PHOTO: Duckweed at the Plantible Foods aqua farm in San Marcos, California. By Eric Thayer for The Washington Post.
I personally find it amusing to imagine that duck weed could save the world.
According to reporter Michael Coren, writing for the Washington Post in a article titled, “The plant protein that could push meat off your plate”…
Rubisco is arguably the most abundant protein on the planet. Every green leaf has it…
Mr. Coren claims that we grow more than enough food to feed every human on the planet, but we’re feeding cows and pigs instead.
About half of the corn and soybeans grown in the United States are fed to cows, pigs and chickens to support meat-rich diets.
As we’ve all heard from the Lamestream Media, this habit of feeding and eating animals is one of the main causes of global warming. Like, down in Brazil, they’re wiping out the Amazon jungle to grow beef for McDonald’s hamburgers.
The Amazon jungle, once upon a time, was one of the main engines for converting (dangerous and problematic) CO2 into (healthful and wonderful) oxygen.
The conversion is handled largely by ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase.
Rubisco. Which we might be eating, someday, in imitation hamburgers.
From Mr. Coren’s article:
“We’re really trying to create version 2.0 of agriculture,” says Fekini. “We need to develop better tool kits, and the only way is to start from scratch, create better ingredients and tap into novel plants. But it’s definitely not the easiest route.”
“Fekini” is Tony Martens Fekini, the chief executive of Plantible Foods.
Plantible Foods has this crazy idea that we can extract enough rubisco protein from duck week to get the world off the meat-eating treadmill. So they’ve taken to growing various strains of duck weed to see which ones will give up the rubisco.
From the photos I’ve seen since researching this column, duck weed is a really cute plant. Sort of like miniature lily pads.
One of my favorite songs, when I was a kid, was “The Little White Duck”. As some readers will remember, in the song, the Little White Duck took a bite of the Lily Pad, where the Little Green Frog would subsequently find a place to sit. And there was a Little Black Bug in the story… and also a Little Red Snake, who turns out to be the villain.
The song was written by Walt Barrows and Bernard Zaritsky and recorded by Burle Ives in 1950.
When the song ends, the Little Black Bug has been eaten by the Little Red Snake, and the Little White Duck and Little Green Frog have been frightened away.
And there’s nobody left, sitting in the water. “Boo hoo hoo.”
Although I didn’t realize it at the time — as a child, playing the Burle Ives record over and over — this song was obviously teaching us that eating meat (in this case, the Little Black Bug) was ultimately going to result in the pond being empty.
And if we were smart, we should stick to eating lily pads.
Tony Martens Fekini and the employees of Plantible Foods have been working on ways to use the rubisco protein found in duck weed (and all green plants) as a food ingredient. Extracted from duck weed, rubisco is colorless and tasteless, but it binds with fats and oils, and with proper processing, can produce a plant-based burger that cooks, tastes and feels a bit like a real hamburger.
Plantible says it has already begun experimenting with rubisco in plant-based sausages, chicken, fish and even steak.
Apparently, Plantible has received funding from Kelloggs. But I didn’t find any evidence in Mr. Coren’s article that rubisco has a potential role as a breakfast cereal.
The final paragraph from Mr. Coren’s article.
“No one will sacrifice their taste buds to save the planet,” says Fekini as we clear the plate, leaving only crumbs. “It’s all about taste. People aren’t compromising on taste because of the cool technology behind it. Consumers are ruthless.”
I wonder if that’s true. I ask myself, would I sacrifice my taste buds to save the planet?
I suspect Mr. Fekini is right.