Eggs are extremely nutritious. We should not be excited to replace them with Soylent Green.

Humans are omnivores. Without eating animal products society would collapse.

> Without eating animal products society would collapse.

I'm not a vegetarian (I eat an egg every day!), but wow, what a confident assertion. I'm open to your evidence behind this, but it seems absolutely preposterous to me.

Imagine going to a part of the world ravaged by starvation and explaining to them that we're throwing millions at growing egg whites in a lab because the chickens are sad. The amount of privilege needed for this is incomprehensible.

I mean, you realise that one of the major long-term goals of this sort of thing is a _cheaper product_? Theoretical efficiency for something like this is far higher than for a chicken, because, well, you don't need to sustain an actual _chicken_. The egg-laying chicken itself is largely a rather expensive byproduct in the egg production process.

This doesn't even touch the GP point.

Further, "long-term" is a weasel word that is meaningless to people starving right now. The hungry want to hear food is coming, not some hifalutin agriculturally illiterate fantasy thought up by hung over trust fund kids.

Short if giving a specific date and objective success criteria, long-term means never.

I mean, long-term would want to be soon, or the company will go out of business. From the article, and I do realise that it is considered most improper to actually read them on this website:

> Onego Bio plans to sell Bioalbumen to companies that would then create the food products.

The processed food industry is very cost-sensitive and both industrial egg albumen and various substitutes are already available; if they're not price competitive they'll die quickly.

It doesn't seem at all unlikely that they'lll get to being price competitive quickly. They're producing a single protein with a fungus. There's another well-known example of this; quorn. Quorn's actually a bit more complex in that, once they've produced their protein they need to add stuff to make it palatable, and their processed output still comes in at about the same cost as processed chicken, and generally a bit cheaper than other processed meat. These people seem to be literally just producing albumen, so it's close to an ideal case.

What this company is doing is not zero-sum with providing food aid, and it's certainly not taking any food sources out of circulation for the hypothetical country being posited. Why is it one or the other? The money put into this research is not coming from the budgets for food banks. Is all R&D in this space, even from private investors, a waste in your eye?

I think the idea that there’s still so much about nutrition we don’t know is a very reasonable take and a good argument against removing animal products from our diet

Of course there is a conversation to be had, though I think there's pretty clear evidence individuals can function just fine without animal consumption. But the idea that "society would collapse"? That seems to be going just a tad bit beyond what I would consider a "very reasonable take".

I think it would be easier to argue that our addiction to meat consumption is one culprit fueling society's collapse already given the environmental and ecological impact that meat production creates.

If everyone stopped drinking alcohol, society would also collapse.

By monetary valuation, the global alcohol market is over 30x the size of the global meat market. Does this mean we should discourage people from replacing getting drunk with healthier alternatives?

Do you have a source for this statement? Doesn't pass the smell test for me...

Well, I had sources yesterday but I didn't save them. Today all I can find is that the alcohol industry is a little bigger, but not 30x (maybe closer to 20%). I'm not sure why there is so much disparity in these kinds of figures. Every source I can find today still seems to indicate the meat industry is at least somewhat smaller, though.

Source for meat products market size estimated at 1660.64 billion in 2023: https://www.precedenceresearch.com/meat-products-market

Source for alcoholic beverages market size estimated at 1949.2 billion in 2021: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/alcoholic-beverages-...

> Without eating animal products society would collapse.

... Wait, how does that follow? Like, if everyone stopped tomorrow, sure, maybe; it would at the very least be a massive economic shock, and would likely lead to critical shortages as well. But phased out over time, it's not clear why this would be the case.

I'm never eating the JUST EGG

It tasted fine.

There are recipes for egg-equivalent online, typically involving Kala namak aka black salt, if you want to try doing it yourself.

Wait, Onego eggs are people?!

Or... probably not

I think more people should keep chickens in back yards. They’re good pets, they recycle scrap foods and they keep insects off your veggies. Nobody should be buying cage eggs in the shops.

Theres still some kinda difficult ethical problems with those. People generally want female chickens, since that's where the eggs come from (and I think there are problems with having multiple males in a flock). Unfortunately naturally you get a 50:50 ratio of males and females in the eggs. The males are usually killed shortly after hatching.

Its worth pointing out that there are methods for avoiding this, by detecting the male chicks when they're still essentially a foetus in the egg. These work so well that France, Germany and Italy banned culling chicks a few years back. Unfortunately they're more expensive than determining the chick's sex after they are hatched so other places don't do it.

"The males are usually killed shortly after hatching."

Not necessary. https://www.soos.org.il/

Not necessarily, but certainly usually (unless you're in France, Germany or Italy as I mentioned).

Are there? I think that all animal suffering is bad. And I think that in general more living creates is a moral good. But I'd argue the right to remain alive once alive only really kicks for animals that can make plans about the future. So I'd feel qualms about euthanizing a raven or parrot, but not a chicken.

I think that in the absense of a "god" to tell us, everyone has to come to their own conclusions about where they draw moral lines. For me specifically I think that being able to make plans about the future is a superficially appealing but pretty bad way to decide. For a start there are humans who (because of brain-damage or whatever) lack the ability to make meaningful plans.

I thought that the traditional way, with traditional breeds of chicken, was to allow the male chicks to grow large enough to be slaughtered for their meat.

Industrial farming use different breeds for egg-laying and meat, so they would find early culling more economical.

I believe that is how things traditionally were, but I think it is rather rare today. It will depend on the specific breeder what they do with them. I'm sure some smaller breeders keep the males around but this is not the case with large-scale breeders.

This isn't unique to keeping backyard chickens, it's an ethical issue with factory farming as well.

Of course, I strongly agree.

Eggs aren't fertilized (no roosters :|). If you really want to get down to the ugly truth of eggs, you're essentially eating chicken menstruation...And there's no ethical problems when it's in a backyard or the chickens are free ranging. I agree that commercial poultry operations are gruesome and psychotic but that's what happens when you build these things out at scale and it's largely a result of the great-depression and the new deal machinations to end hunger. Good intentions pave the path into hell.

> And there's no ethical problems when it's in a backyard or the chickens are free ranging.

I believe there are. The people buying the chickens for their lovely free range or backyard thing are specifically only buying female ones. The males get killed, usually in somewhat gruesome ways shortly after hatching.

That might not be an ethical problem for you but it is for me.

While I agree with you, as already mentioned by other poster it is likely that the practice of killing the males will be banned in most places and it will disappear, because now there are means to detect the sex of the eggs, so the male eggs can be selected for egg consumption.

What is the cost differential?

I'm very far from qualified to talk about the economics of the egg industry but quoting from Wikipedia

> On 18 July 2021, French Minister of Agriculture, Julien Denormandie, announced chick culling would be banned from 1 January 2022.[70] Both maceration and gassing will be prohibited, and the French government would grant chicken breeders subsidies of 10 million euros combined in order to acquire in-ovo sexing machines instead (leading to extra consumer costs of about 1 eurocent per box of six eggs).

My 3 big hold-ups are not wanting to annoy my neighbors, since I live on a corner and behind my house would be next to their back yard. Then not being sure how my dogs would handle the chickens. One has a lot of herding instinct and the other has guardian instincts, but they both react to wild animals strongly. And finally the current bird flu going around bird populations worries me.

I live in a 30 story apartment building. Tell me more about this back yard

I’ve been doing this for a year and it’s been great. 3 currently laying hens, which means about 3 eggs a day. 4 younger hens also. Getting an automatic coop door is helpful.

What back yard?

The future utopian Food Synthesizer from Star Trek seems a very tiny % more achievable now.

There exists quite a few of vegan egg replacement products already. I've found egg replacement based on lupinus seed flour to be perfectly adequate for baking sponge cake and frying crepes.

The problem is that a replacement product that doesn't contain the identical substance can replace the original only in some recipes. With "vegan products" in general, you'd have to pay more attention when cooking because it will often not cook exactly the same way as the product it imitates.

Eggs are so versatile any replacement is bound to be very context specific.

But nutritionally speaking, I don't think we can find anything that compare. It's quite an amazing food.

Well, this is still just albumen, so you won't be making custard with it. Actual albumen would be a lot more versatile than existing substitutes, tho.