Last night I ate my first 3-D constructed steak, made entirely from plants, at the great Chouchou restaurant in Stockholm. It's astonishing. The texture's exactly right and the taste is excellent. This is before we have precision fermented proteins, encapsulated fats and heme.

I thought the texture would be the greatest challenge of all, and the last thing they'd get right. But it's already there, via @Juicy Marbles. The hardest part has been done. We are on the way to microbial meat that will be indistinguishable from the flesh of animals.

Minus the animal suffering, habitat destruction, river pollution etc .... Change is coming. It will be massive and disruptive. It will bring a phenomenally cruel and destructive industry to an end, and shrink the environmental footprint of protein-rich food to a dot.

Reading the responses, there are two main objections. 1. The price. 2. The ingredients. Let's take these one by one. Subthread/

Price. Yes, it's expensive. It's right at the top of the price curve: new tech, new product, pioneering a whole new approach. New tech for early adopters is always expensive. Think of computers and phones. The price will plummet as it scales.

Ingredients. Yes, there are several, inc possible allergens for some people. But this is an intermediate step: proof of concept. Now the same structural technology can be used to do something really exciting: turn animal proteins and fats produced by microbes into meat. Read on/

This permits a radical reduction in both ingredients and processing, to make products with the same biochemical composition as meat. And, once the technologies mature, it becomes much cheaper. Eventually it will undercut animal farming.

It also bypasses the need for cell-cultered meat. These are quicker, easier and cheaper technologies.

George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

The corpse at every wedding, the bride at every funeral.

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George Monbiot@GeorgeMonbiot

Last night I ate my first 3-D constructed steak, made entirely from plants, at the great Chouchou restaurant in Stockholm. It's astonishing. The texture's exactly right and the taste is excellent. This is *before* we have precision fermented proteins, encapsulated fats and heme.

George Monbiot

George Monbiot
@GeorgeMonbiot

Last night I ate my first 3-D constructed steak, made entirely from plants, at the great Chouchou restaurant in Stockholm. It's astonishing. The texture's exactly right and the taste is excellent. This is before we have precision fermented proteins, encapsulated fats and heme.