Dairy-Free, Meat-Free, Joy-Free?

Years ago, I went to an A’s game with a co-worker, an ex-co-worker, and my brother. The A’s were promoting they were now featuring the Impossible Burger as part of their food menu options. At the time I knew this was a plant-based meat alternative made in a lab, but my brother didn’t. I said I’d try the burger and so did my brother. We went to get our food, came back to our seats, and ate. After we were finished, our other companions asked, “Well? What did you think? Did the burger taste like a beef burger?” I said it did, but the texture was a little different. My brother said it tasted fine, but wondered why they called it an impossible burger. I noted that it wasn’t made of meat, but rather was a plant-based meat alternative. He jokingly said, “Oh, I thought it was going to be this huge burger that was impossible for one person to eat.” Ha!

Plant-based foods are much more common at supermarkets now than they were a few short years ago. You can get milk made from oats, almonds, or soy. Foods that taste like chicken, sausages, and even vegan cheeses. I’ve tasted almost all of these as my daughter is a vegetarian, but not vegan. The reason she’s not vegan? She can’t give up cheese. Yes, she’s a cheese lover and has been since she was a small child. Me? I have an issue with milk products that contain the A1 protein, so since there aren’t a lot of A2 cheeses out there, I use vegan cheddar — which varies in taste. These are not choices I make out of any values-based reason. Rather, it’s because I don’t want to be in pain or have, well, problems down there after eating…if you catch my drift.

Today, I was reading my local paper (The East Bay Times), and they profiled a company in Berkeley (California) that’s making dairy-free cheese. But not just any cheese. Rather, they are the kind of cheeses that are very difficult to create without the aid of cow’s milk — and that’s aged cheese. Brie, blue, feta, and chévre… you know, those kinds of cheeses. Well, this company (called Climax Foods) was started by Oliver Zahn. Zahn used to work at Google as a data scientist and at Impossible Foods doing roughly the same job. He started Climax Foods in 2019 and has, according to the news article, raised about 26 million dollars to fund his company’s efforts to make aged dairy-free cheeses. As Zahn said in the article (which is behind a paywall, so I’ll just paste in what it says):

“What does an animal do?” Zahn said. “Fundamentally, a cow just eats a bunch of plants and converts them into milk and meat. I was thinking, is there another way to achieve that, to make foods directly from plants? It didn’t strike me as some weird Franken-food — humans have always tinkered with what they eat.”

Here’s how it works: the company collects reams of data from rare plants found all over the world, and feeds the information to machine-learning models that predict exactly how the foods would hold up against the real thing.

Then, the company’s labs in Berkeley synthesize the foods that Zahn said have been mesmerizing early testers.

Would I try these cheeses? Sure! Why not. It may not taste quite like a really lovely brie, but you gotta start somewhere. If there’s a market for these kinds of cheese then I’m sure the company will get much better at its production process. Will they win awards in national or international cheese competitions? Probably not. However, if the public takes to this type of cheese, then they will likely become profitable and it’ll start a virtuous economic cycle for them. Considering how climate change is going to affect our food supplies — and that includes lettuce, it seems — the likelihood that we’ll be able to farm certain areas of the world and consume meat at the rate we have been is just not sustainable. So, leave it to science to come up with an alternative that may prove less expensive in order to feed the world. If we can simulate the taste, texture, look, and smell of foods we were used to, there may be a way to engineer our way out of a food and water crisis that we’ve brought upon ourselves. In the Star Trek universe where replicators create foods for humans via voice command (i.e., “Computer. Earl Grey. Hot”), food made in a lab may be one step in getting there.