"International researchers have developed a beef-brice hybrid" is not a very good description. "rice-grown beef" is a better description. They bascially use rice as a scaffold to grow beef stem cells.
Mostly because "reef" is already a word that means something, and coincidentally a word that's also used in combination with "beef" - "beef and reef", aka "surf and turf"; a steak served with prawns in garlic cream sauce.
I tried reading the paper [1], but my layman eyes couldn't find anything that could be used to calculate the actual delta, in an obvious way. I see increases mentioned, but it's not clear that the coating was zeroed out
(or needed to be).
"Marine collagen" is basically fish gelatin with some extra processing steps, and based on price and availability it appears to have growing demand in recent years as a specialty nutrition product. So there is already some interest in this protein source.
They need to provide some good chefs with this and see if it can be made appetizing.
There's a comment in the Expanse series books that, for synthesized food, it's often better to go with someone's designer food rather than bad emulations of traditional foods.
My early rule with vegetarian places is soups. I know there's good options otherwise, but there's plenty of all veg soups everyone already like, and it's not too bad to swap a meat broth with a flavorful veg broth.
Vegetables are tasty on their own if you cook them well!
To me, chicken sometimes tastes like garlic and herbs, while for some others, it tastes like chicken. Whenever I cook vegetables in my oven, I sometimes add garlic and herbs, people often says it tastes like chicken..
I guess meat is tasty also because it is cooked that way. Take that way of cooking, test it on vegetables, and you legit have some good recipe.
There's a ton of recipes in my country where you're supposed to cook the meat during 8 hours inside overly complex sauces involving red wine, herbs, spices, garlic, onions, salt and all that jizz-jazz; I mean, if people took that much care to vegetables, for sure they would taste good.
This is less about hybrid rice I suspect then it is trying to find cheap scaffolds for synthetic meat production. If your input can just be "slightly modified rice" and then you go straight to culture in vats, that's a pretty good pathway.
Will these and other foods in future where the meat is not meat-meat (living, walking, animals), will we consider them vegetarian or non-vegetarian?
To someone eating this “brice”, it is just “rice” unless you go deeper from the roots and tell them what it contains. For other meat-like vegetable-meat (the ones in burgers), it is visually meat.
I'm serious, and curious (not trying to be political or anything derogatory).
Vegetarians and vegans abstain from meat for various reasons. However, the primary motivation for a large majority of them is driven by ethics.
I suspect any meat-based origin proteins that are grown from plants would be considered vegan since their production does not involve the suffering of animals.
Some vegans may object to it on principle that there may be animal testing involved with their FDA approval. But other vegans usually find this stance a bit hardlined.
This formula uses fish gelatin, which rules it out for strict vegans or even vegetarians.
But if we set that aside, I'm sure opinions will differ. This is a single-celled organism we're talking about here, to me (was vegetarian, then vegan, now neither) that's more like yeast, and the fact that it's in the animal kingdom is a technicality. None of these cells are neural tissue so it's incapable of suffering in any way we would recognize.
But I would expect the more crunchy-granola school of vegans to find the idea horrifying and refuse to eat it.
Interesting question. I think it really depends on which purpose for the distinction we have in mind. If you make the distinction on "was/wasn't once part of an animal" then it would make sense to classify it as vegetarian - and people who don't eat meat purely because they oppose the harm that is done to animals might follow that classification.
On the other hand, if you make a biological distinction - plant vs animal proteins - then this is clearly falling on the "animal" side. This might still be important for people who don't eat meat for health reasons or who are vegetarians for so long that they find meat plain yucky, no matter where it's coming from.
Maybe making this a third category would make most sense.
The dogma around vegetarianism/veganism is absurd.
Someone who never eats meat and who eats meat a few times a year are nearly indistinguishable compared to someone who eats meat every day.
The purity tests are childish. Eating meat on rare occasions doesn’t make you not a vegetarian.
To your point, I have no idea and I would give little stock to someone who would actually care. You’ve almost certainly eaten some insects in your produce in your lifetime, does that mean it wasn’t vegetarian?
I doubt you've had strength competitions with every vegan you've ever met. I'm a vegan and I would bet 100:1 I'm stronger than you, at least as it goes by traditional powerlifting standards.
First, over half of them are women, and any women stronger than me are very clearly so at first sight, and second, most of the vegan men I've met, I've arm-wrestled. I have never won so easily as against a vegan man. It's like there's no energy in the muscles. I know there are exceptions, like the vegan Olympic weightlifters, but their diet is a lot more expensive than my scrawny genetics and primarily red meat diet.
I'm 150#/6'1", bench 240 (ok, my genetics are a serious advantage here), deadlift 340 and eat about 1700 calories a day. If you can go better pound for pound, I'll accept your point.
I'm a rural southerner, vegans are an object of curiosity here. Also, arm-wrestling is just a common pastime in my community. One of my favorite matches was against a 230lb Korean guy, college student visiting town. Definitely overall stronger than me, but he just couldn't put the torque up before he wore himself out.
One interesting thing I've noted is that people who were raised eating meat and doing farm chores are much stronger than vegans who work out in a typical fashion. I arm-wrestled a monk who doesn't eat meat, but was raised on a farm, and he had a lot more endurance than a typical plant-based person.
FYI, arm wrestling is a test of technique moreso than strength. And IMO you are generally correct that people who actually work with their muscles tend to have more functional strength (endurance, efficiency, and versatility) than people who train in gyms and have very pretty muscles that aren't terrible efficient in demanding real world situations (lots of explosive strength but only optimized for very specific trained movements). Still, this has nothing to do with what type of protein one consumes.
Arm wrestling is almost entirely technique. Most people don't arm wrestle anyone, and their technique will suck, but it seems like you arm wrestle most of the people you meet, which means you probably have developed some kind of useful technique even if you haven't explicitly studied it.
I'm 210#/6', My 5 rep maxes are(I don't do 1RMs): bench 275, DL 495, squat 455. You do seem strong, but I am pretty sure that is due to your genetics and whatever exercise you get, and not due to the red meat diet you have.
Yes, but my technique is terrible, relying almost entirely on wrist strength. I routinely lose to a relative who I am stronger than, but has stronger forearms than me.
I started lifting as a vegan (properly supplemented) and switched to primarily meat when I stalled my progress. My 1RMs were 270 DL, 180 bench then. Same weight and height. I only saw progress when I started eating meat, although the dairy probably helped too. Also seriously helped my recovery times. I think the increased digestibility of dairy and meat proteins allowed my body to heal enough to actually build strength, and I'm now lifting at a much higher class for my weight and build.
This is the funniest thing I've seen on the internet in a while. A reality where people are challenged to arm wrestling competitions because of what they eat is hilarious (and completely ridiculous - I would laugh my face off if someone started telling me how they bench more than me when I order vegetarian food at a restaurant)
<4% of people are vegan in the US. Have you sought out vegan lifters? Unless this is a gimmick of yours, like you run some Youtube channel where you challenge vegans on Bondi Beach, you don't. And a simple google search can find vegans stronger than you including internet personalities like Vegan Gains.
If you are stronger than strong vegan lifters, then you're stronger than almost everyone anyways, and your observation applies to everyone else, even people eating your diet. Long before we even get to the claim that any of this is diet related rather than most-people-don't-lift related.
Finally, I don't believe your numbers. 150lbs at 6'1 is a tiny build, if you can even call it a build. I'd love to see a video of this "physique" lifting anything. When you fib numbers, at least fib something more reasonable like 180-200lbs if you're going to pretend you outlift anyone.
Used to gym with a few vegan lifters. I don't have a YouTube channel about this.
> Finally, I don't believe your numbers. 150lbs at 6'1 is a tiny build, if you can even call it a build. I'd love to see a video of this "physique" lifting anything.
Won't be doxxing myself, maybe I'll blur my face on a 100lb strict curl or something. Generally not cool to body shame like this, but I'm pretty used to this type of comment. Generally people shut up when I rep 300 DL.
So you were stronger than a "few vegan lifters" and now you reply to HN comments that merely mention veganism with "I'm stronger than every vegan I've ever met."
And when someone pushes you on your BS numbers, they're body shaming you even though you force some weird self-aggrandizing diet shaming stunt in the HN comments and boast about your 150lb body.
My numbers are real, sorry. They aren't even super high, Cailer Woolam was waaay stronger than me at this weight. He was DLing ~800 at 210lbs, too. Some people powerlift without eating like a horse, it's a real thing.
"...8% more protein and 7% more fat than regular rice"
Let's see, 100g of cooked rice has 2.7g protein, 0.3g fat and 28g carbohydrate, according to USDA data. The stated increases yield 2.9g protein and 0.32g fat, not exactly a stunning increase. Referenced research is behind a paywall so I cannot discern from that how accurate this is. None of which, of course, detracts from its value as proof of concept.
Weird to describe one of the applications as solving famine. We can already do that with grains and pulses, and more efficiently than using those as feedstocks for an expensive industrial process.
Even in developed countries I'm not sure this approach makes sense. Switching to grains and pulses for protein is viable. It's the lifestyle habits, including food preparation and flavour profiles, that are difficult to change. Embedding beef into rice grains doesn't seem to solve the problem of longing for the flavour/texture of steak or bacon.
I agree that the solving famine argument doesn't make sense. Famine is a problem of economics, politics, and distribution. We have the technology today to end famine, just not the political will.
Sadly, it's impossible for me to access the paper – but I do wonder how nutrient-dense that makes the b-rice, especially since it looks like it's being made with white rice.
I'm not in an academic institution, so I can't access the PDF unless I fork over $35.95. (Yes, I've checked sci-hub as well.)
To add a little bit to my earlier comment as well – I was motivated by one of the authors' comments, saying that it could be used in famine relief efforts. Could this be used as a sole-ingredient therapeutic food? How much supplementation would be needed for something more nutritionally rounded? That's what I meant by asking about nutrient density.
