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.
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
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?
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.
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
Those pills have pretty much the same colour as the food cubes in Farscape…
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.
