Ingredients

Imagine sitting down to a meal with all the sights and textures of a meat-based one, except the beef strips in your stir fry, which happens to be super-charged with flavor, are not actually beef. Only you don’t have to imagine it. The meat of the future is here and it’s alive—but not in the way you might think. It’s a product of the push by a growing number of technology companies to tap into the vastness of microscopic diversity to recreate complex animal-based products, such as steak and bacon. The hope is to meet global protein needs in an environmentally friendly way.

This past week Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced that its DeepMind group has solved a long-standing grand challenge in the scientific community around protein structure prediction. To get a feel for what the impact of this milestone might be, The Spoon asked Sudeep Agarwala, a synthetic microbiologist for Gingko Bioworks, what he thought DeepMind’s work could possibly mean for food.

France aims to raise the area sown with protein-rich crops by 40% from 2022 as it seeks to cut the country’s heavy reliance on soybean imports from South America, Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie said on Tuesday. France and other European Union countries import millions of tonnes of soybean and soymeal each year, mainly from Brazil and Argentina, to feed livestock, making them dependent on world prices, trade relations and environmental practices overseas.

Solar Foods has been granted €4.3M of new financing from Business Finland to support its €8.6M development project for commercialising Solein, Solar Foods’ natural protein made from air. Business Finland’s financing takes the total Solar Foods’ financing to the total €24.8M.

The Israeli startup The Mediterranean Food Lab, which has been developing natural plant-based flavor bases for the alternative meat sector, has won an award of €100,000 from the EIT Food Accelerator Network (FAN) Program, according to a statement released by the Technion on Tuesday. The EIT FAN program is held at the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food in the Technion, in conjunction with the Strauss Group. EIT Food, a major European food intiative, has been seeking to reshape the foundations of the food industry.