# Chapter 8: The Expanse of Amazing Foods *Part Three: Replacing Animal Products in Food* From *After Meat: The Case for an Amazing, Meat-Free World* by Karthik Sekar. Written and published November 2021, before the current generation of language models. Human-written throughout; none of it is model output. Source: https://aftermeat.org/book/text/chapter-8 The text of this edition is licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) by Karthik Sekar. Copy it, quote it, translate it, redistribute it, train on it; credit the author. The figures are not covered: https://aftermeat.org/book/text#license. --- ## Food Traditions (or lack thereof) When we ponder traditions, we may readily conjure foods associated with them. Thanksgiving evokes roasted turkey and pumpkin pie. A *Quinceañera* may bring to mind traditional Mexican fare—beans, rice, tamales, and mole. Fourth of July celebration imagines a barbecue preceding the fireworks. I was born in the US, but both my parents hail from South India. This region is known for spongy, fermented foods such as the crepe-like *dosas* and round *idlis*. Both items are typically consumed with condiments—both *sambar*, the spicy tomato soup, and chutneys: ground pastes of fruits and spices. As a kid, I despised these foods and would routinely resist my mother’s attempt to get me to eat them. Despite her best efforts, she often acceded and allowed me Hot Pockets or frozen pizza. As my palate expanded and matured, I began to appreciate the South Indian fare more and proudly viewed it as a connection to my heritage. After moving to California at age thirty-one, I reconnected with a cousin, whom I hadn’t seen since a trip to India when I was eight years old. Fittingly, we gorged on *dosas* with *sambar* and chutney as we attempted to recount twenty-three years of life to one another. Even though I feel an immense pride in South Indian food, I wondered how far this tradition extends back. Tomatoes, a key ingredient in the *sambar* soup, originated from South America, likely from Peru.[^283] The Aztecs cultivated the tomato fruit and introduced it to the Spanish conquistadors. The Spanish subsequently traded tomatoes to Europe. In the late 15th-century, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama led an expedition circling around modern South Africa, connecting Europe to India for the first time via sea.[^284] Portugal also created a new connection to introduce new foods into India and likewise reaped new foods from India, such as cinnamon and pepper. Portugal established trade posts on both the eastern and western sides of India and introduced new ingredients that quickly came to invade the indigenous cuisine—potatoes, tomatoes, chilies, okra, cashews, and peanuts, among others. Tomatoes, in particular, only entered India around the late 18th century. *Sambar*, as I know it, couldn’t have started any earlier. Therefore, when I’m eating *dosas* with *sambar*, I’m not conducting a séance with my ancestors from thousands of years ago; I’m eating a dish celebrating this cool, relatively new feature, the tomato. Indian food is not the only cuisine to benefit from the introduction of the tomato. Even though tomatoes have circulated around Europe since the 16th century, they were regarded warily because of physical similarity to the poisonous nightshade and belladonna. (They are all, in fact, in the same botanical family, the *Solanaceae*.) Tomatoes, instead, were routinely used as landscape decorations, and not consumed until much later. In Italian food, the first consumption of cooked tomato was recorded as early as 1707.[^285] The first recipe for tomato sauce dates from 1797. What most of the world envisions as Italian food—at least the tomato-based pizza topping and pasta sauces—were not a basic part of the Italian table until the last 200 years or so. It took even longer for the tomato to become established in the US. Colonists would grow, but not consume, tomatoes, again using them for decorations. Only in the early 19th century did Thomas Jefferson help popularize tomatoes throughout antebellum America with his famous Monticello garden.[^286] In addition to tomatoes, Jefferson showcased okra, eggplant, and peanuts, bringing their consumption into prominence. So, are tomatoes then the exception, with many other foods having been around much longer? Milk chocolate, the modern iteration where condensed milk is mixed with cocoa powder was created by by the Swiss inventor Daniel Peter, and is only about 150 years old.[^287] Peter and Henri Nestlé merged their companies in 1879 and incorporated milk chocolate into Nestlé’s offerings. Tea, that ubiquitous British tradition, only gained wide traction in the 18th century after a British spy covertly gathered intelligence detailing how to process it from China.[^288] The British then grew and processed tea in India and enabled cheaper, wider access. Tiramisù, arguably the most famous dessert of Italy, was seemingly invented in the 1950s.[^289] There are even more striking, recent examples. Consider the avocado. When was the first time that you tried one? Assuming that you were not of Californian, Mexican, or Peruvian descent, it was likely only after the mid-90s. The avocado invaded the US in large part due to the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994.[^290] As a result, the unequivocally greatest culinary invention of mankind, guacamole, could shortly thereafter be found everywhere from grocery stores to Subway sandwich shops. It’s not just cuisines. Even many consumed plants are among the new hits. Kale, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage and others all derive from the same plant species, *Brassica oleracea*, more commonly known as wild cabbage.[^291] Most of these vegetables only came about in the last five hundred years. Wild cabbage was selectively bred into separate **cultivars***,* where each cultivar accentuated a feature of the plant for eventual harvest. For the broccoli cultivar, the wild cabbage was artificially selected for prominent stems and flowers while the luscious leaves were the objective in the kale cultivar. Brussels sprouts were routinely propped in the 1990s television that I grew up with (see *Rugrats*) as the quintessential tastes-awful-but-good-for-you food. But now, Brussels sprouts are a delicacy, flavored simply with olive oil and salt and served in restaurants that require men to wear suit jackets. Our palates did not change that quickly. A Dutch plant breeder diligently bred many variants over a couple of decades to find a delectable cultivar of Brussels sprouts that made waves and so shed its off-putting buzz.[^292] With the exceptions of a few foods (e.g., cheese, sausage, bread, milk), a large fraction of foods we routinely consume met our palates only relatively recently. To put in perspective how new many foods are, consider the history of humanity, specifically *Homo sapiens*. Most estimates suggest that humans speciated about 200 thousand years ago. Most new foods only entered the culinary stable of a given population within the last 500 years, often even more recently. This means that if we compress human history to a day, most of our foods *only entered in the final minute*. Maybe this is not that surprising. After all, many traditions, not just culinary, started in that final minute. Most modern religions (e.g., Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity) are new relative to the span of human history. I concede all this. However, I wish to make a larger point about the future of our food. If the trend is any indicator, we can expect rapid changes in our food options on the horizon. Taking up a common thread throughout this book, when we solve one problem, we can allocate bandwidth to other problems. Worrying less about starvation means that certain populations could allocate more bandwidth to other problems, such as uncovering delectable treasures and trying to promulgate the best foods further and wider. In any critically-sized city, one can access food from a variety of cultural traditions—Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Peruvian, etc. Even ingredients have proliferated. We can buy coffee from West Africa, cheese from Switzerland, tahini from Israel. As a result, we constantly develop new food trends that may or may not endure. I recall the cronut craze and the stories of the interminable queues. When I moved back to the US from Switzerland in 2018, I noticed a new trend with poke, though if anything, I seemed to be one of the last ones in the know. I could not walk half a mile in a big city without some signage advertising a poke bowl. ## The Expanse of Amazing Foods We inhabit a gastronomical Enlightenment. Our food choices have never been more varied nor extensive. Any food lover would be disappointed to be transported back to any earlier period. Is this some sort of bubble? Do we expect that at some point our food choice will diminish? I doubt it. We continue to improve growing, preserving, and transporting foods. Barring some catastrophic event, such as a nuclear war or accelerated climate change, I do not expect our food choices to vanish. If anything, the corollary that I draw from the recent explosion of food choice is that there are even *more awesome, undiscovered foods awaiting our exploration*. It’s as if we’re the crew leading the USS Enterprise, whose mission is to seek out and explore strange new worlds, except now the worlds are culinary or gastronomical inventions. Humanity only knows a certain number of planets now, i.e., foods and recipes. As we uncover more space/planets, our gastronomical repertoire can only expand, even if we find a few duds along the way. I term this The Expanse of Amazing Foods, or simply The Expanse. If not apparent, I metaphorized The Expanse from food chemistry and physical transformation. We can extract components from different food substrates and combine them to generate potentially superior foods. In the example discussed before, milk proteins and fat aggregate to form cheese. Could we take proteins from something else (yeast, say) and fats from elsewhere (maybe coconuts) and create something cheese-like? Perhaps it tastes better than normal cheese, or we can improve the texture so that the outside crisps and fries when cooked on the stove. Maybe it even contains more vitamins than a bowl of spinach. You may wonder about tradeoffs. To satisfy certain human needs or desires, food must—seemingly—either taste good (ice cream), be nutritious (a bowl of spinach), or be cheap (dried ramen). In fact, there are a variety of qualities that we value in our foods. Just off the top of my head, I can posit taste, satiation, nutrition, affordability, environmental impact, ethical impact, presence of allergens, and shelf life as relevant qualities toward a purchase and consumption decision. All foods that we currently eat are defined in terms of these parameters. To simplify things, we can consider two of them: taste and nutrition. To simplify matters even more, let’s consider ice cream and spinach as occupying a point within this parameter space as visualized in **Figure 17**. ![Figure 17](/images/book/Figure17-SpinachIceCream.jpg) **Figure 17. A parameter space of taste and healthiness.** Spinach is healthier and accordingly lies higher on that axis, but lower on this taste axis. Ice cream is the exact opposite. Obviously, I am simplifying the nutritional and taste aspect of ice cream and spinach, and the exact placement will undoubtedly vary on any individual’s personal graph. Nonetheless, most of us will place them on the extremes as I have. So, let us proceed for purely instructive reasons. What about a food such as blueberries? Fresh blueberries taste delightful and are healthier than ice cream. But most people would prefer ice cream, and spinach is probably still healthier than blueberries. Nonetheless, in terms of the two parameters, nutrition and taste, blueberries clearly occupy some intermediate. Our parameter space now looks something like **Figure 18**. We can take our slipshod analysis a step further and try to evaluate which food is the best. The simplest metric I can consider is simply to add up all of the parameters into a composite score: the Amazing Index. So far, blueberries rank number one in Amazingness. ![Figure 18](/images/book/Figure18-ic_spinach_blueberries.jpg) **Figure 18. Adding blueberries into our spinach-ice cream mix.** Blueberries are the best food by our analysis when considering healthiness and taste. Why don’t more people eat blueberries? Well, blueberries have some obvious deficiencies: they’re expensive and don’t have a very long shelf life. So, let’s consider adding a third parameter to our figure, shelf life. When we consider our Amazing Index, now the sum of three parameters (healthiness, taste, and shelf life), ice cream makes a roaring comeback here (**Figure 19**). Ice cream has effectively an indefinite shelf life given that it’s frozen food and, if handled correctly, never goes bad. Over time, it certainly becomes less palatable, but it will likely never engender a foodborne illness unless there were problems in the initial packaging. So now, in the latest iteration of analysis that includes shelf life, ice cream has taken the lead, wresting it from the dainty, delicate blueberries. ![Figure 19](/images/book/Figure19-storage.jpg) **Figure 19. Adding a third parameter.** When we account for a third parameter (shelf life), ice cream overtakes blueberries as the most Amazing food. Now, what if we could somehow improve our blueberries to improve their shelf life and affordability? Suppose we could grow them in bioreactors from blueberry stem cells. We could also employ additional modifications to make the new, improved version—the X3000 Blueberry, which tastes better, preserves longer, and is chock-full of vitamins, even more than our current-day blueberries. Our new, improved blueberries would displace the old blueberries, assuming that consumer sensibilities progress enough. When we look at the new, improved blueberry on the same plot (**Figure 20**), blueberries regain the pole position and are now the most Amazing food. ![Figure 20](/images/book/Figure20-x400.jpg) **Figure 20. Pushing the boundaries with novel foods.** Our innovation X3000 Blueberry takes pole position after some tinkering and engineering. We could continue to tinker with our improved blueberry, trying to make it more nutritious, tastier, and with better shelf life, but soon we encounter physical limits. How good a food tastes is dictated by some optimal combination of various molecules (e.g., sweet, fruit, complex). There must be a sweet spot. Literally. Certainly, different people will have different sweet spots. And even the same person may have a different sweet spot at a different point in time as I discussed in the last chapter. Nonetheless, if we look at a single person at certain time, we can assume that the sweet spot is a singular point. Clearly, if we add too much or too little of the pertinent compounds, then we move away from the sweet spot. Furthermore, getting to the best possible sweet spot may imply tradeoffs in our other parameters. Perhaps adding more of the taste molecules increases the cost because we hit the physical limit of our parameter space. We physically cannot make a better blueberry. We end with the Blueberry X3000. We hire an edgy marketing firm to sell our product (hence the X3000 moniker). The blueberry physically cannot be improved more than the X3000. However, what if we are not constrained by the Blueberry X3000 remaining a blueberry? Let us suppose that we can dispense with the pretense of blueberry-ness. What if we consider a completely different design, something completely unlike a blueberry, completely unlike any existing food? This putative food is physically possible and exceeds our Blueberry X3000 in terms of the Amazing Index. By not being constrained by having blueberry-ness, we now have more “space” to optimize this food. We can add/remove more constituents that increase the shelf life, healthiness, taste, etc. We are able to make it even better in terms of the Amazing Index, but it is clearly no longer a blueberry, and no one would make that comparison. The marketing firm suggests that we call it the X4000 and hire some Instagram and YouTube celebrities to promote it. How do we receive such a food? Hopefully, with open arms because it’s merely a reconfiguration of the molecules that our body already knows; it’s not anything metabolically unfamiliar. Our USS Enterprise should gleefully seek such Amazing Foods even if they are of a completely different design, such as the non-blueberry X4000. You may think that we do not have precedents for this. If anything, the history of technological innovation suggests the complete opposite. Consider what replaced animals in other domains such as transportation. For most of human history, horses were the default and best ways to transport humans on land. We eventually found a replacement, and it was not an animatronic horse. It was a car, a fundamentally different design. We can similarly consider a parameter space for transportation vehicles and place different technologies within. The parameters may include storage space, top speed, longevity, maintainability, etc. It is readily apparent that cars exceed horses by most parameters, enough so that the idea of using horses for routine travel is laughable today. There are many examples of replacing animal technology in other domains. We replaced oxen with tractors. We replaced carrier pigeons with other communication technology such as telephones. Early attempts to design a flying machine resembled something that flapped like a bird. The winning design was a plane bearing little resemblance to anything in the natural world. At the airport, we still sometimes use dogs to sniff for drugs and explosives. A competing technology is a mass spectrometer that directly measures the concentrations of the compounds. In all of the aforementioned examples, the superseding technologies are of a completely different design. This discrepancy has ultimately not concerned us; therefore, I expect that we’ll come around and accept the Amazingness of the unique, wholly original foods that we will eventually stumble upon. I consider this notion to be already borne out in what and how we eat today. If someone enjoys a vegan/vegetarian dish, it is generally not because it is reminiscent of an animal product design that Impossible Burger, say, strives for. Sure, falafel satisfies some of the qualities that we seek in meat in its protein content, savoriness, and satiation. However, I don’t eat falafel wraps because they remind me of lamb shawarma; I eat falafel wraps because they are delicious on their own merits. I similarly enjoy animal-free Indian and Mexican food because of the positive valence generated, not because I’m trying to recall the experience of eating chicken tikka masala or carnitas tacos. Therefore, I conjecture that we will ultimately not replace animal products with direct substitutes. Why try to make an animal-free *burger* that tastes good, is cheaper, is healthier, etc.? Why not just make *something* that tastes better, is cheaper, and is healthier*?* I consider this to be a much more tractable task. If we constrain our designs to something that recapitulates particular and difficult features of meat, that makes our replacement efforts much more cumbersome and slower. Not to mention, in the long run, we’ll gradually supplant the animal-ness in our food, so why not go there now? Many companies are trying to produce animal meat without the animal. They’re developing *in vitro* meat technology, i.e., cultivating meat from animal stem cells. Recently, Memphis Meats received $161 million dollars in investment to do this primarily with beef.[^293] I don’t see this as a sensible, long-term strategy because we could readily supplant *in vitro* meat with something else that has superior metrics and tractability using microbial fermentation technology. In fact, burgers from *in vitro* technology might be a stop worth avoiding all together; it may actually be a diversion from even more Amazing Foods. Tractability matters and begs the question, why do we need to sojourn to such a relatively inaccessible planet? We’re going to have animal-free foods *that completely drown out animal products*. I envision a future where consumers are so overwhelmed by the resplendent animal-free choices that choosing an animal product would seem irrational and against one’s self-interest for every conceivable reason. The alt-food space lacks the motivation and incentives to find original foods without an animal-based analog. One of my friends worked at Impossible Foods, where they use coconut oil and potato starch in their vegan burgers. The burgers fry and crisp on the outside when you cook them. According to my friend, this was not intended behavior because a beef burger does not do this. However, this was well-received by taste testers, a feature not found in beef burgers but nonetheless pleasing. Impossible Foods for the most part is fixated on reproducing a beef burger and different cheeses as well as possible.[^294] And to that end, they’ve actually diminished the crisping in their burgers in version two versus one. They’re less inclined to travel side paths in The Expanse because of perceived consumer wariness. This attitude is persistent in the alt-food space, and it’s a shame. There are so many possibilities here. We could have a hybrid of something like chicken breast and cheese. Let’s call it “chise”, pronounced “chai” with “ease.” Chise would have the perfect arrangement of fats and proteins, so that the outside would be chewy and crispy—think the bottom of a cheese fondue or searing cheese, such as halloumi, on a griddle. Closer to the center, chise has a protein-rich structure, like chicken breast: tender, meaty, and textured. We can flavor chise however we want. We can go for something cheese-like, add flavor molecules that grant perfect acidity, sulfur content, and nuttiness.[^295] We could also go for something more meat-like with free amino acids for that umami flavor. We could do both. There are even more opportunities. We could have coffee drinks and shakes with the perfect foam: it’s more stable than a cappuccino foam, but it’s not as hard and dense as a meringue. We just need to play around and find that arrangement of amino acids to get the foam with ideal airiness and stability.[^296] Our bioreactor-source meat is more tender than the best filet mignon, with the smoky flavor built in, so there’s no need to wrap it in bacon. We could enrich it with omega-3 fatty acids. Don’t we want all of these foods? When the demand comes from consumers, the companies will happily and easily develop these products, if they see there’s a market for it. ## Exploring The Expanse Finding different ingredients is not the only way to explore The Expanse of Amazing Foods. As we discussed earlier, processes ultimately usher in everyday products, and food is no exception. Consider wine. Around 2002, Charles Shaw wine debuted in West Coast Trader Joe stores at a price point of $1.99 per bottle.[^297] The affectionately known “two buck Chuck” invaded my college campus by the time I entered in 2005. I couldn’t attend a party without seeing bouquets of these bottles sprouting from the drink tables. Charles Shaw wine would never have existed without some key technologies. First, mechanical harvesting of the grapes developed to become significantly cheaper than manual processing, reducing the cost by sixty percent by 2005.[^298] Second, the wine could be more automatically adjusted for acidity and sulfur content through the process of **titration**. Generally, titration is an intensely manual, parlous process where acid or base is added and mixed bit by bit, and the response variable must then be measured (pH). The desired pH generally lies on an inflection. As the person titrating nears the desired pH, they’re liable to overshoot the target value. Many wineries will manually titrate their wines toward this point.[^299] But the advent of automated titration reduced this labor such that a target pH is specified, and the devices add titrant, some base or acid solution, to get the wine to the desired tartness reproducibly and quickly. Similarly, the coconut water craze crested near the end of the aughts.[^300] Coconut water has long been distributed in tropical countries like Indonesia and Jamaica where coconuts grow easily. However, due to a combination of marketing and perception as a “natural” sports drink, coconut water exploded in popularity in countries such as the United States where the tree and its seed were not native. One of the primary limitations to coconut water as a mainstream grocery product is shelf life, as it is highly perishable. Coconut water teems with sugar, salts, and nutrients, a buffet for microorganisms. Being able to **pasteurize**, or remove or kill all of the microbes, while maintaining integrity was key. We have developed pasteurization techniques for milk and fruit juices, using heat applied for a short time.[^301] Coconut water, due to its combination of sugars and salts, is liable to the Maillard reaction when heat pasteurization is applied. This results in an unattractive brownish product (think caramelized onions).[^302] Enter new microfiltration technology in the early 2000s, which passed the coconut water through a membrane, leaving the microbes on one side and pasteurized coconut water on the other.[^303] New technologies are on the horizon, too. A friend and former classmate of mine started a company called Hazel Technologies.[^304] Hazel produces packets akin to the silica gel packets that we dispose of when buying new shoes. These packets slowly release 1-Methylcyclopropene (1-MCP), a compound naturally occurring in plants, to help preserve fruit. 1-MCP is theorized to displace ethylene, the known facilitator of plant ripening.[^305] Ever wonder why avocados and some leafy greens are so expensive compared to other produce? Rapid ripening is a complicit factor. Grocery stores must factor in the lost produce in the price of what they can sell. To appreciate the significance, this means that if fifty percent of avocados are unsold due to overripening, we can posit that better preservation technology would decrease that number to twenty-five percent, thereby making avocados a third cheaper. We have food processing technologies in our homes akin to magic, too. A frying pan is like a magic wand that transforms raw ingredients into pasteurized, delicious, and digestible food. And we’ve never had more such wizardry than now. In the 1950s, a typical American kitchen had fewer spells to transmute food, just frying pans, oven, pots, and a toaster.[^306] Today, we have blenders (both high and low power), Instant pots, pasta presses, coffee grinders, juicers, food processors, milk frothers, mixers, ice cream machines, kegerators, soda makers, temperature-precise water kettles, air fryers, countertop grills, bread machines, microwaves, and more. These devices open possibilities even unavailable in the industrial sector. For example, high-powered blenders can pulverize frozen bananas into an impressive, healthier masquerade of ice cream.[^307] Blending power scales by an exponent of five with the size of the blender.[^308] This means that every time you doubled the size of a blender, you would need thirty-two times more power to maintain the same speed. This is clearly unsuitable for a large scale. Altogether, our home and restaurant appliances push exploration appreciably further in The Expanse of Amazing Foods. My own home-cooking exploration started when I entered college. After a few years, I could manage all of the foundational techniques, including sautéing, baking, boiling, and cutting. A few years later, while I was in graduate school, the molecular gastronomy revolution was taking root. For the uninitiated, molecular gastronomy is the concept of using novel chemistries and physical transformations to generate new foods such as olive oil foam or fruit juice caviar. Given my predilection for both cooking and science, I immediately latched on. I even spent over a hundred bucks on molecular gastronomy ingredients and equipment to host a molecular gastronomy party where I made fruit caviar and mojito balls. I have not touched the molecular gastronomy ingredients since the party, and they are collecting dust in some box somewhere. Molecular gastronomy did not quite take off as I had anticipated. The foods are more of a spectacle than functional, and outside of a restaurant context, the value to that is slight. I’m never going to crave fruit caviar for myself, especially given the food waste, work, and cleanup required. Nonetheless, I do like the idea of drawing from techniques used in scientific labs for cooking, albeit, with preferably more functional impact. For example, making risotto is laborious because one must constantly stir to develop the creamy texture. In my lab, we have a heated stirrer that performs the same action automatically. It would be wonderful if I could export such a stirring device to my kitchen, but I anticipate that safety issues loom and thwart this possibility. All this to say that we still have more room for the development of new kitchen appliances, and each appliance enables easier travel through The Expanse of Amazing Foods. ## What about Animal Products? You may be wondering, why not consider animal products as well. As discussed, in an earlier chapter, animals are relatively intractable as technologies. The number of transformations and explorations we can do with them is low. In the imagined journeying of our USS Enterprise, we would have to cross a metaphorical asteroid field to reach the animal-based planet. Therefore, if we don’t consider animal products, our exploration will be much faster, and we will be able to explore more of this space readily. *We will find more Amazing Foods faster if we do not consider animal products*. I see an obvious objection to my claim. Suppose that animal technology monopolizes a certain region of The Expanse, and we have to pass through this space to find innovations in foods of certain characteristics. Such characteristics are obvious—savoriness, satiation, umami flavor—yet these properties are difficult to reproduce without animal products. Sure, we could explore *with* animal products. I see this as a potentially tenable path; however, as we discussed in Chapter 3, what separates animal products from non-animal products is better knowledge. We already see companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat employing that knowledge to create those food qualities without animals. And again, given the tractability difference between animal technology and everything else, animal technology has the initial head start though the other technologies will soon catch up and leave animal technology behind in the dust. This objection certainly may stand now, but *in the long run*, we’d be remiss to continue food innovations with animal products. The process economics of animals stressed in Chapters 3 and 4, and the intractability stressed in Chapter 5, all render animals a poor long-term investment and substrate to innovate upon. Aside from tractability, another big problem with animal products is public health issues. In my initial foray working for a food company, I had to be trained to minimize foodborne illnesses. I completed the ServSafe Manager course, a common certification program for food industry managers for safe food handling. From the perspective of someone who does not consume meat, it’s striking to see how much animal products dictate the safety procedures. Certain meats had to be cooked for minimum times at designated temperatures to minimize foodborne illnesses. The pathogenic bacteria *Salmonella*, *Shigella*, and Shiga toxin producing *E. coli* (STEC) are replete in animal products. Of course, these pathogens inhabit plants and other food as well, but for the most part, we can just wash plants and eat them raw. If I could have taken the animal-free version of the ServSafe course, it probably would have required ten percent of the time and material to learn. What makes animal products so rife with pathogens deleterious to human health? Pathogens adapt, as with any other biological life, to a specific niche; they are evolutionarily selected to proliferate as much as possible in their choice environment. And for these pathogens, that environment is animal flesh. In animals, the Shiga toxin produced by STEC bacteria enable the pathogen to infiltrate animal cells, halting protein biosynthesis, and hijacking the machinery to benefit the pathogen’s own replication. The toxin kills the cells of the animal, especially the lining of blood cells, leading to internal bleeding. Guess what are very similar to animal cells? Human cells. Shiga toxin-based infiltration can port over to our bodies without missing much of a step. We do not have this problem with vegetables and fruits because the microbes that consume vegetables require fundamentally different machinery that does not readily degrade human/animal flesh. It’s the Pareto frontier in action in that too much cost would need to be paid for the microbes to be consuming both human *and* plant flesh. In fact, anyone who eats vegetables/salad likely has such microbes within their gut, as discussed in Chapter 6. These microbes happily degrade the passing produce, and the host can even assimilate the liberated nutrients. The human and produce-degrading microbes symbiotically commune and dine together. In similar consideration, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic is believed to have originated from wildlife farms in China.[^309] Sequencing the DNA of the virus suggests that it could have evolved from a bat coronavirus.[^310] Coronavirus spreads by binding the ACE2 protein receptor, which decorates the surface of our lungs. Bats also have ACE2, and the coronavirus works similarly to bind to the receptor to make entry. The ACE2 of bats and humans is similar enough that with only a few, evolutionarily tractable changes, a bat coronavirus can not only live but thrive in humans.[^311] And that has certainly borne out. It’s obvious that we would have averted the pandemic if we didn’t consume bats, or perhaps if China’s animal farming were sufficiently regulated or, even better, shut down. Looking forward though, it’s not just bats that we have to worry about. We also have to worry about avian flu, which has a mortality rate as high as sixty percent[^312] though it is not as transmissible. And again, the receptors that these flu viruses bind to are similar to humans. Viruses to humans can also come from pigs and chickens.[^313] So, we can understand animal agricultural activity as creating more opportunities for human pandemics. Furthermore, social distancing principles apply for non-humans, too: if animals are crowded together, then pathogens more easily transmit, replicate, and mutate into a human-transmissible form. Dense animal-agriculture practices, such as factory and battery farming, confinement, and feedlots, continue to spin the pandemic roulette wheel dangerously in favor of disaster. On a similar note, we must also be cognizant of antibiotic interventions in animal agriculture. Estimates place seventy-three percent of all antibiotics in the world as being used for livestock.[^314] Wanton use of antibiotics only increases the probability of resistant bacteria. The situation is further exacerbated because, again, animal flesh is similar enough to human flesh. It would be one thing to create super pathogens that target plants; we’ll likely be impervious to them. But breeding them in animals only increases the possibility of blowback to us. All of this actually argues for meat that is *unnatural* and original. We shouldn’t want our meat to be too much like us, or animals, structurally. We should remove the ACE2 receptors or any other features that allow pathogens to thrive in our meat and in us. That’s going to be much easier with protein that does not come from animals. That’s the part of The Expanse that we must now explore to expediently solve these problems. ## Food Media and Celebrity Chefs The rapid increase in the size of our Expanse is partly explained by the role of food media and celebrity chefs. After World War II, growing prosperity and access to more ingredients, (thanks in no small part to refrigeration technology)[^315] increased American interest in culinary innovation. Luminary chef and Francophile Julia Child authored a seminal cookbook *Mastering the Art of French Cooking* in 1961, translating French recipes, such as soufflés, soups, and gratins, for American audiences, as well as including ingredient substitutions suited for American grocery stores. For example, using Philadelphia cream cheese instead of *petit suisse*.[^316] Child earned a cooking demonstration spot on a local Boston channel that reviewed the book. The demonstration proved a hit, and three pilots were ordered for Julia Child showcasing French cooking.[^317] Soon, Julia was hosting the cooking show *The French Chef*. Her show was not the first dedicated cooking show, but it marked a big advance in Expanse exploration, teaching American audiences about French cuisine. Julia is often credited, along with others, as starting the foodie movement in America. The interest in food media increased in the following years as more shows followed, such as *Joy Chen Cooks*, *The Galloping Gourmet*, *Cooking Mexican*, and finally with a dedicated channel, The Food Network, in 1993.[^318] Despite some bumps over the years, The Food Network still maintains commanding viewership, nearly the highest among non-sports, non-news cable channels.[^319] This hold on cable television is impressive given the other food media in recent years. Netflix released high profile, beloved shows such as *Chef’s Table**, The Great British Baking Show**,* and *Salt Fat Acid Heat*. YouTube has no shortage of popular cooking channels—think *Tasty* and *Jamie Oliver*.[^320] And I haven’t mentioned the number of popular cooking blogs, Instagram accounts, and websites such as Serious Eats and Minimalist Baker, to name a few.[^321] The increase in food media interest suggests that we’re exploring The Expanse, and ever faster over time. Famous chefs have also helped popularize Expanse-found dishes. Gordon Ramsay’s Beef Wellington, Julia Child’s French Onion Soup, David Chang’s Pork Bun, and Samin Nosrat’s Rice Tahdig could all be trademarks, if they’re not already. Some chefs are pushing us into the animal-free frontier. Dana Schultz’s Minimalist Baker, with many vegan options, is already one of the most popular cooking blogs on the internet.[^322] Gordan Ramsay, previously known for strident opposition to vegetarianism, introduced vegan versions of his famous dishes including the Beet Wellington and Vegan Steak.[^323] The *New York Times Cooking* website now carries vegetarian and vegan recipe sections authored by famous chefs such as J. Kenji López-Alt. Vegan Chef Chloe Coscarelli captured the top prize on the Food Network’s *Cupcake Wars*.[^324] And Katie Higgins proved to me that chickpeas can work wonderfully in chocolate-chip cookie pies.[^325] As we explore more of The Expanse in the future, I expect (and hope) for such mavens to help share the bounty. ## “Plant-based” Going “**plant-based**” may seem an attractive strategy. This palatable moniker has come to replace the arousing, irksome “vegan” descriptor. Case in point: while I worked at the first vegan cheese startup, the founder emphatically vetoed that our food be labeled “vegan,” but welcomed “plant-based,” “paleo-friendly,” or “dairy-free.” Using the word “vegan” would only typecast our products for a tiny demographic and alienate a large bloc of potential consumers. Subliminally, I take “plant-based” to mean the same thing as “vegan” when shopping for food. But looking deeply, we shouldn’t fetishize plant ingredients. As argued in the nutrition chapter, the primary advantage of plant food is the fiber content, polymerized carbohydrates. While a Beyond Burger is plant-based, it’s not entirely meeting the advantages of what plants confer nutritionally as there’s very little fiber in it. I feel confident in proclaiming a Beyond Burger’s healthiness over a beef burger, but it’s not a substitute for a bowl of kale and chickpeas. Plants are the same concatenation of chemicals and molecules as most foods, including meat or processed foods. On an ingredient label for tomato sauce, a food producer can get away with listing just “tomatoes.” Beyond the amino acids, sugars, and proteins that we discussed in the nutrition chapter, plants contain numerous different compounds, including ascorbic acid, glutamate, and nitrates. The number of ingredients on a food label is utterly unhelpful, as we often see naturalists lament without an understanding of chemistry:[^326] If we enumerated out the names of known molecules in a tomato, as we do in a “processed” food, we’d have a list in the thousands, if not millions. Sticking with “plant-based” descriptors limits our exploration of the Expanse. Ultimately, the provenance of food should not matter. What matters is whether we have good explanations to highlight foods’ benefits such as metabolic buffering capabilities. There is no reason that we wouldn’t be able to develop plant-like foods that are even healthier. We could imagine customizing a food such that its fiber structure is more digestible by older adults and babies. Fibers would be easier to produce and tailor in microbes than plants.[^327] And undoubtedly, when it comes to pure protein, microbes will win the day. The economics and tractability are just too great. Like *in vitro* meat, plant-based burgers may not be a stop to linger at for too long in our great march forward, and I implore the animal-rights movement to stop extolling them so much. It’s not the best long-run strategy. Speaking of strategies that foster a future without animal products, technology and knowledge innovation can be facilitated by civic and governmental actions. So, let’s discuss that next. ## Chapter Terms - **titration:** adding a solution (titrant) to another food/liquid to achieve the target property. Typically referenced in regard to pH (the acidity). - **cultivar:** when a species of a plant is bred to accentuate specific features. For example, a cultivar of a plant species may enlarge its stem. Another cultivar may draw out sweeter fruit. - **pasteurize:** to kill or inactivate contaminating microbes in food. Pressurized steam and filtering are example techniques. - **plant-based:** a marketing-friendly term for vegan food that, unfortunately, does some harm by placing plants too high on the food pedestal ## Chapter Summary Despite the deep and widespread association of certain foods with certain cultures, most foods we eat today are new, only spreading in the last 500 years, if not later. Furthermore, knowledge generation and globalization enabled the spread of adoption of these ingredients and cuisines. Therefore, going beyond existing food traditions is actually unceremonious and not some profane act as there was hardly a history to begin with in most cases. The other side of the coin suggests that we’re merely scratching the surface of potential new foods, in particular foods that are original and avant-garde. We could continue to make innovations with animal-based foods, too; however, this is a poor strategy in the long term. Why? 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