I have been involved with plant-based cheese making for the last year or so, and here's my opinion:<p>This is interesting research, but lab-made cheese is far away from being in the shelves. Producing casein with yeast is one thing, but that doesn't mean you can just make cheese out of it. In cow or goat milk (or sheep milk), there are 4 different casein proteins arranged in micelles together with other molecules. That exact set up is important, because when you add rennet (i.e. mostly the enzyme chymosin) to it for coagulation, it cuts the kappa caseins (which are on the outside of the micelles) at a specific position. That's key to the process that is set in motion after that, leading to the texture, taste and function we know from different cheeses.<p>Other challenges include the mass production of casein in this way. Cheeses contain typcially between 10-15% protein per weight, so you need to produce a lot of it. This is unlike e.g., Impossible Foods, which also produce heme with yeast, but of course they need much less of it per kg of meat.<p>We're looking at ways of directly make cheese from plant proteins by finding an enzyme that works similarly how chymosin works with casein. It's not clear if this will work - but if does, it will be a cheaper and simpler process than trying to produce milk synthetically.<p>That doesn't mean that I dismiss the synthetic casein approach - I think it can work, it's just important to understand that it's not as simple it sounds. In the future, we might see cheeses made with both approaches, maybe each with their pros and cons.
I can't access the article, but I'll mention something else. One year ago I met a guy who was working with trying to make bacteria produce caseine and whey. He had some experience making cheese and said that the proteins found in milk are really the secret behind making cheese taste and feel like cheese.<p>The goal was to just have bacteria, feed them molasses (which is cheap and easy to come by) and get raw milk protein as a result. Much more efficient than actually going through a cow.<p>"I would love to say that products in stores is only 2 years away, but let's say 5 to be on the safe side".<p>Milk is substitutable. You loose the taste for it in a year or so. Cheese? I have tried many vegan cheeses. They all suck.
Sounds good - something very like animal proteins without raising entire animals to produce them.<p>Beyond that though, I'm really interested in foods that could be created that <i>don't</i> mimic existing foods derived from animals or plants. You could imagine a nutritionist defining requirements - combinations of proteins, fats and carbohydrates, various micronutrients. Now add the aesthetics of taste, texture, consistency etc. Some of these would be "ready to eat," either hot or cold, but others could be raw materials for traditional cooking: shred a block of this solid stuff, fry it in that liquid oily stuff, and drizzle some thick spicy stuff on it. Marketers to invent names, of course. Maybe we even get food tailored to us individually, based on specific nutritional needs, fitness goals, religious restrictions or palate.<p>This doesn't <i>sound</i> appetizing, so I think it would be a gradual process, where new products
come out that aren't <i>quite</i> like natural foods, but are still acceptably tasty, and cheaper or more nutritious. Gradually we get things that are quite different. It would take a while, but I suspect in a few hundred years we'll have things that are unimaginable today but as accepted as cheese, beer or sausage. And with much, much lower impact on the biosphere.
The dairy industry was already in trouble. Milk consumption is declining. Frantic efforts to add cheese to everything seem to have reached some limit. New studies indicate that adults should not have more than two servings of dairy products per day. Lactose intolerance is rising in the US population.<p>Now this.
Here is a guy doing the gene editing to make yeast produce milk, at home: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiWnygcYsiQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiWnygcYsiQ</a><p>Making the milk taste correct, should not be easy. It contains many smaller compounds not found by just generating the primary proteins.
Which is probably the reason the first companies are creating cheese from lab grown milk: <a href="https://www.realvegancheese.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.realvegancheese.org/</a>
As a side-side note, if the cost is acceptable, there could be some uses to make some form of galalith a more common kind of plastic:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galalith" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galalith</a><p>Nowadays it is only used for buttons and some other small fashion accessories, but it has a lot of interesting properties, although the classic manufacturing process (curing) is very slow.
This should also impact the meat industry. I understand cows need to have calves to produce milk, these calves usually end up as food so the industry must currently have interlocked supply/demand between these somehow.<p>This interlock might mean a lot of pushback from the industry regarding this technology.
According to the marketing/advertising departments of many corporations in the west, this was available years ago, with all sorts of plant/nut juices being labelled "milk".
why mention cow, it's lab made milk<p>i don't want lab milk, i want milk from the cow that had a sweet and free life with its set of (good) bacteria<p>i don't want a pasteurized milk<p>it's an alternative to industrial milk, maybe<p>but not an alternative to fresh cow or other animal's milk<p>people who push this want to sell you a product, they don't care about what it is<p>i'll never buy one of their product<p>Oh and, life is already an open space lab
newscientist used to be one of my favorite news outlets, and them going paywall would not bug me as much if just a few weeks before going paywall, they didn't (justifiably) go on a rant how paywalls destroy science... Now a feeling of resentment prevails.<p>Yeah, I know it's off topic, but there are already complaints here about it being paywalled, so I had to vent.
TL;DR They are not making milk.They don't seem close.<p>They are helping making animal free icecream that might be better than current dairy free.
Are they?<p>I can't access the article behind the paywall, but I ultimately have a very simple question: Where can I (living in Germany, Europe) buy one of these milk alternatives that tastes like milk? Can you name a shop?<p>I would like to buy it. I'm willing to pay a premium. I feel this is an important enough development given the high greenhouse gas impact of milk that I'd like to be an early adopter.<p>It's not the first time I read about something like this, but often enough if you look into some of these plant replacements it's some startup saying "we have fancy tech that allows us to create this product that really is like the original", but they only announce it, but haven't gotten to the point to actually produce and sell it.
I can't read it either, but you don't have to be too clever to realize, that we haven't made a technology advancement so great, that we can cheat nature. So you are telling me, you have done something cows and other animals do, and it's healthier and cheaper than current milk? You either have some stuff of what Albert Einstein had inside, or just really good selling shit with good marketing... C'mon guys, we can't fall for any of this shit or any other PROCCESSED FOODS!