Food & Beverage Reporter August 2018

THOUGHT FOR FOOD
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cells that are harvested by biopsy
from donor livestock and then
cultured in a lab for a few weeks.
In vitro meat could greatly
reduce the environmental impact
of large-scale animal husbandry.
Some estimates believe that
greenhouse gas emissions,
most notably methane, could be
reduced by 96% if it were adopted
large scale.
The technology is being
developed by companies like JUST
and Memphis Meats in the USA,
who are prototyping “clean” meat
balls, chicken nuggets
and sausages.
Of course, public opinion and
the market's “invisible hand” will
ultimately dictate the commercial
success of this new industry. Some polls
indicate that a significant percentage of
people are open to eating “clean meat”.
It is currently very expensive
compared to the more traditional
method of growing meat, with costs of
around $2 400 to make 450 grams of
beef. As the technology matures and
efficiency improves, these costs will fall
dramatically.
7. Vertical farming
Vertical farming could be the future of
large-scale agriculture. With more and
more people moving into cities and
traditional agriculture requiring large
tracts of land, the solution to future crop
production could be to farm “upwards”.
Although initially considered to be a
utopian ideal, vertical farms are springing
up around the world, including SA.
These kinds of farms generally fall
into one of two categories - hydroponics
(plants are grown in a basin of nutrientenriched
water) or aeroponics (roots
are exposed and sprayed with nutrientenriched
mist). Neither requires any
soil, and artificial lighting tends to also
be incorporated unless sunlight is in
abundance.
These kinds of farms have some
clear advantages over more traditional
means of agriculture. Physical ground
space is minimized, all-year-round
farming is possible and agrochemicals
are eliminated.
SA’s vertical farming pioneer, Jacques van Buuren,
featured in our April 2016 issue.
8. The Blockchain
Whenever you hear the term blockchain
you can be forgiven for instantly thinking
of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. But
another application of the technology is
to improve traceability in the agri-food
supply chain.
Being a distributed and collective
public ledger system, blockchain has the
potential for making every transaction in
an agricultural supply chain transparent,
traceable, verifiable and require no third
party oversight. The implications for food
safety are huge.
Food giants like Wal-Mart, Nestle and
Unilever are already working to apply
blockchains to their food supply chains.
According to Forbes, a trial blockchain
system can trace an exact farm supplier
for a particular food product in two
seconds - a task that would normally take
over six days to complete.
9. Personalised nutrition
Personalised Nutrition is the concept
of tailoring your diet to to meet the way
your genetic makeup predisposes you to
react to different foods.
It’s called Nutrigenomics, and
companies like DNAFit, Nutrigenomix and
Habit are offering eating plans matched
to your unique DNA.
Once this discipline becomes more
sophisticated, it is widely accepted that
food and nutrition supply will move away
from a one-size-fits-all approach
to a truly unique and personally
tailored eating plan.
10. Plant-based
proteins
Although “conventional” sources
of protein like animals, eggs,
and fish are excellent sources
of amino acids, so too are some
plant-based foods.
Unlike animal-based protein,
plant-protein is easier to grow
and less damaging to the
environment, just like insectbased
protein.
Whilst soy protein products
have been around for decades,
there’s increasing interest in
extracting high quality protein from
plants like chickpeas, lentils, barley,
almonds, peas, rice, quinoa, spinach,
peanuts, and kidney beans. Companies
like Impossible Burger in the US have
developed meat-like analogs (burgers,
sausages etc) from plant sources that
“bleed” and taste like the “real thing”,
and are gaining speedy consumer
acceptance as the vegan/flexitarian diet
trend gains momentum.
11. Cellular agriculture
Cellular agriculture is often touted as a
means to end to the post-animal bioeconomy.
It’s a means of agricultural
production built on cell cultures
rather than large-scale production like
traditional farms. This process comes in
two forms:
• acellular products and
• cellular products.
The former are products made from
organic molecules like protein and fat but
contain no living cells. Cellular products,
on the other hand, are primarily made
from, or contain, living or once-living cells.
The final products are essentially the
same as regular foods harvested from
animals but are made in a very different
way indeed.
Acellular products, for instance,
use microbes like yeast or bacteria.
By inserting the relevant genes into
something like a yeast cell, the colony
could be “programmed” to produce,
en masse, regular “animal products”
like milk.
8 AUGUST 2018 | FOOD & BEVERAGE REPORTER www.fbreporter.co.za