PLANT MEAT MATTERS
Making a tasty alternativeA freezer opens, and a dense slab
of brown-red material is pulled out.
Atze Jan van der Goot points at the
pancaked layers. It looks like frozen
steak – but this meat is not made up
of cow. It’s a mixture of wheat gluten,
soy concentrate, colourants and
water. “For us, as food engineers,”
Van der Goot explains, “we would like
to make a product that resembles
meat as much as possible.”
Originally a chemical engineer,
he focused on plant-based meat
in 2004, and had a breakthrough –
one claimed to make the texture of
his meat analogue, and the eating
experience, better than any similar
product on the market. WUR’s fake
steak, he says, even sizzles in a pan,
like a thick slice of bacon. The break-
through? Shear cell technology.
Many artificial meat companies,
such as Impossible foods, with itsfamous bleeding burger, employ a
technology called high-moisture
extrusion – essentially, the heating
and cooling of the meat substitute
mixture, to create texturisation.
With WUR’s “meat”, the texture
is achieved through unaligned,
or shearing forces. The mixture
is pumped under mild pressure
into the shear cell cylinder, which
contains two nested compartments:
one spinning, the other fixed. This
movement pulls and weaves the
strands of soy and gluten, creating
a fibrous structure that the WUR
technicians regard as superior to
that achieved through extrusion.
Both the energy input and the cost
of investment for shear cell are lower
than those of any available extrusion
technology: respectively, 25-40 per
cent, and 40-60 per cent less.
And it is catching the eye of
serious investors. Plant Meat
Matters, a project led by Van der
Goot looking to scale up the shear
cell method, has partnered with
several food companies in the
Netherlands, France and Germany,
and the consumer goods multina-
tional Unilever. But shear cell could
also provide a more democratised
method for plant-based products.
In the near future, Van der Goot
believes that every restaurant,
grocery store and kitchen can be
equipped with a fake-meat machine.ARNOLD VAN HUI
Scaling up insect farmingWorldwide, 2,000 species of insects
are consumed as a sustainable
source of food. Beyond Africa and
Asia, however, this is still a very
niche cuisine – a situation entomol-
ogist Arnold van Huis has been
attempting to transform for 20 years.
Outside Wageningen, Van Huis is
known for co-authoring landmark
books on the potential of insects
as planet-friendly protein providers.
The Insect Cookbook: Food for
a Sustainable Planet looks at
the history of entomophagy (the
practice of eating insects), chefs
versed in insect cuisine – such as
René Redzepi, co-founder of Danish
Michelin-starred restaurant Noma- and bug recipes. Edible Insects:
Future Prospects for Food and Feed
Security is a more academic take on
ecological and nutritional benefits.
Cold insect blood translates to
a high food conversion rate: per
kg of meat produced, a cricket
needs roughly 1.7 kg of feed, a cow
7-10. Insects also emit less green-
house gases than conventional
livestock; of insect species, only
cockroaches, termites and scarab
beetles produce any methane at
all. Meanwhile, as Van Huis points
out in Edible Insects, many insects
can compete with conventional
meat’s protein content. Per 100g
of meat, cattle can produce up to
26g of protein, compared with up to
25g for crickets, and 28g for some
locusts and grasshoppers.
According to Van Huis, a new
age of entomophagy is beginning.
Researchers at WUR are looking to
capitalise on bugs’ ability to act as
both livestock and waste treatment
plants. Insects reared on organic
waste serve as both food production
and waste reduction – a triumph of
circular agriculture, where yield and
use of resources are optimised for
minimal impact on the environment.
“We are at the beginning of an
exponential growth,” Van Huis says.
14109-19-FTfoodvalley.indd 143 10/07/2019 11:23