Quorn is a very interesting piece of sociological/science history. People were deadly serious about the risk of food shortage. What that led to included the 1 child policy in china, and the Indian emergency (forced sterilisations) in the 1970s which wreaked immense harm on society at large, and probably the economies of both countries long-term.<p>The Quorn engineers did amazingly well. A small minority cohort of consumers showed them it can cause mushroom-sensitive/intolerant people a bit of harm and so it got a "not safe" label which is a shame. If they'd managed that better we might well have achieved a remarkable shift in protein source efficiency worldwide.<p>You can put C.M.Kornbluth and Fred Pohl's "Space Merchants" and Isaac Asimov's "zymoveal" in his "The Caves of Steel" as well as the "Soylent Green" in "Make Room Make Room" by Harry Harrison into this box: the zeitgeist was very definitely "we are heading to a world with more people than we can produce protein for" view. As late as 1981, Alasdair Gray's "Lanark: A novel" has the idea that desperate times cause desperate protein measures.<p>As it turns out. we're going to peak at 11b. the corner in rate of growth (2nd order differential?) is pretty clear now.<p>Quorn was patented. They expired in 2010 (according to the very fine article)<p>Rank Hovis McDougall food scientists really ought to be known better. Amazing work. When you think about prior science in bio-reactors at scale, you go back to WW1 and the acetone production by Weitzmann which solved the explosives shortage, and relates to the post WW1 Palestine/Israel decisions, and to Penicillin: (WW2, unrelated) which was being made in the UK in of all things, china bedpans, before the Americans worked out a flow process in bioreactors at scale.<p>Weitzmann is famous for a science quote which is something along the lines of "I have only so far made 1 litre. But in principle if I can get this to work I can scale it to 100 Tonnes or more, per production cycle"<p>Edit: here's the quote:<p><i>Weizmann told Churchill: “So far I have succeeded in making a few hundred cubic centimeters of acetone at a time by the fermentation process. I do my work in a laboratory. I am not a technician. I am only a research chemist,” said Weizmann.</i><p><i>Weizmann continued: “But, if I were somehow able to produce a ton of acetone, I would be able to multiply that by any factor you choose. Once the bacteriology of the process is established, it is only a question of brewing. I must get hold of a brewing engineer from one of the big distilleries, and we will set about the preliminary task.”</i><p><a href="https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-170/churchill-chaim-weizmann/" rel="nofollow">https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest...</a>