2022年7月29日 星期五

The Daily: The Future of Food

Answering your questions about industrial agriculture.

Welcome to the weekend.

In a recent episode, we explored why the drying of the Great Salt Lake could be an "environmental nuclear bomb" for Utah — and how state officials are scrambling to find solutions.

After the show, many of you asked us if officials were focused on the wrong industry: Since over 70 percent of Utah's water goes toward agriculture, shouldn't the state reform factory farming instead of limiting household consumption?

It's a good question, and it's one that applies to the rest of the world, too. (Agriculture accounts for roughly 70 percent of global water use as well.)

While factory farming was once an answer for a rapidly growing world, it now poses a major threat to the planet and its people. Below, we take a closer look at the problem and explore some emerging solutions.

The big idea: From farming to 'ferming'

The Daily strives to reveal a new idea in every episode. Below, look more closely at the resource intensity of industrial agriculture.

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By Lauren Jackson

The Wrangler feedyard in Tulia, Texas.George Steinmetz for The New York Times

The lie was delicious.

For years, Americans consumed their frothy, full-dairy cappuccinos, marbled meat and flaky fried chicken without worry. The food was cheap. The drive-throughs, abundant. And the supply seemed infinite — until it wasn't.

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Over the last few decades, a steady drumbeat of documentaries, books and escalating disasters has made it clear that America's current food system, filled with factories and feedlots, can't be sustained without making the planet and its people sick. Industrial agriculture, responsible for one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions around the world, is destroying ecosystems.

"If we want to have an American type of food consumption, we need three to five planets," Dr. Ferdinand von Meyenn, a Swiss food scientist, said in a phone interview. "We don't have that."

Americans are aware. A majority, including both Republicans and Democrats, say they are trying to reduce their meat and dairy consumption. Still, inflation is high, systems are stubborn and tastes are hard to change.

So scientists have been searching for solutions, ones that will make protein-rich food cheap, accessible and far more sustainable. The good news? They already have answers. The problem, they say, is scaling them.

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The protein problem

People need protein for balanced, healthy diets. But that's become a problem for the planet.

"We get most of our protein-rich and fat-rich foods from animal farming," George Monbiot, an ecologist and journalist, said in a phone interview this week. "And animal farming is arguably the most destructive of all industries on Earth."

He added that the industry as a whole is "the primary cause of habitat destruction, wildlife loss, extinction, land use, soil degradation, water use and one of the major causes of climate breakdown."

In an effort to address this problem and limit animal cruelty, food entrepreneurs and scientists have spent decades working to develop high-protein meat alternatives from plants. But until just a few years ago, these products were a novelty, eaten by a small group of committed vegans and vegetarians.

That's changed. Today, popular plant-based alternatives, like those from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, appear on menus of restaurants around the country, from Panda Express to Long John Silver's. Seventy-one percent of Americans have tried a plant-based burger or other meat alternatives. Demand for alternatives to dairy has been growing, too. Now, almond, oat and other nondairy products make up 14 percent of milk sales in grocery stores.

But even if protein is available in other forms, Americans aren't converted. In a 2018 Gallup poll, only 5 percent said they were vegetarians. The majority of the country has high fidelity to meat and dairy products — a taste that has long been difficult to replicate with plants.

"To put it simply, plants are crunchy, and meat is chewy. This is why veggie burgers can often feel crumbly or mushy in texture, without the bite and springiness of animal protein," the chef J. Kenji López-Alt wrote for The Times. He added that "animal fat, which provides mouth-coating richness and juiciness," is also difficult to replicate with plant-based fats.

But researchers have been working on a solution — one that can replicate the those nutrients, tastes and textures without using animals.

A fermented future?

Fermentation, essential for making sourdough bread, beer and cheese, has been around for centuries. But advances in the science of fermentation are helping researchers decouple animals from the proteins they produce.

Specifically, "precision fermentation" is helping food scientists grow ingredients found in animal products without the need for a traditional farm. Instead, the scientists isolate the specific ingredients, then multiply their cells in brewery-style tanks. The result? Animal-free eggs, milk and meat that are biologically similar to animal products.

"It's a new way of producing protein-rich and fat-rich foods, which can greatly reduce the amount of land we require and the amount of water," Mr. Monbiot said.

Recent innovations in precision fermentation are allowing scientists to replicate, for example, "the exact fatty acid" that makes meat taste like meat, said Liz Specht, who oversees a research team focused on the future of alternative protein at the Good Food Institute. Experts say these developments will help close the gap between plant-based products and their animal-derived analogues, making them nearly indistinguishable in taste and texture.

"It's a tool in the tool kit to get these plant-based products over those next few hurdles, from a sensory perspective and from a cost-reduction perspective," she added. "This is very, very different than what was happening in the protein space, say, five years ago."

These products, alongside lab-cultivated meat, could appeal to flexitarians or to occasional consumers of plant-based products who haven't been sold on the taste so far, enabling more consumption of meat alternatives.

And that little bit could make all the difference, scientists say.

A recent study in Nature found that replacing just 20 percent of global beef consumption and other grazing livestock with "microbial proteins," or those made from fermentation, could cut annual deforestation in half by 2050. (Whether the plant-based foods, many of which are highly processed, are healthier is subject to debate.)

"Replacing the milk, meat and, one day, even the eggs that we eat would massively take pressure off the planet," Mr. Monbiot said. "It could also develop a whole new cuisine that we can't even imagine at the moment. Just as the first farmers to capture a wild cow weren't thinking about Camembert."

Scaling up

Enthusiasm for this innovation abounds. ("Precision fermentation is the most important environmental technology humanity has ever developed," Mr. Monbiot said. "We would be idiots to turn our back on it.")

But the question remains: How quickly and effectively can the companies working in this space scale their work — and bring products in development to market?

Growth in this corner of the alternative-meat industry has largely been facilitated by private investment. And interest is booming: Alternative protein fermentation companies raised $1.7 billion in 2021, up 285 percent from 2020.

Still, start-ups working on innovating fermented foods are navigating "inherent inefficiencies," Ms. Specht said. To succeed, and deliver a return for investors, they need to build new infrastructure and nurture talent in a food industry trained to support animal farming.

"They're on a knife's edge of profitability," Ms. Specht added, while the companies also try to deliver products at a "price point within reach of most consumers."

She argues that it's a critical moment for governments to invest in "research and development and provide incentivizes for building out the industry's infrastructure," as many nations have invested in the renewable energy sector in recent years.

Without regulation and support, some worry the industry could one day be dominated by major agriculture companies, like Tyson, Smithfield, Perdue and Hormel, which have all rolled out meat alternatives in recent years.

"Monopoly and intellectual property is a genuine worry," Mr. Monbiot said. "Ninety percent of the world's grain passes through the hands of four corporations."

"We don't want to replicate that problem. We want to confront that dominance," he added.

From the Audio team: Share your story with us

Brian Rea

Have you ever been on a date in a bizarre or unexpected location? Maybe you crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a cargo ship for your 10th date. Or perhaps you wound up on the side of a mountain. Or at a restaurant after hours.

The Modern Love podcast team is collecting stories about out-of-the-ordinary date spots. They want to know: What led you there, who were you with and what made it memorable?

If this sparks a story from your life, visit nytimes.com/datestory for submission details. You may be featured in a future episode.

On The Daily this week

Monday: Crypto was supposed to exist outside the fickleness of the financial system. So why is its value falling?

Tuesday: How a bill protecting marriage equality might now, improbably, become law.

Wednesday: The N.F.L.'s biggest scandal.

Thursday: How expecting inflation can actually create more inflation.

Friday: The rise of the conservative Latina voter.

That's it for the Daily newsletter. See you next week.

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The T Wanderlust Hotel Report, Edition No. 1

This week: New stays in Bangkok, Paris and on Lake Kivu, Rwanda.

Welcome to T Wanderlust, a new travel newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Twice a month, we'll recommend global destinations and hotels worth visiting. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every other Friday, along with our T List newsletter each Wednesday. And you can always reach us at tlist@nytimes.com.

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GREECE

A Heritage-Inspired Guesthouse in the Aegean Sea

From left: the garden at the three-suite Pagostas guesthouse on the Greek island of Patmos has an old stone sink and a lemon tree; a Bauhaus chandelier and tapestry by the Swedish artist Elisabet Hasselberg-Olsson hang in the dining room.Yiorgis Kaplanidis

By Yulia Denisyuk

T Contributor

Twenty years ago, when Maria Lemos of the Mouki Mou lifestyle shop in London and her husband, Gregoris Kambouroglou, a retired trauma surgeon, first visited Patmos, an island of roughly 3,000 inhabitants belonging to the Dodecanese archipelago in the Aegean Sea, they instantly fell for it. After recently taking over a 16th-century guesthouse owned by the Monastery of Saint John and transforming it into the three-suite Pagostas, they've fallen for it all over again. "Using simplicity as the guiding principle, we wanted to create a universe that is modern and light yet rooted in our Greek heritage," says Lemos, who grew up between Greece and England. Teaming up with the Greek designer Leda Athanasopoulou, and Mouki Mou's Apostolos Koukidis, Lemos sourced vintage cane furniture from Athens, ceramics from Lesbos and handblown Cretan glass. A lace tablecloth from Maria's own grandmother adorns the walls of one of the rooms. The Athenian landscaper Helli Pangalou, known for her work with the architect Renzo Piano, designed the small garden to be somewhat reminiscent of monastic courtyards, with plantings of jasmine and myrtle. Toiletries will feature a proprietary scent with notes of eucalyptus, cypress and frankincense — a collaboration with Lyn Harris of Perfumer H in London. "We are a home with a soul," says Kambouroglou, "welcoming travelers who want to understand the Patmian way of life." Rooms from $300; pagostas.com.

PORTUGAL

A Vision in Concrete on the Portuguese Coast

A living room at Pateos with furniture by Carl Hansen, Hay and Mattiazzi.Francisco Nogueira

By Gisela Williams

T Contributing Editor

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The Portuguese beach resort town Comporta and the neighboring community of Melides may be where some of Europe's most fashionable personalities — Jacques Grange, Philippe Starck, Christian Louboutin — buy extraordinary vacation homes, but it's still possible to drive through and notice little more than fishing villages and the occasional stork's nest stacked on an electricity pole. That's because exceptional private properties are tucked out of view — or, like Pateos, a new quartet of dramatically angular vacation rentals nestled at the end of a bumpy dirt road, obscured by cork and olive grove, near Melides. Designed by the award-winning Portuguese architect Manuel Aires Mateus, the interiors of the Tetris-style concrete bunkers are serenely minimal, with smooth stucco walls, furniture upholstered in earth-toned linens and sliding glass doors framing stunning views of the Atlantic Ocean. There is little art, save for the floating Danish Flensted mobiles, but most guests will idle away their afternoons lounging by the shared triangular pool. The one-, two- and three-bedroom units were originally intended as guesthouses for friends and family, but the Pateos owners Sofia and Miguel Charters became so involved in the design process that they decided to try their hand at hospitality. Private yoga sessions will be available on-site and one of the area's most pristine beaches, Praia da Aberta Nova (Vigia), is just a 20-minute drive away. Rooms from $560, including breakfast; pateos.pt.

RWANDA

A Culturally Immersive Experience on Lake Kivu

From left: grilled fish from Lake Kivu in Rwanda; the entrance to one of the Capanne Project's thatched-roof huts on Nkombo Island.Sextantio

By Jennifer Flowers

T Contributor

Travelers primed for mountain gorilla treks and Big Five game drives will soon have a compelling new reason to break up the wildlife sightings on hilly, green Nkombo, a roughly 8.5-square-mile island in Lake Kivu near the Congolese border. The Capanne Project launches in August with two thatched-roof huts inspired by exhibits in the Ethnographic Museum of Rwanda in Butare. The rustic accommodations are built in a vernacular style with bamboo, Congolese hardwood and five kinds of straw; arched entrances offer the only natural light, though each domed hut is equipped with modern comforts such as electricity and hot water. Capanne is the third property to have been developed by the conservation-minded hotel group Sextantio, whose other retreats, in Matera and Santo Stefano di Sessanio, have helped preserve the disappearing architectural heritage of rural southern Italy. The founder Daniele Kihlgren wanted to replicate his so-called social-upliftment model in Africa, where he has traveled extensively by motorcycle. Kihlgren funded the construction of the Capanne Project himself, and its proceeds benefit Sextantio Onlus, a nonprofit he founded in 2008 to provide health insurance to area residents with treatable diseases like malaria. Rates are by donation only, and visitors may have chance encounters with local fishermen, basket weavers and others who call Nkombo Island home. "It's a bit experimental," says Kihlgren. "This is not the typical luxury African resort. You truly feel the day-to-day of the place." sextantiorwanda.com.

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INDONESIA

A Neon-Lit Portal in the Balinese Jungle

Studio Jencquel designed the furniture in the jungle panorama suite at Lost Lindenberg in Bali; the ceramics are by Gaya in Ubud.Robert Rieger

By Gisela Williams

T Contributing Editor

Bali, an island of finely wrought temples and sweeping rice terraces, has seen its share of artists, dreamers and spiritual seekers over the years. Playing into that utopian fantasy is Lost Lindenberg, a boutique eight-room inn that just opened near a black lava sand beach on the west coast. Before guests can enter the compound, they must find a door hidden along a 10-foot-high wall created by the German sculptor Tobias Rehberger. Like a Vegas casino, its facade is covered with blazing neon signs that read "24/7" and "Relax Later" — making the Zen-like serenity of the surrounding jungle feel that much more calming when guests pass through. "It's all about the contrast," says Rehberger. Once inside, they're engulfed by ferns, fire-red Heliconia plants and lush banyan and banana trees. The rooms are secreted away in modern treehouse-like structures built of Bangkirai wood and designed by the German architect Alexis Dornier and Venezuela-born Maximilian Jencquel of Studio Jencquel, both expats who have practiced on the island for more than a decade. After a day spent reading by the pool or surfing the nearby Medewi break, travelers can connect over slow-cooked jackfruit rendang and other plant-based Indonesian fare, served around a 22-foot-long communal dining table. Rooms from $350, including breakfast and a surf lesson; thelindenberg.com.

ITALY

A Monastic Escape in Umbria

Radiant purple allium fills the villa garden at Vocabolo Moscatelli in Umbria, Italy.Jakob Trost

By Jennifer Flowers

T Contributor

Less tourist trodden than neighboring Tuscany, the verdant hills of Umbria, Italy, are filled with quiet hamlets; one of the region's newest hotels, Vocabolo Moscatelli, immerses guests in the quotidian rhythms of the countryside. Opening Aug. 1 in a restored 12th-century monastery 45 minutes from Perugia, the 12-room inn was designed in midcentury Italian style by Jacopo Venerosi Pesciolini of Archiloop studio in Florence. The raw materials and furnishings are also mostly Italian: Bathroom tiles come from Cotto Etrusco, 20 minutes away; canopy beds are the work of Lispi in nearby Città della Pieve; and the iron door frames set within the monastery's original arches were fashioned by Eros, a blacksmith less than a mile up the road. Throughout the public spaces and neutral-hued guest rooms (with original wood-beam ceilings), visitors will stumble across the chromatic works of regional artists, including Massimiliano Poggioni and Edoardo Cialfi, selected for the hotel by the Umbrian curator Matteo Pacini. The restaurant's seasonal lunch and dinner menus are centered around vegetables, which the co-owner Frederik Kubierschky hopes will attract locals, too. A former concierge at Park Hyatt Zurich, Kubierschky was born in Germany but raised in Italy; along with his partner, Catharina Lütjens, he takes a personalized approach to hosting. The couple plan to offer pottery classes for guests at nearby Endiadi Ceramic studio and truffle-hunting excursions with their dog, Wilma, a Lagotto Romagnolo. "Smaller is the future of hospitality," says Kubierschky. "People want somebody who listens to their preferences and can lead them to a beautiful experience." Rooms from around $327, including breakfast; vocabolomoscatelli.com.

FRANCE

A Parisian Hotel With Green Ambitions

From left: William Morris floral carpet covers the headboards at Hôtel Rosalie in Paris; Roman-style statues gaze down from the rooftop; the bench in the hotel's breakfast nook is upholstered with a textile from Maison Thevenon.From left: Hervé Goluza; Christophe Coënon (2)

By Monica Mendal

T Contributor

With 18 properties across France, the co-founder of MyHotels group Joris Bruneel is no novice at hospitality. But his latest opening — a partnership with the designer Marion Mailaender, known for her work at Marseille's fashionable Tuba Club — represents a watershed moment. The 60-room Hôtel Rosalie, located in Paris's 13th Arrondissement, is an overhaul of an existing hotel — one that takes a sustainable approach to reclaiming nature's rightful place in the urban landscape. The pair hired landscape architects at Merci Raymond to weave foliage into the renovation — now, plants spill over the rooftop and lichen and moss grow where concrete slabs used to be. "At Rosalie, the frontier between interior and exterior has been left deliberately blurry," says Bruneel. Galvanized steel, typically used in garden furniture, infiltrates the rooms via benches and wall lights designed by Mailaender. The carpet in the guest rooms is made from recycled fishing nets; vintage chairs have been carefully restored; and plastic from the original hotel baths has been reused in terrazzo-like surfaces. Behind a door on the third floor, travelers can unwind in a secret rooftop garden trimmed with hazel trees, purple willows, a 20-foot-tall hop plant and a junked Peugeot 205. By year's end, the founders hope to earn Hôtel Rosalie the prestigious Clef Verte title — the first sustainable-tourism seal in France, which encourages the travel industry to go above and beyond in its efforts to preserve the environment. Rooms from $150; hotel-rosalie.com.

THAILAND

A New Standard in Bangkok

The Balcony Suite at the Standard, Bangkok Mahanakhon features floor-to-ceiling windows, a private balcony and a soaking tub overlooking the city.Prachpreaw Studio

By Chris Schalkx

T Contributor

With a pixelated facade that looks like it stopped loading halfway on a wonky dial-up, the Ole Scheeren-designed King Power Mahanakhon building has been a defining feature of Bangkok's skyline since 2016. Now, this off-kilter skyscraper has found a new tenant in the Standard, Bangkok Mahanakhon. After making its Thailand debut last year with the Standard Hua Hin, a 1960s-inspired beach retreat three hours to the southwest, the hotel group launched its Asia flagship on the tower's top three and lower 18 floors. Together with the Spanish artist Jaime Hayon, the Standard's design team, led by Verena Haller, infused the space with signature quirks — a Matisse-meets-Memphis mix of scribbled carpets, checkerboard tiling and sculptural rattan lampshades dangling from the lobby ceiling. Rooms range from snug studios to party-size penthouses and follow a similar theme, with curvy sofas and cartoonish side tables. But this is more than just a pretty place to sleep: Destination restaurants include Thailand's first outpost of the Hong Kong dim sum powerhouse Mott 32 and a rose-gold-tinted rooftop spot serving contemporary Mexican fare, created and overseen by the chef Francisco "Paco" Ruano, and the on-site cultural calendar covers everything from D.J. sets to queer tarot card readings. "We don't think of ourselves as a traditional luxury hotel," says Mai Vejjajiva Timblick, the Standard's chief creative and culture officer in Asia. "We hardly think of ourselves as a hotel at all." Rooms from $200; standardhotels.com.

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