Food for thought
author: Pedro Coelho Silva
What do tech, software and disruption have to do with food?
Or proteins?
Or farms?
Not much, you may think. At least, that was what I used to believe until recently.
It’s time to Rethink (pun intended).
But before going into the weeds, here is some context about why I’ve decided to write about this topic.
Food-as-Software
The “Food-as-Software” paradigma has the potential to:
- End world hunger by making food much cheaper and easy to produce locally
- Stop global warming by enabling farmland to be forest again
- World peace, by greatly diminishing the need to fight for resources
When I watched another of Tony Seba’s videos during my Xmas break, I expected his usual communication brilliance on topics I was already familiar with, like electric and autonomous cars or clean energy.
Therefore, I was surprised to hear him talking about Food & Agriculture.
I’m usually aware of all the novelty in tech & science, but I was in the dark about this. The following thought came to my mind, if this revolutionary branch of tech and science was unknown to me, it might be unfamiliar to many others.
Since I’m a big believer that knowledge sharing is key for progress and making the solar system (earth is thinking small) a better place for everyone, it would be cool if I contributed to raising awareness of it, and here we are.
The Breakdown
So how does “Precision fermentation” or “Food-as-Software” works, and why does it disrupt incumbents in these sectors?
Tony Seba does a great job explaining it in his videos, but I’ll break it down in the following paragraphs.
Let me start by sharing some numbers that give us the perspective of the sheer magnitude of potential impact. Food produced using this technology can potentially use 100 times less land, 10 times less water and 5 times less energy. Yet this is not all, far from it. According to RethinkX, food produced this way can cost up to 80% less, leading to an added value of 250B per year to the US & EU economies when it gets to scale.
And this disruption already started in the 1980s with Insulin as its first revolutionary product.
Like many other disruptive trends, it starts slowly but then goes exponential, like the famous S curve.
(If you want to know more about the disruptions framework, check here; pretty cool rabbit hole to dive in.)
Before this tech, in the 1970s, Insulin was extracted from the animal pancreas; essentially, we needed to kill about 25.000 animals to produce 0.5kg of Insulin.
Yes, you read it right!
Luckily in the 1980s, using “Precision fermentation”, an analogue to human Insulin was developed, and about 10 years later, the slaughter (just for this purpose) was over. Not only did we stop unnecessarily killing millions of animals per year, but we also made Insulin super cheap and available everywhere, improving the health of millions of people suffering from diabetes.
Although the seed for precision fermentation has been there for a while, it is only now, with AI and synthetic biology, that we are on the cusp of unlocking this tool at scale and changing the world as we know it. Precise fermentation has a potential hard to put in a few words, but this tech can turbo-charge us for a “Post-Cow World”.
Still, to enable this tool, we need to master DNA changes. That’s where CRISPR, among others, helped a lot.
These advances are now being combined with an entirely new model of production, that is, Food-as-Software, in which individual molecules engineered by scientists are uploaded to databases — open-source molecular cookbooks that food engineers anywhere in the world can use to design products in the same way that software developers develop apps.
This model ensures constant iteration so that products improve rapidly, with each version superior and cheaper than the last. It also provides a decentralised production system that is much more stable and resilient than industrial animal agriculture, with fermentation farms located in or close to towns and cities.
In conclusion
As many startups start creating and scaling in this field, we can only imagine the wonders we will see during the next 10 years! The sector is booming, and the first products are already entering the market with key players like Remilk, Upsidefoods and Impossible Foods.
We also have startups in Portugal working on this tech, one to keep an eye on is for sure Silico Life. They have thrived for the past 10 years and recently raised 9.8M in a Series A.
Yet, this is far from only a veggie revolution.
The proteins we consume today are from a few domesticated plants and animals, but the number of proteins in our nature is in the millions. Hence, the theoretical limit of proteins engineers can design is borderline infinite and the possibilities are endless!
Plus, one of my favourite possible outcomes is that it makes exploring space and inhabiting other planets much easier for us!
I hope you enjoyed the reading and learned something new, and if you are reading this recently after being published, have a great 2023!
