Behind the mic: alternative foods saving the planet one bite at a time
Food production systems account for over one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions according to the United Nations.[1] Industrial meat production, overfishing, trawling, destruction of rainforests, and draining of water resources, are just some of the environmental effects linked to food production and harvesting.
Behavior changes in food consumption are indeed a solution, however meat-lovers would say they miss the feeling of biting into a savory steak.[2] What if there were alternatives that tasted and had the same texture as meat, or seafood, or chocolate?
On our podcast Discovery Matters, across two episodes, we had the pleasure to speak to individuals from companies creating food sources using alternative production methods that can be both beneficial to your health and the environment.
The “magic” ingredient is fungi
Mycoprotein is protein derived from fungi for human consumption. No, we’re not going to tell you about magic mushrooms. Quorn has used mycoprotein to make meat-free products that can replace our tradition home favourites.
Quorn is made from Fusarium venenatum which was found inside a compost heap, in a tiny village in England in 1967, and by the 1980s Quorn was given permission to sell this mycoprotein for human consumption.
Tim Finnigan explained on Discovery Matters that the process of making Quorn involves fermentation:
“So, they get to a certain sort of gross concentration and then they get put into the ferment, which is about 160 to 160 000 liters. […Then] it enters this other batch phase where it grows quite happily for about four or five days and quite rapidly, actually up to a kind of concentration. And I think here is where the engineering magic happens, because not only is that done under very sterile conditions, because you don’t want anything else in there, but we are then able to hold it at that point of maximum growth and harvest at the same rate that it grows, and we can do that for something like 35 days.”
According to the Quorn Footprint Comparison Report, producing mycoprotein takes 95% less CO², than typical beef mince, making it a more sustainable and nutritious protein source for a growing global population.[3] How about a Christmas Quorn treat rather than mince pie? (there’s a comment here that you could do better than me)
So, the rapid growth of mycoprotein, combined with the environmental benefits, means that this is an amazing alternative to meat production.
As one Quorn advert says, let’s make sure we are ‘Helping The Planet One Bite At A Time’.[4]
Cell-cultured: a new way to seafood
Populations of marine species are half what they were in 1970, and are plagued with issues such as overfishing, illegal fishing, the effects of trawling, and lowering fish stocks. One company, BlueNalu, based in San Diego, California, aims to provide a new source of healthy and sustainable seafood by creating fish fillets directly from the cells of fish via a process known as cell-culture.
Dr Lauren Madden, chief technology officer at BlueNalu, told us on the podcast that while the number of endangered marine species is increasing, but the demand is also increasing. So, how do you provide enough seafood to feed our growing population that meets the sensory experience that consumers expect without continuing to overfish the animal and put pressure on those fish stocks?
BlueNalu believe they have found the solution. They derive all of the seafood cell-cultures in-house using a series of proprietary methods to extract and culture the precursor cells. These cells are then fed the same salts, lipids, fats and amino acids that they would experience in the wild and formed into fillets, resulting a product that is 100% yield, mercury and microplastic free, and genetically identical to the seafood you consume today.
According to Dr Madden: “the idea is to generate really stable, robust cell lines that can be grown out, expanded, and — typical to a manufacturing process — frozen down into cell banks. So, we do not have to go back to the fish.”
As consumers continue to shift from red meat to seafood for its nutritional benefits Dr Madden highlighted some of the concerns with the current seafood supply and why BlueNalu’s cell-cultured seafood is an advantageous alternative.
Seafood contains lean proteins, and omega 3s, which we need for a healthy diet, but certain species such as bluefin tuna have high levels of mercury. Also, these healthy lean proteins are increasingly accompanied by microplastics or PCBs or other contaminants that are getting into the food supply through our oceans.
Whilst this cell-cultured seafood is not on restaurant menus or supermarket shelves as yet, it provides us with hope that a new wave of seafood just is on the horizon that will satiate our palates and support the health of people and the planet.
Cell-cultured chocolate
Many a happy memory is flavored with chocolate treats, cakes, and the like, but chocolate has a deeper impact on our environment than we realize. Some research suggests that we will not have chocolate in a few years because of the way it is grown strips the environment of resources, thus exacerbating climate change.[5]
Jacob Moe-Lange, a plant scientist from California Cultured, told us on our episode ‘The future of GMOs’ that areas such as the Ivory Coast has lost 80% or 85% of its rainforest since the 1960s to cacao production.
The land is cleared so that cacao can be grown on an industrial scale, which raises another issue: it’s a monoclonal crop. Being a monoclonal crop essentially means that the producers will have increased or changed geographic distributions of pests and diseases, which results in decreased genetic diversity, and increased pathogen or disease loads or pest loads. Therefore, when looking to the future farmers cannot grow the things that are needed to make chocolate in the field.
There is also the human aspect. Chocolate production has a high level of child labor. Jacob explained that “Jacob explained that “one of the biggest problems is that the [rapid] urbanization in West Africa has basically decreased the [rural] labor pool.” To try and reduce deforestation, Ivory Coast and Ghana have been forcing farmers to replant cocoa crops on already tilled and previously cultivated land. With increasingly depleted soils, rising costs of production (from increased fertilizer application), and plummeting yields, many farmers are incentivized to utilize slave or child labor to meet costs.[6]
So, an alternative is desperately needed.
Enter California Cultured. But the big question is: does it taste like chocolate?
According to Jacob, the best thing is that “in terms of a lot of the bulk chocolate that’s available out there, we are at par if not better at this point. We’ve gotten some chemical analysis back and it’s crazy, we’ve actually been able to find that the cultivars that we have grown in cell culture, their cells that were growing strongly resemble the cultivars themselves go in the field.”
This is brilliant news for all of us chocolate lovers out there, knowing that there is an alternative way to consume chocolate without damaging the environment or sacrificing the pleasure of eating it.
So, ultimately there are alternatives to our problematic food sources. Quorn, BlueNalu, and California Cultured, have each demonstrated that biology holds the key, and the best part is that you do not need to sacrifice anything by switching to these alternatives.
Will you take up the challenge and switch?
References
[1] Food systems account for over one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions | | UN News
[2] Hendrik NJ Schifferstein, “Changing food behaviors in a desirable direction”, Current Opinion in Food Science, Volume 33, 2020, pp. 30–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cofs.2019.11.002.
[3] Quorn Footprint Comparison Report
[4] Helping The Planet One Bite At A Time | TV Advert 2021 | Quorn — YouTube
[5] These 5 foods could soon go extinct due to climate change (yahoo.com)
[6] Ivory Coast’s cocoa sector it vital, and is set to get greener | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)
