Dairy Ice Cream, No Cow Needed: These Egg And Milk Proteins Are Made Without Animals
Earlier today, I ate a scoop of chocolate ice cream – creamy and pleasantly fatty feeling in my mouth. This would hardly seem newsworthy, except for the high-tech ingredient that made my frozen treat go down so smoothly: dairy proteins produced in a lab, no cows needed.
The realm of plant-based meat substitutes has gotten a lot of buzz lately. Think the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat – companies that use biochemistry to mimic the taste and texture of meat using plant-based ingredients. There’s another frontier along these lines – start-ups that use microbes to create egg, dairy and other animal proteins without the animals.
Their pitch: Sustainability. Livestock agriculture uses lots of water and land resources, and produces significant amounts of greenhouse gases.
“If you can produce just the proteins that you want without keeping a living animal alive, that’s going to be a lot more efficient, so it’s better for the environment,” says Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute, which promotes plant- and cell-based alternatives to animal protein. And he says as the technology scales up, it should be a lot cheaper to produce proteins this way, too.