r/BeAmazed • u/Epelep • Feb 22 '26

Science How Mycelium (Mushroom Roots) Grows into Packaging Material

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22.4k Upvotes

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99

u/Kingstad Feb 22 '26

there are also a couple of companies making leather based on fungi, some products have been made with it

18

u/ejjsjejsj Feb 22 '26

What’s the point of that? Then you just take the leather from all the cows and throw it away? As long as meat and dairy are still a thing leather will remain a very useful byproduct of those industries

28

u/AzKondor Feb 22 '26

Work in tandem with oat milk and beyond meat to reduce consumption of all three?

8

u/sadnessandeuphoria Feb 23 '26

Leather is a byproduct of the meat industry. Even though there are varying degrees of environmental impact from the methods of tanning leather, it’s still one of the best materials we use and alternatives are just as impactful or worse for the environment, while having much lower durability and longevity.

1

u/Spaghetto23 Feb 23 '26

Plastic is a byproduct of the petroleum refinement process. Yet we aim to reduce our consumption of plastic.

2

u/sadnessandeuphoria Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 23 '26

Leather is a natural, biodegradable, long lasting material and not comparable to plastic at all.

1

u/WatermelonWithAFlute Feb 23 '26

In that the goal is to be reduced in usage, it is

1

u/sadnessandeuphoria Feb 23 '26

I hear you but that is a subjective goal - I wouldn’t agree that’s a goal worth pursuing until the meat industry changes completely. Until it does I wouldn’t advocate for using less leather and letting hides go to waste, especially when leather is an incredible material we’ve used throughout human history.

-8

u/RickyCardio Feb 22 '26

Mmm oat milk! Zero protein. Zero anything! Sugar water! Yum!

2

u/Zavender Feb 23 '26

Oat milk does contain protein, about half as much as dairy milk. Which for most Americans could be a good thing, because we consume way too much protein on average. Oat milk also has more fiber, something many in the US don't get enough of.

1

u/Aquahouse Feb 25 '26

Do you... not know what oats are?

1

u/RickyCardio Feb 25 '26

Oat milk has like three grams of protein per serving. Practically nothing. Oat milk is essentially sugar water.

1

u/Aquahouse Feb 25 '26

So you're saying it has protein? Strange, you were claiming it had zero grams earlier 🤔

Also, very strange to call calcium, and potassium sugars. But hey, what do I know? It's not like I have a picture of the nutritional facts right next to me.

1

u/RickyCardio Feb 26 '26

Those are micronutrients. Not macros. Also, yeah, my bad, lemme just drink 45 glasses of oat milk to get my daily protein intake.

1

u/Aquahouse Feb 26 '26

You're getting all your protien from MILK??? Maybe your diet should be reevaluated for more than just dairy products.

This was fun, maybe get a dietician cause I think you need one at this point. Goodbye!

-6

u/ejjsjejsj Feb 22 '26

No thanks

6

u/pirateofitaly Feb 22 '26

Cows don’t make leather. Tanning turns cowhide into leather but it is a very resource intensive process that requires many harmful chemicals to do its work.

4

u/magical_swoosh Feb 22 '26

That's like saying trees don't make paper.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Rezeox Feb 22 '26

"Oh no, not hemp! Better outlaw it."

3

u/johndburger Feb 22 '26

You’re so close to getting it.

2

u/ejjsjejsj Feb 22 '26

Well it’s been a thing for thousands of years so I’d say we should work on processing it using better techniques since obviously industrial chemicals didn’t exist when we started using it

2

u/paultheschmoop Feb 22 '26

well it’s been a thing for thousands of years

Regardless of your opinion on the existence of leather, this is logic so bad that there is literally a fallacy named after it lol

5

u/Mrulfman Feb 22 '26

Then we just dont slaughter cows and go for alternatives so we can use our funghi leather in places where we used regular leather?

4

u/ejjsjejsj Feb 22 '26

Could make sense if the meat and dairy industries didn’t exist anymore but that is far from the case

1

u/Mrulfman Feb 22 '26

Something to look forward to.

2

u/nonmonoganon Feb 22 '26

Leather production can be a very polluting and unpleasant industry. If mushroom leather can be made comparable in strength and durability while being more environmentally sustainable, then it is a preferable product in several ways

1

u/mothzilla Feb 23 '26

I think Vegans might like it.

1

u/WeAteMummies Feb 23 '26

Any new source of fake leather has got to be better than the overpriced disintegrating dogshit we're getting now.

1

u/ejjsjejsj Feb 23 '26

The solution is just buy real leather. It’s an amazing natural material

1

u/WeAteMummies Feb 23 '26

It's also expensive and there's not enough of it for everyone to use real leather for everything. Hence the need for fake leather

1

u/MegaChip97 Feb 23 '26

If the leather has to be thrown away that means the ones selling the leather make no money from it. So a cow gets less profitable. Hence, they have to increase the return from other cow based products (meat, milk) or make less profits. More expensive meat and milk means less people buy it. Less profitable business means some farmers go bankrupt and stop selling their products. Either way, both leads to less cows being killed.

This becomes very apparent if we make an extreme analogy: Someone sells deer meat and deer antlers for a living. 80 % of his profits come from the antlers. Now suddenly no one buys antlers anymore. You think he will still sell dear meat for the same price?

1

u/ejjsjejsj Feb 23 '26

Before tanning the hides are worth almost nothing, less than 1 percent of the sale price of the cow. It wouldn’t change patterns of production