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Scientists continue to experiment with the creation of alternatives to the polluting meat industry based on sustainable patterns with which to project the cuisine of the future. An innovative practice that now presents the latest realistic alternative to meat: soybeans that taste like pork, cooked on the basis of a new type of agriculture in which the DNA of soybeans is genetically altered and modified to integrate pork DNA.
“At the end of the day, we are replicating what nature does in an animal inside a plant,” says Gaston Paladini, CEO and co-founder of Moolec, the startup that has developed this soybean that replicates all those key animal proteins that provide texture, flavor and nutrition.
MOLECULAR FARMING
Through genetic engineering, this company modifies the core of the soybean plant so that it can produce the same animal proteins, and eventually market them to food manufacturers.
That process, called ‘molecular farming‘, becomes an affordable route to authentic animal protein-based production – without raising or slaughtering animals – in which cells from a live animal are grown in steel tanks.
‘The beauty of Moolec’s technology is that the only thing we modify is the seed, at the beginning of the value chain, and the actual biology and infrastructure does the rest,’ Paladini explains. This could make it possible to achieve price parity with traditional animal protein. ‘Farmers already grow 350 million metric tons of soybeans a year, and the new seeds could simply replace part of that crop.’
Moolec thus revolutionizes the sector through sustainable innovation with this ‘Piggy Sooy‘ with which to produce the protein in soybeans, instead of raising the pig, considerably reducing the carbon footprint on the planet, as well as presenting one of the great meat alternatives of our era.
