Give peas a chance
By Larissa Zimberoff
As A crop, The peA hAs risen And fAllen, buT TodAy
everyone seems to agree it checks the box against the big-
gest problems plaguing the earth: climate, food and health.
From a sustainability standpoint, peas do everything wheat,
corn and soy don’t. They require less water, are drought tol-
erant, reduce the need for nitrogen fertilizers because they
take nitrogen from the air and store it in their roots, and are
an ideal candidate for crop rotation. Want to avoid aller-
gens? Pea allergies are rare; it’s why peas are leaving soy in
their dust.
Mintel, the market- research firm, reported that 757 new
pea- related foods hit the shelves last year. That’s in addition
to what’s already out there, including the most famous pea
food, the Beyond Burger. With one of the strongest IPOs in
the past two decades, Beyond Meat is a prime example of
our food system’s new priority: plant protein.
Peas are easily broken down into building blocks of
function : starch, fiber and protein. In China, home to many
of the manufacturing plants that do the breaking down,
called fractionation, pea- protein isolate is widely thought of
as the by-product. Pea starch is used to make noodles, and
the leftover protein is shipped to the U.S. McConnell’s Fine
Ice Creams makes five nondairy flavors starring micronized
pea protein; Ripple Foods has sold 7 million gallons of its
nondairy milk made of a proprietary yellow-pea protein.
The U.N. named 2016 the International Year of Pulses,
which include peas, lentils, chickpeas and beans. That, says
Tim McGreevy, CEO of USA Dry Pea and Lentil Council,
helped kick off a “paradigm shift toward plant-based foods”
in the U.S. “Up until five years ago, the majority of our prod-
uct was exported,” he says. But now the U.S. is getting on
board with the rest of the world, where highly adaptable
pulses are widely used across cultures. The government is
helping to push the trend: in the last two farm bills, it autho-
rized funding for the Pulse Crop Health Initiative, including
almost $3 million over 2018 and 2019 to the U.S. Department
of Agriculture for proposals that will accelerate our knowl-
edge of pulses.
However, tHese efforts pale in comparison to those by
Canada, which has $115 million earmarked for research into
plant protein and plant-based products. Roquette, a French
company, is spending $300 million on a pea- protein facility
in Manitoba, and Verdient Foods, a pulse- processing facil-
ity in Saskatchewan, has a large chunk of investment from
married partners James Cameron, the film director, and Suzy
Amis Cameron, an environmental activist.
In addition, Canadian companies don’t have to deal with
the constant threat of retaliatory tariffs. “All of U.S. agricul-
ture has been hugely affected by the tariffs,” says McGreevy.
“We’ve been completely shut off of green and yellow peas,
and the Canadians are taking full advantage of that.” Be-
cause the U.S. is no longer a reliable supplier, McGreevy re-
ports that his Chinese counterparts are looking toward the
Baltic region of Europe to fill the gap.
It’s not only food manufacturers who
see the beauty in peas. If science can
make a more protein-packed legume, it
could answer the looming question of
how to feed our growing population. To
that end, an international team is poised
to release the entire genomic sequence
of the pea. “It puts peas back where
they belong,” says Rebecca McGee, a
plant breeder with the USDA’s Agricul-
tural Research Service, who worked on
the project. McGee is currently work-
ing on a related initiative called MP3—
“more protein, more peas, more profit.”
The goal is to find the genetic nature of
protein concentration, which could lead
to make a more powerful pea.
There’s also a line of plants waiting
quietly behind the pea for their 15 min-
utes. In Canada, Ron Kehrig, deputy
director of investments for the Sas-
katchewan ministry of trade, reports
his farmers are testing fava beans and
canola seeds. From Beyond Meat, we
may soon get sausages made from lupin
beans or camelina, mustard and sun-
flower seeds. The message is clear, and
there’s a not-too-distant future in which
our unsustainable reliance on animal
protein is jettisoned for the almost
limit less variety of our plant kingdom. TimeOff Food
757
New pea-related
food products
to hit shelves
in 20181.8B
Pounds of dried peas
the U.S. produced in
2015, up from
500 million in
1995163%
Increase in share
value of Beyond
Meat’s stock on
its first day
of trading