A Little Word Told Me

Over consumption of animal-based food products has been linked to heart diseases, stroke and other illnesses . Animal agriculture has also received increasingly bad press in the last few years, due to a growing understanding of the suffering inflicted on animals and its impact on the environment. Nowadays, you see a lot of companies jumping on the plant-based bandwagon due to increasing demand from consumers . However a lot of plant-based food items, including dairy alternatives do not make it to the consumer’s kitchen shelves. Why? It seems illogical, right? People nowadays, due to easy access to the internet and information, are more informed about risks associated with animal-based diets yet they seem reluctant to move towards a plant-based diet.  One of the key factors is flavour, or the lack of it. There’s no accounting for taste. But when it comes to plant-based dairy alternative products, a lot of consumers agree that most of the products available in the market are missing...

 In conversation with Chris Crocker, Founder of Good Koffee If you were asked to create your own “ dream drink” and sell it, what would you choose to sell? And if you see that everyone around you is trying to sell their own version of dream drink too, what would you do to stand out? I have asked this question to a lot of people and most of them answer, “ we would try to dress our drink in innovation and creativity. After all it's the newness and the sense of adventure that intrigues humans.” Although it might be true, it is easier said than done. I have surfed through the shelves of various supermarkets and while at first glance, a lot of drinks did seem ‘ novel ’ , when I carefully looked at their packaging information, I found out a lot of them are quite similar. There ’ s nothing truly new to a lot of them. And that ’ s how I realised that although everyone talks about making a product creative and innovative, not everyone has been able to do it. It is not impossible but only f...

Why is everyone expecting CO 2 to save our planet? CO 2 , a greenhouse gas that was once considered a villain has now become an uprising superhero, a hero on whom all of us are relying upon to save us and our planet.   Innovators and promoters of sustainable development, across the globe, are now trying to capture excess CO 2 and turn it into meat , alcohol, concrete, fuel, plastics and whatnot. It seems nowadays everyone is trying to make everything out of CO 2 .   How are they doing it? A lot of research organizations and companies are building their sustainable production systems around a technology, generally referred as DAC- Direct Air Capture . This relatively new technology can be used to capture CO 2 from atmosphere, diluted gasses and distributed sources of carbon via industrial processes. To keep it short and simple, this carbon capturing system consists of 3 main elements- contacting area, solvent or sorbent and regeneration module. The contacting area fa...

To make food production more sustainable, a circular project development company, Orbital Farms, is working to create a system by integrating biotech, energy and aquaponics. This is how they do it. As the coronavirus has enveloped the entire global population in its chaos and our whole nation has gone into lockdown, I, like many of my friends, have turned to the internet to engage my mind by reading all sorts of innovation stories published on various outlets. And this is how I came across this Forbes article . Published in March 2020, this article talked about how different food and biotech companies, across the globe, are working to develop climate independent, farm-free food systems that are sustainable and relatively environment- friendly. In it, they mentioned about a circular project development company - Orbital Farms - and how is it working to integrate different technologies. With the integration of Agritech, Biotech and other technologies, they'll be able to...

Is it really possible to produce food just from 'thin air'? And will this new technology be able to save our planet earth? I have spent a lot of time thinking about food over the past month. Even before this coronavirus period, I used to spend a lot of time cerebrating about food in general, but now, due to the curfew imposed in my city- Chandigarh- since last week of March because of COVID-19, my cerebral cells have really been pushed to think about it a lot more than usual. While my Instagram feed has been filled with people showing off their newly-acquired cooking skills, I and one of my food-nerd friends, Apoorva Tikku, have been sharing articles and discussing all the novel innovative ways to produce food.  During this season of sharing links with each other, I came across a review paper published in September 2019, written by a team of Finnish scientists, that explains how protein flour can be produced without any farms, farmers, plants, and photosynthesi...