I am excited for this sort of thing to come to fruition but right now I cannot imagine anything other than just a lettuce made of meat growing and this is haunting.
Perhaps you enjoy a burger in a lettuce wrap once in a while—but what if greens were also crucial to the patty? That’s the ultimate promise of new research showing lettuce can be engineered to produce myoglobin, a protein found in meat.
Myoglobin (and its better-known relative hemoglobin) contains the compound heme, the red pigment in blood. Adding heme can give plant-based meat alternatives a meaty flavor and the ability to “bleed.” For example, Impossible Foods uses a compound called leghemoglobin (a heme protein derived from soybeans) to flavor its meat alternatives. But using myoglobin, which is found in animal tissue, could lead to vegetarian products that not only look and bleed like red meat but smell more like it, too.
In the study, published in Frontiers in Plant Science, the researchers describe how they got lettuce and tobacco plants to produce myoglobin for the first time, says lead author Alexia Groff.
In 30 years we will all be eating meattuce. It will be the monocrop that provides most of the world’s protein and fiber. The other monocrop will be cannabicane, a sugarcane/hemp hybrid that will provide everyone with carbohydrates and make them hungry enough to eat their meattuce.
As a vegetarian, can't you all just learn to eat some vegetables and be happy instead of heading down this Island of Todd Flanders road for basically no value?
Compared to what? You have to look at the nutritional value of a meal and the inputs to it and not just "can we add nutrients to iceberg lettuce" and isolating single ingredients
Almost anything that you do engineering wise will add nutrients, but is the juice worth the squeeze when you consider all the inputs and externalities? This also smuggles in an assumption that a vegetarian diet can't be nutritious without resorting to genetically engineered meat substitutes. This seems like it's to appeal to people's tastes in the same way that a luxury couch does, not in a "feeding the poor starving orphans in Lemuria" sense
I sense a lot of emotions attached to the topic. I see it far simpler and more pragmatic.
Hypothesis we can engineer lettuce to produce myoglobin.
Benefits would include increasing nutritional value to a product that can be grown at scale at lesser cost than animal proteins can be raised by farming.
>compared to what?
More nutritional value compared to lettuce that doesn’t produce the extra protein.
> This also smuggles
I don’t see this smuggling in that assumption at all.
The part that confuses me about your position is that it seems to me that something that can lead to less meat consumption, i.e. protein containing greens and other vegetables effectively lowering the portion size needed to achieve nutritional thresholds for meat eaters, should be something that appeals to you as a vegetarian, assuming you believe people should lower meat consumption.
>The part that confuses me about your position is that it seems to me that something that can lead to less meat consumption, i.e. protein containing greens and other vegetables effectively lowering the portion size needed to achieve nutritional thresholds for meat eaters, should be something that appeals to you as a vegetarian, assuming you believe people should lower meat consumption.
It perplexes me as a vegetarian. If this is supplanting one polluting source of food for another when we know that the environmental impact of vegetarian diets is less than meat eating diets then as an environmentalist it has no appeal to me.
You can talk about hypothesis testing all you want, but the only "hypothesis" offered is something we know by reading the tin. If you're saying for any given amount of nutrition delivered that this is better than a vegetarian meal, and lettuce is not a vegetarian meal, for a given cost then this does reach that conclusion https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2026.1876707/full
It's far more intensive to do it this way.
>The meat industry is a voracious energy consumer: 60 percent of agricultural energy use comes from farming and transporting animal products. Making meat substitutes less resource-intensive is a step toward more sustainable food systems—even if it means making meat proteins in a vegetable.
This line in the article is added to without anything in the study to indicate this does or ever will lead to a lower cost or environmentally impactful outcome than simply eating nutritionally complete vegetarian diets. That is to say, people can change their diets right now and still eat nutritious meals with a lower environmental impact but they don't because of preference. And this study that lets people create engineered lettuce that bleeds like meat because that suits their preference but from a cost and nutrition and pollution aspect it seems like a bust to me
Awesome fact without any surrounding context. How many people are deficient on iron purely because of a vegetarian diet and how does this work out against things like bog standard generic and readily available iron supplements?
>In conclusion, the meat protein Mb has been successfully expressed in the chloroplast of C. reinhardtii (<0.25% TSP), tobacco (2.7% TSP), and lettuce (1.5% TSP)
...
Fresh weight yields (94 ± 12 mg/kg for tobacco and 48 ± 2.6 mg/kg for lettuce) and dry weight yields (800 ± 110 mg/kg for tobacco, 810 ± 60 mg/kg for lettuce) are promising but still require further optimisation to match animal muscle.
In these varieties specifically how do your calculations work out, since you did the math on the economics of supplementing dietary iron through genetically engineered plants?
What are we even talking about here? Is this a science subreddit or are we just saying things as if you can cogitate the validity of a statement through pure conjecture uninformed by actual data?
> can't you all just learn to eat some vegetables and be happy instead of heading down this Island of Todd Flanders road for basically no value
If people could have, it would have happened already. The bottom line is that there is too much invested in meat in the US to make individuals have any meaningful impact, both in finances and in mentality. "If everyone just did X", you would indeed get a change, but they won't, and it's futile to try to change people's minds on an individual scale. Similarly, "If everyone just did X" worked, we wouldn't have a problem with guns in the US. We need a systemic change to make a real difference, whether that comes from veggiemeat^TM as mentioned in the article, political incentives (good luck), or some kind of freak disease eliminating the meat monoculture stock so people are forced away from it.
It was a rhetorical question, of course, but I don't really think this is going to be a systemic change at all. It might get developed as a novelty but it will never be something that competes with traditional agriculture. It's no different than the vertical farms they building in places like Singapore to try farming locally in places without arable land and even in the best of cases it'll never prove out to be productive enough to support their localities. At the end of the day putting seeds in the ground and letting the soil and the sun do the majority of the work is far and away economical, and finding ways to do that in less polluting ways is far more realizable and scalable than any sort of meat-lettuce future.
It doesn't seem realistic to me in the best of cases
No_Scene_5885 | 4 hours ago
I am excited for this sort of thing to come to fruition but right now I cannot imagine anything other than just a lettuce made of meat growing and this is haunting.
simonbleu | 3 hours ago
Why are hating the meatuce?
BillButtlickerII | 58 minutes ago
Meattuce™️
TorrenceMightingale | 58 minutes ago
Too close to the meatus.
theemptyqueue | 22 minutes ago
Brought to you by Wheatus
ksye | an hour ago
In the actual article the plants just look normal, maybe a bit smaller.
jxj24 | an hour ago
Just you wait until "head of lettuce" means something truly terrifying!
onFilm | 4 hours ago
More haunting than how we systematically treat living animals when it comes to food?
I personally love this!
No_Scene_5885 | 4 hours ago
Totally unnecessary rhetorical question… I didn’t say, suggest or imply anything like that.
onFilm | 7 minutes ago
Never did I say you implied anything of the sort. I'm the one who brought it forward.
LoocsinatasYT | 4 hours ago
I wanna try the meat lettuce, I imagine peeling the lettuce leaves off like roast beef meat flaps
jsc1429 | 4 hours ago
Disgusting, when can I try it?
devilishycleverchap | 2 hours ago
Im imagining a combo of the little LED herb gardens and the heat lamp for the roast beef at Arby's
[OP] scientificamerican | 5 hours ago
Perhaps you enjoy a burger in a lettuce wrap once in a while—but what if greens were also crucial to the patty? That’s the ultimate promise of new research showing lettuce can be engineered to produce myoglobin, a protein found in meat.
Myoglobin (and its better-known relative hemoglobin) contains the compound heme, the red pigment in blood. Adding heme can give plant-based meat alternatives a meaty flavor and the ability to “bleed.” For example, Impossible Foods uses a compound called leghemoglobin (a heme protein derived from soybeans) to flavor its meat alternatives. But using myoglobin, which is found in animal tissue, could lead to vegetarian products that not only look and bleed like red meat but smell more like it, too.
In the study, published in Frontiers in Plant Science, the researchers describe how they got lettuce and tobacco plants to produce myoglobin for the first time, says lead author Alexia Groff.
-This-Whomps- | 3 hours ago
Bulbasaur meat
Puzzled-Working-2105 | 3 hours ago
Honestly, as an anemic vegetarian, that sounds very interesting. I don't really like the taste of meat, but i would give it a try.
SerpentBride | 2 hours ago
In 30 years we will all be eating meattuce. It will be the monocrop that provides most of the world’s protein and fiber. The other monocrop will be cannabicane, a sugarcane/hemp hybrid that will provide everyone with carbohydrates and make them hungry enough to eat their meattuce.
blueblocker2000 | 2 hours ago
Meattuce???
Hugostrang3 | 2 hours ago
Very close to meatus which refers to an opening in the body.
sk1nnyjeans | an hour ago
Which is even closer to Wheatus which refers to a teenage dirtbag.
Spare-Locksmith-2162 | 4 hours ago
How about we engineer self cleaning lettuce that isn't subject to transmitting explosive diarrhea or horrific parasites?
franken-owl | 4 hours ago
But the gamble is the best part of lettuce.
thejoeface | 4 hours ago
We can change farming and labor practices and fix that. No gene editing needed.
TheGruenTransfer | 4 hours ago
We can grow lettuce that doesn't make people sick but it costs more, and under this administration agribusinesses don't give a fuck about safety
MikeGalactic | 3 hours ago
That's part of its charm.
011010- | 4 hours ago
You do? make friends with salad?
MikeGalactic | 3 hours ago
Cucumber/sausage
CUCAGE!
'Delicious, beefy and great for your fucking skin!'
ChironXII | 3 hours ago
Babe your meat lettuce is getting cold what's wrong
sinedirt | 3 hours ago
If they can get AI into it, it’s gonna be a perfect food.
Hugostrang3 | 2 hours ago
Super intelligent meattus...
McRedditz | 2 hours ago
Lettuce pray it doesn’t cost $50 per unit.
Konradleijon | 2 hours ago
That’s cool can people go vegan now
Konradleijon | 2 hours ago
What about b12.
Bigmoochcooch | 21 minutes ago
Incredible scientific feat, but not something I’d wanna eat
Accurate_Koala_4698 | 4 hours ago
As a vegetarian, can't you all just learn to eat some vegetables and be happy instead of heading down this Island of Todd Flanders road for basically no value?
Like I get the value of things like deriving milk substitutes from engineered organisms ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266683352500019X ) but there's value in that it's less polluting than traditional dairy farming.
What is the real value of this technology?
thenikolaka | 4 hours ago
Because it has more nutritional value and doesn’t require the ecological cost of raising animals. Why is that bad?
Accurate_Koala_4698 | 4 hours ago
>more nutritional value
Compared to what? You have to look at the nutritional value of a meal and the inputs to it and not just "can we add nutrients to iceberg lettuce" and isolating single ingredients
Almost anything that you do engineering wise will add nutrients, but is the juice worth the squeeze when you consider all the inputs and externalities? This also smuggles in an assumption that a vegetarian diet can't be nutritious without resorting to genetically engineered meat substitutes. This seems like it's to appeal to people's tastes in the same way that a luxury couch does, not in a "feeding the poor starving orphans in Lemuria" sense
thenikolaka | 4 hours ago
I sense a lot of emotions attached to the topic. I see it far simpler and more pragmatic.
>compared to what?
More nutritional value compared to lettuce that doesn’t produce the extra protein.
> This also smuggles
I don’t see this smuggling in that assumption at all.
The part that confuses me about your position is that it seems to me that something that can lead to less meat consumption, i.e. protein containing greens and other vegetables effectively lowering the portion size needed to achieve nutritional thresholds for meat eaters, should be something that appeals to you as a vegetarian, assuming you believe people should lower meat consumption.
Accurate_Koala_4698 | 3 hours ago
>The part that confuses me about your position is that it seems to me that something that can lead to less meat consumption, i.e. protein containing greens and other vegetables effectively lowering the portion size needed to achieve nutritional thresholds for meat eaters, should be something that appeals to you as a vegetarian, assuming you believe people should lower meat consumption.
It perplexes me as a vegetarian. If this is supplanting one polluting source of food for another when we know that the environmental impact of vegetarian diets is less than meat eating diets then as an environmentalist it has no appeal to me.
You can talk about hypothesis testing all you want, but the only "hypothesis" offered is something we know by reading the tin. If you're saying for any given amount of nutrition delivered that this is better than a vegetarian meal, and lettuce is not a vegetarian meal, for a given cost then this does reach that conclusion https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2026.1876707/full
It's far more intensive to do it this way.
>The meat industry is a voracious energy consumer: 60 percent of agricultural energy use comes from farming and transporting animal products. Making meat substitutes less resource-intensive is a step toward more sustainable food systems—even if it means making meat proteins in a vegetable.
This line in the article is added to without anything in the study to indicate this does or ever will lead to a lower cost or environmentally impactful outcome than simply eating nutritionally complete vegetarian diets. That is to say, people can change their diets right now and still eat nutritious meals with a lower environmental impact but they don't because of preference. And this study that lets people create engineered lettuce that bleeds like meat because that suits their preference but from a cost and nutrition and pollution aspect it seems like a bust to me
aculady | 2 hours ago
Heme iron is far more bioavailable than non-heme iron, by roughly a factor of 10.
Accurate_Koala_4698 | 2 hours ago
Awesome fact without any surrounding context. How many people are deficient on iron purely because of a vegetarian diet and how does this work out against things like bog standard generic and readily available iron supplements?
>In conclusion, the meat protein Mb has been successfully expressed in the chloroplast of C. reinhardtii (<0.25% TSP), tobacco (2.7% TSP), and lettuce (1.5% TSP)
...
Fresh weight yields (94 ± 12 mg/kg for tobacco and 48 ± 2.6 mg/kg for lettuce) and dry weight yields (800 ± 110 mg/kg for tobacco, 810 ± 60 mg/kg for lettuce) are promising but still require further optimisation to match animal muscle.
In these varieties specifically how do your calculations work out, since you did the math on the economics of supplementing dietary iron through genetically engineered plants?
What are we even talking about here? Is this a science subreddit or are we just saying things as if you can cogitate the validity of a statement through pure conjecture uninformed by actual data?
EquipLordBritish | an hour ago
> can't you all just learn to eat some vegetables and be happy instead of heading down this Island of Todd Flanders road for basically no value
If people could have, it would have happened already. The bottom line is that there is too much invested in meat in the US to make individuals have any meaningful impact, both in finances and in mentality. "If everyone just did X", you would indeed get a change, but they won't, and it's futile to try to change people's minds on an individual scale. Similarly, "If everyone just did X" worked, we wouldn't have a problem with guns in the US. We need a systemic change to make a real difference, whether that comes from veggiemeat^TM as mentioned in the article, political incentives (good luck), or some kind of freak disease eliminating the meat monoculture stock so people are forced away from it.
Accurate_Koala_4698 | an hour ago
It was a rhetorical question, of course, but I don't really think this is going to be a systemic change at all. It might get developed as a novelty but it will never be something that competes with traditional agriculture. It's no different than the vertical farms they building in places like Singapore to try farming locally in places without arable land and even in the best of cases it'll never prove out to be productive enough to support their localities. At the end of the day putting seeds in the ground and letting the soil and the sun do the majority of the work is far and away economical, and finding ways to do that in less polluting ways is far more realizable and scalable than any sort of meat-lettuce future.
It doesn't seem realistic to me in the best of cases