Goodbye Meat, Hello Crickets: The Future of Food
Image: Ivan Radic via Flickr
I quite like eating insects. I’m vegetarian, not for dogmatic reasons, but because I just don’t like meat. But I do like these cricket and maggots and also grasshoppers. Though I usually take off the wings because they keep getting stuck between my teeth.
I wouldn’t mind if, in the future, we’d farm crickets instead of cows. And this isn’t the only idea for future food that scientists have come up with — there’s also 3D printed meat, mushrooms, algae, and jellyfish, among other things. Let’s have a look.
Meat alternatives have made a lot of headlines in recent years. There are several reasons for this. One is that growing animals is much more energy intensive than growing plants. A lot of energy and carbon emissions could be saved if we stopped eating meat. According to a study from the University of Oxford, shifting to a vegan diet could cut food-related greenhouse gas emissions by up to 70% globally. That’d be about 16% of the total. A really big chunk. We could even cut them by 100%, we just all need to stop eating.
But it’s not just about climate change, it’s also about land use and independence.
Many countries are looking into new food production methods so they have to rely less on imports, or because they are running out of space, especially in densely packed areas like Singapore.
Insects are an obvious replacement for meat as a source of protein and fat. The idea isn’t new of course. People have eaten insects for thousands of years – or millions, depending on your definition of “people”.
It’s remained somewhat of a niche food because for one thing it’s hard to come by with decent amounts. But also because wild insects might carry diseases and parasites and I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to wash a grasshopper, but it’s not all that easy. That’s why companies have looked into making insect farming cleaner and more efficient.
They often don’t just sell the entire insects, they make other food products from them, such as protein bars, oils, or crisps. They sometimes also offer pet food.
That said, I have noticed that insects aren’t for everyone, so let’s have a look at something closer to what you know and like, lab-grown meat.
The idea of growing a nice, succulent chicken thigh in the laboratory has been around since at least the 1930’s. In 1931, Winston Churchill even predicted that “Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”
Synthetic meat is usually produced by first taking some muscle tissue from a living animal. The muscle cells are then supplied with nutrients and grow into larger structures like muscle fibers and, eventually, chunks of meat!
This process has been refined over the decades, but textures has remained a problem. The Spanish company Cocuus wants to fix that with 3D-printing which also helps create some relatively normal-looking meats.
This isn’t the only problem with synthetic meat though, another issue is to get the muscle fibres to integrate fat. This problem could be partly solved with yet another food alternative, mushrooms
Mushrooms — or to use the more general scientific term — fungi, have been around as meat replacements since the 1980s. The first was the British brand Quorn which is still around today. To produce it, one grows a tiny fungus under controlled conditions. The product has a high content of protein and fibre, and structure that resembles chicken breast, if you don’t think about it too much.
Today, companies are still producing similar products, which are named mycoproteins. Mycorena is one such company – but the company produces protein alternatives, it has also developed a fat-like product that can be used to make synthetic meat juicier and tastier.
Most dedicated meat eaters probably won’t be convinced by this stuff. At least for now. But in the end, meat is just a particular arrangement of molecules and sooner or later, I’m sure, we’ll find a way to produce it without actually growing and slaughtering an animal.
An entirely different avenue is to just go for plants, and make sure they grow quickly and efficiently. Algae farming, which includes a large variety of species, is the best example for this approach.
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