Can microbes feed the world?
The Inquiry
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Can Microbes Feed the World?
The technology underpinning the idea is not new but building enough capacity to replace protein on a scale that would be meaningful will take time. So far only a handful of these foods have been approved for consumption and they're all on sale in the US. European regulators are more strict or won't approve a product unless they can be absolutely certain it doesn't contain any engineered DNA from the microbes that produce it. There are also real questions as to what the impact will be of waste products using this technique escape into the environment. But there's no question that meat and dairy products are a large source of greenhouse gases and the problem needs to be tackled one way or the other.
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