INSIDE THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF NOVEL PROTEINS

Advanced fermentation technologies are offering a a new class of climate-smart foods. Can it disrupt farming?

- Sayantan Bera

Insiders call it R2. An unassuming biomanufacturing facility in Tumkur, Karnataka, just 90 minutes away from the bustling metropolis of Bengaluru, R2 is an expansive structure with a gleaming white façade, decked with dashes of vivid blue on the edges. As one steps inside, this discreet innovation hub evokes a sense of wonder. It offers a peek into the future which is part-utopian, part-dystopian.

Within its sterile premises and inside giant fermentation tanks, microbes swimming in a nutrient-rich broth make different types of proteins. For instance, a milk protein that can be used to make ice-cream or cheese. A dairy ingredient made without raising dairy cattle, without using a drop of milk, or even a single animal cell.

The consequences can be earth-altering. Specific proteins can now be factory-made without raising livestock. This can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, free up land used for grazing and grow crops to feed animals. The microbial production system—known as precision fermentation—can be a hedge against climate emergencies, besides cutting down future pandemic risks. Also, the inherent violence associated with animal farms—from injecting cattle with hormones for more milk to cruelties in the meat supply chain— can be avoided, to an extent.

Precision fermentation is now widely used to produce insulin, a life-saving drug for diabetics, in a lab and not from pig’s pancreases. Likewise, rennet, an enzyme required to make hard cheese, is now manufactured using fermentation, and not from stomach linings of young nursing calves, which were once butchered in large numbers.