Precision Fermentation: Precisely Idiotic

Using precision fermentation to make food is being suggested as an answer to the issues of feeding our growing population and solving the climate crisis simultaneously.

For argument’s sake, let’s park all nutritional concerns and assume that the stuff is nutritionally complete.

This technology, like almost all human-invented technology, is scalable. Theoretically, scalable to the point of ensuring food security globally as claimed. More concrete + more steel + more plastic = more factories = more ‘food’.

The second claim of this theory, it’s potential to solve the climate crisis, is another story. The assumption is that this technology would fully replace all livestock farming, thereby completely negating the emissions and use of land, subsequently solving our crisis.

This, in practice, would not be the case. These are the main reasons why:

• Livestock emissions are widely miscalculated and overstated in the commonly cited literature; skewing and invalidating all further calculations.

• Life-cycle analysis of the potential emissions of precision fermentation has not been included, or in fact even calculated . Without these estimates, we cannot and should not compare it to any other model of food production.

• The theory incorrectly assumes all livestock are damaging all the land they ‘use’.

• The theory incorrectly assumes that the removal of said livestock would restore the land.

Precision fermentation is yet another product of narrow, linear thinking. It is another shiny showcase of humans thinking that technological advancement is how we progress. No ultra-processed food product will ever be an ‘answer’.