Dinner on Mars: The Technologies that Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth by Lenore Newman and Evan Fraser explores the food science, technology, and production methods it will take to feed a settlement on Mars, while meeting the needs of the estimated 9.8 billion people on Earth by 2050. Here’s an excerpt from the book (chapter six, pages 118 to 121) on the potential of cellular food.
One Order of Milk, Hold the Cow!
The question of producing decent cheese on Mars can be made simple: Can we take our cumulative understanding of cheese science, umami, and terroir and combine them together to produce good cheese there? After all, despite their tasty versatility, sometimes oats aren’t enough. We want mozzarella that melts and stretches. We want brie with bite. And when we reach for our Stilton, we want it blue. But without cows or millennia-old microbiomes, is that possible?
Answering this means we need to dig into the space-age stuff, and this requires us to shift focus and meet the newest kid on the food block: cellular agriculture (cell-ag). This emerging technology proposes to produce meat and milk but without any animals. Cell-ag refers to a set of technologies that fall into two rough categories. The first is tissue farming, in which meat and other products are grown in an oversized petri dish called a bioreactor.1 The second approach is more like brewing and involves using yeast (or fungus or bacteria) that is modified to convert sugars into animal protein (instead of alcohol or other more common products of fermentation).
As we are writing, cell agriculture has exploded into the mainstream and every other day seems to bring new headlines that “yet another cell-ag start-up” had struck venture capital gold, raising hundreds of millions of dollars to bring chickenless chicken burgers, finless fish sticks, and cow-free milkshakes to the market.2
With all this hype, one might assume that cellular agriculture has burst from nowhere, but the idea has been slowly brewing in bioreactors for some time. New Harvest, an NGO dedicated to the development of cellular agriculture, was founded in 2004. In 2013, professor Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands trialed the world’s first cultured meat burger, and by 2014 the synthetic biology accelerator IndieBio had managed to launch several cellular agriculture start-ups. The first academic conference for cellular agriculture was hosted in July of 2016 at the Presidio in San Francisco.3 And the company Perfect Day began selling cell-ag ice cream in the U.S. during the summer of 2020, followed by cream cheese in 2021.
But the story of cell-ag reaches further back even than this. Fermentation using genetically enhanced yeasts and bacteria owes its origins to the gene-splicing techniques of Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer back in 1973. Cohen and Boyer’s work was initially ground-breaking for medicine, as it led directly to our ability to synthesize insulin using genetically altered bacteria. Synthetic insulin became commercially available in 1982 and causes fewer allergies, has a more consistent quality, and provides a more dependable supply for diabetics, thus saving millions of lives in the past few decades alone. Synthetic insulin was so successful that it launched the entire field of biopharmaceuticals.
But let’s get back to Martian dairy.
It seems almost certain that the future Martian milkshake won’t rely on cows, or even oats, but rather on yeast and bacteria to synthesize the kinds of proteins we normally find in milk. These proteins will then be added to plant fats, water, and trace elements to create the look and mouthfeel of animal-derived dairy. And this technology is already being used in North America today.
For instance, when Perfect Day began selling cell-ag ice cream in 2020, they used a strain of yeast that digests particular sugars and produces milk proteins. In this way, Perfect Day uses a process more like brewing beer than milking bovines. This yeast-derived whey protein is then used as an ingredient in ice cream. Simply mix with water, fats, sweetener, and flavour and, voila: the perfect ingredients for the would-be Martian ice cream parlour where the nearest cow is 114 million kilometers away. Other companies are working on casein protein synthesis and the creation of animal fat through advanced fermentation. Our Martians might have to assemble their cheese like a jigsaw puzzle, but it is likely they will have all the needed pieces.
These technologies will be useful on both Mars and Earth where they are already solving a very cheesy problem. For the past three decades, cheesemakers everywhere have faced a critical shortage of the enzymes found in rennet, which come from the stomach lining of ruminant mammals. This is what makes milk separate into curds and whey, thus helping dairy on its journey from udder to cheeseboard.
As the global demand for cheese has grown, the supply of stomach lining couldn’t keep up, so, years ago, some smart food scientists asked: could a supply of rennet be engineered? Thankfully the answer is yes. Rennet can be produced through a fermentation process very similar to the one Perfect Day uses to make their dairy proteins by employing bacteria, fungi, or yeast to convert sugars into rennet. Synthesized rennet has meant that the cheesemaking industry has been able to match demand. When fermentation-derived rennet was approved by the FDA on March 24, 1990, it was the first genetically engineered product approved for food production.
And the economics work out too: synthetic rennet has become much cheaper than the animal-derived product, and the cheese it creates has been consumed by an entire generation of happy human cheese lovers without any health or environmental problems.
This successful track record of using biotechnology to convince yeast to do the work of animals set the scene for numerous other such products including Perfect Day’s products that received approval from the FDA on April 15, 2020. Their ice cream started to be sold across America as a demonstration of the technology that summer.
1. We will return to these technologies in the next chapter.
2. Even petfood is getting a rethink. Toronto-based Because Animals is busy culturing mouse meat for cats and rabbit meat for dogs. This is significant as pets in America consume up to 25% of the country’s total calories from meat.
3. Lenore sat in the back whispering “wow” and slamming back complimentary Soylent.
Excerpted in part from Dinner on Mars: The Technologies That Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth by Lenore Newman and Evan D.G. Fraser. Copyright © by Lenore Newman and Evan D.G. Fraser, 2022. Published by ECW Press Ltd. www.ecwpress.com
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