Imagine a tomato plant.
Time and effort and sunlight and water and soil all
go into growing that plant, but all you can eat
are just a few red fruit.
What if there was a way to turn the rest of that plant
into something edible, too?
This video is the first in a series about food, biology,
and eating, all focused on the central idea of what's
in your food.
Today's episode is all about a future technology that
could turn everything from wood to grass clippings
to plastic into something edible.
And it's in collaboration with Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany.
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We need the ability to better make, allocate, and distribute
food.
A WHO report in 2000 estimated that 25,000 people
die from hunger and hunger-related causes
every day.
Over 800 million people in the world suffer from hunger,
and 1.3 billion people lack regular access
to nutritious and sufficient food.
The UN estimates that the world will
have nearly 10 billion people in 2050, and all of those people
will also need to eat.
To feed not just the people we have now
but also the increasing population of the future,
we may need to increase agricultural production
by 50% between 2013 and 2050.
Now, one possible way to do this is
to shift diets towards ones that favor
vegetables more than meat.
A 2016 study showed that, in general,
the amount of people an individual piece of land
could feed was higher for diets that
relied more on plants than for those
that relied more on meats.
But another possibility would be to get more edible product
out of what we're already growing.
So let's go back to that tomato plant.
You can eat the tomatoes, but there's so much unused biomass
there.
The leaves, the stems, the roots--
that all takes resources and solar energy to make,
but you can't eat it in the end.
Usually, we can't eat that biomass
because it contains things we can't break down,
like cellulose.
Cellulose is a big, long polymer molecule
made up of lots of sugar rings.
And it's what gives plants their shape and structure.
Currently, we do sometimes break biomass like this
down to make other stuff.
So biomass can be converted into ethanol and biofuels,
and there are projects that turn things like corn and beets
into omega-3 oils using algae.
Biomass can also be turned into food additives and supplements.
And interestingly, lignin from wood
can be used to make smoky flavor additives.
But what if we imagine an invention that could turn
inedible biomass into food?
All right, honesty, pulling-back-the-curtain
moment--
Merck KGaA came to me with an idea about a video
around their Future Insight Prize, which this year was
awarded to some researchers who are working on food generation,
turning inedible biomass into something you can eat.
But when I started researching this,
they hadn't awarded the prize yet.
So I decided to brainstorm how I would create a food
generator like this.
And my first thought was bacteria,
because bacteria are awesome.
I figured it'd be similar to the symbiotic relationship
that cows have with their gut bacteria.
So in the cow gut, Ruminococcus bacteria breaks cellulose down
into glucose.
They can then continue to break that glucose
down into other components through glycolysis.
And they make things like butyrate, acetate,
and propionate that are then used by the cow.
So what if we could just do that, but not in a cow,
but in a big bioreactor and get something edible out of it?
I imagined placing a big hunk of plant
stems into a bioreactor full of bacteria, letting the bacteria
ferment all of those stems into sugar,
and then being able to consume that sugar.
And I talked a big game about my bacterial breakdown idea,
but then the winners were announced.
And they were doing something similar, except a billion times
cooler, because they work in this field.
So the prize went to Dr. Ting Lu at the University
of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Dr. Steve Techtmann
of Michigan Tech.
They're using bioengineered microorganisms
to break down not just inedible biomass, but also plastic.
All right, first step, you have to break the polymers
into monomers.
Whether you're thinking of cellulose or plastic,
a lot of it is polymers, long molecules made up
of smaller, often repeating components called monomers.
And those monomers are usually a lot easier to break down.
So step one is to break the polymers into monomers.
This could happen enzymatically or chemically or even using
things like heat.
The output of that step could then go into a system
where the monomers are further broken down and used
by bacteria.
And then you dry the bacteria down
and eat it as a protein source.
Microbial biomass is approximately 55% protein,
so it would be like a protein powder
that you could add to a smoothie or bake into something.
The researchers envision that you could also
combine that bacteria with bacteria
that have been engineered to have
specific biochemical pathways to make things
like key amino acids or lipids so that you could have a more
complete and nutritious powder.
Cellulose and biomass-eating bacteria makes sense to me.
But what bacteria even eat plastic?
Turns out some scientists looked at bacteria
at a recycling plant a few years ago,
and they found bacteria that could eat PET.
PET is Polyethylene Terephthalate,
your number-one plastics.
The scientists found that this specific bacteria contained
an enzyme that could munch up PET
into its component parts, specifically terephthalic acid
and ethylene glycol.
This specific bacteria, Ideonella sakaiensis,
actually uses PET as its main carbon and energy source.
That's really cool.
It's growing by eating plastic.
Different groups are making improvements
to the bacteria's enzymes now to make them even more efficient.
Now, this is still a future technology at the moment,
but that's the whole point of MERCK KGaA, Darmstadt,
Germany's, Future Insight Prize.
The whole goal is to stimulate innovative solutions
to some of humanity's greatest problems.
And their plan is to give out a million euros a year
for the next 35 years.
It's not bad.
The money goes to researchers and groups
working in important fields, like food generation in 2021,
multidrug resistance in 2020, and pandemic prevention
in 2019.
So these are clearly really pressing, important topics.
Next year's prize is going to be around converting
carbon dioxide into fuels.
You can find out more about the prize
and about this year's winning project
by visiting the link in the description below.
And remember, this is the first in a series
of food videos coming out right here on this channel
this summer.
Next up is a story about some really, really expensive peanut
butter.
This isn't it.
And the scientist in the next video
specifically told me I could not eat the very expensive peanut
butter.
Or, I mean, I could, but she did not recommend it.
But subscribe to make sure you don't miss it.
And until then, go forth, do science, and have a snack.
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