Eating in an Alt-Universe

This story is from the final print issue of MOLD magazine, Design for a New Earth. Order your copy here.

Mockturtle soup was created in the 1700s as an alternative to soup of green turtle, the star ingredient of which had been hunted to near extinction across the Caribbean to satisfy the appetites of wealthy Britons.¹ By the late 1800s canned versions of this soup, typically made with calf’s head (brains and all) to replicate the texture and flavor of turtle meat, was sold with labels warning, unironically, for consumers to be “Beware ofImitations.” In some places, including the United States, this mock, or “alt”, turtle soup became more popular than the original ever had been.

What we term the alt-universe—a space that we imagine to contain all possible combinations of flavor, texture and mouthfeel that closely mirror the foods we are familiar with—is well-mapped. From margarine as alt-butter to toasted chicory, lentils, rice or dandelion² as alt-coffee, humans have been ingenious and persistent in recreating their favorite flavors, so much so that many things that started off as being“alt” have now moved firmly into the established flavor universe.³ In the past, much of this innovation was borne out of scarcity. But now, driven by very valid ethical and environmental concerns, we are seeing a slew of alternatives being designed in highly systematic ways with the intention of being rolled out at vast scales across the global food system. Distant pockets of this alt-universe are now being explored for the first time.

Powerful new tools are enabling us to rethink things we’ve long taken for granted. The idea that we need to breed cattle for meat and dairy, or deforest thousands of acres of land to grow the soybeans and corn to feed them, is being challenged with the promise of creating foods that might be better for the planet, its people and some of its other organisms.⁴

Cultivated meat—grown from stem cells taken from animals—could give us steaks made without the loss of a single (large mammalian) life, while insect meal could satiate the world’s need for protein in a way that is vastly more energy-, water-and resource-efficient. Similarly, mycoproteins grown via biomass fermentation—in vats similar to how beer and wine are produced—or plant-based proteins extracted from cereals and legumes and glued together with binders can yield burger and sausage fillings that are close to fooling the average palate.

In recent years, billions of dollars have gone into funding startups working in the field of alternative proteins,⁵ and while these approaches appear to offer the hope of solving lots of pressing problems in the food sector, it is vital for us to “look beyond this hype and consider what is actually changing,” and what is changing for good.⁶

Take Eat Just,⁷ the American food tech startup previously known as Hampton Creek Foods.⁸ Rather than raising whole animals on farms, they grow only the most highly consumed parts. All breast, no connective tissue (all muscle, no flavor?). At small scale, nurturing a few chickens looks very dissimilar to growing lab-grown meat. But at large scale—anonymous buildings crammed with stainless steel, automated heavy-duty machinery and people dressed head-to-toe in protective clothing—the lines between labs for growing meat and industrialized meat factories start to blur in a way that may sit uncomfortably with the eaters of meat who have an intuitive mistrust of newer technologies. Consumers in Singapore, where Eat Just’s “chicken” nuggets gained regulatory approval to be sold, can already chew the fat of that conundrum. Diners in the United States will have the chance to follow suit soon, with the FDA approving cultivated meat for sale for the first time in the form of Upside Foods’ cell-based chicken in November 2022.

On paper, the “disembodied economics” of cultivated meat may appear to be advantageous in terms of time, efficiency and capacity. Certainly this is how it has been sold, first to investors and now to consumers. But the machinery required to run cell culture facilities will be hugely energy-consuming with, some predict, an eventually higher carbon footprint than existing farming systems.⁹ Moreover, while so-called “clean meat” involves no slaughter of animals, the growth mediums (the source of nutrients and growth factors needed to grow the meat) used for non-animal meat remain expensive (circa $1,000 per liter) and ethically dubious. Currently, one widely used medium—fetal bovine serum—comes from baby cows. Animal-free meat, made from animals! The alternative to this, using recombinant protein production from some plant source, is currently more expensive and, although likely to drop in price, will rely on cheap monoculture crops if it is to become economically competitive.

An alternative approach to cellular agriculture is the processing of plants or algae to produce meat-like products. Umaro Foods makes something that looks, tastes and apparently chews like bacon using red seaweed, chickpeas, coconut and sunflower oil, sea salt and colors extracted from paprika and radishes.¹⁰

Even when we lean into the expansive, delicious and unique worlds of plants and fungi, we seem obsessed with creating facsimiles of meat products. Are we addicted to meat, or is it the avatars we’re familiar with—the burgers, sausages, and bacon slices (the“carnal skeuomorphs” as Ben Wurgraft calls them¹¹)—that we really crave? If we take animal cells grown using billion-dollar technology but insist on stuffing them into the same old culinary casings, might we be accused of lacking imagination?

Artist Carolien Niebling¹² explored this dilemma in her book The Sausage of the Future. She cites the sausage as “one of mankind’s first-ever designed food items” and praise sits endless flexibility and possibility as a “shell for all kinds of nutrition.” She envisions future sausages, made with insects, nuts and legumes, as diverse, resource-efficient, delicious but, perhaps most critically of all, still familiar.

Of all the approaches outlined, the most futuristic seems to be the idea of lab-grown meat. But even here, could current food tech entrepreneurs be accused of limited imaginative faculties? In her work The Six-winged Chicken and Other Fabled Animals of the Food Industry, artist Anne Kamps set about exploring how—with the right marketing and storytelling—consumers might be fooled into believing that fantastical animals, such as a six-winged chicken or a spineless pig, were as real as a high-yielding dairy cow or a factory-farmed (two-winged) chicken.¹³

Kamps’ work brings to light several key points. First, how divorced many of us are from where our food comes from and its original unprocessed form. Further, it prompts us to question the validity of such animals. Is the conceptual jump from a two-to a six-winged chicken bigger or stranger than from a farmed whole chicken to a lab-grown chicken breast? Is one of those chicken forms really better (for us, the chicken itself, or the planet) or more “natural” than the other?¹⁴ And what of the ethics of creating, cultivating and harvesting the flesh of such a beast?

Engaging with such questions, food designer Marije Vogelzang presents us with “superior” alternative plant-based meats in her Faked Meat project, consisting of four fantasy animals, which have exciting backstories that are more pleasant than the narratives of the original, industrially produced meats that they are imagined to replace.¹⁵

These examples encourage us to look beyond the products themselves, deeper into their supply chains, to understand the externalities at play. In a rush to bring products to market in the plant-based milk space, cheap, low-ethic dairy is being replaced with almond and coconut juice, the cultivation of which involves biodiversity loss-inducing land clearance and vast amounts of water, as well as exacerbating issues with the pollinators that grease the axles of plant fertilization.¹⁶

We cannot swap one damaging industrialized system for another. In redesigning major features of the food system, it’s critical we avoid replicating its problematic aspects—namely food as an extractive commodity. We cannot have alternatives, whether plant-based or lab-grown, if they are ultra-processed, manufactured in harmful systems that are reliant on monocultures and if they continue to detach humans from their food, thereby eroding compassion for other living things.

What if we shift our perspectives away from these techno-futures that replicate the same old extractive, industrialized food production paradigm¹⁷ and take a step closer to the land? Could we move from looking outward to looking inward by connecting to the soil and thinking about our symbiotic relationships as humans with other species?¹⁸

One paradigm of our interdependence on the multispecies world can be found in our daily lives. The production and consumption of fermented foods—including our daily bread, cheese, wine, chocolate, coffee, kimchi, kefir and more— demonstrate the ways in which “(fermentation) mediates relations across human and microbial bodies such that [the relationship] is emergent and participatory,” as researcher Dr. Maya Hey puts forth.¹⁹ From the harvesting of plants or extraction of animal products, and their preparation and processing with our labor, to the introduction of bacteria, yeasts or molds (or a combination of all), and the time we allow for the living microorganisms to synergies and transform textures and flavors, the process is a symphony of symbiotic, mutualistic interactions that we feed, in order to feed ourselves.   

There are a few companies engaging in approaches rooted in nature and tradition, approaches that might encourage collaboration and a holistic, multispecies worldview. For instance, US-based Kingdom Supercultures assembles existing microbes into combinations to create “new communities with unprecedented functionalities” such as, they claim, zero-calorie sodas, plant-based dairy and meat replacements.²⁰ Their belief is that the tools for creating delicious, sustainable foods are already with us. Like sports team managers, we may just need to shuffle the squad to find winning combinations.

Meanwhile, The Mediterranean Food Lab in Israel is carving their route into the universe of meat alternatives by producing richly-flavored, meaty amino acids and sugars from fermented grains, legumes and vegetables that have underpinned global cuisines for thousands of years— such as in the making of soy sauces. Far from needing to reinvent the wheel, they are leveraging microorganisms and techniques that are hiding in plain sight, in foods we already eat, to find ways to cleverly reduce meat consumption. 

Because, in reality, the world uses about 30% of its meat not center-of-plate but in other dishes as bringers of flavor—of umami, complexity, richness and the sugar-amino products of the Maillard reaction that are behind many of the delicious brown foods we crave most. We love meat—and the fat that usually comes with it—in part because it has the capacity to make other foods much more delicious.²¹ Meat products are flavor amplifiers. And here the plant and fungi kingdoms are especially well-suited to help us. From Japan’s legume-powered misos to Brasil’s manioc-derived tucupi, humans have long co-opted the plant world to augment or supplement meaty taste and aroma compounds.

In Singapore, bar owner Vijay Mudalia and his team at Analogue—conscious of the environmentally and/or ethically unsound credentials of some of their favorite ingredients and curious to source as many from as close to home as possible—have made it their focus to build an entire menu out of alternatives. In an espresso martini, they sub coffee beans for a low caffeine mix of roasted chicory, dandelion, coconut nectar and cinnamon. Tonka beans take the place of vanilla, and elsewhere on the menu sautéed mushrooms, miso paste and Marmite are combined to create a meaty gravy in their take on poutine.²² That they entered at number 37 on the World’s 50 Best Bars list within a year of opening implies that the results are compelling and delicious. And yet, they do this on a shoestring budget with no venture capital backing, guided by their palates, culinary intuition and an understanding of food history.

There are already myriad sources of non-meat proteins and pathways to savouriness, and the knowledge and traditions of how to cook satiating, complex dishes without animals exists in every corner of the world. Similarly, curious minds have been developing flavor analogues—routes to the same delicious end-points—for many of the world’s other favorite ingredients for generations.

In a world where vast amounts of money are being fed into conjuring animal flesh in ways that perpetuate and entrench existing problems, should we really be turning people onto the wonders of the culinary worlds that already exist in our cultures, our cookbooks and our kitchens. 

Arguably, this lacks the caché of a techno-futurist approach and promises fewer of the juicy financial returns that encourage flows of capital from investors’ pockets into food tech startups. But, teaching “the tasting body,” as anthropologist Heather Paxson puts it,²³ to crave foods that are better for the environment and the well-being of all species, once all externalities have been factored, is a worthy cause.

By way of culinary education, celebrations of food cultures and amplification of traditional knowledge, this approach would reconnect people with their food, empower them with the means to nourish themselves and challenge the world’s taste for unsustainable foods that often also offer poor nutritional bang for the buck. At the same time, we should lean into the abundance of existing ingredients and organisms—some lesser-used or lesser-known, some not yet documented—that can unlock flavor profiles that we know and love and open pathways to corners of the alt-universe not yet visited, all while helping us preserve the biodiversity of the macro and micro worlds we live amongst.