How Monbiot Thinks Microbes Will Save the Planet
Reader’s Digest from Regenesis, Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet
I started reading George Monbiot’s Regenesis, Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet thinking it would be about Regenerative Agriculture and how to minimize the environmental impact of our food by changing how we treat the soil and its symbioses. It is about the environment, the diet, and the role of microbes, but differently.
As a premise, I should say Monbiot is a British journalist, book writer, and editor at the Guardian, as well as a famous environmental activist and notorious vegan, which is a cleaving topic. My objective here is not to take sides, divide, and certainly not to go into counterproductive agribashing, but to take the points of well-informed experts and think about problems so they can be resolved. It’s important to include everyone in this conversation, as we are all a part of the solution. And the microbial solution is a mightily beautiful and inspiring one.
Damages Caused by Our Food System
As often occurs in such essays, the beginning is a gloomy observation of the damage our food production system inflicts on the environment. A university lecturer friend of the author said “I study insects because I love them. But the only funding I can get is to kill them.”
This heart-breaking statement shows how little the beauty and services of insects are understood. Between 75 and 98% of insect biomass has disappeared since the 1980s (Goulson, 2019), and insects are so important for many ecological roles, from pollination to soil structure to feeding birds, which themselves support soil fertility and seed dissemination… Yet, “the global use of pesticides is expected to triple during the first 50 years of this century.” As life in the soil gets depleted, desertification and erosion accelerate.
“The global use of pesticides is expected to triple during the first 50 years of this century.” — Monbiot.
Monbiot’s analysis of the food system’s impacts turns a lot around the disproportionate impact of animal products. “The biggest population crisis is not the growth in human numbers, he says, but the growth in livestock numbers” that have risen to 2.4 % a year while the human population grows at about 1.05% a year.
“The biggest population crisis is not the growth in human numbers, but the growth in livestock numbers.”
“Already, roughly half the calories farmers grow are used for raising livestock.” — Monbiot.
Livestock represents double the biomass of humans on Earth and takes 7 times the land occupation (51% to 7% in the UK).
“Farming is the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of the global loss of wildlife, and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis. It’s responsible for around 80% of the deforestation that happened this century. /…/ Of 28,000 species known to be at imminent risk of extinction, 24,000 are threatened by farming.” — Monbiot
Yet, I feel many growers have chosen this path because they love life, they marvel at seeing the birth of seedlings, but as the entomologist quoted above, they suffer from a context that pushes them to deliver food as cheaply as possible, in a system that makes them dependent on special seeds, that require special treatments and conditions, which reduce soil biology, and without the soil support system, this vicious cycle becomes ineluctable.
But the positive side of this story is that everything can change. We have a choice.
Seeking Land Efficiency
For Monbiot, land efficiency is the best environmental indicator, because the best way to restore biodiversity and sequester carbon is to release land from human activities.
“I have come to see land use as the most important of all environmental questions. I now believe it is the issue that makes the greatest difference to whether terrestrial ecosystems and Earth systems survive or perish.”
“The most secure and effective means of removing carbon from the atmosphere is to reduce the amount of land we need for farming, and rewild the land we spare, restoring wetlands and forests.” — Monbiot.
From this land use perspective, this book taught me two new concepts: ghost acres and soil obesity. The measurement of ghost acres, meaning land used in another place, on which a farm depends. For example, when organic growers use animal dung, this implies their produce is ghosted by an area about 2–3 times as big as the one they farm, according to Iain Tolhurst, one of the growers Monbiot interviews. It is a very important estimate of land efficiency. In a chicken farm, imported feed and pellets for warming should be accounted as ghost acres.
The second concept is soil obesity: a buildup of phosphate and potassium in the soil, that reduces the activity of fungi and bacteria. As an agronomist who studied Biology and the microbiome, and now the roles of the soil microbiome in soil structure, water retention capacity, and plant growth and resilience, I find this concept very interesting.
“Agricultural science has devoted a great deal of attention to soil chemistry. But the more we understand, the more important the biology appears to be.” — Monbiot.
In the second part of the book, Monbiot meets exceptional growers like Iain Tolhurst, Ian Wilkinson, Tim Ashton, and Paul Cawood, who dedicate incredible amounts of time, energy, and passion to their farms, developing complex culture rotations, building soil fertility and growing biodiversity.
Some hurdles these farmers meet are that they have small lands and are not eligible for subsidies, that go to major land owners, mostly producing monocultures and feed, and that the customers they sell to value conformity more than all the long-term benefits they are working for. This was also observed by Montgomery and Bikle in What Your Food Ate.
“We want diversity. They want conformity. We get no points for wildlife, no points for soil quality, no points for a complex rotation. It just has to be cheap. This is the world we work in.” — Tim Ashton.
Although these examples are inspiring and seem among the most productive lands by the acre, with the least use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, this is not where Monbiot thinks the major agriculture revolution is taking place.
Farmfree Agriculture
Monbiot met with Pasi Vainikka, CEO of Solar Foods, a biotechnology company growing hydrogenotrophic microbes consuming carbon dioxide from the air, hydrogen from water, some micronutrients, and electricity, and producing biomass in the form of a high-quality protein meal with an amino acid profile similar to that of animal protein, and oils similar to citrus and palm oil, with huge potential in the food and cosmetics sectors. With a nutritional profile similar to soy, this fermentation-based “agriculture” requires 1700 less land than soybean, according to Monbiot.
Solar Foods website is a little less ambitious, claiming water use is 600 times inferior to beef and 100 times inferior to plant protein, and land use is 200 times inferior to beef and 20 times inferior to plants — and these more conservative figures may not take into account ghost acres and the upsides of the potential for rewilding in the liberated land.
There are many advantages of land-free or farm-free agriculture based on microbial cells. Microbes grow much more quickly than plants and animals: in a matter of hours. Their carbon needs can be met by carbon dioxide extracted from the air or from carbon-intensive industries at every hour of the day and night. Fermentation requires little space and can easily be verticalized. The flavor profile of these flours is easy to adapt to many foods and recipes. And they are not contaminated by antibiotics and antimicrobial-resistant bacteria from manure, or other chemicals.
This is the most elegant circular economy example, and it can offer humanity and wildlife its boons immediately.
Scaling microbial-based protein has the potential to reduce humankind’s reliance on other proteins requiring land use and impacting life on Earth. Liberating 15% of the land from destructive activity in some parts of the world could prevent 60% of the extinctions that would otherwise happen and could sequester 30% of all the carbon dioxide released since the Industrial Revolution, according to Monbiot and a study in Nature.
“For the first time since the Neolithic, thanks to the possibilities created by microbial protein and fat, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world.” — Monbiot.
Are We There Yet?
Monbiot doesn’t comment on the availability of these novel foods, but Solar Foods microbial protein received its first Novel Food approval in Singapore, the most food innovation-friendly regulation, in 2022, and the novel food dossier was submitted in the UK and EU, where it is pending examination. The company says they will also seek a GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) approval in the USA.
However, other forms of microbial protein already exist and have been consumed for a long time. Yeasts like Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly used to ferment beer, bread, and wine, are sold in powder form or flakes as an excellent source of protein and fiber, as well as B group vitamins, zinc, chromium, selenium, and magnesium. These products are sold as dietary supplements and as culinary aids. I love them sprinkled on a salad or a soup, and they are also recommended on pasta and even dairy. They offer a very nice umami taste that enriches foods, especially when low in animal products. They are used daily in vegan Buddhist communities like Plum Village, for both nutritional and flavor integration.
Beyond Solar Foods and Air Protein, other new biotechnology companies are coming up to develop microbes as a source of food, like Arbiom and Biospringer by Lesaffre, producing protein-rich yeasts for feed and human consumption reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions about 8-fold compared to soy protein, Nature’s Fynd growing a bacterium called Fusarium yellowstonensis as a protein source, which uses 99% less land and emits 99% less GHG compared to animal protein (according to the consortium Protéines France), or Arkeon in Austria that works on Archaea to make food out of carbon dioxide. For a more comprehensive list of the actors fermenting the microbial food revolution, you can refer to this 2023 publication in Nature Communications.
According to a report from the Good Food Institute, just in 2020, 1.5 billion USD was invested in alternative protein, of which nearly a third is using fermentation.
Bacteria and yeasts have a significant place to take to become mainstream foods, as we diversify protein sources and seek a more harmonious dance with nature. As consumers, startups, regulators, and the agrifood industry, let’s give a welcome cheer to these microbial foods!
