industry, not a word about dairy.
(Admittedly only read the executive summary.) I've seen quite a lot of this
over the past year or two: Lots of "we're going to end cattle farming" when
all they're really talking about is beef. Industrial dairy operations are
horrible: carbon intensive, noisy smelly and cruel, but I don't see anyone
claiming to have synthesized dairy replacements, and without that, the cattle
business is in no serious danger.

~~~
acollins1331
If anything, the large and fairly mature market of dairy replacement (soy
almond milk etc) shows how crazy this article is on meat. I've been vegan
myself, but to think just because the market now has an alternative to an
animal product that everyone will stop using the animal product is crazy.

~~~
lukeschlather
The dairy replacement market, while mature, doesn't do a very good job of
competing directly with the dairy industry. Non-dairy milks cost easily twice
what the dairy milks do.

It's not even possible to buy a gallon jug of soymilk. They simply don't
exist.

------
mogadsheu
While I don’t disagree with the sentiment of the report, I do question its
credibility. They don’t cite their sources, but do make bold claims with broad
statistics and buzz words.

Looking into the authors, they don’t lack credentials, but it seems like
they’re newsletter and report writers, not people who are putting skin in the
game to back their claims.

First impression: be skeptical of “the Seba Technology Disruption Framework™“,
named after the founder, but open to a change in opinion.

Does anybody have experience with these guys? I could be way off!

~~~
mido22
try looking at the linked report, it has about 116 references.

~~~
jstewartmobile
money! money! money!

very few of the citations are scientific in nature

------
scotch_drinker
I guess we'll never learn from things like margarine and other lab invented
foods. Beyond Meat is heavily dependent on seed oils which are terrible for us
(expeller pressed canola oil is ingredient #2). Red Meat actually isn't
unhealthy at the levels most people currently eat it. While it wouldn't
surprise me if more people ate Beyond meat and its ilk in the future, it
doesn't make it better for us and will likely just make us sicker.

[https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2752326/effect-lower-
vers...](https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2752326/effect-lower-versus-
higher-red-meat-intake-cardiometabolic-cancer-outcomes)

~~~
mrfusion
What’s wrong with oils though? And if canola is bad why can’t they switch it
out for olive oil?

~~~
salasrod
Olive oil is not that good for you, and most importantly, it burns at really
low temperatures, and ends up tasting horrible when it happens.

~~~
oAlbe
That's actually very incorrect and misleading. Olive oil, expecially extra
virgin olive oil, can withstand higher temperatures than sunflower, peanut and
the like. IIRC the smoke point for EVO is around 210C. You could literally fry
in olive oil, it's just too expensive to do so.

~~~
flush
Where are you getting your data from? I'm an avid cook and have always thought
EVOO to be a low smoke point oil, especially compared to something like peanut
oil.

I did a quick search and found this:
[https://www.seriouseats.com/2014/05/cooking-
fats-101-whats-a...](https://www.seriouseats.com/2014/05/cooking-
fats-101-whats-a-smoke-point-and-why-does-it-matter.html)

which suggests that EVOO has a relatively low smoke point compared to
sunflower and peanut oil.

I'm still open to other numbers though, since I'm not sure what study if any
these numbers come from.

------
zaroth
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.

It would be great if governments could better align taxes and incentives for
the development and real-world deployment of these technologies, but they
seems to be progressing quite well even in a maximally dysfunctional political
environment.

~~~
noonespecial
I don't even care if they're wrong. It's just good to hear people starting to
say hopeful things again.

~~~
ianai
I totally agree! It’s like we’ve been in a dystopia since like 2010. Ok more
like 2006. Or 2001...

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Silent Spring was published in 1962.

------
vturner
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?

~~~
bitL
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.

~~~
codesuela
I would like to more about this can you give me a few links for further
reading about this?

------
condour75
I'm very sympathetic to this argument, but it's really hard not to imagine
this article being monologued by a supervillain while Bond is being lowered
into a lava pit.

------
pfdietz
The reduction in land could be even higher if the energy for the fermentation
is produced by non-biological means. That is, instead of feeding the bacteria
plant-derived compounds, feed them CO2, water and electrical energy.
Photovoltaics are an order of magnitude more efficient than photosynthesis,
can operate in places and times plants cannot grow (deserts, below freezing
conditions), and require negligible amounts of water.

~~~
jacknews
at sea

------
basicplus2
I dont think this is correct, food contains many trace elements and things we
need that we dont fully understand.

Even slightly changing the natural feed of an animal we eat dramatically
changes the quality and nutritional value.

thinking that you can so dramatically change the production (and only produce
one part of a food - one of the proteins) all the other elements we need are
lost.

It sounds like a recipe for malnutrition.

------
Amygaz
I am highly skeptical of what this piece is claiming. I doubt it will be as
radical as what industrialization did to agriculture a 100 years ago.

I also doubt that it will be 5 times cheaper for the consumer. When you
include all the costs, not just productions, but government incentives and
environmental costs for examples, one might claim that it will be socially
cheaper, eventually... One can hope. It will also be easier to transport the
system to another planet.

But, this is very speculative, and the 5-10 years milestone is very very
optimistic and probably takes into account some fairy magic dust here and
there.

------
worik
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.

~~~
slimed
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.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
It sounds like the real solution is to stop making babies.

~~~
slimed
Past experience shows that this does not happen until countries reach a
certain level of wealth. We'll get there as a planet eventually.

------
mark_l_watson
While I think it is good to create inexpensive healthy high protein foods, I
also think we should have a fair free market for people who want to continue
buying real meat, organic foods, non GMO foods, cheap foods produced with GMO
and petrochemicals. Free choice and a free market, with strict accurate
labeling laws is what I want.

~~~
rcpt
> fair free market

If we had that there wouldn't be so much meat in the first place. Currently,
each year, American taxpayers subsidize the animal food system to the tune of
$38 billion.

~~~
o_p
The problem with the free market is that mass starvation can perfectly be a
market optimal, of all the things that are subsidized, food is the most
important.

~~~
rcpt
There are many ways to prevent starvation without heavily subsidizing animal
agriculture.

------
teumesios
We already have the resources to feed the hungry. A third of all the food
produced is thrown out.

The problem is how we distribute it. Systemic change is the only thing that
can address this problem in a meaningful way. Efficiency is great but
producing more when we already have enough is completely missing the issue at
hand.

~~~
marcus_holmes
I used to work in the food distribution system, and regularly witnessed entire
dumpsters full of perfectly good food being destroyed.

Consumers, as usual, are the key to changing this. We'd have to change the
eating and shopping habits of an entire generation to change this.

Changing the system won't work without changing the way we think about food
and food shopping.

~~~
afarrell
Can you write some detailed stories of what led to those dumpsters being
destroyed? I think there's not a good understanding of what leads to larger-
scale food waste.

For instance, I've seen a few people online pitching "ugly produce" startups.
But what prevents Campbells Soup and Jamba Juice from buying all the ugly
fruit/veggies?

~~~
carapace
> Global food loss and waste[1] amount to between one-third[2] and one-half[3]
> of all food produced.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_waste](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_waste)

Start here?

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=food+waste+story](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=food+waste+story)

~~~
afarrell
None of those sources tell me what marcus_holmes has personally witnessed.

~~~
carapace
No, but they speak to your statement, "I think there's not a good
understanding of what leads to larger-scale food waste."

------
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...](https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/impossible-burger-or-beyond-
meat-aren-t-healthy-fast-food-ncna1050911)

> 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...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/choosing-
chicken-over-beef-cuts-carbon-footprint-surprising-amount/)

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)

~~~
pfdietz
You are assuming that fat and sodium are unhealthy.

I suggest the real health problem of beef could be a particular carbohydrate
(Neu5Gc) that non-human mammals have Impossible Burgers would avoid this.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Glycolylneuraminic_acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Glycolylneuraminic_acid)

------
concordDance
I'm worried that these new constructed foods will be lacking in components or
structure in a way that our natural selection created digestive system is
poorly optimized for, leading to mass malnourishment.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Surprise! Current food is deficient in many ways, and not what our digestion
is optimized for.

The opportunity is, to create foods that _better match_ what we need. Instead
of eating the random cow we fixed on for our modern meat supply.

------
gralx
My first reaction was, "Wait - world food supply is about to be disrupted?"

Then I realized "disruption" was meant in the marketing sense. This is why I
read the comments first.

~~~
WaltPurvis
I almost didn't click on the link because I didn't care to read another
depressing prediction of imminent doom —- so I was pleasantly surprised to see
the report was about an _optimistic_ disruption.

------
momokoko
While beef is an easy target, we are able to produce chicken at an incredibly
low price per gram of protein.

~~~
slimed
Many people have a guilty conscience over how we achieve that incredibly low
price. That will be a strong motivator.

------
DoreenMichele
Color me skeptical about these bold, precise and seemingly unsourced confident
assertions.

 _Prediction is very difficult, especially if it 's about the future._

\-- Niels Bohr

------
SKILNER
Many comments here by people who would have said the iPhone was impossible, or
Tesla could never succeed. Or that the iPhone is actually bad or a Tesla is
actually bad.

Not a lot of facts though. Such gleeful negativism in our gene pool.

"Just because you don't know how to do something doesn't mean you can't."

------
jmartrican
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?

~~~
zplizzi
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.

~~~
witten
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan_gum)

~~~
52-6F-62
Just don’t let it go near infants apparently. Holy hell!
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrotizing_enterocolitis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrotizing_enterocolitis)

------
passiveincomelg
I love the optimism in this. Just hope "intellectual property" and corrupt
politicians will not fuck this up. Unfortunately the latter is very likely to
happen here in Germany. Our pork industry for example is abhorrent.

------
rcpt
This all sounds great I hope they're right

------
mcculley
I don't understand why we would need to synthesize proteins. My understanding
is that the body breaks proteins down into amino acids and then builds them
into the proteins it needs. So could we just ingest amino acids? Would they be
simpler to synthesize than proteins?

------
hyperpallium
Finally with Food-as-Software, world is eating the software.

The purpose of this article is food deregulation advocacy. If you thought
unregulated sugar was bad, just wait.

I like the idea of returning pasture etc to forest and bush, but where will
the raw materials for food manufacture be sourced?

------
o_p
Feel free to beta test that new "food". Ill stick with real animals thanks.

~~~
ripdog
Even as those animals destroy the ecosystem?

------
cubano
Wouldn't the correct buzzphrase be "Food as a Service" not "Food as Software"?

They certainly make bold claims and some cites sure would help to convince me
as to their claims.

~~~
nine_k
Food as a Service is basically a restaurant; known for millennia and does not
sound disruptive enough.

------
fallingfrog
This reeks of theranos level obfuscation. It’s exactly the kind of investor-
speak you use when trying to separate fools from their money.

------
jacknews
i think this approach might work well to replace milk, juices, pulps, and
possibly some ground/processed meats etc.

It will take much much longer to replace a good steak, ribs, a crisp apple,
etc

------
Simulacra
Food production will continue to get cheaper, while food quality will continue
to worsen. We are rapidly approaching a future of "let them eat cake" where
the non-wealthy subside on fake food.

------
chiefalchemist
Too much rant, too little if any data and facts.

------
lstroud
If that happens the numbers of starving and diseased livestock will be a
significant issue.

------
torgian
More disruption? Seems normal now;)

------
jstewartmobile
filthy

