โPolitics is downstream of culture,โ but culture is downstream of technology and there is a major technological revolution going on in food.
Plant-based food used to be, for lack of a better word, ้พๅ (Nรกn chฤซ). While the correct translation is unpalatable or something like โnot tasty,โ the literal meaning of ้พๅ is more along the lines of hard to eat, which is why my vaguely-hippie motherโs attempts to get us to eat meat substitutes during our childhood and adolescence always floundered on the ้พๅ-ness of the actual products.
In the last few years, however, plant-based foods have undergone a major revolution! Plant-based restaurants are now good. Not as-in good for the soul, but actually good.
This is happening, however, in a field where selling products as โthe latest technologyโ is often taboo. In fact, to present novel, patented, food products as โheritageโ is a fairly common marketing technique1 (with the Impossible Burger being perhaps an exception to this pattern as they are more unapologetic pro-tech2; they will also not sell in Europe anytime soon3).
Still, whether the marketing departments sell it as heritage or farm-raised or ethical whatever other euphemism for super-high-tech they find, the technological progress is immense and will eventually change the culture. Once the plant-based meat supplants the animal-based kind in taste and mouthfeel, itโll be over for cows.
I used to be skeptical that vegetarianism would win, now I have no doubts that veganism is the future. It will be heralded as a moral triumph, but it will have been a technological victory first of all.4
Day job links
June 25: NGLess tutorial
If you work on metagenomics binning (MAG building), check out SemiBin. The manuscript is in preparation, but we are getting excellent results (20-40% gain over Metabat2 in the number of high-quality MAGs from the same data).
Links of the Week
The story of Lithium as a drug for bipolar disorder: โHe began to collect urine samples from people with depression, mania and schizophrenia, aiming to discover whether some secretion in their urine could be correlated to their symptoms[โฆ] Cade injected the urine into the abdominal cavities of guinea pigs, raising the dose until they died. The urine of people with mania proved especially lethal to the animals. In further experiments at Bundoora, Cade found that lithium carbonate โ which had been used to treat conditions such as gout since the nineteenth century โ reduced the toxicity of patientsโ urine. [โฆ] After trying it out on himself to establish a safe dose, Cade began treating ten people with maniaโ (earlier Rabbit Thought: The episode Japan)
Questionable research practices are often celebrated, not done in secret (earlier Rabbit Though: Psychology is the science control group)
Tweets of the Week
Photos
I do have a general soft spot for a certain kind of marketing fraud in the food world.
They made fungi that bleed! How cool is that?
In fact, having recently gotten back to Europe from Shanghai, this place seems stuck in the mid-2010s when it comes to plant-based food. This may be another technological revolution that passes Europe by.
Morality is a normal good.