When you hear ‘fermentation’, you may think of the spice of bubbly kimchi, the smell
of rising bread, or the tang of a good beer.
These techniques have been part of human life for millenia.
But today, fermentation is being hacked for the food of the future.
Those tiny microbes are helping us solve the global challenge of how to produce more and
more food for more and more people…and we’re not just talking about stuff like bread.
Like one of my favorite bacterial genuses, Lactobacillus, let’s break this down.
When microorganisms like bacteria or fungi do fermentation, they’re breaking down some
kind of sugar, like glucose, into smaller building blocks—it's how they make energy
for themselves.
But we‘ve been harnessing that process since the dawn of civilization, using these microbes—and
their byproducts—to make tasty stuff for ourselves, too.
When it comes to food, there are three main types of this process:
Lactic acid fermentation, which is used to make things like yogurt, pickles, and sourdough
bread.
Ethanol/alcohol fermentation, which is used to make things like wine, beer, and more.
And acetic acid fermentation, which makes things like vinegars and kombucha
When we talk about fermentation for the future of food, we mean something a little different.
The traditional fermentation we’ve been talking about can be used to produce non-meat
‘meat’ products, like fermenting soybeans into tempeh, which is a vegan meat alternative.
But there’s also something called whole biomass fermentation, where the microbes themselves
are the food.
For example, Quorn is a company takes filamentous fungi
and ferments them into what's called mycoprotein.
So there fermented fungi are the protein-packed product.
Then we get into real sci-fi territory with precision fermentation.
This is where we can tell a microbe to produce the exact enzymes and proteins that make up
real animal products.
For example, a company called Perfect Day takes the genomic sequence that we know codes
for beta-lactoglobulin (a type of whey protein).
They can "copy" and "paste" that sequence into the genome of a fungus.
This fungus now has the instructions to create whey as part of its fermentation process.
And because it’s not coming from an animal, this milk doesn’t contain any hormones or
antibiotics.
That's because these problematic compounds often end up
in traditional meats and animal products to address
issues that come with modern industrial animal agriculture.
But that’s kind of a whole ‘nother video.
This precision production pipeline can be used to make all kinds of different molecules
that are a part of many animal products, like eggs and cheese.
These proteins and enzymes can be used to add flavor or texture to an animal-free product,
like with Impossible Foods.
They use yeast as little factories to produce a molecule called heme, the compound that
gives meat its meaty taste and that makes their plant-based burgers ‘bleed’.
Precision fermentation could also solve challenges that other alternative meat endeavors are
facing. For example,
cell-based agriculture aims to create meat by growing animal cells outside of the animal.
So, this involves taking a small, harmless sample from a cow,
and then proliferating those cells in the lab
into something like…a steak.
Fermentation could produce the key components that keep those cultivated meat cells healthy
and thriving as they proliferate.
But an actual animal has been using their muscles.
The forces of motion and gravity have been acting on that muscle and forming it in really
key ways that are extremely difficult to recreate in a petri dish.
So, fermentation could be again used to produce things like collagen and fibronectin.
These proteins could hold those lab-grown cells together in a way that may more accurately
mimic the steak we know and love, structurally and texturally.
So, all three of these fermentation techniques present a huge opportunity to solve some of
the world’s biggest challenges.
Like an ever-expanding world population requiring more and more food, especially protein.
Fermentation-based food technologies could provide that protein, but without the land
and water use, the pollution, and the greenhouse gas emissions of traditional animal agriculture.
Plus—it’s good news for the animals too.
But the cost of taking it to the big time can be astronomical, especially for precision
fermentation.
For one fermentation-based milk company, for example, the cost of producing enough milk
to go commercial would result in a product that costs 4 times its animal-based competitor.
So lots more research needs to be done into how to get the absolute most out of those
little suckers—maximizing their efficiency as tiny biofactories,
while also trying to minimize cost.
And the question still remains: would you buy alternative protein like this?
Would you eat it?
One of the biggest hurdles may be convincing people
that meat or milk or other animal-free animal products
that come from microbial fermentation are just as tasty and safe and nutritious as the real thing.
So, I guess that’s a job for us microbe enthusiasts to get on, stat.
If you want more on alternative food production, check out this video here, and if you have
questions about this topic or others like it, let us know down in the comments below.
Make sure to subscribe to Seeker for all your microbial newsflashes, and as always, thanks
for watching.
I’ll see ya next time.