Posted by rguiscard 12/12/2025
We have been using these as healthy, nutritious food sources for eons. I'm fine with people creating alternatives and making them available, but far too many people want to see the former disappear because they're misled by bad science and hysteria.
This is a huge disadvantage. Not every farmer is a biological research institute.
This really looks like an attempt to get investors to come back and push the stock price.
Given how fucked up astronauts who spends just a few month in space come back to earth I think we have dozens if not hundreds of other things to solve before even considering food. Your bones, muscles, eyes, circulatory system, &c. are not made for anything other than good ol earth
Jell-o (gello?) is a good example, nothing tastes like it naturally. Why aren't there tasty food that are original in terms of taste and texture but good for health and the environment? I suppose part of the struggle is that food is entrenched into culture so much. burgers and bbq are inextricable from july 4th and memorial day for example.
Jell-O actually proves this rather than refuting it. It succeeds because it hits that hardwired sweet preference, not because it invented some novel taste dimension. A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.
So you’d have to either work within those existing taste channels while creating novel combinations and textures, or somehow condition people to associate genuinely new sensations with safety and reward. The latter is slow going. We’re quite literally built to be suspicious of unfamiliar foods.
We have five taste receptors, so it's it's actually impossible to get something that doesn't map unto those five. Instead, what we call the taste of food, and what GP was referring to, is actually the smell of food, or more commonly, its aroma, which we can detect both from the outside by sniffing it with our noses, and while it is in our mouths via molecules wafting up to our respiratory tract.
Unlike the simplicity of taste, we have a huge array of smell receptors, with most of them having much more indirect associations, if any, with any specific survival need. It's very much possible, and in fact quite common, to synthesize novel smells/aromas which don't resemble any natural food.
Slightly unrelated, but what I find very cool is thinking about your taste sense as a hyper-sensitive molecule detector. Individual aromas are just the signal your brain generates for different kinds of molecules, and it's very good at that. That's why at wine tastings, for example, people come up with all these elaborate terms for specific aromas—it's a way to name the molecule composition.
A good example might be one that came up recently (on "Tasting History") is musk, which tastes of and has the bouquet of laundry detergent, or basil (which if you eat it plain and in isolation has a bizarre chemical flavor and bouquet), etc.
At first. If the food has nutrients that are important to the brain, it will recognize that in the future. There are animal experiment confirming this.
We don't link a sensation initially, until our mind associates it with feeling good in some way. Then we like it.
There are also a wide variety of textures that are heavily industrialised. If you go to some fine dining restaurants, you'll find smells and colours which you simply cannot replicate at home - let alone make from scratch.
Most synthetic meat and fish is really just a flavour carrier for whatever sauce people like. I've had imitation chicken, shrimp, beef, crab, etc. They all taste great - but that's mostly because the sauces are the same as their meaty counterparts.
Do you mean processing ingredients with the goal to take cheap ingredients and make a product as hyper-palatable as possible? That would generally be called "ultra-processed food"; you're not going to find a Doritos chip in nature.
Do you mean developing completely completely new flavors via chemical synthesis? I don't think there's much possibility there. Our senses have evolved to detect compounds found in nature, so it's unlikely a synthetic compound can produce a flavor completely unlike anything found in nature.
Also, I think you're overestimating jelly. Gelatine is just a breakdown product of collagen. Boil animal connective tissue, purify the gelatine, add sugar and flavoring and set it into a gel. It's really only a few of techniques removed from nature. If you want to say it's not found in nature, then fair enough, but neither is a medium-rare steak.
The technology is based on some naturally occurring proteins from fruit native to West Africa, but I'd say the idea of sweet things that are good for you is pretty novel!
I guess for casual buyers having a familiar reference point is just crucial.
Remember the target audience - people would rather drink and die from raw milk than get a shot for a completely preventable sickness.
Details are a bit vague but it seems like it's viable.
Soylent Green is People, too!
Sighhh, Sol Roth ;)
I'm fine with GMOs, a lot of produce would be pretty inedible without it.
It's a lot more natural then what we're doing here.