Sustainable food alternatives are changing our plates and palates, but are we ready?

Innovative food production methods are being showcased at the Science Museum in London, focusing on sustainability and reducing the environmental impact of agriculture. One highlighted development is an oil produced from food waste using a special yeast, which offers a sustainable alternative to palm oil without contributing to deforestation, habitat loss, or labor exploitation. This oil can be used in products like chocolate and peanut butter and is made from industrial food waste that would otherwise be discarded.

The exhibition also explores other future foods, such as cell-grown meat and genetically modified crops, placing these technologies in the broader context of humanity’s long history of selective breeding. With agriculture responsible for nearly 30% of global carbon emissions and facing challenges from climate change, these innovations are presented as potential solutions to make food systems more sustainable.

These future foods could help the planet

This is an oil used to make everyday foods like peanut butter and chocolate, and it's made from garbage, specifically food waste. It's supposed to taste the same as using other oils for other peanut butters and chocolates, but this oil has a few extra perks. Mainly, it doesn't cause deforestation or loss of animal habitats, nor does it exploit labour, all of which are common problems of the palm oil industry. We are here at the Science Museum in London at the Future of Food exhibition, a free exhibition that explores the sustainable practices of food production, lab-grown meats versus factory farming, and sort of looks towards the future of bioengineering and technology, and the impact that it has on our plates and the impact it has on the planet. Pushing into new food science can also push the limits of what you may find appetising. Take yeast, for example. It has a long history in aiding food fermentation, and is one of humanity's oldest food technologies. Here's a three and a half thousand year old piece of bread discovered in Queen Hatshepsut's tomb in Egypt. The sourdough starter has come a long way, but now yeast has a new job in making a sustainable substitute for palm oil. Palm oil and other oils are responsible for a very large amount of greenhouse gas emissions, and with a growing population we need to find new ways to feed people and to support our food system. What we're doing here is we're culturing a yeast, a rather special yeast, a wine yeast, called Mechnikovia polcherrima. Now this grows on food wastes, on grass clippings, and we can create an oil equivalent to palm oil, equivalent to cocoa butter, or even rapeseed oil from this yeast as we culture it. So we grow it up on the waste feedstock to be able to have maximum biomass, and it makes a little oil droplet inside the cell. We break the cell open, it releases the oil, and then we can use that in all sorts of products from chocolate and margarine, all the way through to breads and peanut butters that we're displaying in the museum. Yes, this oil comes from industrial food waste, foods discarded during production before reaching the customer. It may not sound too appetising. The team says it's safe to eat, but there's a chance consumers might be too grossed out to try it. I think we're quite sort of detached from the reality of how food is produced anyway, so cell-grown meat is a topic that sometimes people think, oh I wouldn't try that, it feels a bit disgusting. But when you kind of think about the reality of industrial factory farming, the technology there is like so cruel and environmentally problematic, and it's not really any more natural. And considering sort of 85% of the meat eastern UK is factory farmed, when you compare the two different approaches there, you could sort of re-evaluate what you think about in terms of disgust, and yeah, what's natural. Cell-grown meat is also spotlighted at the exhibition, as are GMO foods, which have been facing controversies in the past four decades. We showed Genetic Engineering how it emerged as a technology in the 1980s as GM, but it's also a technology that's been going on for millennia in the way that we've been breeding and selecting for particular plants. On display we have some ancient wheat grains, which are an early example of humans domesticating wheat. So they selected, over many years, wheat varieties that didn't drop their grains so easily, so you could harvest them better. So we're quite keen to put Genetic Engineering in this much longer history of selective breeding. We're also looking at alternatives to farming, and how biotech can kind of maybe engineer plants that don't need fertiliser. There's lots of different ways of looking at how we might solve these big global problems. The agriculture and food industry is currently facing multiple challenges, including climate change. The increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are shifting crop calendars, contributing to food insecurity in economically vulnerable areas and communities facing conflict. And sometimes the way we cultivate and distribute food contributes to the problem. Researchers estimate that 29.7% of all carbon emissions come from the agriculture sector, and current industrial farming practices require excessive water use and can lead to deforestation and biodiversity loss. It's a real garbage situation that maybe soon could get a little better, thanks to solutions like this oil, made from garbage. But would you try foods made from waste? Or would you be happier not knowing how they're made? Let us know in the comments. And if you want more stories about the technology shaping our future, subscribe to our channel.

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