Synthetic milk is ‘logical and predictable’
Nature uses fermentation to change one thing into another. Beer for example: Yeast is added to the brew, the yeast is fed sugar and they produce carbon dioxide (CO2) and alcohol. You have an input, a micro-organism, and an output.
Fermentation is not new and man has used it for good and bad.
The good includes penicillin – discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928. He found the juice from the common fungus penicillium, found in blue cheese and in fruit, killed bacteria.
Laboratories would grow this and harvest painfully small amounts of penicillin.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer developed a fermentation technique. The input was lactose, the micro-organism is the penicillium fungus, and the output is penicillin.
Today the nucleus of the penicillium fungus is
manipulated to give different types of semi-synthetic penicillin. It costs $20 to produce a kilogram of penicillin today as opposed to $600 in the 1950s.
Fermentation is also used to make a synthetic of the human hormone insulin. Human DNA is inserted into an E coli bacteria cell. The bacteria are fed sugar and during fermentation the bacteria output insulin. This synthetic is an exact molecular copy of insulin made in the human pancreas. Prior to this, insulin was harvested via the rather inefficient process of killing piglets.
Synthetic substances are everywhere. Vitamin C is ascorbic acid. The inefficient way to harvest ascorbic acid is to take fruit and process it until you are left with just ascorbic acid. Most of the vitamin C used in food and supplements today is synthetic ascorbic acid. It is made by fermenting corn syrup and bacteria that output ascorbic acid. Like insulin, the synthetic version is molecularly identical to natural ascorbic acid.
Former New Zealand company Lanzatech has developed a fermentation process using a bacteria that uses CO2 as a food source and outputs ethanol. You can see how that solution is in demand.
One of the oldest fermentation processes is in a cow’s gut. The input is grass, the microorganisms in the gut ferment away and the output is energy.
The cow uses this energy to power the body and to produce milk. Milk is a complex substance and very nutritious.
After all, it is designed as a complete energy source for growing calves.
We use the components of milk for lots of different things.
In many cases, supplement manufacturers or food companies require only one specific milk component, such as a protein like lactoferrin or casein. Just like the previous examples, scientists are looking to create specific proteins by fermentation.
As with vitamin C, it may be much more efficient to create the exact substance required by fermentation.
The cow has a few things going against her. She produces byproducts such as methane and nitrous oxide. Fermentation produces a fraction of the byproducts.
Fermentation is ideal for producing a specific output like one protein or substance but won’t produce complex substances like orange juice or liquid milk. So the cow is not obsolete just yet. But fermentation could produce a dairy protein that could help combine plant proteins or make plant-based milk taste or behave more like cow’s milk. It is dairy but it is not dairy. The fact something is not dairy is a compelling marketing proposition to many people and it will be used ruthlessly by synthetic protein companies.
Imagine insulin was a consumer food, would consumers buy the genetically modified organism version or the natural version that kills piglets? The ultimate success of synthetic protein will depend a lot on the sugar in, to protein out ratio. If the economics work better than milking a cow every day, then it will win.
Synthetics are not new, they are not wacky or weird. Their rise in dairy is logical and predictable. The production of synthetic substances will not be perfect. It will require a lot of biomass such as sugar cane. The downside of plant-based technology is it generally relies on intensive monoculture agriculture which has environmental effects.
The problem for dairy farmers is believability always beats truth. For many urban people, the dairy industry telling them plants are bad for the environment and cows are good is unbelievable. The modern dairy farmer must be able to show that dairy is not scary.
The modern key performance indicator for dairy farmers is believability. If they are not believable, they are obsolete.