With more of us looking for alternatives to eating animals, new research has found a surprising environmentally friendly source of protein – algae.
The University of Exeter study has been published in The Journal of Nutrition and is the first of its kind to demonstrate that the ingestion of two of the most commercially available algal species are rich in protein which supports muscle remodeling in young healthy adults.
Promising? Sure. Surprising? Catch up with the science fiction 😹
Or the Japanese. Algae is used in sushi rolls, this is nothing new.
Its also more texture than flavor
One of the problems with large scale algae farming afaik is the algae getting contaminated by other algal species that are toxic and outcompete the edible algae. I’d like to see the solutions to that issue
It is a complicated topic, pest management strategies can vary. A lot of the time it is site and organism specific as far as what you’d end up with, certain species can be susceptible to different infestations. So many invasive organisms require different cures, these can include chemicals, fungicides, filtration, but these kinds of contamination events are somewhat expected after enough time, so as long as the same issue isn’t recurring too frequently, the economic strategy is to just reboot the pond after a clean.
Typically, the strategy is to outcompete what you may get contaminated with. Ideally your crop is a high productivity strain of algae (much more productive than things originating outside the pond), and as long as the algae exhibit faster growth rates, the invasive species doesn’t have an opportunity to take off as the desired algae will continue to take the majority of nutrients.
If you get something toxic in there, it’s gotta be dealt with accutely based on the critter, but other preventative strategies like inlet media filtration/heating, crop rotation, and organism population monitoring can help mitigate these things from starting up. A good review can be found here.
I guess the production could take inspiration from the pharma industry and use strict increasingly clean zones and sterile environments the closer you get to the core production. After sterilising everything and sigeling out the alge you want you should in theory be able to run more or less indefinitely. And if a contamination of found it just a matter of sterilizing everything with steam and reboot the system.
Yeah we’ll just make our food like we do our drugs. Surely those who can’t afford a steak will be able to eat…
Keeping things sterile is very labour and energy intensive, even in the Pharma industry, where the profit margins are orders of magnitude above what you can do in the food industry.
Look this will sound harsh, but it’s not, really.
Your reasoning is good if you compare it to an hypothesis a student of Pasteur or Koch could have thought of 150 yrs ago.
Thus I have to ask you, why did you think you have a good take on this?
My cat is sterile and it only cost $135 once so what are you on about?
Nice username. You are my hero
Here we are again. Still got the most gnarly username lol
Thus, very nice, very nice.
Did you read what i wrote? i said “take inspiration from” not "should copy 1:1 also i work i pharma so yes i have a good take on this.
When you’re working with coproducts like algae-derived pharmaceuticals (see Lumen biotech in Seattle) that sell for 6 figures/kg you’re correct, much more stringent pharma-like ideas do get implemented because the down time is costly. This is seen in indoor reactor setups where you can grow under artificial light year round. Outdoors, the cost to implement more sophisticated systems doesn’t translate in your TEA especially when growing things like protein which is cheap in comparison.
Yeah you are probably right that cost will be the biggest issue when comparing between the two fields of production. Getting a good stable production that is also cheap enough to be viable is always the hurdle
What you said on the 1st sentence is okay. After that, is clueless. …in the context of discussing the difficulties - technical and economical - of growing specific algae for food.
After sterilising everything and sigeling out the alge you want you should in theory be able to run more or less indefinitely.
This is like saying that if there’s sun and no clouds, in theory, the sky should be blue. In practice there’s no useful information added to the discussion on the…
And if a contamination of found it just a matter of sterilizing everything with steam and reboot the system.
Like in all that is microbiology, kind of. Except steam is not sterilising. Unless under autoclave pressures. Inside an autoclave. Even in those conditions, which are agreed to be sterilising, even then not all microbes are killed and contamination is still considered as an issue in some cases. Again, in practice there’s no useful information added to the discussion on the…
Your non-expert overconfidence is not unique. It’s an epidemic. And that’s why I’m triggered to comment on it.
Again, in practice there’s no useful information added to the discussion on the
And by that logic neither have you added anything useful so far with two long posts in this thread. So I guess we are even now? :)
Unironically (within reason) I do not care where my proteins come from if they taste good enough and are renewable
I got some renewable protein for ya
These SICK LEFTISTS are going to FORCE THE CUM LOAF on you
Bro no! There is protein in trash. Would you pay for recycled mcdonalds half price no returns sold out of a alley?
If they reprocessed it in a way that posed miniscule health hazards and didn’t taste off I would not care
I’ve eaten hotdogs before, and they’re often found to contain HUMAN meat, what difference does it make
Maybe I will, don’t judge my kink.
Algae just have a pretty strong flavor and might be off-putting for some so for it to take off i would love to have different flavours and species to pick from. Would be interning. So far I’ve only tried spirulina which has a quite strong taste in my smoothies and is deafening the taste of almost everything else.
Try Soylent. Their premixed bottles taste really good.
Just don’t get the green bottle…
the chocolate mint is fine. I prefer the original flavor powder tho.
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Is that surprising? I feel like that’s the least surprising option. Cricket flour was surprising.
I tried dried cheese-flavored crickets once. 0/10; the legs got stuck in my molars. Also, tastes like straw
Bugs are more spices than food
Snort some centipede heads go to the void
Those pills have pretty much the same colour as the food cubes in Farscape…
What did you think was in the good cubes?
I think they mention the contents at some point, but I don’t remember.
I’m not against algae as a food source, but the similarity of this research to Soylent Green’s cover source in the movie being plankton is hilariously on the nose.
I mean you’d think soy and lentils, wouldn’t you.
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I get it!
Meat is meat i say
This pig meat is quite long
Algae and kelp can be really damn yummy, too. Takes work, but I remember having my first non-meat burger back in my teenage years and loving the hell out of it. It was this blend of kelp and algae and it was so damn good. It didn’t taste like meat, and it was miles better than any of the usual “veggie” burgers I’ve had since.
I’m jealous, I’ve always wanted to try a Krabby Patty
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Looks delicious mate!
