28
votes
Food scientists at Finnish startup SuperGround have found a way to make chicken nuggets and fish cakes out of otherwise discarded bones and hard tissues
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Chicken bones ground into paste could help cut food waste and emission
- Published
- Jan 14 2024
- Word count
- 959 words
The article provides information on our planet's energy use, of which a high percentage is spent on food, especially meat, compared to plant based food systems. It seems like this can recover a percentage of already slaughtered animals and keep it in the human stream as opposed to letting it flow downstream to pet food and pig feed.
For what it's worth, I grew up on dace fish paste and fish balls and meat paste type balls: they're super springy (what the article refers to as biting resistance; some say "mouth feel") and are even more enjoyable than regular fish sticks. If they can figure out how to get it from bones and hard bits without high heat and without compromising on texture and springiness, good for them! I'll be first in line.
It doesn't help the planet as much as not eating meat, but it can be a good aid for the step down process: from choosing different meat one meal a day, to animal product free meals once or twice a week etc
Why do you hope that they have figured out the process without high heat? Is it because that destroys nutrients? Or is it an energy-consumption issue?
Yup!
I have a tiny pressure cooker at home, and when I pressure cook bones and hard cartilage I can already soften them and puree them and feed them to my cat, but stuff being in water, especially hot water, destroys nutrients. Stuff also turns mushy grey.
So the process they're talking about here somehow gets the best of three worlds: use up all the bits, but don't lose nutrients, and don't have it mouth-feel like pureed cardboard.
Can you cite credible, peer-reviewed research that demonstrates "water destroys nutrients" in any sort of meaningful way? That is a wild claim to make.
Here's a random study on the nutritional impact of boiling cactus leaves:
The potential nutritional loss boils down to two effects:
However, "nutrient" is a pretty broad category, ranging from fatty acids to elemental minerals, so it's not as though all (most?) nutrients are affected by boiling. And of course, the destruction needn't be total. But, for example, it seems like vitamin C is particularly susceptible to both these effects?
I'm reacting negatively to the way this response reads.
Anyway from the linked article itself:
From wiki article on pasteurization:
I didn't think it was a "wild claim to make" at all. [Redacted]
The claim I am challenging is specifically that "stuff being in water destroys nutrients".
Application of heat generally, and pasturization specifically, are not at all the same as just "being in water", and they quite obviously have the potential to alter the chemical makeup of food.
Dissolving nutrients into solution is also not "destroying" them.
Sounds like accelerated bone broth. I'd give it a try! Thanks for sharing.
So they've recreated Pink Slime for fish and chicken, except with added bones? I'm curious how they plan to make it safe without heat or chemicals. Long as it's safe and tastes the same, I don't see an issue, but I hope they label food made with it and don't try to sneak it in. Pink slime wasn't that bad, except they used it to fill everything without telling people.
I do wonder about their claims of it being discarded and environmentally friendly. Even in the article they say it isn't really discarded, everything can be sold or repurposed already. The only food waste is on the consumer end (restaurants and people at home).
Half the article just seems like fluff to make it sound more environmental than it is. At most you could say it reduces the footprint of turning the waste into other products, but those other products will need to be replaced with something else and that might end up being less environmentally friendly.
I also immediately thought of pink slime. From preliminary reading, though, pink slime didn't contain bones (oh the lost revenue!) And also the biggest problem with pink slime was the pathogens needed ammonia gas or other ways to kill, which is like, eww, and the ammonia method pink slime is banned in EU and Canada.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime
Yeah this is more about money than really changing the world, I agree. Eating hotdogs didn't dial down our desire for steaks, afterall.
Why?
There are already several brands of good, mock "chicken" nuggets in the supermarket made out of a variety of legumes or grains. Loads of easy, do it yourself recipes on YouTube as well.
Probably because they do not actually taste like chicken. I know from experience with celiac disease that it can be hard for people who have exited a food group to remember what it actually tastes like, but vegetarian substitutes are not, with the exception of a few rare cases (impossible burgers are not far off) even close.
That's a good point. I get asked about meat substitutes a lot because I've been a vegetarian for so long and I always tell people I can only say what tastes good to me because I don't remember what meat tastes like anymore.
I eat both meat and meat substitutes regularly and definitely when it comes to heavily processed things like nuggets, sausage rolls and so on there are plenty of non-meat versions around these days that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference from the meat ones.
It wasn't too many years ago that wasn't the case, but they can spin so many textures from soy/pea/mushroom/meat etc these days. Chicken flavour has been a solved issue for ages (yeast. it's yeast and salt and context), half the chicken flavour things on the market don't have chicken in, never have, and still taste satisfyingly chickeny.
Sure, I haven't had a steak or bacon replacement that is remotely convincing - but "beef" stock, "chicken" nuggets, "bacon" lardons? All absolutely as good as the meat versions at this point. Unless it's Quorn nuggets which are very chickeny but I can tell the difference when the farts hit about an hour after eating..
I'm with you that processed foods all kinda taste the same but I still think you can tell a meat and non-meat product apart. I can't be sure, but I think its might be the taste of animal fat. So its more pronounced on fattier foods (using your example the sausage roll would be more obvious to me than the nuggy). Just to be clear, I'm not trying to knock the non-meat products, I still enjoy them if they are well made.
XD
I have to say I don't think I agree. For context, I've been an on and off again vegetarian for a good few years, and I'm very open minded to meat alternatives. I'd ideally like to live in a world without meat, or at least keeping meat consumption to a bare minimum. And I do think that for the most part, meat alternatives are pretty good. But they're only 60-70% of the way there to convincing me that they're meat. From my own experience, those around generally agree.
I cook the meals in my family, and over the years have tried to throw in meat alternatives into my cooking without telling my family. Most of the time it's been clocked straight away, though admittedly many of this has been the less processed meat alternatives such as Quorn mince or chicken chunks. However, even the more processed meats like sausages and chicken nuggets have been clocked as well. (In all fairness to the chicken nuggets, its normally: 'oh these chicken nuggets are weird where did you buy them', and not 'ew, what is this fake ass meat') But really Quorn chicken nuggets are the only one that my family has been surprised by when I revealed it's not meat. On the occasional chance that nobody realises they're eating veggie meat (happened once with a non Quorn mince for example), when I revealed the hidden ingredient the general consensus was 'oh that makes sense I thought something was off but I didn't know what'.
The other thing worth mentioning is that when I cook with veggie meats I put a lot of effort into making the dish taste meatier, using msg, mushrooms, or even real meat stock to help me out. Granted my family maybe isn't the best example here because they have grown to expect the occasional non-meat intruder so they're probably always a little bit on the lookout, but I generally agree with them. For the most part, meat alternatives don't yet taste like meat.
For people who don't live in the UK, you can stop reading now. The next 3 examples of foods I've had in the past couple weeks are quite UK centric I feel. The first meat alternative was a Greggs vegan sausage roll. Frankly I think it's very obvious that that's not meat. That's not to say it doesn't taste good, but imo it tastes pretty strongly of fake meat. Following that, I had the Gregg's vegan steak bake. I would say that one was categorically bad. It didn't taste meaty at all, and I thought was quite gross (I'm not sure if they've changed the recipe since they brought it back, because I remember I used to quite like it). Lastly, earlier today, I saw some meat free fridge raiders and thought if anyone can make a convincing alternative it's fridge raiders, simply because their actual meat product tastes so far removed from meat anyway. Unfortunately, they didn't. The texture was almost there, but the flavour tasted strongly of plant (pea?) protein, and was trying to be hidden by far too much salt.
All of that is to say, I think fake meat can be delicious, but I'm yet to be convinced by any fake meat product that you can prepare at home. I think this is compounded by the fact that I do eat quite a lot of fake meat, so I've really become quite familiar with the flavour and texture, meaning it's easier for me to identity it when I eat it.
In terms of stock and flavour such as bacon, I do think we've become very close. I can't remember who it's by at the moment but there was a YouTube video with NileRed in it where people were blind taste testing chicken stock to identify which ones were meat free, and most of them got it wrong. Definitely an interesting video because it does make you question what you know about flavouring.
When I was growing up in HK, occasionally there would be Buddhist inspired dishes of veggie duck, veggue chicken, veggie abalone etc
I always thought the veggie X food was delicious, and on a banquet cold platter for example even prefer veggie duck to cold char siu, but they're always a terrible disappointment when I was expecting to bite into X instead of whatever it was.
Same thing with plant milk. None of that is milk!! But they're fairly tasty as plant drink. Peanut juice and coconut water in particular.
I think the real shift is going to be mental: we have to lay aside veggie-meat and just enjoy and value the veggies for what they are.
Easier said than done though: we've all been programmed to devalue veggie and associate it with "yuck" afterall :(
I think it’s still worth it to continue to improve animal product alternatives, though, because the amount of cultural heritage that has to be set aside to avoid animal products (including meat, but especially dairy and eggs) is staggering. Easily a double digit percentage of the world’s dishes, which is incredibly harsh no matter how one looks at it.
With that in mind, I hope that in the coming decades convincing replacements are developed so these foods don’t have to be lost to the sands of time.
There is already a lot of effort to preserve notable historic recipes. But I would argue that if the culture has moved on there is no more use to continue cooking them. There are already many recipes that have become essentially lost, like jello salads and potted meat, and some that are already borderline gone like water pie and chipped beef on toast. I don’t see how we are worse without them.
Are we not talking about chicken nuggets right now? Why am I allowed to turn animal protein into a congealed slurry chunk but do it with plants and it’s forever considered a cheap imitation of “meat”?
Um, I think I was agreeing with you, that plants should be valued and not considered a cheap imitation of meat?
To me it really sounds like you are suggesting that plant based nuggets don’t count as whatever thing chicken nuggets are. And my point is that a “nugget” of protein is already so removed from what it’s made of, that it’s really silly to pretend like any kind of nugget is more or less artificial than any other.
I'm not vegetarian or vegan but I've still switched to oat milk because I only really use it for cappuccinos and oatly barista edition legit steams better than normal cow's milk. The coffee also makes the taste difference between it and normal milk way less, especially when steamed.
Indeed -- a lot of people don't even drink milk on a day to day basis. When I was growing up in HK it's all malt based or soy based drinks at home and at the school cafeteria. Milk can still be purchased from glass containers or individual cartons but they're kind of a less common thing: smaller quantities and more expensive. I was pretty shocked to find people just guzzling it for "funsies" when I moved to North America.
Was there a big industry push for it to become standard fridge fixture? Or was it always the case since people had cows or indoor refrigeration?
Milk is delicious.... amendment: whole milk is delicious and has many uses, but maybe we don't really need to produce so much that it's just a casual water alternative. A lot of plant drinks are very tasty in their own right, like you found.
It has been pretty big in the West for a long while (even prior to refrigeration, lactase persistence was selected for among particular populations for a reason) but there indeed has been a lot of bit industry pushing for it -- most famously (but not limited to) the Got Milk? advertising campaign.
There's a lot of persistent misinformation about how important milk specifically is for you that directly results from the dairy industry. This video on the milk-industrial complex by healthcare triage is both good and quite short.
I'm actually not a huge fan of the taste and mouthfeel of straight-up milk tbh. Cheese and butter are where my heart's at when it comes to milk products.
This is it exactly. The human body is excellent at adapting to its environment and that includes the food you eat. The value in fake meats is not that they are a direct one-to-one replacements for meat, but they act as a bridge to help make the transition more easily. It’s really important to realize this because fake meats are often just as bad for you as the real stuff, nutritionally.
If you are the type of person who says that the only thing stopping you from becoming vegetarian is the taste of meat, it’s basically the same thing as a person saying they can’t lose weight because they can’t stop eating donuts. Yes, you have the cravings, but there are ways to deal with them that will eventually eliminate them, so it’s ultimately just an excuse to avoid change.
I'm not sure how much people actually care about the chicken flavor in a chicken nugget. I always thought of nuggets as sauce delivery vehicles.
Perhaps not so much the taste, but you would require a certain mouth feel: there has to be some kind of bite resistance that you're used to detecting in meat and hot dogs and such. For example you wouldn't use deep fried butter as a sauce delivery, nor a slice of canned beet, nor a spoonful of porridge, even flavour aside. You want that slight bounce, not complete mush.
That's true, the texture still needs to be halfway-decent. Personally I find the Beyond Meat chicken tenders to be an acceptable alternative.
No, it's going to be because it's still mostly (50-75%) actually chicken and fish and this new material is basically filler (with apparently nutrients). This is really quite similar to soy filler in existing nuggets, but with the benefit of not wasting parts. This is different though, in that there is actual meat involved, unlike pure meat substitutes.
Because if you can make 30% of your nuggets out of byproducts you had been selling for pennies then your margins just shot through the roof.
One more way to do it is always a good discovery, and I think another reason is that this parts of animals usually discarded, which means this way could reduce waste.
I could see the fish cakes being better than the veggie alternatives. I can't judge because I was never a big seafood person and I've been veg for decades at this point, but my sister loved seafood and has been disappointed in the veg options.
Because most people still want the real thing, me included.
The alternatives don't taste or feel right.
No disrespect, but that real thing is literally garbage.
One man's trash... is a proverb for a reason.
Yeah it's literally made out of the leftover trash parts of meat already.
But it sure does taste good.
The hot dog of the poultry industry.
Without eliminating killing of these animals for food, it's objectively good for us to use as much as we can of them when we do so.
I'll take door number 1.