Aren't fermented proteins unnatural GMO Frankenfoods?
Short answer: You've eaten this tech for 30+ years. Precision fermentation made vegetarian cheese rennet in 1990 and most of the world's insulin, it's old news.
GFI Europe (2023)
The objection
“These are unnatural, GMO Frankenfoods cooked up in a lab. I’ll stick to real food.”
The answer
Then you’ll need to give up a lot of “real food” you’ve eaten for decades.
Precision fermentation is just brewing. You give a microbe (yeast, fungus, bacteria) a gene, and it produces a specific protein, exactly as brewer’s yeast makes alcohol. We’ve used it in food and medicine since the late 1970s. Almost all insulin for diabetics is made this way; before that it came from slaughterhouse pancreases. In 1990, the enzyme chymosin (rennet) became the first food product made by genetic engineering, which is the only reason vegetarian cheese exists at all. Roughly 80% of the world’s cheese rennet now comes from microbes rather than calves’ stomachs. Many vitamins in your cereal are fermented too.
The “GMO” label trips on one detail. The microbe is engineered, but it’s filtered out. What’s left is a single protein, say whey or casein, molecularly identical to the one from a cow. There’s no modified DNA in the final food, and under current US rules it isn’t even classed as bioengineered.
“Is this natural?” is the wrong question anyway, since almost nothing in a modern supermarket is. The question worth asking is what’s actually in the product and how it was made, and on that score a brewed protein with no animal in it has a cleaner story than the dairy it replaces. You’ve trusted this technology with your insulin for forty years. A cheese is a smaller ask.