Presentation Information
[2Brew-02-KL]From lab to table: harnessing fungi for sustainable food production
○Vayu Hill-Maini1 (1. Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University (USA))
Keywords:
Bioengineering,Gastronomy,Food
The current global food system is inefficient and encompasses a striking paradox: on one hand, the amount of food produced globally is enough to feed everyone on the planet; on the other hand, billions of people are malnourished due to the unavailability of high-quality nutrition. While this discrepancy can be attributed a variety of factors, a major contributor is food waste. Globally, over 30 % of produced is wasted, amounting to over 1 billion meals a day are wasted. This wasted human nutrition includes diverse edible byproducts that are generated in the transformation of crops into foods, including spent brewers’ grain from beer brewing, soybean residue from tofu production, and pomace from fruit and vegetable processing. While byproducts are produced at the million-ton scale globally, most end up in landfills, a process that ironically costs money to the producer and causes massive greenhouse gas emissions (~800 kg CO2 equivalents per 1000 kg disposed).
Edible filamentous fungi provide a tantalizing solution to this problem, as they have the potential to convert byproducts into nutritious human food through fermentation. However, to fully leverage the powerful capabilities of fungi for waste-to-food conversion, we need to transition from merely observing what the organisms do in nature, to being able to program their biology as an engineerable solution for human and planetary health. In this talk, I will describe our lab’s efforts developing and deploying synthetic biology tools to engineer edible filamentous fungi for enhanced conversion of waste into food. I will share recent results bridging fundamental discoveries with synthetic biology tool development that now allow us to program fungal flavor and nutrition at the level of molecules and genes. I will also discuss how we are leveraging these tools and insights to develop new foods in collaboration with Michelin-star chefs, using our state-of-the art R & D kitchen at Stanford. By bridging bioengineering with gastronomy, this work promises to lay the foundation for a new generation of delicious and sustainable fungal foods – that happen to be made from abundant byproducts.
Edible filamentous fungi provide a tantalizing solution to this problem, as they have the potential to convert byproducts into nutritious human food through fermentation. However, to fully leverage the powerful capabilities of fungi for waste-to-food conversion, we need to transition from merely observing what the organisms do in nature, to being able to program their biology as an engineerable solution for human and planetary health. In this talk, I will describe our lab’s efforts developing and deploying synthetic biology tools to engineer edible filamentous fungi for enhanced conversion of waste into food. I will share recent results bridging fundamental discoveries with synthetic biology tool development that now allow us to program fungal flavor and nutrition at the level of molecules and genes. I will also discuss how we are leveraging these tools and insights to develop new foods in collaboration with Michelin-star chefs, using our state-of-the art R & D kitchen at Stanford. By bridging bioengineering with gastronomy, this work promises to lay the foundation for a new generation of delicious and sustainable fungal foods – that happen to be made from abundant byproducts.
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