What if people who shared the distaste for today’s food system could encourage the building, seed by seed and cell by cell, of ways to provide a delicious, healthy, diverse array of foods with markedly less cruelty and environmental damage?
Heretofore niche proteins, such as insects and seaweeds, are being explored not just for their gourmet potential—which is higher than most might believe—but also as ways to refashion food chains.
Yeasts are being programmed to grow proteins that make a soy-protein patty cook and bleed in the way a minced cow does.
Inland saline aquaculture promises to provide fresh seafood to people thousands of miles from an ocean.
Crops are being grown in soil-free shipping containers just blocks from the city dwellers who will eventually eat them, rather than half a world away.
Cells taken from a living animal in a simple biopsy are being used to grow meat in bioreactors, providing familiar sources of protein without the need for slaughter or industrial-scale farming and the cruelty and health hazards those things entail.
Immense hurdles remain. It is one thing to grow a hamburger in a tank, another to get people to eat it, and a third to provide competitively priced tankburgers by the billion.
