Yerda
Veteran Member
Guardian columnist George Monbiot had this piece published on the food tech process called precision fermentation. It might not live up to the hype, but the possibility of high-protein nutritious food without the costs in land, water, carbon, labour and animal welfare sounds promising.
From the article:
Precision fermentation is a refined form of brewing, a means of multiplying microbes to create specific products. It has been used for many years to produce drugs and food additives. But now, in several labs and a few factories, scientists are developing what could be a new generation of staple foods....
...The first is to shrink to a remarkable degree the footprint of food production. One paper estimates that precision fermentation using methanol needs 1,700 times less land than the most efficient agricultural means of producing protein: soy grown in the US. This suggests it might use, respectively, 138,000 and 157,000 times less land than the least efficient means: beef and lamb production. Depending on the electricity source and recycling rates, it can also enable radical reductions in water use and greenhouse gas emissions. Because the process is contained, it avoids the spillover of waste and chemicals into the wider world caused by farming...
Emphasis added.
See also:
Through PF, scientists can program microbes to make specific, customized molecules to do whatever we want, including making food and other consumer products taste, feel and perform better. Scientists do this using precision biology to study and catalogue the proteins and other molecules in plants and animals, as well as the genetic information that codes for them. They then use this data – which is stored in massive, searchable databases – to copy, edit and paste relevant genetic sequences, and even brand-new sequences designed from scratch, into microbes. The microbes then act as highly efficient factories that consume specific inputs and spit out desired outputs (whether they are the exact same molecules that are found in plants and animals, modified or entirely new ones). The modern information technologies that underpin precision biology are crucial to the process as AI, automation and simulation allow research and development, scale-up and production to happen much more quickly on a much greater scale.
Precision Fermentation: What exactly is it? - Rethink Disruption
And:
The promise of cruelty-free dairy!!
Better Dairy: Meet the UK start-up tapping precision fermentation to disrupt dairy
From the article:
Precision fermentation is a refined form of brewing, a means of multiplying microbes to create specific products. It has been used for many years to produce drugs and food additives. But now, in several labs and a few factories, scientists are developing what could be a new generation of staple foods....
...The first is to shrink to a remarkable degree the footprint of food production. One paper estimates that precision fermentation using methanol needs 1,700 times less land than the most efficient agricultural means of producing protein: soy grown in the US. This suggests it might use, respectively, 138,000 and 157,000 times less land than the least efficient means: beef and lamb production. Depending on the electricity source and recycling rates, it can also enable radical reductions in water use and greenhouse gas emissions. Because the process is contained, it avoids the spillover of waste and chemicals into the wider world caused by farming...
Emphasis added.
See also:
Through PF, scientists can program microbes to make specific, customized molecules to do whatever we want, including making food and other consumer products taste, feel and perform better. Scientists do this using precision biology to study and catalogue the proteins and other molecules in plants and animals, as well as the genetic information that codes for them. They then use this data – which is stored in massive, searchable databases – to copy, edit and paste relevant genetic sequences, and even brand-new sequences designed from scratch, into microbes. The microbes then act as highly efficient factories that consume specific inputs and spit out desired outputs (whether they are the exact same molecules that are found in plants and animals, modified or entirely new ones). The modern information technologies that underpin precision biology are crucial to the process as AI, automation and simulation allow research and development, scale-up and production to happen much more quickly on a much greater scale.
Precision Fermentation: What exactly is it? - Rethink Disruption
And:
The promise of cruelty-free dairy!!
Better Dairy: Meet the UK start-up tapping precision fermentation to disrupt dairy
