The Language of Food

Opening the can on food webs in the age of engineering biology, inspired by Cellular Agriculture Australia's new language guide

From the title page of Cellular Agriculture Austraila’s Language Guide

I've been putting this post off for far too long now. Partly because I was searching for the right words, but mostly because it’s difficult to tread into a space where so many great voices and writers are already operating. However, late last year, Cellular Agriculture Australia released a Language Guide and this gave me the perfect anchor for exploring the wide world of food webs. This post is not a sitrep for the new food era. If you, like I, need a weekly ingest of new food updates, then you must read Eshan Samaranayake’s Better Bioeconomy newsletter each Monday. I religously read it for updates on trends, news and morsels of interest.

My original training was in creative non-fiction writing, so I read language guides like rules that need breaking.¹ CellAg Australia’s language resources are more than just guides to words though, they are doorways onto the core concepts of tomorrow’s food system.

Food and energy verticals are two sides to the same coin. Liquid and gaseous fuels when combined with food make up the energy webs of the world. Too often we conceptually separate them, but when you break it down to an atomic level, it's all the same energy shifting substrates, the same sun blowing the same photons, the same humans organising and disorganising carbon based on the whims of complex system dynamics.

The Energy Verticals

This post is not about joules shifting substrates, there is indeed something more going on. The language of new food is standardising. This is important because words breathe form from power. The vertical of cellular agriculture is beginning to play with that power. We can talk about photons another day.

An organising movement

In 2022, a memorandum of understanding (MOU) was signed between 36 stakeholders in the APAC region, agreeing that ‘cultivated’ was the sector’s preferred term.

This quote is from the Language Guide, it shows how well organised the CellAg sector is. This organisation curls around a technological vision woven from three proof points:

1. Global food demand is increasing

2. Our current food system generates negative externalities like famine, plague, climate change, modern slavery and mass extinction

3. There is another way to grow food that could meet our growing needs while mitigating existing negative externalities.

Systemic disruptions to agriculture leave mythological marks on human history. The goddess Demeter, one of the oldest gods, rises from the early agriculturalists need to follow the seasons. The Grapes of Wrath, a beautiful book about the struggles of American agriculturalists during the Great Depression, charts the end of the family farm in the US and shows a prototypical large-scale farm run on indentured labor.

As those who have lived through shifts in policy that affect farm ownership, financing or profit sharing know all too well, when you make abrupt changes to the food system, you immediately create cascades through the body politic. Cellag is not going to be an abrupt change but its consequences and impacts on our webs of food production, our biomass logistics and ways of eating, will no doubt be just as transformative.

It has the same feels as one of the hypotheses for how agriculture arose in the first place. A slowly growing dependency of nomads on crop planting cycles that eventually led to villages, city-states, and the need for armies to protect crops and steal from others. End result, farmers became tied to the land they had once freely wandered. Cellag is food production as technology, enabling a permanent disconnection of food production from productive land. This has profound implications by enabling the disconnection of power from land that has so fiercely characterised human civilisation for so long. Technology platforms can be instantiated anywhere by those who have the resources, finances and know-how to do so.

An unfair competition

This portability of cellag technology means it can be seen as threatening to the old ways of food and beverage production that often rely on traditional methods, unique terroir qualities and cultural reification amplified through ritualised marketing. But it’s not the only disruptive force contained within the trend of new food, the most compelling dynamic is the projections on cost per kilogram. This is a technology that promises to make cheaper food at higher quality. Margins can mobilise global capital, and as Eshan shows week after week, investment scaling in this vertical continues at pace.

Cauldron Ferm’s techno-economic modelling shows that current production costs for precision-fermented ingredients vary. Fed-batch systems produce at USD $45/kg, while Cauldron’s continuous production method using hyper-fermentation is at USD $22/kg, close to price parity (their industry insights have identified a B2B price of USD $20/kg as competitive). They also forecast that their platform could produce food proteins below price parity at around USD $9/kg with future strain design improvements.

I've said it before and I will say it again, incremental productivity improvements are going to generate exponential accelerations in overall output. But the beauty of the cellag story is that this productivity no longer needs to come from the organisms, the fertiliser, the pesticides, or the land alone. It can come from improvements in biodesign software, improvements in bioreactor engineering, improvements in feedstock mediums or intermediates, improvements in workforce skill, increasing robotic integrations, new AI implementation in fermentation bioprocessing and modified cellular growth, and further down the track, advanced bio-computing layouts within the cellular metabolic network that optimally regulate growth and output phases of a biomass cycle.

These types of advances will enable continuous fermentation, novel forms of hyper fermentation, and the choice to ramp production over short periods to meet increased demand or to switch product output without changing the batch. This is all coming. Current $/kg estimates likely do not factor all of these technological advances into the estimates of decreasing COGs.

Food production is going to look more and more like the design, test, build cycles of digital and analog semiconductor wafers. Cellag companies will push validated R&D out to a distributed network of biomanufactuaries in the same way our phones receive software updates. Individual sites won't even need to receive the physical organism, they'll just boot up a new codebase for their organism of choice and seed a fresh bioreactor. Or better yet, use a horizontal gene modality to upgrade a batch in situ. The topography of potential improvement vectors is incredibly vast, as is the potential acceleration ramps for deploying these improvements into production.

Now I've been calling this Moore's Green Law for want of a better word, but it obviously needs its own name that more clearly evokes cellag’s exponential trajectory.

Clarity is everything

The final point I’d like to pull out of this language guide is the drive for clear definitions and language that isn't loaded with emotion. Two things you're unlikely to find across my posts. I like to paint by filling a balloon with three types of biomanufactured dye and then popping it all on a mixed-media canvas. Indeed, I should start all posts with the label that clarity and unemotive language is not to be found here.

That said, unemotive clarity could not be more important. Cellag is wading into a multi-decade GMO debate with a brand new technology that could solve many of civilisation’s ills. The words we use pull at the strings of power and no one wants to light the tinder on a protracted cultural war that sees strange bed partners working in weird coalitions to either accelerate or halt cellag's deployment. Right now it feels like everyone's sharpening their knives and taking the temperature of opinion polls while ordering up social media semantic analyses. Watch this space.

The food vertical promises to deliver our generation the greatest change to food production since the green revolution, but in many ways that could be a vast under estimate. This could be the beginning of the greatest change to human civilisation since the invention of agriculture itself. 15,000 years ago we started messing with seeds in a pre-Mendelian magical feast, where Dionysus and Demeter headed each end of the dining table. We're now staring down a precision fermented future where the only limits are our creative human-AI co-piloting potential and the borders of our biomass growth boundaries.

What's for lunch?

---

The Verticals series is designed to help you categorise the techno-economic changes underway and prompt you to find new opportunities amid the diverse challenges we face.

1. There is an obvious caveat here, and the words of my writing tutor reverberate through the decades, you must know the rules before you can break them. This is the essence of art and craft, practicing a form to the point where you can creatively extend the artifacts of that form through conceptual synthesis, targeted rule breaking, and careful editing. This process of learning and extending a craft could nowhere be more appropriate to the engineering biology endeavour than as it applies to the food vertical. Food is so deeply woven into the cultural and social rites and rituals of our individual and collevtive being that to modulate it is to modulate civilisation itself.