IMO it is the partnership of microbial fermentation with feedstocks which are easy to grow but not considered especially edible is the real low hanging fruit. Lots of weedy semi-edible plants which are one complementary detoxification enzyme away from being delicious and dependable.
As an example, we have a hyper productive legume tree (Castanospermum). The local foragers used to roast and slice the giant starchy seeds, then soak them in running water for a week to leech the nasty alkaloid. The right bacteria would eat that molecule with a spoon and short cut the lengthy process (though the saponins could be more of a challenge).
This is genuinely interesting. However, you present cultivated meat as a field boxed in by real technical bottlenecks, which is fair, but then treat novel fermentation with nontraditional gut microbes as if it were comparatively straightforward. It is not. Reviews on next-generation probiotics and novel microbial applications make clear that safety assessment, regulatory classification, strain characterization, and commercialization pathways are substantial barriers, especially for unconventional human-associated organisms. Fermented foods are also more microbially diverse and process-dependent than the essay lets on, so the contrast between “simple old fermentation” and “overengineered cultured meat” is cleaner rhetorically than it actually is scientifically
The regulatory classification thing is interesting—if you take it the food route, at least in the US, the regulatory burden is about on par with developing a new kind of cheese. (They keep talking about closing the self-determined GRAS “loophole”, but I don’t see it happening.)
You try it, you feed it to some friends, and if it doesn’t make anyone sick you take it to the farmer’s market. And if you sell five cases and nobody comes back and says “hey this made me sick”, the FDA considers that safety data.
On the note of safety: there are of course exceptions (e.g. certain species of Bacteroides), but most of the strict anaerobes you isolate from the human gut have a million-year safety record, with a billion+ subjects in the “trial”…the fact that these microbes are present in practically every healthy human’s gut provides an implicit presumption of safety over and above even other natural products like plant extracts.
Manufacturing and commercialization pathways is another story. This is why we are not freeze-drying, which deserves its own post. Keep an eye out! And thanks again for reading.
Good stuff. BTW, if you ever have the need to remove slime from your poop samples, or from the biofilm-producing organisms you isolate, I have just the product. They're called bismuth-thiols (BTs), and I’ve written on them extensively (google Philip Domenico PhD). We even used them to remove exopolysaccharides from overnight cultures so we could extract DNA from bacteria cleanly. I always wanted to do a before-and-after oral BT low-dosing to see how it affects the microbiome and bacterial counts. Some microbes are quite a bit more sensitive than others. In mice, a 1 mg/kg dose for 5 days reduced aerobic bacterial counts on agar medium by 90%. It doesn’t take much. The stools looked normal, however. Giving 10 mg/kg reduced aerobic counts by 99% and turned the stool hard and black. I have to scale down even further to find the ideal dose.
There's a longer, much more critical reply I want to write when I've got the time...but for now, just want to note that you missed a great opportunity to make a civet joke in footnote 8.
A very pleasant discovery this Easter morning, this read popping into my orbit.. I only began my own fermentation journey (beyond beers) after half a century circling the sun, but can’t get enough of it.. & maybe the fountain of youth is hidden somewhere between these flora.
I’d love to read your thoughts on kombucha, a veritable cornucopia of microbes in comparison with some fermented products.
IMO it is the partnership of microbial fermentation with feedstocks which are easy to grow but not considered especially edible is the real low hanging fruit. Lots of weedy semi-edible plants which are one complementary detoxification enzyme away from being delicious and dependable.
As an example, we have a hyper productive legume tree (Castanospermum). The local foragers used to roast and slice the giant starchy seeds, then soak them in running water for a week to leech the nasty alkaloid. The right bacteria would eat that molecule with a spoon and short cut the lengthy process (though the saponins could be more of a challenge).
Ahh, the dingle-est of berries...and cancer-nuggets!
And this set of systems we call a body...almost seems like it was designed? (spoiler alert, it was :)
I can't look at these molecular machines and the complex iterative dance that keeps us alive and think it was change by chance that developed it.
RNA? Where there is a code, there is a coder.
Cheers...a thought provoking piece for us humans that will eat almost anything.
A delicious post!
This is genuinely interesting. However, you present cultivated meat as a field boxed in by real technical bottlenecks, which is fair, but then treat novel fermentation with nontraditional gut microbes as if it were comparatively straightforward. It is not. Reviews on next-generation probiotics and novel microbial applications make clear that safety assessment, regulatory classification, strain characterization, and commercialization pathways are substantial barriers, especially for unconventional human-associated organisms. Fermented foods are also more microbially diverse and process-dependent than the essay lets on, so the contrast between “simple old fermentation” and “overengineered cultured meat” is cleaner rhetorically than it actually is scientifically
Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
The regulatory classification thing is interesting—if you take it the food route, at least in the US, the regulatory burden is about on par with developing a new kind of cheese. (They keep talking about closing the self-determined GRAS “loophole”, but I don’t see it happening.)
You try it, you feed it to some friends, and if it doesn’t make anyone sick you take it to the farmer’s market. And if you sell five cases and nobody comes back and says “hey this made me sick”, the FDA considers that safety data.
On the note of safety: there are of course exceptions (e.g. certain species of Bacteroides), but most of the strict anaerobes you isolate from the human gut have a million-year safety record, with a billion+ subjects in the “trial”…the fact that these microbes are present in practically every healthy human’s gut provides an implicit presumption of safety over and above even other natural products like plant extracts.
Manufacturing and commercialization pathways is another story. This is why we are not freeze-drying, which deserves its own post. Keep an eye out! And thanks again for reading.
Good stuff. BTW, if you ever have the need to remove slime from your poop samples, or from the biofilm-producing organisms you isolate, I have just the product. They're called bismuth-thiols (BTs), and I’ve written on them extensively (google Philip Domenico PhD). We even used them to remove exopolysaccharides from overnight cultures so we could extract DNA from bacteria cleanly. I always wanted to do a before-and-after oral BT low-dosing to see how it affects the microbiome and bacterial counts. Some microbes are quite a bit more sensitive than others. In mice, a 1 mg/kg dose for 5 days reduced aerobic bacterial counts on agar medium by 90%. It doesn’t take much. The stools looked normal, however. Giving 10 mg/kg reduced aerobic counts by 99% and turned the stool hard and black. I have to scale down even further to find the ideal dose.
There's a longer, much more critical reply I want to write when I've got the time...but for now, just want to note that you missed a great opportunity to make a civet joke in footnote 8.
A very pleasant discovery this Easter morning, this read popping into my orbit.. I only began my own fermentation journey (beyond beers) after half a century circling the sun, but can’t get enough of it.. & maybe the fountain of youth is hidden somewhere between these flora.
I’d love to read your thoughts on kombucha, a veritable cornucopia of microbes in comparison with some fermented products.
As for bacterial fermentation, have you heard of Lambic Beer?
I have! Not generally a fan of sours—presumably that's another lactic acid bacteria ferment
It uses wild yeast and bacteria.
I'm going to go stare into my refrigerator for a few minutes...
The final footnote made me laugh out loud.