Still a lot to do before eating insects is optional

JUICY lab-grown steaks and burgers made of plant-based meat could soon be tempting hardened carnivores scanning restaurant menus in the world’s biggest cities, as food producers explore fresh ways to feed booming populations.

With people pouring into cities across the developing world, rocketing demand for meat and dairy products will make it essential to find high-protein alternatives that have a lower environmental impact, some experts said.

“The food of the future, as we become more and more urban, will continue to be meat, but it won’t be meat from industrialised animal agriculture,” Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Washington-based Good Food Institute, said.

“It will be meat made from plants, and it will be meat grown in factories without farmers or slaughterhouses,” Friedrich said.

He calculates that traditional meat will be eliminated in high-income countries by 2050. Others predict bugs or high-protein algae, such as spirulina, will be high on the list of future foods, along with fish produced in deepsea farms or vast urban warehouses.

But with a 50 percent jump in agricultural production needed to support nearly 10 billion people by 2050 as climate change bites, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said more obvious solutions may lie in cutting calories and animal protein in the diets of the rich, making agriculture more efficient, and reducing the one-third of food that is wasted.

About 80 percent of all agricultural land is dedicated to grazing or growing feed for animals, the FAO said.

In addition, the livestock industry consumes 10 percent of the world’s fresh water, while generating methane and other planet-warming emissions, and causing large-scale deforestation.

Kind to animals

A handful of companies are racing to develop technology that could drastically reduce the price of so-called “cultured” or “clean” meat, grown from starter cells taken from live animals.

It could eventually be produced in urban “breweries”, would cost less than real meat, and use 99 percent less land.

“Meat-eaters, in a few years, will be able to choose between traditional meat that includes animal suffering and non-animal suffering meat that is 100 percent meat and resembles meat’s texture, taste and look,” said Yaron Bogin, chief executive of the Israel-based Modern Agriculture Foundation. Elsewhere, start-ups are using “cellular agriculture” to develop animal-free eggs, milk and fish.

San Francisco-based Hampton Creek wants to get the first clean meat product to consumers next year, but industry watchers and other companies said huge technological and regulatory hurdles mean it will take five years for the food to arrive in high-end restaurants and a decade to reach mass-market consumers.

“You’ll be able to create food you can store and transport easily,” said Ido Savir, chief executive of Israeli firm SuperMeat, whose cultured chicken will be kosher and halaal.

The technology will help feed people in developing countries who now consume almost no meat or have a poor-quality diet, he added.

Other entrepreneurs are eyeing protein-rich bugs, already eaten by billions, which could easily be bred in cities on urban farms that don’t take up large slabs of pricey real estate.

New York’s Terreform ONE has developed a futuristic modular shelter and cricket farm, crowned with spiky quills, ideal for cultivating high-protein crickets that can be ground into flour.

“You can see protein changing because it can be produced inside cities,” Mitchell Joachim, Terreform cofounder, said.

“It makes a lot of sense to do it in the case of insects – pound for pound it’s a crushing difference. “It’s almost 1 000 times less water, 300 times less carbon. “It’s incredibly cheap to make bugs in cities.”

Affordable pricing and astute marketing are key to convincing consumers to try radically new foods.

Particularly, as they find it harder to ignore the ethical and environmental impact of their purchases. “It’s always money; it’s availability,” Morgaine Gaye, a food futurologist, said. “We’d like to think it’s about how good it tastes, but you’ve first got to get someone to pick it off the shelf.”

The “celebrity cool factor” can make a big difference to sales, if companies can get stars to endorse brands.

Lorenzo Giovanni Bellù, a senior economist with the FAO, said: “We have a lot of things to do before eating insects. – Reuters

The technology will help feed people in developing countries who now consume almost no meat