If the thought of laboratory-made meat is hard to swallow, get ready for fake milk and egg products also hitting the supermarket shelves in the near future.
In the US, plant fats, yeast, sugars and other non-animal protein ingredients are already being fermented together like a craft beer to make a synthetic, non-animal-based milk which mimics real milk’s taste and texture, but without any cholesterol or lactose content.
Manufacturer, Perfect Day, also boasts its bio-engineered milk making process uses 65 per cent less energy and 98pc less water than a conventional dairy farm and dairy processing plant.
It also creates 85pc less greenhouse gas from a factory site covering just 10pc the land area needed to produce an equivalent amount of cow’s milk.
A commercial-scale release of its “Claytons” milk is expected next year.
San Francisco firm, Hampton Creek Foods began manufacturing its egg substitute “Beyond Eggs” three years ago using plant sources such as sunflower lecithin, canola, peas, and natural gums.
The man-made egg whips into foam and coagulates into gel just like real eggs and has been a crucial base for Hampton Creek’s vegetarian mayonnaise and baked goods.
Like Perfect Day, Hampton Creek’s founders have vegan backgrounds and push their foods as ethically and environmentally superior than conventional farm-grown commodities.
Fake hamburger mince advocate and founder of US firm Impossible Foods, Pat O’Brien also insists “there must be a better way than relying on cows to turn plants into meat”.
He set out to do the seemingly impossible and “make delicious meats that are good for people and the planet, without relying on water-thirsty, land-hungry beef cattle production”.
Impossible’s burgers are also plant-based – unlike the patties grown from real meat tissue cells at Germany’s Maastricht University laboratories in 2013 – yet they sizzle and taste like meat and have a real meat texture.
They are served at eateries in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The rise of bio-engineered agricultural commodities as key components in modern food supply chains apparently knows no bounds.
Even lab-engineered cotton lint could be just around the corner.
Farmers already battling to stay globally competitive against increasingly voluminous production from the Brazilian and Indian beef industries, or quota-liberated European dairy farms or South American and Black Sea grain exporters now have a new challenge ahead warned New Zealand creative entrepreneur and new ideas communicator, Kalia Colbin.
“Milk bio-engineered to be like cow’s milk, human milk or goat’s milk sounds disgusting to me, and probably to most people in countries like ours,” she said.
“But these businesses don’t care about me, you, or those whole foods shoppers who can pay premium prices for organic.
“Core markets for man-made meat, milk and egg products will be industrial caterers and big food processors who use thousands of kilograms of egg powder or liquid each week.
“These bio-engineered foods will also be a significant factor in feeding a planet of 12 billion people in 75 years’ time.”
US-born Ms Colbin, told the international Farm2Fork summit in Sydney, synthetic egg production would be quickly responsive to food sector orders, it would be free of salmonella risk and cheaper than running poultry farms to lay real eggs.
Give it was also impractical to expect all the world’s current 7.4 billion people to eat locally-grown organic food or afford it, the most environmentally sustainable option to feed everybody was likely to involve factory-grown foods.
“I can’t predict the future or what these products will do to agricultural markets, or how quickly change will hit, but I know they are market-ready now,” she said.
“It’s not an easy pill to swallow if your ambition is to keep on farming the way you do today, because you will probably lose.
“To stay in business today you have to be willing to disrupt yourself.”
She expected “real” farms to continue feeding a big portion of the market, but they would increasingly need to prove their sustainable land and water use production credentials to meet tougher expectations of those consumers buying conventional steaks, eggs and cheddar cheese.
However, already shoppers in affluent economies were adapting to foods produced in factory-style environments.
New York shoppers were paying the same price for fresh vegetables grown under lights in disused night clubs and warehouses in New Jersey as they did for comparable produce from farms in California.
Japan boasted the world’s largest indoor farm, producing lettuce using 40pc less energy and 99pc less water, and with 80pc less vegetative waste, than a conventional outdoor enterprise.
A key contributing factor to indoor farming’s rising efficiency was a 90pc reduction in LED lighting costs and a doubling in the life-span of LED lights since 2010.
“Farming indoors is no longer limited to certain `high value’ leafy crops we might have once talked about.”