Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? This eternally-confounding question now has an answer—that is, if just the egg white counts.
In a continued expansion of the list of animal products now being made without animals (such as salmon, bacon, steak, and milk, to name a few), San Francisco-based Every Company just released its Every EggWhite.
The company says its product is identical to the real thing but made fully synthetically, without any chickens.
This is possible with a technique known as precision fermentation, simply defined as industrial-scale brewing of organisms to produce specific compounds. microbes act as tiny cell factories and are directed to produce a specific product.
To get a little more specific: scientists create genetically engineered microorganisms like yeast, algae, or bacteria, programming them to pump out certain proteins or fats when they’re fermented—that is, fed sugar and allowed to grow.
The process is essentially the same as that used to make beer, kombucha, kimchi, or any other fermented food, and similar to alcohol, the value here is in the byproduct of the process rather than in the thing being fermented.
