Food Technology Sustainability and the Future of Food
The world is quickly becoming more polluted while a greater number of people go hungry. But advances in food tech could help save both the Earth and its hungry inhabitants.
A surprising source of pollution
The small plastic stickers on fruit and vegetables create a stupendous amount of waste and emit countless tons of greenhouse gases. Branding the produce with a laser is a much more eco-friendly alternative. The laser only removes a tiny bit of pigment from the outermost layer, so it doesn’t affect taste, texture, appearance or shelf-life. And since it’s a relatively simple technology, consumers won’t have to pay more for their produce.
Laser-branded fruits and vegetables are appearing at grocery stores in England, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. Sweden’s leading grocery retailer, ICA, estimates it saves 135 miles of plastic by switching to laser labeling. Germany’s Edeka can reduce plastic consumption by more than 50 tons a year, in a country that throws away 18 million tons of packaging annually. Overall, laser technology cuts carbon emissions by 99% compared to traditional sticker manufacture.
How silk can reduce global food waste
More than one-third of the global food supply is wasted every year, while 10% of the population doesn’t have enough to eat. But a novel solution was recently, and accidentally, discovered during a cooking competition at the MIT labs. A competition to decide who could best use silk in a recipe.
Assistant professor Benedetto Marelli inadvertently left a silk-covered strawberry out for a week and returned to find it still edible. This eureka moment inspired Marelli and other Boston scientists to form Cambridge Crops, with the common purpose of advancing silk-based food preservation.
Silk is one of the simplest, cheapest solutions. It doesn’t require genetic experimentation like other food preservation projects, and it does away with wasteful packaging. Plus, it’s cheap. All it takes is water and salt to refine the silk proteins. Once applied, the ultra-thin coating keeps food fresh up to 200% longer without refrigeration during transport or storage.
Turning waste into something useful
Brewing the world’s favorite early morning pick-me-up — coffee — produces more than 550,000 tons of grounds each year. These grounds are dumped at landfills, where they sit and release methane, a major greenhouse gas.
But coffee grounds aren’t totally spent. They retain about a third of their oils and aromatic compounds and a significant amount of calories. Calories equal energy, so an English coffee recycling company called “bio-bean” collects grounds from UK businesses and transforms them into fire logs.
The dense, compact “coffee logs” are each made from 25 cups of coffee waste. And they’re more efficient than current combustibles. They burn 20% hotter and 20% longer than kiln-dried wood. Compared to coal, they leave no carbon footprint. And recycling coffee grounds generates 80% less methane than sending them to rot in landfills.
Killing two birds with one stone
Berlin-based Kaffeeform is using coffee grounds to reduce the reliance on another polluting product: paper cups. Paper cups take decades to decompose. And in the U.S., about 120 billion of them are thrown out every year.
Kaffeeform employs bicycle couriers to collect more than 100 pounds of coffee grounds every day from local cafes and roasters. Only raw plant compounds are added, including cell wall-forming biopolymers, to create a pliable mix. An espresso cup and saucer, for example, requires about 6 cups of grounds.
The result is a plastic-free, 100% plant-based, fully biodegradable product that emits a light coffee aroma. In the future, Kaffeeform hopes to scale-up the technique to larger items, like furniture.
The evolution of alternative meat
The world consumes more than 100 billion pounds of beef annually. But every pound of beef requires more than 20 pounds of feed and 10,000 liters of water. And it produces over 20 pounds of greenhouse gases.
Animal-free meat alternatives could slash those numbers. So it’s no wonder that the alt-meat sector is growing faster than any other food industry and could reach $140 billion annually by 2030.
Israeli animal-free meat producer, Redefine Meat, uses 3D-printing to create meat-less steaks, reducing environmental impact by 95%. The “Alt-Steak” is made solely from plant ingredients, including soy and pea proteins, coconut and sunflower fats, and beetroot for color.
By digitally mapping more than 70 “sensorial parameters,” Redefine Meat matched the fat distribution and structure of real steak, producing something that looks, tastes and feels real, without any cholesterol.
3D-printing could feed the world
The global market for 3D-food-printing is on the rise by about 46% per year and could hit $525.6 million by 2023. It’s easy to see why: 3D-printing ensures consistent food quality, only requires a few simple ingredients and is unaffected by climate change.
It also offers almost endless variety. Food printers can replicate the microscopic structures of “natural” foods to perfectly match taste and mouthfeel. Printers also allow unprecedented culinary customization, creating foods with altered textures or specific nutritive qualities for people with specialized dietary needs.
And 3D “bioprinters” promise real meat, by depositing layers of live animal cells so that researchers can create cow-steaks without ever harming the cow. All that’s required is harvesting some muscle stem cells via biopsy while the animal is under anesthesia. The stem cells are stimulated to proliferate and grow into tissues, yielding biologically real meat. This technique could produce the equivalent of 80,000 Quarter Pounders from a single tissue sample.
The future doesn’t have to look so bleak
With the current state of global affairs, innovative food technologies like these are necessary in reversing some of the environmental damage done by major industries. But as long as scientific creativity is allowed to flourish, there’s always hope.