Side note: "in to" should be one word - "into".
The corn syrup based foods are cheap, tasty, and really easy to eat. It's too bad they have no nutrients besides calories.
The rest of the world seems to use sugar from beets/sugar cane/coconuts?
Correct me if I'm wrong, I base the above statements on a rant by an American coworker about how the corn lobby managed to somehow force American food producers to exclusively use relatively high calory corn syrup as a sweetener as opposed to much lower calory sweeteners.
No, corn syrup is used in food and drinks all over the world.
Personally, I have nothing against corn syrup so long as the sweetness actually tastes nice and appropriate for what I'm consuming.
Corn syrup is also a lot better than artificial sweeteners which all taste like hot garbage and make me literally ill.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/495946/consumption-share...
...Diabetes prevalence was 20% higher in countries with higher availability of HFCS compared to countries with low availability, and these differences were retained or strengthened after adjusting for country-level estimates of body mass index (BMI), population and gross domestic product (adjusted diabetes prevalence=8.0 vs. 6.7%, p=0.03; fasting plasma glucose=5.34 vs. 5.22 mmol/L, p=0.03) despite similarities in obesity and total sugar and calorie availability. These results suggest that countries with higher availability of HFCS have a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes independent of obesity.The problem is that US government subsidies for corn and soy have created an entire class of products that are cheaper than any alternatives.
If we removed those subsidies, there would be far less incentive for companies to use them.
We have at least some options for this already. Mycoprotein is one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn#Production (apart from the plant isolates)
> [...]
> It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever
Personally I follow fermentation based (bacteria based) proteins with interest, potentially they can have an even smaller footprint than plant based protein.
Like Solein ( https://solarfoods.com/solein/ ), which has now been accepted as safe for human consumption in one country: Singapore.
So they're not always behind the curve.
Maybe one day - the potential of fungi is amazing. It's a whole world that is fundamental to ecology and comparatively poorly understood or mapped. However, I remain skeptical at present once you factor in one or both of the lab costs (steel vats, process control, power consumption, thermal systems, and lab employees) and the raw inputs (fermentation doesn't happen on thin air).
By the time you've grown the raw input, why not just grow a food crop?
I feel virtue-signalling regulatory moves are meaningless. Case in point: many markets are totally unregulated, by your logic they're ahead of the curve. I don't disagree.
For life generating protein is a byproduct of other goals. It seems possible that we can do better.
More broadly, it's not really about cell-cultured meat. It's about producing any kind of protein whatsoever which can be ingratiated in to the food supply chain anywhere. The huge success in culturally normalizing the consumption of 'beef balls' and similar '<highly processed, derivative, nominal protein identity> balls' in markets like Thailand to my critical eye largely stem from the beef ball factories of Shantou in Guangdong. Make no mistake: those people are making bank selling total bunk for real bucks.
Poverty will be the driver.
Economically, it's hard to pass up plants. They've literally evolved over millions of years to produce the goods using almost nothing in resource terms. Somehow the world just needs to learn to love Indian food and stop expecting protein and lipid dense meals.