With more of us looking for alternatives to eating animals, new research has found a surprising environmentally friendly source of protein -- algae.
The University of Exeter study has been published in The Journal of Nutrition and is the first of its kind to demonstrate that the ingestion of two of ...
With more of us looking for alternatives to eating animals, new research has found a surprising environmentally friendly source of protein -- algae.
The University of Exeter study has been published in The Journal of Nutrition and is the first of its kind to demonstrate that the ingestion of two of the most commercially available algal species are rich in protein which supports muscle remodeling in young healthy adults.
One of the problems with large scale algae farming afaik is the algae getting contaminated by other algal species that are toxic and outcompete the edible algae. I'd like to see the solutions to that issue
It is a complicated topic, pest management strategies can vary. A lot of the time it is site and organism specific as far as what you'd end up with, certain species can be susceptible to different infestations. So many invasive organisms require different cures, these can include chemicals, fungicides, filtration, but these kinds of contamination events are somewhat expected after enough time, so as long as the same issue isn't recurring too frequently, the economic strategy is to just reboot the pond after a clean.
Typically, the strategy is to outcompete what you may get contaminated with. Ideally your crop is a high productivity strain of algae (much more productive than things originating outside the pond), and as long as the algae exhibit faster growth rates, the invasive species doesn't have an opportunity to take off as the desired algae will continue to take the majority of nutrients.
If you get something toxic in there, it's gotta be dealt with accutely based on the critter, but other preventative strategies like inlet media filtration/heating, crop rotation, and organism population monitoring can help mitigate these things from starting up. A good review can be found here.
I guess the production could take inspiration from the pharma industry and use strict increasingly clean zones and sterile environments the closer you get to the core production. After sterilising everything and sigeling out the alge you want you should in theory be able to run more or less indefinitely. And if a contamination of found it just a matter of sterilizing everything with steam and reboot the system.
Algae just have a pretty strong flavor and might be off-putting for some so for it to take off i would love to have different flavours and species to pick from. Would be interning. So far I've only tried spirulina which has a quite strong taste in my smoothies and is deafening the taste of almost everything else.
I'm not against algae as a food source, but the similarity of this research to Soylent Green's cover source in the movie being plankton is hilariously on the nose.
Algae and kelp can be really damn yummy, too. Takes work, but I remember having my first non-meat burger back in my teenage years and loving the hell out of it. It was this blend of kelp and algae and it was so damn good. It didn't taste like meat, and it was miles better than any of the usual "veggie" burgers I've had since.