- More food producers are becoming aware
of the vegan pound and wanting to cash in on it,
which means we're seeing more of these
highly-processed vegan foods which have
a lot of ingredients, they're often packaged in plastic
and they've been flown halfway around the world.
Is this really the answer?
- I mean I think there's a lot of
vegan junk food out there,
and that needs massively to change and to improve.
You know, it's got to be healthy,
it's got to have low impact
because that's the whole point of it, isn't it?
(laughs) That's, you know, it's,
there are a companies quite cynically cashing in on this,
but actually, some of the companies are also really aware
that they will be judged on their environmental footprint.
There's a lot of interesting stuff
going on in food technology
and I think we're gonna see some big changes,
and it will be easier to make
really good, high-quality vegan food
with a very low environmental footprint,
and I think what we've gotta realize
is that we're seeing the experimental phase at the moment
as there's this massive increase now in plant-based diets.
And as the technologies develop,
and as the pressure develops,
to have very low footprint, very healthy, very tasty food,
things are going to change, I'm sure that is true.
And I'm incredibly excited, actually,
by some of the huge qualitative shifts
that are taking place at the moment.
You know, my usual interest is in political economy,
so how do we make these big political shifts,
these big economic shifts.
Actually, with food I'm getting really interested
in the technology now, partly because
I'm not seeing any sensible policy
being developed by governments anywhere around the world,
but you know, I think the food technologists
might come along and just blow
all that stuff out of the water.
And the thing which really interests me
more than anything else, and I've done a sort of
scoping review to try to work out who's on top,
and these guys seem to be way out there,
in terms of both the potential
and of their ecological footprint,
which is like really, really low,
are the people in Finland developing proteins and lipids
and carbohydrates from hydrogen oxygenating bacteria,
these are soil bacteria, and it's just incredibly efficient.
Really, really simple and it's using existing equipment,
they're just using standard brewing equipment
and it's very cheap indeed, and it's high quality.
So I was the first person outside the lab
to eat a pancake made of this stuff.
I mean basically they have these bacteria in a vat,
and it's a sort of yellow brew,
doesn't look very appetizing,
but then they pipe it off onto a heated roller,
and it comes out as this really quite
beautiful-looking golden flour,
because they're got natural
beta-carotenoids in the bacteria,
and then you just mix it with a bit of water,
bang, into the pan, you've got a batter,
because it's 60% protein when it comes out.
We actually had to put some wheat flour in
to dilute the protein content
because otherwise there was, you'd made more of an omelet
than a pancake (laughs).
So without any eggs, without any milk,
you had too much protein in it, it's amazing.
And made a pancake, and do you know what?
It tasted exactly like a pancake.
This was a thing which blew me away.
You know, I was expecting some sort of taste
that was different, but it tasted just like a pancake.
And actually protein kind of tastes like protein,
you know, that's, I mean, it was very similar
to the protein that you'd find in a normal pancake
and I thought, "B;limey."
So you know, this could potentially be the feedstock
for cultured milk, cultured meat, cultured eggs,
with a little bit of tweaking
you can start producing lauric acid,
bye-bye palm oil, won't need that anymore.
You could start producing omega 3 fish oils,
long-chain fish oils,
the ones you can't get from land plants.
We don't need the fishing industry anymore,
you know, it's like, really very, very exciting
what you can do and our calculations that I did with the lab
suggest that you could produce all the world's
protein needs from an area of desert the size of Ohio
because this is such an efficient process,
and if you did that, then you've got
this enormous potential to rewild the world
and to draw down huge amounts of carbon
from the atmosphere as ecosystems recover,
so it's potentially really exciting.
I think this is the clincher technology.
You know, when you talk about environmental technologies
people think about wind turbines and solar panels
and electric cars and all the rest of it,
which, fine, you know, but this, this is the big one.
I think this is what's really gonna change things
and we're on the cusp of something
bigger than digitization, this is,
the entire food chain is gonna change.
The only thing really which we'll need
to grow anymore will be fruit and veg
because it's just not gonna be necessary
to grow the big commodity crops.
Certainly not the meat, or any of the animal products,
not the soya and the other pulses, not the grains,
you know, you'd could just,
everything that we get from them,
you can make far more efficiently in a vat.
And some people will respond with horror to that,
you know, and say, "Oh, what a horrendous idea,
"getting our food from bacteria!"
because, you know, yes, it's true,
for the first time in our history, we'll have staple foods
which aren't reliant on photosynthesis,
you know, which is an extraordinary idea.
But I would say to those people,
"Well, you know, if that horrifies you,
"just take a trip down to a slaughterhouse,
"take a trip to an intensive livestock farm."
I worked on an intensive pig farm when I was a teenager,
I know what disgusting looks like, you know?
If you want to see disgusting, go and take a look at that.
If you wanna see horror, look at the soya farms
cutting down the rainforest in the Amazon,
cutting the Cerrado in southern Brazil and Argentina.
The dry Chacha just disappearing like that, you know.
We don't need to do any of that stuff anymore.
This is really incredible, we're really on the cusp
of something huge, and people haven't grasped it,
even at this future foods conference I was at yesterday,
no-one had heard of this microbial protein production,
and I was talking to someone
from one of the cultured meat companies,
and say, "Here's your feed stock."
And he's like, "Oh, ohh, that is exciting."
You know, there was this real sort of sense
that they're all a bit vulcanized,
they're all a bit in their silos doing their own thing,
but you start o pull some of this stuff together
and you find Incredible efficiencies.
It's very exciting.
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