The Future of Food

Our eating habits reflect our biological needs, cultural practices, and accessibility to resources. Aotearoa is facing mounting sustainability issues and Fonterra has recently been named the highest carbon emitter in the country, after reporting over 13 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions to the Environmental Protection Authority. Dr Rosie Bosworth is a specialist in the future of food, with a PhD in environmental innovation and sustainable technology development. We interviewed her in 2021 on our radio segment, titled Tomorrow’s World, which airs on 95bFM. We decided to revive this interview in light of growing food sustainability concerns for Aotearoa, and adapt it into a print article exploring the future of food. While it is well known that changing to a plant-based diet mitigates the effects of climate change in a myriad of ways, for some, a stark shift to entirely plant-based just isn’t feasible. So, what could diets look like in the future if the entire planet can’t go strictly vegan?

Is a vegan diet more sustainable?

Historically humans have consumed meat to satisfy nutritional needs. With hunting related to high danger risks and energy demand, a shift to intensified agricultural practices has increased with patterns of urbanisation [1]. However as wealth and resource extraction has concentrated into some regions, and populations have increased globally, the type and quantity of food produced has changed dramatically. In the last four decades global meat production through agriculture has increased by 20%, with 30% of the global land surface area used for animal production [2].

The normative practices of consuming meat within a daily diet has contributed to biodiversity loss and increased greenhouse gas emissions. However it is important to consider that the consumption of any resource comes at an expense. We asked Dr Bosworth how sustainable a vegan diet is:

“It is complicated, vegan food has so many types of ‘plant based’ options – some of which are being criticised for having a large footprint themselves – like almond milk. But there are now also more and more advancements in science and biotech which mean we can even produce the same proteins as those found in animals or dairy proteins themselves, without the animals, that don’t require the use of plants as substitutes . When you’re looking at plant based milks, almond milk gets a worse reputation than other plant based milks like oat or coconut, but even when you compare almond to dairy it is markedly more environmentally friendly, especially in terms of water use.”

The idea of lab grown food, which Dr Bosworth refers to as ‘biotech’, has been rising in popularity. Even large fast food chains such as Burger King have released Beyond Meat® and Impossible™ Foods burgers.

So how do these cell based meat processes stack up sustainably? A life cycle assessment (LCA) considering the eutrophication, potential land use requirements, and greenhouse gas emissions of these alternative proteins compared to chicken, lamb, and beef (Fig 1) show a better performance for cell-based meats [3]. However, currently the energy consumption used by cell-based meat production exceeds all alternatives.

Cellular agriculture

[cellular agriculture is] “Taking cells from animals and growing these actual cells outside the animal. By feeding them a carbohydrate feed stock, we don’t need all the energy source to produce that we do to grow animals over time to slaughter or raise as dairy cows. Another really cool process that’s being advanced right now to produce dairy proteins and other molecules is precision fermentation. Precision fermentation involves programming yeast or fungi to produce the very same proteins and molecules like milk or cheese, without the animal, in large vats. Essentially, the cow is becoming an old piece of tech.”

As a response to the long-term environmental degradation that traditional livestock agriculture creates, biotechnologists have conceived a new route of catering to the 21st century human’s desire for meat: cellular agriculture. As Dr Bosworth mentions, the process is essentially taking a piece of animal tissue, relevant to the section of the animal we want to consume. Then, these cells are cultured, and given all of the nutrients in vitro that they would receive in vivo. They grow to maturity in a bioreactor (which is simply any manmade vessel that carries out biological processes) in the same manner an entire organism would grow in a field, and reach the same fate that such an organism would: they’re harvested, and processed appropriately.

There are two distinct processes included in cellular agriculture, and they’re not limited to producing ‘meat’. Acellular products can create things like milk, for example, using a starter culture, inserting the gene that produces milk, an animal protein, into a microorganism. This means the process of milk production then occurs in a lab, outside of an animal, so we skip all of the excess maintenance of the animal that would occur, and jump right to the end result; the animal protein we desire. This is the process by which most medical insulin is made, and the host microorganism in that case is generally E. coli. These engineered microorganisms do all the work for us, and are markedly lower maintenance than farming an entire cow.

Cellular agriculture, alternatively, takes specific tissue from a biopsy, and is grown similarly to acellular products, with a scaffold and nutrients. Its differentiation is the fact that living cells are being cultured, rather than proteins. The main part of the meat we eat is muscle tissue, so this is where the biopsy is taken from.

Ethics

The ethics of cellular agriculture [4] could fill two entire volumes of this publication alone, so we’ll simply outline them. There’s a pro-stance, which argues that since we’re avoiding the raising of livestock purely for the use of their resources and inevitable slaughter, the process aids animal welfare. And it’s easy to see the arguments for this; we do indeed clearly bypass the possibilities of inhumane treatment, because we don’t have a whole organism (in the traditional sense) to deal with. It also ties in neatly with the argument of sustainability; by avoiding the raising of a whole cow, we avoid the emissions that said cow creates, simply by its existence. That’s avoiding a lot of emissions even before we get to the supply chain points of maintenance, space, land use, water consumption, then the myriad of processing that needs to happen after the animal’s demise.

The inverse of these arguments is a tricky conversation: Gene-editing may be perceived as tied up with the ethics of ‘playing God’, and the implicit debate within these questions as to what the definition of ‘life’ is. Of course, these cells are ‘living’, but are they sentient? And how does that make a difference to how they should be treated? Answers to these questions are value-laden and boil down to a pretty detrimental issue for the process if left unresolved. If people are unsure about how they feel about this new technology, they A) won’t participate or B) will actively rally against the concept. There’s little point in developing technologies such as this, if they won’t be accepted and adopted by the populus. Science often operates as a knowledge seeking exercise, and as catering to the needs and desires of the population; if no one’s using it, it’s a dead end.

Figure 1. Comparison of the environmental impact of meat and meat analogs. Data are normalized to the impact of beef production. Eutrophication does not include data for mycoprotein. Land, emissions and energy data for mycoprotein were adapted from a 2015 LCA. Data for beef, pork, chicken and CBM were adapted from a 2015 life cycle assessment. Data for PBM were adapted from an impossibleTM Beef LCA (land, eutrophication, emissions) and a Beyond Meat® life cycle assessment (energy use). Figure adapted from Rubio et al., 2020.

Manipulating soy to mimic meat textures and tastes

“Heme (or leghaemoglobin) is a molecule found in cows but can also be bio-fermented and harvested using the same DNA found in soy root nodules. It’s what gives meat that umami aroma and meaty rich smell and taste. [This is important because the] average consumer wants a similar experience with meat burgers – not a rubbery or bland soy product. There’s a sensory experience that tofu may not give, and we need to offer the same sensory experience to get mainstream audiences to switch over.”

As an alternative to cellular agriculture, the biofermentation of heme may provide another solution to people’s rejection of plant-based alternatives. As important as taste is, it’s not the only component in the sensory experience of food. As Dr Bosworth explains, heme can be found in cows, and is utilised by meat substitution products to recreate the ‘mameme aroma’ experience, which can be so imperative to enjoying meat products.

Haemoglobin is the source of heme in cows, but can be replaced with sensational likeness by leghemoglobin in a food context. Leghemoglobin is found in the root nodules of soy and other legumes, and fixes nitrogen as soy plants grow. The two are oddly similar, which is why leghemoglobin has been appropriated for the purpose of mimicking ‘blood’ in plant-based foods.

There are many methods of accessing heme in leghemoglobin. The most intuitive one is digging up the roots of soy plants, and extracting the goodness inside for our purposes. However, this does seem counterintuitive if part of the aim is to be more sustainable – ripping up acres of crops for their roots doesn’t quite fit. So, researchers found another way to produce leghemoglobin: fermentation. Again, our tiny microorganism friends help us battle climate change.

Fermentation for heme production involves using genetically engineered yeast, which has been inserted with the gene for leghemoglobin production (in soy, this gene is LBC2) [5]. The ancient process of fermentation then ensues, and a whole batch of yeast, working hard to produce leghemoglobin, is created. It is similar to the acellular agriculture process. After this, it’s simply a matter of isolating the leghemoglobin produced, and adding it to whatever meat substitute a company desires.

Environmental psychology and the value-action gap

When we consider what we will be serving for our University reunion dinner in twenty years time, we may be leaning towards in vitro meats. Although a vegan diet offers many benefits, the sensory experience and cultural ties to eating food associated with emotions of satisfaction will remain [6]. When you know something tastes good, your taste sense works through chemosensory where a chemical stimulus on a nerve ending (taste bud) is mediated through taste and smell, and naturally our bodies like things that give us energy, such as sugars and carbohydrates [7]. We asked Dr Rosie Bosworth how future food developers considered this:

“When we think about food, future foods don't want to consider themselves as food tech or science start ups, especially when positioning themselves for the end consumer. By and large they still consider themselves as a producer of tasty food, that is the most important bit.”

The cultural and sensory process of eating meat can be related to environmental psychology, modelled by the value-action gap [8] . Although we may be aware of the environmental and health benefits of eating less meat, there are stronger values such as convenience, habits, and satisfaction that result in continued meat eating behaviour. A 2021 New Zealand questionnaire found that an omnivore diet was the most prevalent dietary category (94.1%). Gender (men) and political ideologies (conservatism) predicted lower probabilities of transition from a meat to no-meat diet [1].

As climate concerns, food production demands and ethical tensions continue to grow it will be interesting to see which food technologies gain mainstream traction. This is where future foods such as cell-grown meats may come out as the top dish.