... I'm not going out to eat, anymore ~

That would reflect a very big population, though.

 

I don't think this is an ideal place to push the 'per capita' button.

If you've been purse seined, it can't matter much where the vessel is flagged. You're done, heading for the ice-filled hold, and some shark will miss its dinner

The world's newest largest country India doesn't even make the OECD page. What, they don't fish? Time to go teach a man, as the saying goes.

Norway might win the per capita race. Or not. I am not inclined to redo that whole spreadsheet. My space laser is on the fritz. Too busy with that.

 

There is a wide research literature on which marine species are super over fished, which merely somewhat overfished, and which could be called sustainable. It is not a uniform landscape. Seascape. In some cases like snow crabs, pops are crashing from unknown causes.

= The big picture remains that 10 billion people will need to eat. Marine sources (not you, Bob) can fill part of that. Agriculture has room to grow, for sure, but it abuts some 'buts'. Farmed animals are tasty but inefficient, and none are less efficient than cows. So we would rationally consider some adjustments. Insects (perhaps especially as animal feed) could be a larger slice of the supply pie. But icky right?

Pigs and chickens are more efficient, but they 'vector in' new human diseases from time to time. It's a minus.

Farmed animals altogether are by far the largest 'consumers' of antibiotics, which can lead to antibiotic-resistant bacteria that move on to humans. It's another minus.

Step back and perceive that big picture is complicated. Rational improvements are being and will be sought, surely. But when somebody 'goes off' on one or another slice of the pie, Liberal New World Order or whatever, that just slows things down.

 

You, I'm sure, would know far more about this with me. Is the whole lab-grown meat thing a red herring (not literally), or is it something that might be viable and sustainable?

 

I've had some of the mock-meats in the USA. Over priced, they do a fair imitation of hamburger.

Bob Wilson

 

I don't mean the fake meats - like Impossible or whatever - that use vegetables and TVP to recreate what meat tastes like. I've had a few of them, and they're OK, but really no more than that.

I mean the ones where they actually grow actual meat in a laboratory. See I tried lab-grown meat made from animals without killing them – is this the future of ethical eating? | Food | The Guardian. At the moment, it's hilariously expensive, but I'm wondering whether it could be viable in future.

---

Honestly, I've always thought that dressing up vegetables and pretending they're meat doesn't work especially well, and that vegetables that are actually vegetables offer far more deliciousness. @Leadfoot J. McCoalroller and @tochatihu both discussed the joys of ma po tofu before. Lots of people in the west think tofu is stupid because if they've tried it, it's been tofu pretending to be meat, in a burger or a sausage or a stroganoff or whatever, and it is deeply disappointing in such an application. But treat tofu as tofu, as a thing in itself rather than an alternative to something else, and it can be a wonderful thing.

 

I think that's what's happening to Japan's whale market.

 

Oh awright. Professorially we must begin with a clarification. Peas and soy (probably legumes more generally) can be modified to closely resemble cooked animal muscles. Taste and texture. This is a 'bridge' technology, not entirely unlike hybrid vehicles. Meat-like legume products can do niche. They need not even beat the cost of meat, because when latter externalities become recognized, niche can become much bigger.

Lab-grown meat is two completely different things. One can start with bovine stem cells and compel them to become muscle. Or, one can start with bacteria and edit in genes that cause proteins to assemble themselves to resemble animal muscles. Both are doable, both are currently very expensive, but both could get much cheaper. In an efficient factory, costs would be driven by amino acids on the cow side or simply ammonium ions on the bacteria side. I should not call those resources dirt cheap, because dirt is egregiously undervalued. But there it is.

No fundamental limitation to upscaling the latter two processes is obvious. Work out all the many kinks, and manufacture! First real-scale production facilities will be beaten by lower production costs in later ones, but hey, capitalism.

All this is in service of supplying gustatory experiences to paying customers. I do not judge that. But see that two flies could land in our ointment.

First, these are companies and all their tricks and hacks are proprietary. Since meat animals were first farmed, the whole thing was open source. Anyone could do it. That goes away. All pseudo-meat become corporate. You like?

Second, these factories produce gobs of what other bacteria dearly enjoy. Listeria bacteria caused recall of meat (real meat) products, very big, within the last few days. Listeria bacteria are not alone in loving what we love, and on the side, causing human illness. So this whole new industry will create a whole new pathway for bacteria to do harm. They will, of course, sanitize their work surfaces, but sometimes they'll miss a spot.

In service of supplying meat gustatory experiences to paying customers, these new industries will create new ways to stick humans' chins out. Take a punch from bacteria. It's almost like we intend to hand it back to bacteria who really run the planet, with humans only making a blip here.

==
Instead, if humans choose to rely on plants directly for food, we might befuddle our bacterial enemies and prosper. Bacteria interested in plants are not interested in us. They made different choices way long ago.

Professorial enough for you?

 

S'OK by me.
We can disagree.....agreeably.

Neither me too.
I've never tried shark fin soup, so I cannot offer an opinion.
HOWEVER (comma!)
If I must live in a world with sharks, I prefer them with fins, if only to serve as a limited warning of their presence.

 

I have enjoyed 'fried' tofu but it has become all but invisible. The softer versions are OK but nothing to write home about. Generally innocuous in a stew of vegetables and spicy sauce.

Bob Wilson

 

Gosh, yes. That was really interesting. Thank you!

 

The hot, deep-fried one with a salt-and-pepper or soy-and-chilli dip that you get in Cantonese and Vietnamese places? Or the chilled deep-fried lumps that you chuck into fried rice or laksa?

I like both. My Scottish genes demand that all things be deep-fried, though.

 

The last time I checked, our regular grocery store only carried the soft-blocks. I'll try some the other places and the Asian markets.

In the past, broccoli and tofu was the only one available at local Chinese carry out.

Bob Wilson

 

One variation of ma po I love includes a small amount of meat. Just enough to suggest a meat-y sauce not unlike dandan noodles.

Many American restaurants selling Chinese-style foods offer "home style tofu" which is generally deep-fried chunks with veggies in a garlicky sauce. I find the dish easier to trust than most meat dishes when trying a new place.

@bwilson4web it's probably there- for whatever reason several brands leave it in small print on the packaging so look closely, but I've had no trouble finding firm or extra-firm in groceries all over America.

My wife and I are often trying to copy foods we've found in our travels, influenced by what we can find locally. Our hens think it's spring, laying more already so we've been working on punjabi egg curry and tornado tamago for a bit.

 

We're still getting fresh squeezed from an educator friend for five bucks a dozen.
She would take less but we don't mind paying a 'living' wage so that her girls get a really good diet.

Like I said before....it's NOT the food you eat....

 

Yet your selected example of a bad bacteria above is a soil organism that just happens to cause trouble when it manages to find itself out of the dirt. Sometimes that out of dirt arena is frozen vegetables.

Listeria readily succumbs to cooking heat and good hygiene practices in the kitchen. What makes it troublesome before infection is that it can grow and spread at low temperatures that put another bacteria to sleep.

 

In the southeast US there are many offerings in ones own yard - dandelions, greens, wild onions, wild strawberries etc (provided you do not poison your yard). As well as many other offerings - rabbits, squirrels and doves everywhere to the point they are nuisances to those of us who garden.

Yes, I have eaten and hunted squirrels even though they may be considered rodents as well as pulled bull frogs out of an algae infested pond and fried up their rear legs after breading them.

There are many food offerings in nature as our ancestors found out. As Mr. Darwin pointed out adapt - or be adapted.

 

That's the weird thing. Shark fin soup is the blandest food in the world. But people are willing to pay a fortune for it.

 

In China, ma po tofu should always include meat - usually minced pork. (But I don't know whether the Japanese version can be meat-free.) If I'm cooking it for a vegan friend I substitute it with chopped-up mushrooms, but it's really not the same.

If it doesn't include the minced pork, then it's ma la tofu. Which is also delicious.

I met a university friend in Singapore last week - he lives there - and we were reminiscing, and telling our kids stories of our youth. Cooking came into it. We were in the same Chinese class at university in Britain. British university language courses (with the stupid exception of Cambridge's Chinese course, but that's another story) are four years long, with one year in the country that speaks that language. Dom and I spent that year in Tianjin. This was the early 90s, when private enterprise was just starting to develop in China, and there were a bunch of small family-owned restaurants clustered around the university. We got to know the owners of these restaurants - restaurant food at the time was so cheap that we ate out every night - and eventually managed to get them to invite us into their kitchens. They taught us how to cook a lot of the classic dishes, especially those from Tianjin, Beijing, North-East China and Sichuan. It was great.

(We also told them about the time I accidentally set fire to the oven while cooking Peking Duck. But that, also, is another story.)

Might I suggest leaving the bedroom windows open if you have that for dinner?

I once got a flight from Colombo to Hong Kong immediately after eating a garlic curry - not a curry flavoured with garlic, but a curry where whole garlic cloves were the star, instead of chicken or lamb or whatever. The people sitting within about 10 rows of me suffered through that flight.

 

I mentioned Listeria only because it caused the most recent food recall in media reports. That was for processed meats intended to be served without cooking. Thus, entirely consistent with @Trollbait comments.

Lab meats would be cooked, so that leads to different concerns. I can think of few food industries from for bacterial contamination problems from time to time. Lab meat is not yet mature enough to join the party. But when it does, and when Campylobacter or some other arises, we can expect to hear FUD from Big Meat Inc.