How Tomorrow’s Technology Will Help Feed the Planet

Solving our challenge of feeding 9-plus billion people by 2050 will take many great minds, ideas, approaches, and policies. But we will not get there without science and technology, according to the latest interview series on Promising Technology from IFT’s FutureFood 2050 publishing initiative. Topic’s in this series include high-pressuring processing, smart implements for agriculture, cultured chicken meat, synthetic biology, gene cataloging, and plant waste utilization.

Biomedical engineer Amit Gefen never intended to become a pioneer in food technology, let alone a global leader in creating test-tube chicken meat. But his work in obesity research unwittingly led him down a path he expects will lead to the first steps toward a commercial lab-grown chicken breast by the end of 2015. 

It’s a tall order for the Tel Aviv University professor, because concocting a cultured chicken breast is considerably trickier than growing beef in the lab, such as the much-heralded “test-tube burger” unveiled by Maastricht University researchers in 2013. Rather than gathering small fibers of cow muscle into one big chunk of meat, Gefen is trying to make a whole chicken breast—a long-term project to be sure.

Why a chicken breast? “It’s a popular choice for a main course in many cultures and countries, especially in Israel,” he says. And chicken accounts for nearly a third of the world’s total meat consumption. 

Gefen began the initial $25,000 cultured chicken feasibility study in January 2015 and is due to present The Modern Agriculture Foundation, which is sponsoring his research, with a “recipe” for culturing chicken cells by the end of 2015. Gefen says he will need to culture the chicken cells together in three dimensions to create the tissue. That requires a “scaffold” of sorts, something usually made from collagen from a live animal. As part of his research, Gefen is investigating whether the scaffold can be made from the cells themselves, meaning no live animals would be involved at any stage.

Cultured meat could be the perfect food of the future, says Gefen, “where you can control the nutritional value and the amount of chemicals and antibiotics so you can minimize their effect on the human body. Our goal is to use tissue engineering to create co-cultures—cultures with different types of cells—[so] we will be able to control the [meat] texture and diversify it, something you cannot do when you grow a chicken in a coop or a cow in a barn. You can insert fat cells and grow colonies of fat cells within muscles. It isn’t trivial, but the level of juiciness will be in our hands.” 

Producing enough food and generating enough sustainable energy are two of our biggest challenges for the future. Y.-H. Percival Zhang, a Virginia Tech biological systems engineering professor, intends to solve both of them with a new process that turns plentiful plant matter into two products: edible starch and biofuel. 

Zhang’s idea centers on cellulose, the compound that gives structure to the cell walls of plants. Like many other bioengineers around the world, Zhang has been researching methods to convert cellulose—found in easy-to-grow perennial grasses, or agricultural waste like corn-husks—into biofuels such as ethanol. The basic process involves using enzymes to break down cellulose into glucose, or sugar, which is then fermented to produce ethanol.

Zhang’s light-bulb moment struck as he was thinking about the chemical similarities between cellulose and starch. He wondered whether he could turn cellulose into starch rather than sugar. Not only did the project work, Zhang says, but it turned out to be easier than anyone had expected. He published his method in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013, a mere two years after the idea first struck.

Zhang’s process isn’t the first to turn cellulose into a starch that could be used to make all sorts of things: biodegradable plastics, dissolvable coatings for drug capsules, animal feedstock—and, eventually, human food. What makes his method different, he says, is yield. In contrast to existing methods, his process converts cellulose into starch and ethanol without wasting any sugar molecules, he says. That results in higher yields and, he hopes, lower production costs.

The final stamp of approval for human consumption may be a long way off, he admits. But in the meantime, the starch could still benefit global food production. If the starch were used in animal feed-stocks, more of the crops produced by traditional agriculture could be used to feed people instead of cows and pigs. There are non-food applications too: More than half of biodegradable plastic is made of starch, Zhang notes. “We could use [our starch] to replace that natural starch [used in plastics], giving more room for natural starch to be used as food,” he says. 

“The food issue, in my opinion, is just a small branch of the energy issue,” Zhang says. “If we have enough energy, we can always make food.”

To read these and other stories in the Promising Technology series, please visit www.futurefood2050.com.