I love to see this. Based on the Horizon experience in the EU, these kinds of problems are often best tackled by a mixed consortium—maybe a university, a start-up and a multinational—which bring different aspects and questions.
These technical questions are very tractable but very complex. There are universities and industry groups who work on them in other contexts. For example there is a field called tribology which studies the texture of foods in the mouth, and texture is critical to our view of “meatiness”—and very difficult to copy. If it were just taste, we could must mix amino-acids a paste and flavour them, but consumers want not just the taste, but also the mouthfeel, the aroma, the feeling you get when you bite into a steak, and how that changes as you chew it and as it interacts with your saliva. It is hard, but if you get it wrong, people won’t say “well, it was a good effort,” they’ll just say “sorry, but it’s not meat!”
Artificial meat/fish/eggs might be the single greatest opportunity for the world. It can prevent so much animal suffering in factory farms. It can prevent so many emissions. It and reduce the land-use and water-use needed to feed us. And it can ultimately give us a low-cost, plentiful, nutritious food supply with no need for antibiotics, which can feed the world.
I love to see this. Based on the Horizon experience in the EU, these kinds of problems are often best tackled by a mixed consortium—maybe a university, a start-up and a multinational—which bring different aspects and questions.
These technical questions are very tractable but very complex. There are universities and industry groups who work on them in other contexts. For example there is a field called tribology which studies the texture of foods in the mouth, and texture is critical to our view of “meatiness”—and very difficult to copy. If it were just taste, we could must mix amino-acids a paste and flavour them, but consumers want not just the taste, but also the mouthfeel, the aroma, the feeling you get when you bite into a steak, and how that changes as you chew it and as it interacts with your saliva. It is hard, but if you get it wrong, people won’t say “well, it was a good effort,” they’ll just say “sorry, but it’s not meat!”
Artificial meat/fish/eggs might be the single greatest opportunity for the world. It can prevent so much animal suffering in factory farms. It can prevent so many emissions. It and reduce the land-use and water-use needed to feed us. And it can ultimately give us a low-cost, plentiful, nutritious food supply with no need for antibiotics, which can feed the world.
It’s great to see the focus on this.