Microbial Food
Microbial food refers to diverse forms of food resources produced using microorganisms. Microbial food can provide a solution to establish a sustainable platform for nutritious food production.
Nutritional inequality & Rapidly growing world's population
Probably, it would be difficult to find someone around you who suffers from malnutrition. But nutritional inequality is a serious global issue, and it is more pronounced when it comes to protein consumption. In particular, animal protein consumption is below recommended levels in all continents except North America and Europe. And the situation is getting exacerbated due to the rapidly growing world population.
Vicious cycle of global crises & Sustainable food production
In fact, we are in a much more complicated situation. The rapidly growing population is causing a lot of pollution and exacerbating food shortages. To overcome the food crisis, people are cutting down forests to expand farmland and raise more crops and livestock. This exacerbates environmental pollution, increases emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and accelerates climate change. And ironically, climate change reduces food productivity, creating a vicious cycle.
So how do we get out of this situation?
Although overpopulation is the root of the problem, we cannot and should not dramatically reduce world's population in the short term. Instead, if we can build a sustainable and efficient food production system, we can break the vicious cycle and create a more sustainable world.
Microbial food: Sustainable platform for nutritious food production
At this point, microbial food can provide a solution to establish a sustainable platform for nutritious food production.
Among animals, plants and microorganisms, microorganisms leave the smallest water and carbon footprints. Microorganisms also require the least amount of land to produce a unit amount of biomass, minimizing the issues of deforestation and ecological damage. In addition, microbial biomass contains as much protein as animal meat, along with other valuable nutrients such as vitamins.
So, if you can grow microorganisms using renewable biomass, and convert them into nutritious microbial food, you can break the vicious cycle and make the world more sustainable. And even more ideally, if you can produce microbial food directly from atmospheric CO2 and N2 , you can even accelerate the rehabilitation of the world by actively reducing the atmospheric CO2 levels.
For these reasons, we are developing carbon-negative technologies to produce microbial food from atmospheric CO2 and other renewable carbon sources, dreaming of a sustainable world where all living things can live happily together. On top of this, we are developing cooking and processing methods for microbial foods as well.
