The world’s population is projected to reach 9 billion by the year 2050.  Using current food production methods, we cannot sustainably feed a population of this size.  Various solutions to this problem have been proposed; change over to a vegetarian/vegan diet, genetically modify existing food sources to increase yield or arable farmland, use insects as a food source, grow meat in a laboratory, panic, etc..  I’d like to suggest an alternative solution.  Farm bacteria.

“Bacteria” is a catchall term that can apply to a lot of different things (even moreso than usual as I include Archaea in the term), and so let me first clarify that I’m not proposing that we all start eating random prokaryotes that we happen to come across.  I’m suggesting that we start farming bacteria in much the same way that we originally started farming plants and animals — find a few species that seem alright to eat and start selecting them for desirable characteristics.  I imagine that safety during consumption, nutritional content, and taste would be the most immediately relevant traits to select on, but feel free to disagree.  After a year of selection (i.e. on the order of 10,000 bacterial generations), it is hard to imagine that we couldn’t make some real progress on any of our traits of interest.

There are numerous advantages to growing bacteria over growing plants.  To name a few, bacteria can be grown literally anywhere.  Bacteria have a natural ability to acquire and lose genetic elements in the form of plasmids — for example, if a vanilla flavor is desired, add a plasmid that encodes for vanillin.  Nutritional requirements for bacteria to replicate are minimal relative to agricultural plants.  Doubling times are extremely short relative to growth rates of plants and animals providing advantages in production.  And perhaps most importantly, many bacteria can grow in the complete absence of other organisms, whereas plants and animals rely heavily on bacterial and fungal microbiomes.  This ability to grow in a true monoculture simplifies the complexity of the system, greatly enhancing the potential for research and development on limited budgets.

I’ve told this idea to many people over the last 10 or so years.  The most common responses I get are “ew, gross”, and “wouldn’t the texture be weird”.  My immediate response is, “people eat tofu, people will eat anything”.  My more thought out response, however, is that the texture and color of bacteria are highly variable in nature (not all bacteria are beige), and so it is hard to imagine that a palatable combination of taste, texture, and color couldn’t be generated with a little effort.

But the Beige Revolution won’t happen unless someone actually makes the effort to implement it, and I’m not going to be that person.  So if you think it’s a good idea, I wish you good luck, and I’ll put in my pre-order for an E. coli steak now.

Spherification in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (illustration by Quentin Blake)

I recently bought some sodium citrate from Amazon. In addition to giving club soda its signature tang, sodium citrate solves one of the major concerns in my kitchen. Namely, how do you get cheese sauce that is both flavorful and creamy?

The problem with cheese is that when it gets hot, like when you’re making a cheese sauce, the hydrophobic dairy fats tend to separate from the water soluble components and you end up with greasy mac and cheese. One solution is to use a béchamel sauce, flour browned in butter and cooked with milk, which acts as an emulsifier to keep the dairy fats mixed into your cheese sauce. But the problem with béchamel sauce is that it’s not a great emulsifier and the more you add in, the more you dilute the flavor of the cheese. This is why most home made mac and cheese recipes call for cheeses with strong flavors, to balance out the béchamel sauce.

Sodium citrate, on the other hand, is a great emulsifier. It’s so good that you don’t even need the béchamel sauce, you can just mix your cheese directly into a hot liquid. You can use milk, beer, or even water as the base of your sauce.

Another use of sodium citrate, the one that’s listed on the jar that I bought, is spherification. In addition to being a really sweet word, spherification is a molecular gastronomy technique that produces little caviar-like bubbles of liquid. Sodium citrate isn’t the main ingredient for this process, but it can be used to change the pH of acidic liquids to make them more amenable to spherification. Which means that you can spherify just about any liquid you can think of. Check out this blog for photos of spherified wine, whisky, and sriracha sauce.

If I’ve sold you on sodium citrate, you can order your own here. Even if you aren’t as enthralled as I am by the idea of spherification, you can still use it to make this mac and cheese recipe.