Show HN: MealSquares, our whole food Soylent alternative

Re:Show HN: MealSquares, our whole food Soylent alternative by Pxtl on Thursday February 27, 2014 @02:45PM (#7314485)

A bit offtopic, but I'm always sad that more research hasn't been done in making eggs/milk cruelty-free - that the "cruely-free science" went straight to synthetic meat. I'd love to see more research in mass-cloning female chickens to avoid the "sexing" problem, or painless alternatives to de-beaking, or hormonally-induced lactation in cows. Even the ideal pastoral rural hobby egg-farmer has intrinsically cruel aspects because of the useless male chicks and occasional violence between chickens... but it feels like these would be lower hurdles to overcome with technology than weaving synthetic beef on a magical meat-loom.

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Re:Show HN: MealSquares, our whole food Soylent alternative by teach on Thursday February 27, 2014 @03:01PM (#7314601)

I think it's because cruelty-free is already quite easy to get: just buy food from local, organic farms that actually raise animals instead of mass-producing them.

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Re:Show HN: MealSquares, our whole food Soylent alternative by Pxtl on Friday February 28, 2014 @09:35AM (#7318839)

But my point is that even local organic farms have to deal with the useless males problem. For eggs: if they have a rooster to breed more chickens, they kill the male hatchlings as soon as they're old enough to be sexed (which can be at birth or a few weeks later depending on the sophistication of their sexing techniques). If they purchase their chickens from a breeder, the same problem exists there.

I mean, simple respectable pain-management could help with de-beaking, but the existence of unwanted male birds is a hard problem.

I'd be a lot more comfortable with ovo/lacto vegetarianism (which is what I do) if those problems could be solved, and I'm no luddite - if there was a high-tech solution to these problems using crazy cloning techniques or somehow inducing parthenogenesis or something, that would be great.

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Re:Show HN: MealSquares, our whole food Soylent alternative by nawitus on Thursday February 27, 2014 @03:04PM (#7314622)

I agree. The good news is that there's Hampton Creek Foods, who are researching egg replacements: https://hamptoncreekfoods.com/

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