Lisa, welcome.
Thank you.
Given the work you do in food sustainability, from your
perspective, what's the future of food look like?
Well, we have 8 billion people on the planet today, and it's
only going to get bigger than that, you know, 9 billion, 10
billion people by 2050.
So the important thing is how do we make food for all those
people in a way that's sustainable?
How do we make food for all those people in a way that
doesn't increase the greenhouse gas emissions?
Because right now the food sector emits more greenhouse
gases than the entire transportation sector, and an
amount of land the size of South America and Africa combined has
been cleared for the food system.
So the future of food has to include new solutions where you
can grow food using less land, that does not emit massive
amounts of greenhouse gases and that ultimately is able to feed
the nation's nutritiously.
So it has to be different.
I think that's the the summary talking about new, different
solutions.
Tell me more about air protein, if you would, and the role that
it has to play in this future.
Yeah, well, air protein attacks the problem head on because it's
a process that actually is better than carbon neutral, is
carbon negative, and it doesn't use any arable land so that we
don't have to clear more rainforests or other things in
order to make room for more agriculture.
So we're able to make food using elements of the water.
I'm sorry, elements of the air, water and energy as our inputs
and that's those are the main inputs and we're able to make a
really nutritious protein rich ingredient that can be used as
an ingredient for, you know if you go to the supermarket today
and on the edges you have the produce and the meat, but
everything in the middle are all about ingredients.
You know, whether it's your cereals, your breads, your
pastas, you need ingredients for that.
And so we're able to make those food ingredients using air,
water and energy.
Is there a way, in layman's terms, you can describe how?
Well, what I can say is this is, you know, we definitely stand on
the shoulders of giants.
So this was based on work done by NASA during the Apollo space
program where they were thinking about how to go to Mars and you
have to figure out how to feed people without lots of land
essentially.
So the idea that they came up with is to use a process.
It's like fermentation, like making yogurt or cheese or your
probiotics or making beer or wine.
But the difference is you use elements of the air, water and
energy as your input in order to make your food.
What else is exciting you in this space?
Well, that is very much exciting.
I think what's exciting me is are the amount of innovators
that have jumped in and they've asked the question, you know,
how can we leverage your natural processes to just speed them up?
How can we make food, you know, regenerative agriculture as an
example.
How can we make food in a way that protects the land, that is
sustainable and is something that really can last as more and
more people are on the planet?
Lisa, thank you so much.
Thank you.