Has Wonka foreseen the future?

3D-printed meat, ‘bleeding’ meatless burgers, and meals to solve world hunger are on the menu for 2028.

Image credit: Unsplashed.com

Understandably, the weird and wonderful culinary feasts we drooled over from our childhood movies are hard to believe—even if we desperately wanted them to be real. The flying Fizzing Whizzbees in Harry Potter, materializing Turkish delights from Narnia, or the scaly Nuna Turkey Jerky from Star Wars are sadly (cue the tears) not real. But, before we drag our feet back to our non-magical meals, we may be heading into a Willy Wonka-esque future of fantastical meatless burgers that 'bleed', spices that can fill your hunger and burger patties printed in a lab.

Impossible Foods’ ‘Bleeding’ Meatless Burgers

They may call themselves Impossible Foods, yet they are anything but. They're a California-based food company taking on the million-dollar meat industry with one not-so-secret weapon: heme. Heme is an iron-rich molecule essential for oxygen transport in blood, Impossible Foods CEO and Founder wrote in 2018. In a typical burger, heating the meat causes the myoglobin protein, which carries heme, to open up, releasing heme and initiating reactions that generate the distinctive aroma and flavour that make meat so irresistible, Impossible Food’s Chief scientist David Lipman told Wired.com. However, no animals were harmed in the making of this burger.

*Enter the humble soy root*

Impossible Foods discovered that soy leghemoglobin, a plant-based equivalent to myoglobin, offers the same properties as heme in animal meat. However, since it would take a mammoth amount of soy roots to produce enough plant-based heme molecules, Impossible Foods has created a solution: genetically engineered yeast that makes its own heme molecules in very high quantities, Lipman explains to Wired.com. What you're left with are four core ingredients making up the Impossible Foods burger. You’ve got: leghemoglobin for that meaty taste, wheat protein to help with the crumbly texture and potato protein with coconut oil for your meat-like fats.

How Do You Prefer Your Cultivated ‘Meat’?

What if nibbling on a tender meat pie, chewing on a sizzling piece of bacon, or picking at a light pan-fried salmon wouldn't cost you the guilt of hurting the planet? Companies like Eat Just and Finless Foods in California are working hard at making ‘alternative- meat’ commonplace. Future Meat and its fellow cellular agriculture allies ask, ' Are animals necessary to consume protein?’ They reckon that they aren’t thanks to something called cultured meat. Think, agriculture inside a petri dish.

In other words, animal stem cells are fermented in a special food facility. Without the need for wide open spaces and a mass number of animals, cultured meat could use less land and water, emit fewer greenhouse gasses and reduce the pollution created by agriculture. These benefits can even stretch as far as the ocean.

Finless Foods uses similar methods to its red meat neighbours all because of a bioreactor (colloquially known as a cultivator). Once inside the bioreactor, the stem cells are isolated and fed the necessary nutrients needed to grow as they would in their natural animal owner. The cells will then multiply into something you could eat with its own muscle fat and connective tissues.

Taste a Menu Designed to Save the World

Among the many issues we face in today’s world (climate change) Dr Hervé This thinks one of them we can solve is world hunger. Here’s the problem: we can’t transport food quickly enough to targeted communities before the contents spoil. The reason for their spoilage is the water retention in certain foods. It’s because moisture-rich nutrients are a microorganism playground which is the reason for their speedy deterioration, This explained to the New York Times. The solution: we should stop transporting ‘wet’ foods and instead break them down into their important parts, This told the New York Times.

Herve This plans on deconstructing food into its individual textures, flavours and compounds until he’s left with foams, gels and powders of the meal he once had. It’s known as molecular cuisine – a mad food scientist's daydream and a solution to world hunger, according to This. The important thing to remember is molecular cuisine can remove moisture from items such as carrots, apples and other moisture-rich fruits and vegetables. It gives scientists like This the ability to create powders and long-life liquids made up of the basic components of food. You may soon have a spice rack of complicated-sounding food components that, when mixed with their complementary compounds, can produce a satisfying and nutrient-dense meal.