What If Our Food no Longer Causes Greenhouse Gases?
Agriculture and land use emits around 24% of global greenhouse gas emissions until now we mostly ignored that fact. How can we use science and technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to nearly zero? Here are three examples that showcase the future of food.
There are numerous examples of how technology made our civilization better. Innovations in the medical field allowed us to live longer and more comfortably. Cars and planes let us move faster and to any place in the world. Electricity unlocked mass production. Food can grow on one side of the planet and be distributed anywhere just in time to be eaten. Humankind has never lived better. But at what cost?
The more we innovate, the worse the state of the world becomes. We have never emitted that much greenhouse gases (GHG) as nowadays and it is killing our planet. Food production alone is responsible for a quarter of global GHG emissions, yet it keeps increasing.
Why is feeding the world a problem?
We have almost 8 billion mouths to feed by the time I am writing this. The world population is expected to jump to nearly 10 billion people by 2050. It is estimated that food production will have to increase by 70% from 2007 levels to feed everybody. To produce this amount of food, the agricultural land will have to increase massively. And we are already using cropland equivalent to South America.
But not every piece of earth is arable and the cultivable land is decreasing due to poisoning caused by pesticides on land which means we are running out of agricultural land. Allied to this, meat and dairy are some of the most inefficient ways to feed mankind since livestock has to consume way more weight of food to turn it into meat. To create 1 KG of steak, a cow needs to eat up to 25 KG of grains. It is estimated that 5% of the global green gas emissions are only for livestock affairs. Furthermore, the richer the country, the more meat it consumes.
Currently, the more food we need to produce, the more greenhouse gases we emit.
The way we grow food is just wrong.
How modern technology can solve the food-problem
This sounds dramatic, but there is no need to panic since we already know the solution: The world adds 51 billion tons of GHG to the atmosphere every year. To prevent the worst effects of climate change, we need to reduce that number to zero. Easy right? Well, no.
But since investments in the private food sector increases, the chances that we succeed in reverting climate changes are higher. Let’s check out the future of the food industry.
1. Plant-based meat
Plant-based meat was designed to revert the motion of GHG emissions for the food sector and as a meat-alternative for vegetarians and vegans.
I am sure you may have heard of Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods already. Those are the two most famous plant-based meat companies and their mission is to feed the world without destroying our earth. They do it by creating food that looks like, tastes like and can be cooked like conventional meat. Some people even consider it meat. Not because it comes from an animal but because of its composition. Meat is five things: amino acids, lipids, trace minerals, vitamins, and water, just like our bodies. And this is what plan-based meat is. It assembles each of those pieces to make meat but instead of coming from animals, it comes from plants and vegetables.
And if you think this is not enough to call it meat, these companies found out the magical molecule that makes us crave meat: heme. Heme is an iron-containing molecule and it is essential for life on earth. The heme on the blood carries the oxygen through our blood. It is also what makes meat delicious and juicy. It’s what makes meat taste like meat. And those companies found a way to make heme from soy leghemoglobin in the root nodules of soy plants that is scalable, sustainable, and safe. Soy leghemoglobin was already used to make other proteins, certain kinds of beers, and wine that people are already familiar with so this is nothing new.
What’s funny is that this food is way more efficient and sustainable at feeding the world than traditional meat. Its production takes up to:
- 99% less water;
- 93% less land;
- up to 90% fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
2. Cultured meat
Meat consumption is so deeply rooted in the western culture (and starting to grow in the eastern) that some might say it’s impossible to quit its consumption. Meat lovers just don’t want to drop it. They call plant-based meat impostors.
This is where cultured meats come in handy. Cultured meat (also known as clean meat) isn’t veggie burgers or plant-based meats like we saw above. It’s actual meat. And these companies are promising a kind of utopia where we can eat as much meat as we want without stringing the environment or hurting an animal. To keep that promise, they produce meat by in vitro cell cultures of animal cells. It’s similar to making livestock meat, except the cells grow outside the animal’s body. Oh, and there is no slaughter.
In short, they harvest a bit of muscle tissue from an animal (without hurting it). The tissue is made of muscle and fat cells which they separate from one another. What’s needed is the muscle that is dissected and cultured into an artificial medium containing nutrients that come from plants and naturally-occurring growth factors, allowing them to proliferate just as they would inside an animal. All it takes is one single muscle cell to grow up to 1 trillion muscle cells. The newly muscle cells naturally merge to form tiny myotubes which are then placed in a ring. The muscle cells tend to contract frequently, causing them to grow into a small strand of muscle tissue. Then, the tubes are layered together to form meat.
To be fair, it doesn’t look exactly like traditional meat in colour and taste, but it’s a fair trade-off for an efficient and sustainable way to create animal protein and feed the world’s growing population.
Just like plant-based meats and when compared with the traditional ways of eating meat, cultured meat production reduces:
- water consumption by 98% less water;
- land used by 86%;
- carbon footprint by up to 93%.
In a nutshell, these creative ways of producing food are way more efficient at using the resources as we removed livestock out of the equation.
3. Vertical farming
However, all of the solutions above require plants as a resource, and today’s agriculture is still a curse because of the increased deforestation, decreased agricultural land, and emissions due to massive crop production and pesticides.
At last, Vertical farming came as a solution for all the agriculture issues above. Vertical farming is an innovative way of growing crops in vertically stacked layers in an indoor fully controlled environment prepared to optimize plant growth. It takes advantage of modern soilless farming techniques such as hydroponics, aquaponics, and aeroponics (used by NASA). The controlled environment lets farmers adjust the temperature, humidity, and light, allowing crop production all year. Alongside soilless farming, water used is drastically reduced and pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers are cut out since no insects or pests are wandering in these environments. Last but not least, it needs so much less space due to the vertical aspect of crop growing that it is viable to have big vertical farms in urban areas. This reduces greatly the food’s last mile, consequently reducing transportation emissions. Vertical farming can produce so much more than traditional intensive crop farms that it starts to be viable to grow food in a decentralized way. It means we can now feed the world population with local healthy sustainable food grown up from urban or home farms.
Summarizing, urban vertical farming:
- reduces water usage by up to 95%;
- increases crop yield 20x more than open-field production. Yes, you heard it right!
- reduces drastically food’s mile transportation.
Food production has to move from intensive centralized crops to decentralized urban vertical farms.
However, if facilities are not powered by green energy, it might not reduce emissions that much but as soon as the world shift to clean energies, it is no longer an issue. It would greatly reduce food GHG emissions.
Can we still solve things?
Some scientists say we still have a couple of decades to fix climate changes. The more pessimistic ones say there’s something like five years left until we reach a point of no return where it’s impossible to avoid the sixth mass extinction.
Nobody knows precisely but we can’t keep on ignoring the climate changes. We have to work harder than ever and it translates into our eating habits:
- We need to eat from urban sustainable farms;
- We need to grow part of our food ourselves;
- We need to drop traditional meat and eat sustainable alternatives;
- We need to support green tech innovation.
Only by doing so, we can save the world.
