Veggie Digest #6

Leather made from mushrooms, the truth about vegan cheese, food tech terminology, and much more!

Welcome to the latest installment of the Veggie Digest, the newsletter that keeps you on top of the latest in sustainable food innovations. 

Headlines and Trends

A curated roundup of interesting food tech news from the past week.

📰 Meat Accounts for Nearly 60% of All Greenhouse Gases from Food Production (The Guardian)

A third of all planet-heating gases emitted by human activity is caused by the global production of food. The farming of cows, pigs, and other livestock is responsible for 57% of all food production emissions, with 29% coming from the cultivation of plant-based foods. It also requires a lot of land for livestock to graze as well as to grow their feed. 

📰 This Realistic Mushroom “Leather” is Ready for Commercial Production (Fast Company)

Bolt Threads is a biotech materials startup that makes Mylo, a leather-like fabric made from the root structures of mushrooms known as mycelium. The company chose to use mycelium because it was feasible to make in huge quantities and a large number of mushroom farms already exist. The material is also sustainable unlike real leather as it is not made from cows. Bolt Threads will not release specific numbers about the carbon dioxide savings of mushroom leather until the material is coming out of the factory at scale.

📰 Technology Is Revolutionizing Food, but How Can It Be Explained to Consumers? (Food Dive)

The boom in alternative proteins, dairy-free milk, plant-based substitutes, and cellular agriculture has created a big challenge for companies and the industry as a whole: how can these food innovations be described and explained to consumers to help drive adoption? For instance, the previous term for cell-based meat, “clean meat,” has fallen out of favor. Instead, more and more companies are calling it “cultured meat.” And the public seems to be responding positively to this rebranding. But with so many new and novel concepts coming to the forefront—like precision fermentation, protein scaffolding, and plant-based substitutes—companies will have to invest in their communications, marketing, and public relations efforts to effectively educate and entice customers.

📽️ Why Vegan Cheese Doesn’t Melt (YouTube)

The problem with vegan cheese is that it does not melt, stretch, or bubble like dairy-based cheese does. This is because casein proteins, which give the cheese its melty and stretchy qualities, are only found in the milk of mammals. Therefore mimicking casein with a plant-based alternative is nearly impossible. Luckily, some plant-based cheese startups are tackling this issue in different ways. One company, Those Vegan Cowboys, is using a fungal strain to create casein. Another company in San Francisco, New Culture, is using microbes to make a melty, stretchy mozzarella.

Food Lingo: “Synthetic Scaffold”

There’s a lot of jargon in the food technology and sustainability space. Each week I highlight an important concept to improve your food lingo literacy.

Synthetic Scaffolding is engineered tissue that provides a structural framework that acts as the fibrous protein component of the extracellular matrix, which helps regulate cellular functions.

📰 These Four Startups Are Growing Animal-Free Scaffolds for Cell-Cultured Meat (The Spoon)

• To make a complex product like a steak or a salmon fillet, cell-cultured meat producers must have stem cells with a scaffold to grow on.

• Below are some startups experimenting with scaffolding solutions

  • DaNAgreen’s scaffolds are made from isolated plant proteins.

  • Seawith is using nutrient-rich algae-based scaffolds.

  • Excell is exploring the use of fungal mycelium as a scaffolding substrate.

  • Matrix Meatsis using an electrospinning technique to build nanofiber scaffolds.

Sustainability Beyond Food

A handful of non-food-specific pieces to keep you abreast of other environmental items of interest.

📰 16 Sustainability Leaders Weigh In: How YOU Can Help to Reverse Global Warming (Crowdsourcing Sustainability)

Several climate experts were asked the question “What is the most effective thing that someone can do to help reverse global warming?” Answers ranged from “Going out to young people and getting them engaged” to  “We need millions of people in the streets and at the ballot box to put politicians in office who’ll take the action we need and kick fossil-fuel funded ones out.”

📰 The Planet Has Lost Half of Its Coral Reefs Since 1950 (Smithsonian Magazine)

Coral reefs are biodiversity hotspots that provide habitat for fishes and protection for coastal communities. Sadly, a recent analysis revealed that half of the coral reefs have been lost since the 1950s. The reason corals are dying is that they are highly sensitive to changes in water temperature and acidity. Scientists say climate change, overfishing, and pollution are wiping out these ecosystems.

🎙️ Earth Overshoot Day (Good Together)

Earth Overshoot Day marks the day when humanity has used up all biological resources that the planet can regenerate in a year. This year, Earth Overshoot Day was on July 29th, which means humans are currently using 74% more resources than what the earth can regenerate. The population and sustainability organizer at the Center for Biological Diversity, Sarah Baillie, speaks about the role everyday consumption plays and what people can do to ensure our resources are sustained.

—-

Thank you for reading the Veggie Digest newsletter. If you’re enjoying it, be sure to share it with your friends and colleagues.

If this newsletter was forwarded to you, visit this link to subscribe.

You can reach me by replying directly to this email or by adding a comment on Substack.