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When you hear ‘fermentation’, you may think of the spice of bubbly kimchi, the smell
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of rising bread, or the tang of a good beer.
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These techniques have been part of human life for millenia.
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But today, fermentation is being hacked for the food of the future.
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Those tiny microbes are helping us solve the global challenge of how to produce more and
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more food for more and more people…and we’re not just talking about stuff like bread.
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Like one of my favorite bacterial genuses, Lactobacillus, let’s break this down.
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When microorganisms like bacteria or fungi do fermentation, they’re breaking down some
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kind of sugar, like glucose, into smaller building blocks—it's how they make energy
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for themselves.
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But we‘ve been harnessing that process since the dawn of civilization, using these microbes—and
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their byproducts—to make tasty stuff for ourselves, too.
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When it comes to food, there are three main types of this process:
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Lactic acid fermentation, which is used to make things like yogurt, pickles, and sourdough
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bread.
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Ethanol/alcohol fermentation, which is used to make things like wine, beer, and more.
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And acetic acid fermentation, which makes things like vinegars and kombucha
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When we talk about fermentation for the future of food, we mean something a little different.
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The traditional fermentation we’ve been talking about can be used to produce non-meat
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‘meat’ products, like fermenting soybeans into tempeh, which is a vegan meat alternative.
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But there’s also something called whole biomass fermentation, where the microbes themselves
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are the food.
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For example, Quorn is a company takes filamentous fungi
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and ferments them into what's called mycoprotein.
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So there fermented fungi are the protein-packed product.
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Then we get into real sci-fi territory with precision fermentation.
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This is where we can tell a microbe to produce the exact enzymes and proteins that make up
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real animal products.
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For example, a company called Perfect Day takes the genomic sequence that we know codes
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for beta-lactoglobulin (a type of whey protein).
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They can "copy" and "paste" that sequence into the genome of a fungus.
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This fungus now has the instructions to create whey as part of its fermentation process.
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And because it’s not coming from an animal, this milk doesn’t contain any hormones or
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antibiotics.
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That's because these problematic compounds often end up
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in traditional meats and animal products to address
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issues that come with modern industrial animal agriculture.
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But that’s kind of a whole ‘nother video.
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This precision production pipeline can be used to make all kinds of different molecules
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that are a part of many animal products, like eggs and cheese.
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These proteins and enzymes can be used to add flavor or texture to an animal-free product,
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like with Impossible Foods.
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They use yeast as little factories to produce a molecule called heme, the compound that
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gives meat its meaty taste and that makes their plant-based burgers ‘bleed’.
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Precision fermentation could also solve challenges that other alternative meat endeavors are
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facing. For example,
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cell-based agriculture aims to create meat by growing animal cells outside of the animal.
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So, this involves taking a small, harmless sample from a cow,
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and then proliferating those cells in the lab
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into something like…a steak.
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Fermentation could produce the key components that keep those cultivated meat cells healthy
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and thriving as they proliferate.
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But an actual animal has been using their muscles.
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The forces of motion and gravity have been acting on that muscle and forming it in really
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key ways that are extremely difficult to recreate in a petri dish.
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So, fermentation could be again used to produce things like collagen and fibronectin.
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These proteins could hold those lab-grown cells together in a way that may more accurately
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mimic the steak we know and love, structurally and texturally.
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So, all three of these fermentation techniques present a huge opportunity to solve some of
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the world’s biggest challenges.
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Like an ever-expanding world population requiring more and more food, especially protein.
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Fermentation-based food technologies could provide that protein, but without the land
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and water use, the pollution, and the greenhouse gas emissions of traditional animal agriculture.
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Plus—it’s good news for the animals too.
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But the cost of taking it to the big time can be astronomical, especially for precision
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fermentation.
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For one fermentation-based milk company, for example, the cost of producing enough milk
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to go commercial would result in a product that costs 4 times its animal-based competitor.
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So lots more research needs to be done into how to get the absolute most out of those
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little suckers—maximizing their efficiency as tiny biofactories,
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while also trying to minimize cost.
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And the question still remains: would you buy alternative protein like this?
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Would you eat it?
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One of the biggest hurdles may be convincing people
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that meat or milk or other animal-free animal products
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that come from microbial fermentation are just as tasty and safe and nutritious as the real thing.
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So, I guess that’s a job for us microbe enthusiasts to get on, stat.
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If you want more on alternative food production, check out this video here, and if you have
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questions about this topic or others like it, let us know down in the comments below.
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Make sure to subscribe to Seeker for all your microbial newsflashes, and as always, thanks
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for watching.
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I’ll see ya next time.
