Animal-free dairy: Could this be the future of milk?

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dairy alternatives with real milk proteins but no use of cows are now becoming a reality. In the US you can now buy animal-free dairy ice cream, and around the world scientists and food technologists are aiming to create lab-cultured dairy products indistinguishable from the real thing. This is possible through precision fermentation, a process which uses genetically engineered microbes to grow the proteins in a bioreactor, which is how insulin and rennet are already produced. The proteins are then separated and used to create products like milk and cheese from scratch.

Companies creating precision fermentation-made dairy believe it could play an important part in reducing the environmental impact of traditional dairy production, and provide a much needed source of alternative protein. But as this new industry emerges it’s still not known how consumers will take to animal free dairy, and if it can scale up enough to make the products widely available and affordable to make an impact.

In this programme, Leyla Kazim visits a company in London creating an animal-free cheese, and asks if it can ever be the same as a traditionally-made product. And as this new industry grows – how far could it go in making dairy more sustainable?

Presented by Leyla Kazim and produced by Sophie Anton for BBC Audio in Bristol

Transcript

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0:57.5	I am in a lab in East London, surrounded by a lot of instruments and scientific looking equipment and here they are making
1:06.9	proteins which are going to be used to make cheese but what makes this particularly interesting is that these proteins are the same as you would find in cow's milk
1:18.5	yet no animals have been involved in the process at all.
1:23.3	I'm talking about a technology some people are calling the future of dairy, real dairy proteins
1:29.8	created in a lab and brewed in a bioreactor and not a cow in sight all made possible by a process called precision fermentation.
1:40.0	It's an incredibly powerful and exciting technology and we're already starting to see the early movements of this industry taking off with milk and cheese.
1:49.0	But I want to think the best solution will ultimately win and hours will prove to be the way that dairy will
1:54.6	be made in the future because of the benefits on CO2, the benefits on product.
2:00.2	Once the storytelling and the cultural resonation and the mindset is there, there's nothing really stopping it.
	...

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