Our current food supply systems aren’t working. Large numbers of people globally are going hungry, there is inequity of access to healthy, nutritious food and it’s harming the planet too. With theworld’s population predicted to increase to 10 billion people by 2050, there is a pressing need to find more sustainable and healthy supplies of food. In this article, we highlight the latest research on developing foods for the future.

The challenge with our food supply chain

“有一个论点是，我们的食品供应链模型并不特别适合今天，但我认为更重要的问题是它将在将来满足我们的需求。”Claire Bomkamp，专门从事栽培肉类和海鲜的高级科学家Good Food Institute, a global non-profit organization working to accelerate alternative protein innovation.

“The food industry is a complex system that can’t be viewed through the lens of individual challenges such as greenhouse gas emissions or fish biodiversity loss. The question is really how do we build a system that will meet our future needs, as growing populations and incomes lead to increased demands for meat and seafood?”

A 2018 meta-analysis estimated that food production releases more than one-quarter of all human-caused greenhouse gases and that agricultural irrigation accounts for about two-thirds of all fresh water used by humans.¹The same report estimates that 37% of the planet’s land area is already dedicated to food production and, according to the联合国食品和农业组织, just 7% of our fisheries are “underexploited”. This shows how scarce the planet’s resources already are and how little opportunity there is to scale up our seafood production using current methods.

Solutions for a sustainable food supply

In 2019, international researchers proposed the EAT-Lancet diet, a meal plan to feed 2050’s estimated population of 10 billion people sustainably.²The plan called for extensively reduced protein consumption – around 200 g/day per person – of which meat, fish and eggs comprise just 84 g with the remainder made up from legumes and nuts. It was designed to sustain not just the planet, but also people’s health.

“许多慢性疾病与我们的饮食有关。”David Julian McClements, distinguished professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Food Science, USA. “People have been told for years to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, but many people do not have the time, money or inclination to do it. So, we need to look at how we can make processed food convenient, fast and affordable, but also healthy and sustainable for everyone.”

McClements说，从基因编辑到提高农作物产量和弹性，到使用机器人，自动化和人工智能来提高供应链效率，有许多潜在的解决方案。但是，不可避免的事实之一是，我们目前和未来对动物源蛋白的消费根本是不可持续的。这就是为什么像McClements这样的研究人员正在努力设计替代品味的动物食品，这些食物可以以相同的方式烹饪，但对环境和我们的健康有益。

Plant-based food alternatives

Until recently, McClement’s research focused on using nanotechnology to encapsulate vitamins and nutraceuticals to keep them stable in food products and increase nutrient bioavailability. But as the importance of alternative protein sources became apparent, his research team switched to designingplant-based foods利用食物生物化学如何影响味道，质地和外观的知识。^3,4

“The biggest challenge is that animal products have unique proteins that are different from those you find in plants,” explains McClements. “In meat, you have these soft, fibrous proteins that give the desirable texture and mouthfeel when you chew, whereas plant proteins are spherical, nano-meter size protein balls. We need to coax those balls into strings to simulate the texture and microstructure of real meat products.”

They achieve this by using soft matter physics principles. “If we mix the spherical proteins with polysaccharides, they undergo phase-separation, organizing into two layers,” says McClements. “When this mixture is stirred gently, it forms fibrous structures that we can cross-link with a food-grade enzyme, locking the fibers into place.” This mimics the microstructure of meat, but it’s just the first step. Further development is needed to achieve the texture, appearance and mouthfeel of a meat product. “The brown color from cooking meat comes from theMaillard reactionwhen proteins and carbohydrates interact with heat, for example, whereas the juiciness of a food depends on the water-holding properties of the protein network when you cook it. We can then fortify these foods with omega-3 fatty acids or vitamins or reformulate them to avoid blood sugar spikes, helping people managing their diabetes.”

Cultured meats and seafood

Another approach iscultivating meatand fish from animal cell lines. In fact, there are now more than 70 start-ups focused on developing cultured meat inputs, services and products according to theGFI’s 2020 State of the Industry report，在2020年末，栽培的肉在餐厅菜单上首次亮相新加坡approved it as an ingredientin a chicken nuggets product.

Bomkamp说：“我认为GFI在过去几年中取得的最激动人心的事情之一是建立一个研究人员社区，这些研究人员正在研究耕种的海鲜和耕种肉的不同方面。”许多海鲜研究仍然是早期的，但是GFI现在已经资助了广泛的项目cultivated meatand new grants for teams working onnanofiber scaffolds for cultivating shrimp, andalgae scaffolds for cultivating fish。

One of the key challenges in developing cultured meat and seafood products is creating an appropriate scaffold for the cells to grow on, which give the end-product the texture, mouthfeel and appearance of wild meats or fish. “If you take a scaffold that you designed for beef and try to grow seafood cells on it, will that work? Perhaps, but it might not be great from a taste and texture perspective,” explains Bomkamp. “The geometry of fish and mammalian muscle is different: with mammalian muscle you often see features such as marbling, but with fish, if you picture a fillet of salmon there are those white lines of fat and connective tissue, and the fibers are oriented 90 degrees from that structure. It’s not only the design of the scaffold that is important, but the fabrication techniques, and developing these in a way that's scalable.”

Recent advances include development of a cell line from fish fins that resemble fibroblasts but appear to differentiate into many different cell types.⁵“This could be game-changing for the field if it turns out it’s possible to take an easy-growing fish fibroblast cell line and differentiate it into the muscle and fat cells needed to make a fish fillet,” says Bomkamp.

Future challenges and opportunities

没有一个单一的障碍可以阻碍开发栽培肉的方式，更多的是从成本和规模的角度来看的一系列驱动因素，即细胞培养，媒体和生物反应器的进步。Bomkamp说：“媒体可能是当今最大的挑战，但相对容易解决。”“下一个挑战将是设计低成本，易于消毒的食品生物反应器。”

还需要考虑细胞，生长因子和养分等原始材料。“我们可以整天考虑替代蛋白质技术，但是我们要在哪里获得投入？”Bomkamp说。“替代海鲜将需要大量的omega-3脂肪酸来源，因此我们需要能够扩大生产的供应商，无论是来自藻类耕作，精确发酵，植物分子养殖还是无细胞的系统。”

“收获后，我们还需要了解栽培的海鲜和肉类会发生什么。传统的肉不仅是肌肉，而且肌肉已经经历了各种衰老过程，并且受到各种因素前和屠宰的影响。一个主要的挑战是，我们如何将其构建为通过细胞系中的食品设施中种植的产品。”

There are also importantsynergies with other aspects of sustainable food production。“Where cultivated meat becomes a really good solution is when we produce it with clean energy. Alternative protein advocates need to be also supporting clean energy andvice versa,” says Bomkamp. “One of the big negatives of conventional meat production, particularly terrestrial meat, is changes in land use that destroy forests and their ability to capture carbon. If we can reverse that trend and produce the food we need with less land, what opportunities does that present? We need to think ahead to ensure policies and incentives allow extra land to be used in a way that's going to benefit the climate.”

But with these challenges come unique opportunities for a new generation of researchers with wide-ranging skill sets. “It’s easy to think of this as just a science or business problem, when in reality we need people from a variety of backgrounds with different interests – from computer scientists to model bioreactor designs to chefs who can cook these products,” says Bomkamp.

“It's a very exciting area to be working in at the moment,” agrees McClements. “I've never had so many students who want to work in the lab because everyone's really passionate about these plant-based foods and using them to try and improve the health of people and the sustainability of the environment.”

References

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