vegan

I did. The article is riddled with blind support for plant based capitalism and suggests using the tech to improve existing meat products. I also read a little about moolec, which itself ~~grew out of~~ is quite cozy with the pork industry. Finally, where are they getting the DNA subsequences? Is such a company going to build a small library of DNA and then never grow/purchase new pigs to deconstruct to catalog taste, texture, and genetic material?

Soybeans are good, and they don't need to taste or feel like pigs for people to enjoy them.

Chinese people have been making plant based umami tofu since before fictional Jesus Christ was around

There's literally no reason to bring a pig into it when you could just use mushrooms or something else for umami flavor

Crackkkers trying to reinvent the soy wheel, badly, with more animal cruelty

you wouldn't have to do any of that.

I would think the animal exploitation is only absolutely necessary early in R&D where they're still figuring out stuff like which sequences code for production of what proteins, how those are expressed and how these interact with other instructions in the plant dna.

However, I also expect there's much more profit to be made in continued testing, more animal-based R&D in the form of trying to translate desirable phenotypes in animal meat to the plant-produced analog, and in selling the protein back to the meat industry who can mix it with similarly graded animal protein and sell it to omnivores as a greenwashed meat product. All I'm trying to say is that I think they should do the R&D without exploiting more animals.