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"A meat-eater with a bicycle is much more environmentally unfriendly than a vegetarian with a Hummer."
--Dr Mark Post
The world's largest food concern, Unilever, has opened a new research lab at the world's most prestigious agricultural university, the University of Wageningen (the Netherlands). Unilever will locate all elements of its foods R&D there. A spokeswoman on Dutch radio stressed plant-based meat alternatives as an important research subject.
Wageningen University has strong credentials in that respect, with the development of shear cell technology.
Shear cell technology strings plant proteins together in tightly controlled fibers, resulting in a meat substitute where texture (fibrousness, bite, mouthfeel) can easily be controlled, and changed at will. This, combined with 3D food printing, offers the possibility of creating multiple meat (substitute) variations in future.
Unilever's food campus is open to startups, innovators and partners. One of the first to have build its own lab on the same grounds is Symrise, an industrial flavours and scents group.
About half of Dutch people call themselves 'flexitarians'. This means that they don't eat meat with their main meal at least three times a week. The proportion of vegetarians is stable, at just under five percent of the Dutch population.
Wageningen researchers believe, however, that feeding 9 billion people with animal meat will not be sustainable for the planet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @06:26PM
Pretty sketchy honestly. No germ theory and a poor understanding of the world at large and you're telling me that the divergent monkey fuckers that bred out humanity figured out that if you cook meat it doesn't kill you? You think we constantly went into smackdowns with mammoths and had good enough odds that we didn't endanger the whole of the species? I don't, we opportunistically chased some off of cliffs, maybe a handful of real hard motherfuckers speared some down a couple of times. Most were probably scavenged. This is a time when a scratch could be a mortal threat, dysentery or e.coli and you may as well be dead. Compatible parasites crawling in the skin of every member of the community. The whole model really doesn't read well to me. It was a slow and accidental process that lead us to where we are, which is maladapted for meat consumption, frankly; this is reflected in current medical literature and the massively increased incidence of disease as meat (especially red) consumption has increased, and this despite stringent rules in meat processing and retail hygiene.