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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: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 07 2019, @12:20AM (1 child)
Nonsense. You do realize that even in the absence of humanity, coal seams are exposed, eroded, and sometimes even burn. Yet where was the harm in that (particularly, when one considers that there's a great deal of harm in too little CO2 in the atmosphere to support photosynthesis)?
And it's not the gram of carbon going into the atmosphere that is harmful. It's the gram's estimated 10 quadrillion friends per year that are causing the harm.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @05:08AM
Don't forget shellfish. They sequester 200 megatonnes of carbon per year as limestone. Without carbon release, give it 10,000 years and the biosphere is dead.