Start-ups are trying to revolutionise the food industry and have received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from venture capitalists to do so.
Many are motivated by a desire to wean humanity off meat and other foods that have big environmental and social impacts, whether in the methane emissions and land use of cattle herds or additives in typical processed food.
"The traditional food system is broken in every way," says Seth Bannon, founding partner at Fifty Years, an early stage venture fund in San Francisco that has invested in food technology companies. "It's terrible for the environment, it's economically unfavourable and it's not great for human health."
The best-known of these would-be disrupters is also the most extreme in its approach. Soylent was founded in 2013 by a group of Silicon Valley engineers trying to cut the time and money they spent buying and preparing food. The company has expanded from producing a powder that was mixed with water to ready-made drinks and nutritional "food bar" snacks.
Yeah, those damn farmers are fragging the ecosystem with their amazing production and low cost. The bastards. We better fix that! By marketing shit that is really and truly called "Soylent."
A reminder my friends. This year these people are fricking looneytune nutjobs on the fringe of the fringe. In ten years, given the slavish following of the media to yet another Good Cause, you will be seeing this shit on the school lunch program. And I do mean shit, note above that the Nordic Food Lab is talking about processing and including animal poo in their offerings.Insects, blood and faeces may not sound particularly appetitising, but they are among the produce we should consider eating if we want our food to be sustainable and healthy, according to a team of chefs and scientists in Denmark.
The Nordic Food Lab was set up on a boat in the Danish capital of Copenhagen in 2008 by Michelin-starred Noma head chef René Redzepi and culinary entrepreneur Claus Mayer to better understand the flavours and the gastronomic potential of Scandinavia.
But in almost a decade – and now based at a laboratory at the University of Copenhagen – its researchers are travelling the world to piece together a holistic approach to eating. Scientists, artists chefs, designers and specialists in education are all rolling their sleeves up and getting stuck in to the cause.
4 comments:
when they make meat eating illegal i'll be feasting on grain fed long pig.
"I went into another chamber, but was ready to hasten back, being almost overcome with a horrible stink. My conductor pressed me forward, conjuring me in a whisper “to give no offence, which would be highly resented;” and therefore I durst not so much as stop my nose. The projector of this cell was the most ancient student of the academy; his face and beard were of a pale yellow; his hands and clothes daubed over with filth. When I was presented to him, he gave me a close embrace, a compliment I could well have excused. His employment, from his first coming into the academy, was an operation to reduce human excrement to its original food, by separating the several parts, removing the tincture which it receives from the gall, making the odour exhale, and scumming off the saliva. He had a weekly allowance, from the society, of a vessel filled with human ordure, about the bigness of a Bristol barrel."
from Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world by Jonathan Swift
"Soylent" is not as sinister as the name might suggest, nor is it's inventor a brain dead hippie trying to eliminate meat. I've read the guy's website and even tried a homebrew version. It's basically a protein shake with the macros tweaked into a more complete meal replacement. I think a powdered version would be a big seller among the prepper types, unfortunate naming choices aside.
Mister_V, evidently you missed the part where Soylent's products have all been recalled because they caused violent vomiting. Upon review analysis they could not identify what was wrong with the stuff, so now they're looking for alergic reactions.
This is not protein powder we're talking about here. This is all about making "food" out of bacteria, plankton, cellulose and other not-food type substrates. It is fantastically dangerous, and extremely ill advised.
Because -nobody- understands the human digestion system completely, much less the human immune system. There are plenty of people out there that will die if they eat peanut butter. How many will be found that have that level of immune response to an new and unique molecule the company did not know was being made in their cellulose digesting gene-spliced anaeroboic bug plant? You get my drift.
Not to mention some of these fruitloops are making "food" out of animal droppings, and they're doing it because Global Warming.
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