Scientists are working hard on unlikely things like waste products, air, volcanic organisms and solar power to come up with healthy, safe, alternatives to resource-sapping meat as a staple food. And the results are encouraging. By Thin Lei Win
Finnish scientists at Solar Foods really are making food from air. Courtesy Solar Foods.
Rome, November 2019. Hipsters world-wide are queuing up outside trendy meat-free burger joints to eat fast food without offending the planet (or its cows). But some have criticised plant-based alternatives flooding restaurants and store shelves as being as bad as the original product. Harvard scientists recently questioned their role in a healthy diet, partly due to being highly processed and high in sodium, and several media reports have also queried that so-called "fake meat" are loaded with more chemicals and are costly to produce.
Supporters of New Meat counter that burgers have always been laden with fat and sodium and were never exactly considered health food anyway, but the issue still remains. However, the latest efforts from white-coated tinkerers worldwide are bearing sustainable fruit (or meat, or food) with much less in the way of by-product negatives.
Enter Solar Foods, a Finnish company working on an edible protein powder called Solein which uses water, air and renewable electricity as a way to separate food production from agriculture.
"You avoid land use impacts like clearing forests for agriculture, use of pesticides and use of fertilisers that release greenhouse gases and so on," CEO Dr Pasi Vainikka said. Solein is made by putting microbes into a liquid and feeding them small bubbles of hydrogen and carbon dioxide, a process similar to making beer or wine, apart from the lack of grapes or grains, Vainikka explained. As the liquid thickens, it is dried into a very fine powder which is about 65% protein and tastes much like wheat flour, and can be used in existing plant-based products or future offerings such as lab-grown meat. Solein will cost about €5 per kilo ($2.50 a pound) to produce and will hit the market by 2021, Vainikka said.
According to the United Nations, agriculture, forestry and other land use activities accounted for 23% of total net manmade greenhouse gas emissions from 2007 to 2016, soaring to 37% when pre- and post-production activity were factored in. Livestock meanwhile is responsible for about 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
With concern over these issues rising, and the success of vegan beef and burger substitutes developed by Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, the alternative protein sector just keeps growing. According to investment bank Barclays, alternative meat sales could reach $140 billion - or 10% of the global meat industry - within a decade, a 10-fold increase from current levels.
Thomas Jonas, CEO of Sustainable Bioproducts whose burger-base protein is built on microbes found in volcanic hot springs at Yellowstone National Park, says that a new generation of proteins are way less processed than previously.
Thomas Jonas, CEO at Sustainable Bioproducts. Courtesy SB.
“The most recent UN report on climate change and food reinforces the urgency to drastically rethink our current protein supply chain,” said Jonas. “The good news is that we’ve discovered in nature a solution to this challenge and have developed a breakthrough fermentation technology to scale it.”
In the barren, other-worldly and dangerous landscape at Yellowstone, researchers "discovered a bunch of life forms that across millennia evolved to survive in this environment," he adds. His company has recently raised $33million and plans to produce "a hamburger equivalent" next year through a novel fermentation of the microbes. Once established and running its plant in Chicago could produce burgers equivalent to those made from cows grazing on 15,000 acres of land, Jonas says.
"Fundamentally we are surviving on this planet based on an agricultural system that has barely changed in the past 11,000 years... when we domesticated a handful of plants and animals. New technologies are really giving us tools for a second domestication - things that we didn't even know were there," he adds.
Another company, Bangalore-based String Bio, is working to convert methane from waste and natural sources into protein powder - initially for animals.
"We said this is probably the best impact we humans can have in this world, where we take something that we don't need for the environment and convert it into something we do need," said Vinod Kumar, who with his wife Ezhil Subbian set up String Bio. “As the population in Asia grows, we need to double our protein capacity. To do so, we’re using waste gas,” added Subbian, adding that their product can reduce cost for feed makers by 30% to 50%.
"There's a lot of climate anxiety," adds Solein’s Vainikka. "And people are looking for hope and solutions and they're happy to see companies like ours, so that's encouraging. Our science is like magic, that’s real."
Courtesy of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters. www.trust.org