To “Reboot Food”—meaning protein made without animals—sounds exciting. But will the same old corporate interests be in charge of it?
As heralded by environmentalist George Monbiot in this tweet, next week will see the launch of RebootFood (at this webinar on Nov 16th). Here’s their pitch:
It’s time to face the facts. Our food system - dominated by meat, fish and dairy - is devouring the planet. If we want to survive this crisis, we need to reboot food.
…Imagine producing the entire world’s protein on an area of land the size of Greater London. Imagine rewilding three-quarters of today’s farmland.
Imagine eating guilt-free meat, milk and cheese without ever having killed an animal. Imagine providing abundant food to the world’s poorest.
Astonishingly we already have the tools to make this happen...
The secret lies in microorganisms. Just as our ancient ancestors relied on microorganisms to brew beer, raise bread and ferment foods like sauerkraut or soy sauce, today’s innovators have discovered how to programme microorganisms such as yeast to brew precise ingredients… like milk, eggs or the delicious fats and proteins you get in a steak.
Thanks to breakthroughs in the tried and tested technique of precision fermentation (already used widely to produce animal-free rennet and insulin), food innovators have now unlocked the keys to make animal-free proteins and fats that are biologically identical (and just as delicious) as those we currently get from cows and other livestock.
With other incredible 21st century innovations across the world of agriculture, we are now standing on the cusp of a revolution as big as the dawn of farming 10,000 years ago.
the 4 core principles to reboot food
Make it plant based:
In a rebooted food system, healthy and varied plant based foods should be at the centre of everything.Brew, don’t slaughter:
Animal farming should be phased out with today’s animal products replaced by identical precision fermentation products wherever possible.Use as little land as possible, rewild everything else:
We must prioritise high yield, low impact farming to spare as much space for nature as possible. On the land left behind we must pay farmers to rewild.Open source everything:
New technologies in food should be open source and corporate concentration must be actively mitigated to ensure the benefits of the food revolution are shared equally with all
More here. Those of you who are long-term readers of Monbiot may remember his discovery of “protein from air” in 2018, which seems to have developed into the broader category of “precision fermentation”, where bacteria mix with gases to produce protein (see this 2020 piece). Finland’s Solar Foods are already putting their Solein product before regulatory agencies (Singapore being the first to pass it).
This seems to be a wondrous piece of food technology, answering our climate crisis in a variety of ways - returning land to a more regenerative use, answering the ethical claims of vegetarians and vegans.
Yet there are questions to ask (which an exchange with a great friend of this site, John Thackera, raised for us).
The other speaker with Monbiot at their launch event is Gunhild Stordalen, a Swedish doctor who founded the EAT Foundation in Stockholm. EAT is responsible for the globally influential EAT-Lancet Report which presented “a global diet plan that could feed 10 billion people whilst staying within planetary boundaries.”
The metaphor they use is to reverse “farm to fork” to “fork to farm” - the challenge of generating enough protein for the human diet while staying within planetary boundaries. This usually means the minimisation of farmed-animal-derived protein.
RebootFood’s agenda is entirely congruent with this. But who supports these initiatives? Replanet.org, the NGO behind the Reboot campaign, explicitly “accepts no industry or corporate funding”, and is grant-supported by unlisted “private charitable foundations who share our values” (though it would be nice to see who they are). But the company kept by their other launch speaker is more worrying.
EAT runs something call the FReSH initiative (Food Reform for Sustainability and Health), described as “an effort to drive the transformation of the food system and to create a set of business solutions for industry change”. Here’s some of the companies involved (the graphic is from their own page…):
In a report from Saucy Dressings, food critic Joanna Blythman is quoted as identifying these bodies as “a roll call of the big names in pharmaceuticals, pesticides, GM, and ultra-processed food. They include Bayer, which now owns Monsanto and its infamous Round-Up (glyphosate) pesticide, Big Sugar (PepsiCo), Big Grain (Cargill), palm oil companies, and leading manufacturers of food additives and processing aids.”
The question is worth asking: whose industrial and commercial interests would the shift to “precision fermentation” of non-animal protein most directly serve? Reboot’s vision of a nature rewilded and liberated from animal farming is beautiful.
But how do many if not most of the companies on the graphic above score on conscious preservation of the biosphere? Not highly. We’d urge George to ask some questions here of Gunhild Stordalen, on the night…
A second and related point, and more contentious, that Thackara brings up is this: is it automatically good that arable and grazing cultures in the developing world are to be wiped out of existence, by Big Ag’s adoption of a techno-solution for protein?
We’ll leave you to explore his sources… but John cites this paper - Livestock Innovations, Social Norms, and Women’s Empowerment in the Global South - as indicating how women farmers are empowered by their livestock management.
There is also the work of Ilse Köhler-Rollefson who is a great advocate of a return to a “pastoralist” model for animal farming, as explained in her book Hoofprints on the Land: How Traditional Herding and Grazing Can Restore the Soil and Bring Animal Agriculture Back in Balance with the Earth.
We are optimists about human creativity and ingenuity at the Alternative Global - so are well-disposed to innovations like precision fermentation of proteins. But we should always question what power relations any new “tech-wonder” emerges from, and maybe even reinforces.