Evolution of food production
CHANGE always seems faster than it actually is and signs of change appear long before mass change begins. Malcolm Gladwell defines this phenomenon as the “Tipping Point,” when something has been bubbling away for years and then suddenly reaches that “moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.”
Cellular agriculture has been bubbling away for years — in fact Winston Churchill suggested in 1932 that “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under suitable medium.”
Cellular agriculture and precision fermentation are solutions that many are banking on as a replacement of animalbased proteins, like whey and casein and even whole meat and milk products. Such “synthetic biology” is at the leading edge of a $4 trillion gold rush (according to a McKinsey report).
Precision fermentation products have reached the shelves in the United States, as I have written about in a prior column, but the costs to consumers are not yet competitive with animalderived products. I have been trying to understand where the barriers are for the largescale use of cellular agriculture — what’s holding up mass commercial release of vatgrown cows’ milk or even human milk? When will the tipping point occur? Being forewarned and forearmed will be critical for New Zealand farmers.
At this point, I would like to acknowledge a great conversation with Dr Andy
West, and subsequent shared material from him, as inspiration for this column.
Globally, we already undertake cell culture and precision fermentation at commercial scale for the derivation of pharmaceutical products, such as insulin, however, if we are to feed protein to the world with these mechanisms, we will need to build fermentation capacity so large it is almost unimaginable.
These enormous vats will need to be heated to 37degC continuously — we don’t have the ability to do this using current sources of solar technology, which means we may need to look at alternate sources such as fissionnuclear power (it’s worth noting, Ukraine has the largest uranium deposits in Europe) if we are to use renewable energy.
The growing organisms and cells need to be fed to survive and grow, nutrients will need to be sourced, probably via largescale cropping. This means we will need greater amounts of croppingsuitable flat land which will be in shortsupply globally and under increasing yield pressures with climate change — worth mentioning also, shifting grazing land to cropping land will also release greenhouse gases.
At the moment, precision fermentation of animal proteins for human food is done at “startup scale”. Moving to largescale vats capable of producing enough material to bring prices down, will require considerable expertise and exemplary foodsafety standards and technology.
You see, the conditions these organisms and cells are grown in, are also ideal for competing microorganisms — imagine the waste or human healthrisk, when a huge vat is contaminated with E. coli. This is a challenge, not just for the engineers and biologists, but for the businessrisk managers and the food regulators. Finally, fermenting material at the kind of scale needed for massproduction will lead to considerable production of waste — we don’t know yet how this will be managed.
It is likely these technical hurdles will be overcome — but it’s worth asking a bigger question. Do we actually need mass production of animal proteins? The plantbased meatalternative industry is not achieving anticipated revenues, despite significant hype and investment. I think this is mostly because if people don’t want to eat meat, they understand they are betteroff eating nonprocessed whole fruits, vegetables, grains and seeds — we don’t need Americanstyle, highlyprocessed plant burgers in our diets.
That leads to a further question — will a whole new food system, with all of the associated foodsafety challenges and energy needs, be better for the planet and human health than focusing on efficient plant production with more environmentally friendly cropping methodologies?
What would the world look like if we all ate plantrich diets with only the occasional animal protein meal. Most of us eat too much protein anyway and could do with more plantbased fibre — those who are nutritionally compromised, the very young and the very old, could be the exception. Would such a diet make an equivalent dent in global emissions as cellular agriculture?
There is no silverbullet for climate change.
Technological advances in food, energy and transport systems will help, so too will policy shifts by the greatest polluting countries.
A tipping point will come, but what that looks like, for our food systems, still has a question mark.