Precision Fermentation: The Future of Sustainable Food Systems

[00:00:00]hey it's Mike here and today animal protein without animals silk without silk worms heem iron without animal Blood and Honey without bees even palm oil without creating deforestation or killing orangutans and so on and how this new food sector could very well be how the food supply shifts to vegan or at least more vegan we're going to talk about what has already occurred which is incredible as well as this huge mounting moment that we're seeing especially this year so we're going to look at the technology behind all of these alternative proteins and other alternative nutrients largely Precision fermentation but also some other methods we'll learn how those work we're not going to particularly be talking about cultured meat other than an update at the end because there is some pretty incredible stuff happening there as well so let's just go so we have a pretty large umbrella of what can be considered alternative proteins alternative fats other alternative nutrients but there's one that's really break away from the pack and does not have enough attention around it people do not know enough about it and of course that is that Precision fermentation so how does that vary from normal fermentation what the heck is going on here well from the good food Institute who's supporting these alternative food methods they break it down into three types of course that traditional fermentation we're talking about beer wine yogurt cheese and then we also have biomass fermentation which uses the high protein content and rapid growth of microorganisms to efficiently make large amounts of protein rich foods one product prodct you may have heard of is corn and they are using filamentous fungi to grow protein quite quickly sometimes they have vegan options I wish they were all vegan some contain egg whites though another type of biomass fermentation is air protein I did an entire video on that and that is using particular types of bacteria to essentially create protein out of thin air using hydrogen as a fuel this is a way that you can even skip plants getting protein just going directly to bacteria so now those plants feel pain people finally have an ethical way to eat protein oh wait they never actually cared it was just an excuse to eat animals but that brings us to the final one the main one here and that is precision fermentation and this is where we are taking microbes whether they are yeast or bacteria and doing some Gene editing so that you can insert a gene to make a particular molecule and have it sort of just squirted outside of its cell membrane and then you can filter it out skim it off the top and then you have what would otherwise be refined product that would be really inefficient have a lot of byproducts use more energy Etc as they say you can use this to make specific proteins enzymes flavor molecules vitamins pigments and fats so if what you want to make is relatively simple you can probably do it through Precision fermentation so oh yeah ladies out there you can probably Precision ferment a man quite easily starting a new company called fermented this is Todd your new boyfriend okay stupid joke let's keep going and we're about to dive a little bit deeper into the history of this because it's fascinating but first I need to mention that yes I am still in Barcelona and one of the cool things about being Barcelona is I got to meet Helena who has the passion project Precision fermentation food.com just major credit to Helena for doing a ton of research and helping out a lot with this video and she pointed to the history of precision fermentation as a testament to how people really are accepting of this technology in general and that brings us to insulin when we first discovered insulin we were extracting it directly from animals I mean originally it was from a dog in the first experiment and they described it as thick brown muck we later started using cows and pigs to make insulin for diabetic people and disturbingly a kilogram of insulin required harvesting the pancreases of 50,000 cows and pigs which is according to the FDA but around 1980 we essentially programmed eoli to create insulin for us through this fermentation process in large Vats and before we knew it in the year 2 99% of all insulin that was used was from Precision fermentation and people weren't like I don't want that I want the animal insulin no give me the thick brown Muk over here which of course it being thick brown mck shows that there was a lot more in it I'm sure it was more refined past that but even more modern animal-based insulin that we had led to allergic reactions other dangers which is just a point for how much more pure this process is and you might be thinking that's pharmaceutical acceptance whatever that's completely different from food well we have another great food example that was accepted and that has to do with renit in cheese making and we're going to cover what's going on in the dairy industry in a bit which is huge renit which curdles the milk separates the curd from the way into Precision fermentation food.com historically we obtained it in the form of paste by scraping the stomach Linings of slaughtered unweaned calves but in the 1990s we edited the genes of microbes so that they could create renit and now know 80% of renit is made this way but fast forwarding a bit many of you have probably had one of these products if you're a vegan or vegan curious person perhaps you tried the impossible burger at Burger King well you had some Precision fermented heem iron those are derived from soy root nodules and that creates that same bloody metallic flavor situation as ual animal flesh so in that sense it's already happening but as of 2024 there's been somewhat of an explosion in investment so it's really really going to happen now back to the good food Institute we can see that in terms of total alternative protein in the first quarter of 2024 plant-based products raised about 60 million cultivated Meats were just down at 12 million but fermentation here is 228 million we're talking biomass and precision fermentation combined you can see that historically plant-based proteins have gotten much more investment twice as much as fermentation clearly that's changing real quick let's look at three interesting things that are being Precision fermented and then we'll hit on Dairy because that's where I think the biggest change is well the first interesting thing here is honey made this way the company Malo is making this beefree honey and it is worth mentioning that bees are you know invasive to North America so they have started fermenting B proteins as well as B enzymes and this is something that appears to be indistinguishable from actual honey cuz it has honey proteins it's been used at 11 Madison Park in New York City that three Michelin star vegan restaurant I haven't heard any negative reviews about the taste and one taste test which I found particularly wholesome was from the YouTube channel Beyond food market okay let's go here the Beast honeycomb you can taste it this is real honey this is real honey this is real this is delicious they nailed it oh yeah so I'd be curious to try that for sure and then the next one we have which is interesting is silk through Precision fermentation many people aren't aware that the standard practice in the silk industry is to just boil thousands of silk worms alive from discover magazine they say that each pound of silk uses like 2 to 3,000 silk worms and this is also an insanely inefficient process you got to grow these little worms you got to know take the little worm outside of the little silk pouch Etc but this way they could just Mass produce the silk itself and then another cool one here is they could do spider silk this way and that is a notoriously strong material so we could be using that without exploiting little spiders which would be impossible anyway at this point at scale at least and then one that I think is really huge is alternative palm oil and this is a case where yeah it's not an animal product but the amount of animals that are harmed in pal production is quite High to the point where many vegans say due to the orangutan deaths the other deforestation deaths I don't consider this vegan and due to the damage that's a valid concern and at this point it's a $70 billion industry it's in the vast majority of processed foods like we need to replace this and the company c16 biosciences is doing just that they're programming yeast to create fats and they can of course adjust the ratio to be exactly the same as palm oil and speak speaking of little microbes we can take a quick break with today's sponsor seeds ds01 daily symbiotic this is a Prebiotic and a probiotic and this tiny little guy has 53.6 billion active bacterial cell units from 24 different strains which are scientifically shown to support various areas of Health we're talking gut barrier gut immunity overall Digestive Health skin Health heart health and more and one thing I've learned from working with seed but I've never really talked about before is the origins of seed as a company and why they've made such a good product and that is because they were scientists who were like hey we want to fund more research but we need a way to do that so these scientists got together and they created these products to do that and so obviously these are scientists that are thinking about what is the best strain they're not just looking for the most common cheapest strains to throw in there they're picking areas of health and throwing in strains that are particular to that and then as I mentioned in the last segment on this engineering the capsule to actually survive and get that back CIA where it's supposed to go so that's why I think seed is better than other probiotics out there and of course part of the reason that Lindy and I have been taking seed since 2021 anyway if you would like to try it you can click the link below and use the code Mike 25 for 25% off your first month supply all right back to the vid all right now let's get to the dairy industry cuz I'm quite sure that this is going to kill at least a large portion of the dairy industry in a decade or so and the first company that might come to mind some of you might have tried Brave robot ice cream it uses Precision fermented whey from the company Perfect Day imagine Dairy is also doing whey fermentation but perfect day commissioned an independent report which passed some fancy ethical standards and and found that it had a 96 to 99% lower water footprint and a 91 to 97% lower greenhouse gas footprint and I'm quite sure that as more of these analyses are done we're going to see that over and over again for precision fermentation because it's precise you're literally just focusing on what you actually want to make no you don't have to grow an entire cow and from this 2021 report in the journal industrial biotechnology this chart claims a 10 to 20 times feed stock efficiency for precision fermentation compared to cows which is insane we got all the feed required for these animals water fertilizer Etc and then the product milk itself has to then be funneled down and processed in all sorts of ways to get something like whey protein I just said all sorts of ways without even realizing I said way anyway we also oh my God I just said anyway and this chart shows cost competitiveness for different Industries fur presses and fermentation over time it started out with you know Pharmaceuticals reaching it like insulin as we talked about and now food is officially happening and get this this chart essentially predicts the near end of dairy from cows by 2030 you know may maybe they jumped the gun a little bit but still major threat other companies like change foods are making casine because apparently casine plays a huge role in the stretchiness of cheese Etc so they're going to use that for cowf free cheese and at this point some of you might be thinking hey aren't there some negative Health reactions to these Dairy proteins like casine Etc and to that I say uh yeah that would be essentially the same you know maybe those are going to be increasing igf-1 more effectively than plant proteins as we've seen from studies in the past but it's the case that milk itself also directly contains the hor hormone igf-1 as well as other hormones so you know people who want to be having an ice cream that has the exact same texture or also has casc in way for whatever reason they can get that and maybe be exposed to less hormones but then moving to Big Dairy itself we can see some major change starting to happen here it's worth mentioning that the businessto business sales are 35% of the dairy industry so if there's somebody who's like I don't want to be having any like fermented animal proteins or whatever uh they're not ones are going to be buying it it's going to be businesses they're going to go for the cheapest option and the massive Corporation Nestle who now owns organe essentially has just released a animal-free whey protein powder this is literally vegan whey which is mind-blowing and unfortunately it's like twice the price of normal way at this point you it might be somewhat more comparable to organic or some special other way but given that they're able to reach this price by making probably a very small quantity as they scale up this could just get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and the fact that it's already not insanely higher than whey which is mostly a byproduct of cheese production that's impressive anyway so that's Nestle which is one of the top largest Dairy companies in the world depending on the year and then the fourth largest company is Danon which is essentially starting a whole program to Precision ferment various products they've invested a ton of money into it starting the facilities Etc so this is huge way alone is a$2 billion industry so there's a lot of room to make the money but now real fast I want to talk about cultured me just a quick update cuz it's wild as well as just the overall change in public opinion around these types of alternative proteins and starting right off we have a fresh hot off depress study from just like two days ago this one right here which was able to produce some super cheap cultured chicken and project how cheap it can be they say that they were able to use an animal free growth medium which is awesome that was only 63 cents per liter that's also effective and they say if this is scaled to 50,000 lers they could be making chicken for $6 a pound I mean Whole Foods Chicken rest that's organic is like $10 a pound so yeah animal agriculture is cooked especially when you consider that the production time on this is just 20 days when you know growing meat chickens is like 40 to 60 days at which point then they're sending these animals off to the slaughterous to then be packaged Etc so it's going to be some quick chicken I should also mention they've made other improvements like they've now made it so the cells create their own signals to grow instead of having to put a ton of growth hormones in there separately but with progress comes PE PE poo poo I mean General resistance from various areas such as the meat industry and political actors George Mono recently covered in the Guardian a green piece report that found a new campaign funded by the livestock industry confronted by a former meet executive is pressing for an EU wide ban yeah Italy has already banned it the states Alabama and Florida have also banned it and this is from some cases like in Florida just an overt Allegiance between the meat industry and the politicians like Ronda santis sorry I almost threw up saying his name and public opinion is where we're also seeing a change you know we've SE seen a lot of people go oh that's gross I would never eat it in the past especially and my response to that was always hey you know we found out that that Subway chicken sandwich was only roughly 50% chicken at least according to report and people kept eating it anyway no one seemed to care but we're seeing what appears to be an increase in the number of people that would accept actually consciously eating it from a Us survey about 60% of the US population says that they would try it and this goes up to 2third of people when we're talking about chicken specifically and that's important because chicken is the number one most consumed meat in the US and its consumption rate is growing the fastest of any meat and Europe has yielded similar results there was a uov survey that looked at 16,000 people across 15 countries and found that yeah about 60% of various countries approve of it entering the market which is cool with a very similar percentages for How likely they would be to actually try eating it and then in terms of precision fermentation and it's public perception I think it's pretty clear that people are accepting it I mean nobody's like I don't eat cheese because 80% of it has fermented rened in it no no one cares and if anything I think if people are sold on how much more clean these products are they don't require antibiotics they have a lower footprint Etc they would actually be encouraged to buy them instead now people might say these fermented proteins or even these cultured meats are gross they're made in a lab Etc well to that I have to respond the food that they are eating now is literally like slaughtered on a blood covered kill floor with little fecal matter and feal dust which I've talked about in the past and all that stuff that's really gross and for some reason they're okay with it but by contrast with Precision fermentation we're talking about large stainless steel Vats that are highly monitored you know and the microbes are filtered out separated from the end product etc for those people that are concerned about genetic modification I know in the past I have been especially in terms of plants that are genetically modified to resist pesticides we soak them in more pesticides and the weeds become Roundup resistant Etc you know that's not something that I'm happy about uh but in this case again they are completely removing those microbes if you're concerned about something happening genetically to those microbes that you don't want to consume and yeah we have that agel concern of like oh well it's not natural uh well how about the artificial insemination virtually every animal that you've ever eaten Wanda that wasn't natural and then the last point I want to mention here which is specifically to vegans I don't think that vegans are that well educated on this topic so much of it is new so I understand but I also think that this is just a great Avenue to take animals out of the food supply and so vegans should be pushing for this if I'm going to be telling vegans what to do you know whether that's through educating people on this investing directly just supporting these companies in any way because this literally is getting animals out of the food supply we're just using some microbes making the exact same products especially when we're talking about whey and caseine and you know silk palm oil heem iron it goes on and on and who knows what we're going to see in the next year or so too invest in fermented now your fermented man companion company and it's also important to make a counter effort to straight up meet company funded anti- alternative protein campaigns that's huge anyway if you would like to try seeds ds01 daily symbiotic of course you can click that link below and use the code Mike 25 for $25 % off your first month supply and as usual let me know down below what you think about this topic you know anytime we're talking about things that are new or grown in some sterile setting people tend to resist it to an extent some people do so let me know down below do you support this what are your concerns Etc and of course feel free to like subscribe all that good stuff and I'll see you in the next one thanks for watching [Music]