I’m naturally quite cautious about things like this, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
Pig Genes in Soy Beans
I’ve got my new band name
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.
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.
Soy doesn’t need to be tastier, carnists just need to learn to use spices instead of being crackkkers
Also there’s literally no way pig genes can be harvested ethically
“Lab grown meat will fix everything” is what i’ve been hearing since i’ve been a child and it serves as a way for animal killers not to have to make any changes until the government somehow fixes everything for them. Just as a liberal waits for a illusionairy competent leader to vote for to lead them to a better world, a liberal waits for a corporation to produce food for them to eat that’s less bad.
The solution to animal cruelty already exists: just do it yourself and eat some delicious fucking beans.
This is just advanced pbc, vegans shouldn’t support this
