I’d be down for some algae burgers if it helps the planet 🌿🍔
replace the meat and dairy industry with b e a n s
Tofu never started a pandemic!
The potential is great but I think it’s better to rethink our current choices and be more conscious with the food that we now have. If we lessen our consumption of animal meat then we can focus on feeding supposed animal feed crops to humans. The use of land and water would be less alongside lower carbon emissions.
This is the way.
We have solutions, or at least ways we could drastically improve things, but I guess folks would rather accept that they’ll be left with algae patties in the future rather than working to limit their animal consumption today. I don’t get it.
Who said it has to be one or the other? We can pursue these new methods for tomorrow while simultaneously cutting down on animal products today.
These two things are not mutually exclusive.
I agree with you, and I never said they were mutually exclusive.
My comment was on how, in my admittedly limited experience, people see stories like this and seem to accept that they may have no choice but to eat stuff like this in the future while making no change to their current choices.
Yeah, I think there’s a novelty factor in a lot of “innovations” that claim to be the secret to solving climate change. And while not inherently bad they sort of miss the picture in my opinion. Like, the future, in my opinion, should be made of trains and apartments. The dull things that we know work.
On a much more insidious level (not that I think anyone here has ill intent, nor the people working on these technologies) it almost implies that we don’t have the technology to stop our impact on the climate. We have the technology, it’s all political will.
Calling apartments “dull” is a bit generous
I already eat a lot of algae but the packaging always has warnings that algae are very high in iodine. You usually can only safely consume a gram or so per day. Strange that they didn’t address this in the article…
How do you eat it? I’m just learning about the world of eating algae now–outside of seaweed, that is (which I also just learned is algae and not just some underwater plant lol).
Well, I’ve been vegan for >11 years and love Korean & Japanese food that’s why I eat it. Usually with rice, i.e. roasted seaweed like Nori leaves or already in stripes. Or as sushi. Also in soup like misoshiru where you usually have the stock from specific algae and you can even put wakame seaweed in it. With sushi you can often also get a wakame salad, which is really tasty, too.
But usually I just cook rice (or use leftovers) and mix it with sesame seeds, sesame oil, soy sauce and some form of seaweed (usually I get a seasoned package of roasted seaweed with added flavors, but nori leaves work great as well). All in all this is a great staple food because you can store everything for longer periods of time and it is easy to make.
Hope this helps!
I wonder if it’s only some forms of algae, or if they can reduce iodine levels with processing and genetic modification.
Yes, seems to be species dependent. But it doesn’t seem to be well studied. But the variation in iodine levels is crazy…
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8035890/
Would we have to worry about mercury?
Unlike fish, Algae are basically the bottom of the food chain. Mercury is an issue because it bioaccumulates in higher trophic levels. Because Algae is right at the bottom, it won’t collect very much at all.
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I dont want to devolve into quoting like on reddit, but this article kept reminding me of the Simpsons.
“Thats what he was eating! Slime! And theres enough slime for all!”
This is interesting reading alongside the one from yesterday about blue carbon - in Aotearoa one of our fiord regions is looking at farming kelp in the same area, too!
After reading the article I’m thinking of trying to grow some. Anyone have experience with it and also on how it tastes? 😁
Anyone here read Artemis by Andy Weir? Yeah…
I have it’s a great book!
I feel like this kinda thing is a bit of a trope in sci-fi and cyberpunk, where one staple crop is used to cheaply feed a large number of people. In some works the staple crop is algae, in some it’s soy, etc. Arguably, in the real world US it’s corn.
