Great article. Fungi produced the environment we now live in. The symbiotic relationship plants have with fungi is the basis behind the idea of no-till farming. Plants are much healthier and require less input when there is a thriving fungal community in the soil. Tilling kills fungal mycelium and turns the balance to bacteria.
Besides such uses in improving traditional agriculture, I believe that the future of protein production, which is needed to supplement plant-based food, does not stay in making fake meat from animal cell cultures, like many attempt to do today, in order to sell to rich vegans.
In my opinion, with animal cell cultures it is extremely unlikely to ever be able to produce proteins at a competitive cost. By competitive cost I mean that any such proteins should cost much less than chicken meat (per protein content).
What I believe to be the right solution, because this should be able to produce high-quality proteins at lower costs than from any animal source, is to use cultures of genetically-modified fungi, which produce some high-quality proteins, e.g. whey protein or egg white protein. There already exist genetically-modified strains of the fungus Trichoderma, which produce such animal proteins, instead of the enzymes that they normally secreted into their environment. Such proteins can be separated from the fungal culture medium by ultrafiltration, in the same way how one makes from whey or milk whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate.
It doesn't need to be cheaper than the cheapest meat to be competitive. If there's some social or moral incentive to avoid real meat, that adds value to plant based alternatives.
Fungi protein sounds cool though. I would totally add that to my diet. But I also think insects are an underutilized protein source, so I might be an outlier
vegan options lack flavor/texture. cost isn't the main issue
As an aside, I'm always perplexed by these statements:
> There are as many as 12 million species of fungi, yet there are just 155,000 or so known species, leaving vast numbers undescribed.
"There are as many as 12 million species of fungi, yet there are just 155,000 or so known species..."
The second number makes sense: it's how many species we've identified. But the first number... how can we know how many we don't know?
This kind of thing pops up all the time (X number of crimes go "unreported"... if they're unreported how can we say that?).
I get that they may be estimates. If so, it's pretty important that that estimation process is described.
Might as well say there are as many as 12 trillion species of fungi.
It's probably something like, here are the environments where we've done comprehensive surveys, here are the kind of different situations where we expect to find different species (decomposers of various types, mycorrhizal, within plants, within animals, on surfaces, specialists, generalists, climates, etc). Multiply the species from places where we've probably found most of them by the number of places where we've only found the most obvious fungi. However it works it's going to have big error bars, reflected in the fact that 12M species is the upper end of a range starting at 2.2M.
There's probably a really good answer using statistics, but it's beyond me.
> 12 trillion species of fungi
Give it enough time, it could happen
Two mushrooms walk into a bar.
The bartender says "You can't come in here."
They say "Oh C'mon we're fun guys!"
He looks at the religious statues in the corner and says "the last of your lot ended up destroying Angels!"
For those who don't get the joke -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroying_angel (destroying angel mushroom)